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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) 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.”
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2) 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.
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3) 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.
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4) 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.
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5) 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.
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6) 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.
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7) ‘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.
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8) 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.
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9) 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.
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10) The Huge, Under-the-Radar Shift Happening in the West Bank
Over the past few months, an Israeli military operation has displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians in West Bank cities. Some Palestinians fear it may be laying the ground to annex the territory.
By Adam Rasgon and Fatima Abdul Karim, Photographs by Afif Amireh, May 8, 2025
The reporters visited the West Bank city of Jenin and met with Palestinian officials and residents. Adam Rasgon and Afif Amireh were escorted by Israeli officers involved in a military operation there.
The streets looked like Gaza. Homes reduced to rubble, walls pockmarked by bullet holes, roads ripped apart by bulldozers. Neighborhood after neighborhood was deserted.
But this was not Gaza, a territory devastated by the war between Israel and the militant group Hamas, where tens of thousands have been killed and hunger stalks the population. It was the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian territory where the Israeli military has been tightening control in the most sweeping crackdown on militancy there in a generation.
The contours of the new offensive were unfolding during a recent visit by New York Times reporters to the city of Jenin, among the once densely populated neighborhoods that have been cleared out since an operation began in January. In one of those areas, more than 10,000 people lived until recently. Now, it is empty — its roads blocked by mounds of dirt and flanked by piles of rubble.
This week, the Israeli military said it would be demolishing homes in Tulkarm, a city near Jenin, to make crowded neighborhoods and streets more accessible to Israeli forces and to prevent the re-emergence of militants.
“They’re taking away my future,” Muath Amarne, a 23-year-old university student, said on Wednesday, the day he learned that his home in Tulkarm would be destroyed.
Israel conducted frequent military operations in this area in recent years, but its forces almost always left within hours or days. Since January, however, its military has maintained its longest-running presence in the heart of West Bank cities in decades.
The campaign has targeted Hamas and another Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad. In recent weeks, however, clashes have become rare, in a sign that Israel and the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank have arrested or killed many of the militants.
The two cities most affected, Jenin and Tulkarm, have long been controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that cooperates with Israel on security and which many Palestinians hoped would evolve into the government of a future state.
But Israel’s extended presence in these West Bank cities is undermining the powers of the Palestinian Authority. Israel has argued that the Authority was not doing enough to tamp down militancy in the territory.
“We’re at a turning point in the conflict,” Mohammed Jarrar, the mayor of Jenin, said in an interview at his office in March. “Israel is acting as if the Palestinian Authority doesn’t exist.”
The Israeli assault began days after a cease-fire in Gaza took hold in January. Around that time, the government added a new objective to its war goals: delivering a blow to West Bank militants.
Days later, armored vehicles backed by helicopters streamed into the Jenin camp.
Israel said it has killed more than 100 militants and arrested hundreds since the operation began. It has displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians — more than any other military campaign in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Middle East war.
That has summoned fears among some Palestinians of a second nakba — the Arabic word for disaster that is used to describe the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to go home like in 1948,” said Saleema al-Saadi, 83, a resident of the Jenin camp who said she had been displaced once before nearly eight decades ago.
In late February, Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israeli forces to prepare to remain in Jenin and Tulkarm for the next year.
If that happens, it would be a major change in the way West Bank cities have been governed since the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. Around that time, Israel ceded most governing responsibilities over the cities to the Palestinian Authority.
The Times reporters visited the camp in Jenin escorted by a senior Israeli military officer in an armored personnel carrier to gain rare access to restricted areas. The Times did not allow the Israeli military to screen its coverage before publication, but it agreed not to photograph the faces of some Israeli troops.
Armed Palestinian groups had built weapons factories in the camps, barricaded themselves in the most crowded districts and planted improvised explosive devices under roads to ambush Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli forces patrol the camps in Jenin and Tulkarm day and night. They have been combing building by building in search of weapons and have been blowing up homes that they believe were used for military purposes.
They have also been expanding roads, according to aerial photos, something that would make it easier for soldiers to reach densely populated parts of the camps. The military has demolished buildings and roads that it says are riddled with terrorist hide-outs and booby traps.
“They’re signaling that they want to annex,” said Ammar Abu Bakr, chairman of the Jenin chamber of commerce, echoing a fear of many other Palestinians.
The Palestinian fears have been fed by the fact that powerful ministers in Israel’s hard-line government advocate annexation of the West Bank, home to nearly three million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers.
The camps — crowded neighborhoods that Palestinians say embody the plight of Palestinian refugees — have housed tens of thousands of people for decades. What were once clusters of tents have evolved into concrete structures in poor neighborhoods.
Mr. Abu Bakr, the chairman of the Jenin chamber of commerce, and Mr. Jarrar, the mayor, said they had been told in late January by Lt. Col. Amir Abu Janab, the Israeli military liaison for Jenin, that Israel was planning to transform the Jenin camp into a normal neighborhood, which many Palestinians oppose because they see it as an attempt to erase a symbol of the plight of refugees.
They said they had also been told that UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians and runs schools and clinics in the West Bank, would no longer have a role in the Jenin camp. Israel has long had tense relations with the agency and hostility toward UNRWA has grown since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023 with a Hamas attack on Israel.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that liaises with Palestinians, declined to comment.
The Israeli military has denied that they forced people to leave. But Palestinians said they had been threatened with violence if they refused.
Kifah Sahweil, 52, said an Israeli drone flew close to her home in Jenin a few months ago, telling her through a speaker to raise her hands and leave. She said the drone warned her home would be targeted if she didn’t comply.
After Ms. Sahweil rushed outside with her son, the drone followed and instructed them where to go until they left the camp, she said.
“I felt that they were going to kill us,” said Ms. Sahweil.
The senior military officer who led the visit to Jenin said Israeli forces were demolishing militant infrastructure like tunnels, weapons caches, and manufacturing sites, rejecting suggestions that Israel was pursuing goals beyond restoring security. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol.
He pointed to a damaged former train station that had been built in 1908 when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. He said militants had built a secret tunnel beneath it which the military blew up.
About six miles from the Jenin camp, hundreds of displaced Palestinians were scattered in apartment buildings meant for university students.
Mohammed Abu Wasfeh, 45 and a resident of Jenin camp, was helping new arrivals settle into one-room apartments while children played outside. For him, the most painful part of displacement wasn’t being forced from his home, but not knowing what had happened to it.
“We’re living in the unknown,” he said. “We’re experiencing a tortuous and destabilizing journey.”
He added: “We’ve lost control of everything.”
Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
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11) In Israel’s Demolition Path, West Bank Residents Pack Up Their Lives
A monthslong Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank has displaced tens of thousands of people. Some are now learning they may not return.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 8, 2025
Nasser Nasser/Associated Press
An Israeli bulldozer tearing down a home in Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on Monday.
When Israel informed the Palestinian Authority that it planned to demolish dozens of buildings in crowded parts of a border city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the notification set off a panic.
Hundreds of Palestinians in the border city, Tulkarm, learned that they would likely not be returning to their homes at the end of a sweeping Israeli offensive in the northern West Bank.
“They’re causing a disaster,” said Nihad al-Shawish, the head of the services committee in the Nur Shams camp in Tulkarm.
Since January, the Israeli military has conducted a large-scale military operation in three camps in the northern West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people and causing widespread destruction. Israeli officials, who say the purpose of the campaign is to target militants and their weapons, have said the military should be prepared to remain in the camps for a year.
The military has said the latest demolition of homes in Tulkarm was meant to make the city’s two camps, Tulkarm and Nur Shams, more accessible to Israeli forces and to prevent militants from regrouping there.
Many Palestinians believe Israel is seeking to transform the camps, which have housed refugees and their descendants, into neighborhoods like the rest of Tulkarm.
In recent days, Israel has allowed some residents of the camps to return to their homes to gather their belongings.
Nasr al-Jundi, 45, a resident of Nur Shams, said he only had time to grab only some of his belongings on Tuesday, including clothing, a television, a fan, a microwave and a sauté pan.
“They’re taking away my dreams,” he said.
Later, residents of the camp assembled on a nearby hill, watching a bulldozer knock down homes.
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12) New Film Names Soldier in Palestinian American Journalist’s Shooting
After Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in the West Bank in 2022, the Israeli military never revealed the identity of the soldier who fired at her. A documentary said it had confirmed his name.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 8, 2025
The site of Shireen Abu Akleh’s fatal shooting in Jenin, the West Bank, in 2022. The killing of the U.S. citizen prompted the Biden administration to push Israel to more rigorously investigate her death. Credit...Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
When Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American broadcaster, was shot and killed in 2022 in the northern West Bank, Israeli officials initially suggested that she may have been hit by a Palestinian militant. Months later, the military changed its account, acknowledging that she most likely was shot by an Israeli soldier — whom it declined to identify.
Three years later, a new documentary has identified and named an Israeli soldier as the shooter, apparently solving a mystery that was a major focus at the time of the incident.
Zeteo News, a left-leaning online news outlet, named the shooter as Capt. Alon Scagio, then a 20-year-old marksman in an elite commando unit, citing another soldier in his squad.
Two Israeli military officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, confirmed the documentary’s conclusions to The New York Times. Asked by The Times to confirm the identity of the soldier, the Israeli military said it had made “no definitive determination regarding the identity of the individual responsible for the shooting.” At the same time, it passed along a message from the Scagio family requesting that journalists avoid publishing the captain’s name.
Ms. Abu Akleh, a veteran reporter for Al Jazeera, was a household name in the Middle East. Her death set off mourning across the region and prompted greater global scrutiny of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Her U.S. citizenship also prompted unusual concern from the Biden administration, leading to friction between the American and Israeli governments.
According to a biography posted on the Israeli Defense Ministry’s website, Captain Scagio was a career soldier who trained as an elite sniper and fought in the West Bank for eight months in 2022. Later, he served in Gaza, following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, before being transferred back to the West Bank, the biography said.
Captain Scagio was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin last June, age 22, after his convoy was hit by a roadside explosive, the biography said.
Zeteo’s documentary concluded that Captain Scagio had fired on Ms. Abu Akleh in the same city more than two years earlier. She had been covering an Israeli military raid and clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. The Zeteo team was led by a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, and included a regular freelance contributor to The New York Times, Fatima AbdulKarim.
Wearing protective gear marked with the word “press,” Ms. Abu Akleh was hit while walking with a group of similarly dressed journalists toward a small convoy of Israeli military jeeps. An investigation by The Times in 2022 found that the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh was fired from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier from an elite unit.
The evidence reviewed by The Times showed that there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot. It contradicted Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at a Palestinian gunman.
As an American citizen, Ms. Abu Akleh’s killing prompted the Biden administration to push Israel to more rigorously investigate her death. Later, the Biden administration was itself accused of downplaying Israeli culpability, a charge dismissed by the State Department, which concluded that while Israeli soldiers may have killed the journalist, they did not target her intentionally.
The Zeteo documentary, citing an anonymous source, said that U.S. officials had initially decided after a site visit that Ms. Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted, before changing their conclusions in the final version of the report to avoid upsetting Israel.
A senior U.S. official familiar with the report said its conclusions were never altered and no draft version had ever concluded that Ms. Abu Akleh had been intentionally killed. The official also said that the American officers who visited the site of the shooting were unable to reach a definitive conclusion on the soldier’s exact line of sight, let alone the shooter’s intention, because the Americans did not assess the site from within an Israeli military vehicle.
The Times investigation was also unable to determine the shooter’s exact field of vision or intention.
The Office of the Security Coordinator — the unit of the State Department that investigated the incident — declined to comment.
Ms. Abu Akleh’s funeral attracted global outcry after Israeli police officers assaulted mourners carrying her coffin, causing them to drop it.
Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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13) Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look.
Gang experts say the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are unlikely to signify gang membership. The president says otherwise.
By Juliet Macur, May 8, 2025
President Trump has claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, is a member of MS-13, the Salvadoran-American criminal gang, and that the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles prove it.
In a post nearly three weeks ago on Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, he gave his version of a primer on those tattoos, showing a photo of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s hand, with one small tattoo on each finger: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with X’s for eyes, a cross and a skull.
Above each of those black tattoos was a letter or a number — M, S, 1 and 3 — in a sans-serif font that clearly had been superimposed onto the photo. “He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,” the president wrote in his post.
In other photos, however, including ones shared by Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the letters and numbers do not appear on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles.
Each of the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles is extremely common, but even combined, they are unremarkable, several tattoo experts said.
And according to experts on gang membership, the tattoos that usually signify MS-13 membership are often much clearer in their association with the gang. Many times, they actually say MS-13, those experts said.
“I can tell you, MS-13 does not equivocate; they don’t leave any ambiguity when it comes to their tattoos,” said Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been working with and studying MS-13 members for more than two decades.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos leave room for interpretation, Ms. Leap said, which does not align with the bold way MS-13 operates. The gang, she said, is proud of the reputation that it is violent and lethal, and members often showcase their association through their tattoos.
Sometimes, Ms. Leap said, the gang’s full name, Mara Salvatrucha, is tattooed in large letters on the chests of its members, or featured across their backs and down their arms. It also is not uncommon for the gang’s members to have MS-13 tattooed onto their cheeks and necks, she said, or to have tattoos of a devil-horns hand gesture — index and pinkie fingers up, everything else closed in a fist — because it’s the gang’s symbol.
“They are very clear, again, about their brand, and they espouse pride in it,” she said.
José Miguel Cruz, an expert in transnational gangs who has interviewed more than 2,000 members of Central American gangs, including members of MS-13, said nothing about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos signals MS-13 membership.
Mr. Cruz has seen MS-13 members with many versions of elaborate tattoos: full-face ones of MS-13 and also ones like 666 or a beast that represents Satan. But he said he has never seen the combination of tattoos that are on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles.
“The basic message here is that we cannot infer that he’s MS-13 just because of those tattoos,” said Mr. Cruz, an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University.
Paul Bradley, the owner of Titan Ink, a tattoo shop in suburban Washington, where Mr. Abrego Garcia lived, has worked as a tattoo artist for 20 years. Referring to the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, he said he has tattooed each of those images on people countless times.
“I’ve pretty much done those tattoos on almost every spectrum of person: man, woman, young, old,” Mr. Bradley said. They are “just symbols that people like for one reason or another.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos helped his wife, Ms. Vasquez Sura, to recognize him in photos posted online of men at a prison in El Salvador, where migrants were sent after being deported from the United States.
Since Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation, the Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his release. The president has dug in, calling him a dangerous gang member who should not be let back into the United States.
Law enforcement officials say the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s hands do not qualify as singular and definitive evidence of membership in MS-13. While many police departments consider tattoos when trying to determine whether someone is a member of a gang, they also weigh other factors, including the use of hand signs or symbols linked to gangs and known association with gang members.
David C. Pyrooz, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on gangs and criminal networks, said even a blatant MS-13 tattoo on someone’s neck or face would not guarantee active gang membership because that membership doesn’t last forever and tattoos are hard to remove. It might have been a tattoo that they had inked 10-15 years ago, long before they dropped out of a gang to get a job or start a family, as many gang members do, he said.
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14) About 80 Pro-Palestinian Activists Arrested in Columbia Library Takeover
The protesters had appeared to be attempting to rekindle the movement that swept the campus last spring.
By Sharon Otterman, Published May 7, 2025, Updated May 8, 2025
About 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested on Wednesday evening after occupying part of the main library on Columbia University’s campus in an attempt to rekindle the protest movement that swept the campus last spring, the police said Thursday morning.
The protesters, wearing masks and kaffiyehs, had burst through a security gate shortly after 3 p.m. and hung banners in the soaring main room of Butler Library’s second floor, renaming the space “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” according to the demonstrators and witnesses at the library.
Columbia security guards blocked them from leaving unless they showed their identification, causing an hourslong standoff. Outside the library, crowds gathered, leading to a chaotic scene. By about 7 p.m., Columbia administrators had called the New York City police back to campus for the first time since the occupation of Hamilton Hall, another campus building, in April 2024.
“Requesting the presence of the N.Y.P.D. is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community,” Claire Shipman, the acting president of the university, wrote in a statement.
Ms. Shipman said that two public safety officers had been injured during a crowd surge outside the library, when some people had tried to force their way in. Several protesters also appeared to have been injured.
The protest comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on Columbia over what it calls its failure to protect Jewish students from harassment, cutting more than $400 million in federal research funding to the school. The university has been under enormous pressure to stem disruptive pro-Palestinian protests, particularly those that call for an end to the state of Israel.
The tense situation that unfolded around the library over several hours on Wednesday threatened to complicate ongoing negotiations between the Trump administration and Columbia officials seeking the restoration of federal funding.
“While Columbia students try to study for finals, they’re being bombarded with chants for a ‘global intifada,’” Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican lawmaker pushing for universities to do more to protect Jewish students, posted on social media. “Not a single taxpayer dollar should go to a university that allows chaos, antisemitism, and civil rights violations on its campus.”
The demonstrators had pushed past a library security guard, carrying tote bags and backpacks, before heading up the stairs to the main reading room, video posted on social media showed. After chanting pro-Palestinian slogans for about an hour, some of the protesters tried to leave but were prevented by the row of Columbia public safety officers, who held them in the room until they identified themselves.
The disruption was limited to a single reading room, a university spokeswoman said. A statement from Columbia said that the protesters would face consequences.
“It is completely unacceptable that some individuals are choosing to disrupt academic activities as our students are studying and preparing for final exams,” the statement said.
Public security officers evacuated students not involved in the disruption from the library, which was filled with people studying. Hundreds of onlookers gathered outside the library, and some protesters tried to push their way in through the main doors.
Just before 5:20 p.m., a group of seven people was released through the back exit of the library on 114th Street. They were free to go, presumably after having their identification checked. A few minutes later, a protester was brought out in handcuffs by the university’s public safety department, which now employs several dozen peace officers who are empowered to make arrests.
The scene became increasingly tumultuous. A building fire alarm began sounding at 5:35 p.m. before going quiet a few minutes later. Some protesters still in the library shouted through megaphones to the crowd outside. There appeared to be at least one injury, with a protester taken out on a stretcher through the back entrance of the library. The person was covered with a white sheet to conceal their identity and had an ice pack held up to their arm.
As 6 p.m. approached, a demonstration in support of the protesters began gathering nearby at Broadway and 114th Street. Police officers assembled metal barricades. The protesters inside the university gates and outside at 114th Street chanted in unison: “No cops, no K.K.K., no fascist U.S.A.”
After Ms. Shipman authorized the police to enter the private campus, events unfolded quickly. At 7:25 p.m., about 30 protesters were escorted out of the building and loaded into police buses by officers in riot gear. The crowd chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” More demonstrators were escorted out, their hands restrained behind them with zip ties.
Inside the library, dozens of demonstrators linked arms as police officers arrived and took them into custody, video showed. The police said that they had responded to a trespassing situation at Columbia and that charges for about 80 people were pending as of Thursday morning.
Columbia has taken many steps to try keep demonstrations under control this academic year, including closing the gates to the main campus to anyone unaffiliated with the university and threatening serious discipline for those who break rules. In part for that reason, the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia has splintered.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group that organized the occupation of the library, once attracted a wide array of antiwar protesters, but has become smaller and more extreme in its rhetoric. Its leaders, who do not publicize their identities, now publish manifestoes supporting armed resistance by members of groups that United States authorities consider terrorist organizations.
The person for whom demonstrators renamed the library on Wednesday is a Palestinian revolutionary icon who was accused by Israel of planning a large-scale attack and was killed by Israeli forces in 2017. Part of the statement that demonstrators published on Wednesday called on students “to propagate the successes of the heroic Palestinian armed resistance in weakening Israel and U.S. imperialism and inspiring anti-imperialist struggles around the world.”
Anvee Bhutani, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Wesley Parnell and Sharla Steinman contributed reporting.
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15) Trump Seeks to Strip Away Legal Tool Key to Civil Rights Enforcement
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to halt their use of “disparate-impact liability,” which has been used to assess whether policies discriminate against different groups.
By Erica L. Green, Reporting from Washington, May 9, 2025
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.
In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of “disparate-impact liability,” a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups.
The little-noticed order, issued last month with a spate of others targeting equity policies, was the latest effort in Mr. Trump’s aggressive push to purge the consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., from the federal government and every facet of American life.
The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.
“This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,” said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group.
The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more.
Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.
Lawyers say the test has been crucial in showing how criminal background and credit checks affect employment of Black people, how physical capacity tests inhibit employment opportunities for women, how zoning regulations could violate fair housing laws, and how schools have meted out overly harsh discipline to minority students and children with disabilities.
Over the last decade, major businesses and organizations have settled cases in which the disparate-impact test was applied, resulting in significant policy changes.
One of the largest settlements involved Walmart, which in 2020 agreed to a $20 million settlement in a case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claimed the company’s practice of giving physical ability tests to applicants for certain grocery warehouse jobs made it more difficult for women to get the positions.
The use of the disparate-impact rule, however, has also long been a target of conservatives who say that employers and other entities should not be scrutinized and penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, based largely on statistics. Instead, they argue that such scrutiny should be directed at the explicit and intentional discrimination prohibited by the Civil Rights Act.
Opponents say that that disparate-impact rule has been used to unfairly discriminate against white people. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who claimed reverse discrimination when the city threw out a promotional examination on which they had scored better than Black firefighters.
Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process, which was nixed by the Biden administration when he left office.
The new order, titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” echoes arguments that Mr. Trump has adopted from far-right conservatives, who say that the country has become too focused on its racist history, and that protections from the civil rights era have led to reverse racism against nonminority groups.
Disparate-impact liability is part of “a pernicious movement” that seeks to “transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort or achievement,” the order stated.
The president ordered federal agencies to “eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible,” under the law and Constitution, and required that agencies “deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.”
That means that no new cases are likely to rely on the theory in civil rights enforcement — and existing ones will not be enforced.
His order also instructs agencies to evaluate existing consent judgments and permanent injunctions that rely on the legal theory, which means that cases and agreements in which discrimination has been proved could be abandoned.
The order takes aim directly at the use of the test in enforcing the Civil Rights Act, requiring Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin repealing and amending any regulations that apply disparate-impact liability to implement the 1964 law.
One of the most glaring examples in history of how seemingly race-neutral policies could disenfranchise certain groups are Jim Crow-era literacy tests, which some states set as a condition to vote after Black people secured rights during Reconstruction.
The literacy tests did not ask about race, but were highly subjective in how they were written and administered by white proctors. They disproportionately prevented Black people from casting ballots, including many who had received an inferior education in segregated schools, and were eventually outlawed with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1971, the Supreme Court established the disparate-impact test in a case that centered on a North Carolina power plant that required job applicants to have a high school diploma and pass an intelligence test to be hired or transferred to a higher-paying department. The court ruled unanimously that the company’s requirements violated the Civil Rights Act because they limited the promotion of minorities and did not measure job capabilities.
Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was “unlawful” and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a vital tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the disparate impact theory “wrongly equates unequal outcomes with discrimination and actually requires discrimination to rebalance outcomes.”
”The Trump administration is dedicated to advancing equality, combating discrimination and promoting merit-based decisions, upholding the rule of law as outlined in the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. Fields said.
GianCarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has argued that eliminating disparate impact would be the final blow to D.E.I., noted that Mr. Trump would need the help of Congress to fully eradicate the rule.
But he said the president’s order would still have a “salutary” impact on the American public by helping people understand that racial animus and disparate outcomes “are not the same things, and they shouldn’t be treated the same way in law.”
“These claims that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country is just empirically false,” Mr. Canaparo said. “The problem with disparate-impact liability is that it presumes that falsehood is true, and accordingly distorts civil rights.”
Mr. Trump’s order contends that businesses and employers face an “insurmountable” task of proving they did not intend to discriminate when there are different outcomes for different groups, and that disparate impact forced them to ”engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.”
Catherine E. Lhamon, who served as the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., disputed that. Her office conducted several disparate-impact investigations that found no intentional wrongdoing, she said.
“It’s a rigorous test,” Ms. Lhamon said, “and sometimes it proves discrimination and sometimes it doesn’t.”
The order’s impact will be particularly felt at the Education Department, where the Office for Civil Rights has heavily relied on data showing disparate outcomes when investigating complaints of discrimination in schools.
In one case, the office examined large disparities in the rates of Native American students being disciplined, particularly for truancy, compared with their white peers in the Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota. In the course of the investigation, the school superintendent attributed the tardiness of Native American students to “Indian Time,” the Education Department report stated. The superintendent later apologized and was fired.
Last year, the school district agreed to make changes to its practices as part of a voluntary resolution agreement with the Education Department. The Trump administration abruptly ended that agreement in April, citing the president’s directives to eliminate race-conscious policies.
The Justice Department has also long relied on the theory to identify patterns of police misconduct and other discrimination pervasive in communities of color. In 2018, the department helped secure a settlement and a consent decree with the City of Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Fire Department after finding that Black firefighters were blocked from promotions because of a test that did not prove necessary for the fire department’s operations.
Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.
In an interview last month, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, praised the executive order for rolling back what she called “a very discredited” theory that “should be overruled.”
“We’re not in that business anymore, pursuant to the executive order,” she told the conservative podcast host Glenn Beck.
She went on to suggest that the level of discrimination that spurred civil rights laws no longer existed. “It’s 2025, today,” she said, “and the idea that some police department or some big employer can be sued because of statistics, which can be manipulated, is ludicrous and it is unfair.”
Civil rights advocates say Mr. Trump is trying to effectively gut anti-discrimination laws by fiat.
Ms. Rodriguez, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said disparate impact had become a crucial guardrail for “ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that are limiting equal access to economic opportunity in every facet of our daily life.” The test helps root out discrimination that many people may not realize is constraining their opportunities, she added.
“The impact of this,” Ms. Rodriguez said of Mr. Trump’s order, “cannot be overstated.”
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16) Trump Declares High-Speed Internet Program ‘Racist’ and ‘Unconstitutional’
President Trump denounced the Biden-era Digital Equity Act as “woke handouts based on race,” raging in a social media post against a broad effort to improve high-speed internet access.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, May 8, 2025
Early in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed a law aimed at expanding access to high-speed internet, which President Trump said on Thursday that he would end. Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.”
Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency.
The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”
In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause that says that individuals could not be excluded from the program “on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability” — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Digital Equity Act, drafted by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, provides $60 million in grants to states and territories to help them come up with plans to make internet access more equal, as well as $2.5 billion in grants to help put those plans into effect. Some of that funding has already been disbursed to states with approved plans — including red, rural states like Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding were approved by the Biden administration in the weeks before Mr. Trump took office, but have not yet been distributed.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump had carried out his threat to end the grants, which were appropriated through Congress. The agencies that oversee the internet initiative, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Commerce, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The cancellation of grants to states would almost certainly be challenged in the courts, where the Trump administration has had some success in blocking, at least temporarily, challenges to its suspension of grants related to equity and diversity programs. However, in late March, the administration failed to ward off a block on its sweeping freeze of federal funds to states.
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17) Police and Brooklyn College Protesters Clash After Pro-Palestinian Rally
The police moved in to make arrests after demonstrators left the college grounds and gathered outside. Officers punched some students and slammed others to the ground.
By Wesley Parnell and Ed Shanahan, Published May 8, 2025, Updated May 9, 2025
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A pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College erupted in chaos on Thursday, with demonstrators and the police engaging in physical altercations, several people being arrested and one officer firing a Taser to subdue a man in the crowd.
The unruly scene followed the arrests of 80 people on Wednesday after pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied part of Columbia University’s main library, prompting university officials to quickly call in the police.
The swift moves to crack down on the two protests reflect the enormous pressure that colleges across the United States feel from the Trump administration to quell pro-Palestinian campus unrest.
The disorder at Brooklyn College began around 6 p.m., as dozens of students and faculty members who had gathered to chant slogans and condemn Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza exited the college’s wrought-iron gates.
They had been on campus for several hours by then. Although tensions had grown through the afternoon, as college officials and security guards threatened to have the demonstrators arrested, the rally appeared to be ending peacefully. Two of the four tents someone had set up had been removed at the college’s request.
There were some small skirmishes as people went through the gates, and officers made a few arrests. The crowd walked on before pausing in front of the college’s Tanger Hillel House, where someone in the group gave a speech denouncing the building as a “Zionist institution.” Others held signs that said: “Israel has no right to exist” and “save Gaza.”
A few minutes later, officers stepped into the crowd to make more arrests, taking some people into custody after punching, kicking or slamming them to the ground. It was unclear what prompted the officers to move in aggressively.
One man was quickly surrounded by several officers and put to the ground. One of the officers pulled out a Taser and pointed it in the man’s direction. A popping sound could be heard, and wires dangled from his pants as officers led him away. Several ambulances arrived.
College officials requested that officers come to the campus shortly before 5 p.m. and they arrested seven people, a police spokesman said Friday morning. It was not clear what charges they faced.
A spokesman for Brooklyn College said in a statement that demonstrators had violated college policy by putting up the tents. When the tents were not taken down after repeated warnings, City University of New York security officers and the New York City police removed them and “dispersed the crowd,” according to the spokesman, Richard Pietras.
“The safety of our campus community will always be paramount, and Brooklyn College respects the right to protest while also adhering to strict rules meant to ensure the safe operation of our university,” he added.
In an email sent to students at around 7:30 p.m., a college official said the campus was closed for the day, that anyone who left would not be able to return on Thursday and that classes that evening might need to be moved online or canceled.
Emma Grillo contributed reporting.
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18) After the Blast
By Saher Alghorra, May 9, 2025
Before the war, this restaurant in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City served Thai food — back when one could still find the ingredients for it in northern Gaza.
On Wednesday, a bloody day in the Gaza Strip, with multiple strikes, the restaurant was the site of the deadliest.
Thirty-three people were killed there and 155 wounded, according to the local health ministry.
I was just across the street when the strike happened, drinking coffee and using the internet at another cafe. When I made my way through the noise, smoke and dust to take photographs, I came upon a scene of the dead and the dying.
Those who had survived were trying to aid one another as best they could. The wounded woman seen in this photograph was carried away to a hospital moments later.
But at least one hospital was unable to accommodate the high number of casualties on Wednesday, according to the health ministry, which put the day’s death toll across the enclave at 59. Its casualty figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Asked about the target of the attack, the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday that its forces had “struck two key Hamas terrorists” in the Gaza City area.
“Prior to the strike,” it said, “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians, including the use of a precise munition, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
Israel was “aware,” the statement said, “of the claim of casualties.”
The strikes followed the collapse in March of a cease-fire between the Israelis and Hamas, which set off the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Israeli military says it is expanding its operations in Gaza to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages seized in that attack.
Outside the cafe on Wednesday, Gazans despaired at the return of war.
“Enough, enough of the bloodshed happening,” said one witness, Ahmed al-Saoudi.
Written by Peter Robins. Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Lara Jakes and Aaron Boxerman.
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