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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program
The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.
By Abbie VanSickle and Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, May 30, 2025
The ruling is the latest to respond to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.
The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.
Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.
Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.
Humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., are two different mechanisms by which migrants from troubled countries can be temporarily settled in the United States. Humanitarian parole is typically obtained by individuals who apply on a case-by-case basis, while T.P.S. is more often extended to large groups of migrants for a period of time. Individuals can hold both statuses at the same time.
Between the two rulings, the justices have agreed that, for now, the Trump administration can proceed with plans to deport hundreds of thousands of people who had fled war-torn and instable homelands and legally taken refuge in the United States.
The use of humanitarian parole has a decades-long history. It was used to admit nearly 200,000 Cubans during the 1960s and more than 350,000 Southeast Asians after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War.
The Biden administration announced a humanitarian parole program in April 2022 for Ukrainians seeking to flee after the Russian invasion.
Biden officials then introduced the program for Venezuelans in late 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023. With a stalemate in Congress over immigration and a sharp rise in border crossings, the programs cleared the way for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from those nations to enter the country legally.
Biden officials had hoped that the programs would encourage immigrants to fly to the United States and apply for entry in an organized fashion, instead of traveling north by foot and crossing the border illegally.
When the program was adopted for Venezuelans, official ports of entry had been closed to migrants since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which had provided additional incentive for those intent on reaching the country to take more dangerous routes and cross the border illegally.
After the administration introduced its policy, Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the border from those countries dropped sharply.
Republican lawmakers have pushed back sharply against the humanitarian parole programs, arguing that they allowed migration by those who would not have otherwise qualified to enter the country.
Texas and other Republican-led states filed lawsuits while Mr. Biden was in office seeking to block the parole program, arguing that it burdened them by adding costs for health care, education and law enforcement. The courts upheld the programs’ legality.
President Trump moved to end the humanitarian parole programs for people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti on his first day back in office.
So far, the Trump administration has not tried to revoke the status of 240,000 Ukrainians who received humanitarian parole, though it has paused consideration of new applications under that program.
Lawyers for migrants then sued. They argued that the termination of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the administration’s revocation of the program in March, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to categorically revoke parole for all 532,000 people without providing individualized, case-by-case reviews.
On May 5, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s temporary block on the administration, finding that Ms. Noem had not made a “strong showing” that her “categorical termination” of humanitarian parole for all migrants was likely to survive a court challenge.
In an emergency application to the Supreme Court on May 8, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Ms. Noem had “broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations” and that federal immigration law permitted the secretary “to revoke that parole” whenever its purposes had been served.
By blocking the Trump administration from ending the programs, the lower court had “needlessly” upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry” and had undone “democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election,” Mr. Sauer argued.
Lawyers for the immigrants filed a brief with the court arguing that Ms. Noem’s decision to end the parole protections “contravened express limits on her authority” and that siding with the Trump administration would “cause an immense amount of needless human suffering” for the immigrants.
The lawyers for the immigrants added: “All of them followed the law and the rules of the U.S. government, and they are here to reunite with family and/or to escape, even temporarily, the instability, dangers and deprivations of their home countries.”
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2) White House Health Report Included Fake Citations
A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.
By Dani Blum and Maggie Astor, May 29, 2025
A report by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health commission cited nonexistent studies on mental illness and children’s asthma medication. Credit...Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this.”
Researchers previously told The Times that they agreed with many of the report’s points, like its criticism of synthetic chemicals in the U.S. food supply and of the prevalence of ultraprocessed foods. (An early copy of the report shared with reporters did not include citations.)
But doctors have disagreed with some of the report’s other suggestions, including that routine childhood vaccines may be harmful — which scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology.
The news that some citations were fake further undermines confidence in the report’s findings, Dr. Keyes said.
She noted that her research had indeed shown that rates of depression and anxiety were rising among adolescents, as the report said they were. But the faulty citation “certainly makes me concerned about the evidence base that conclusions are being drawn from,” she said.
The report also originally cited a paper on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs published in The Lancet in 2005. A paper with that title does exist, but it was a perspective piece from an expert, not a study. It was published in a different journal five years earlier, and was not written by the cited author.
Another citation incorrectly referred to a paper on the link between sleep, inflammation and insulin sensitivity. The citation included a co-author who did not work on the paper, and omitted a researcher who did; it also listed the wrong journal. The citation has now been corrected, but Thirumagal Kanagasabai, a researcher in Toronto and the lead author on the paper, said she was shocked an incorrect citation had made it in there in the first place.
“I just don’t understand that,” she said. “How could it get mixed up?”
The report also pointed to what it said was a 2009 paper in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology by “Findling, R.L., et al.,” on the advertising of psychiatric medications. A spokesman for Virginia Commonwealth University, where Dr. Robert L. Findling works as a professor of psychiatry, said Dr. Findling had not written the article.
Experts said that even some correctly cited papers were inaccurately summarized. For example, the report said that the fifth edition of a guide used by psychiatrists to classify mental health conditions had loosened criteria for A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder, driving a 40-fold increase in diagnoses in children from 1994 to 2003.
But that edition was not published until 2013. The diagnoses mentioned in the cited study would have been made using an earlier version.
In addition, the data appeared to originate from a 2007 study that refers to an approximately 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among youth from 1994 to 2003, but does not mention increases in A.D.H.D. prevalence.
Part of what makes the errors so striking, Dr. Kanagasabai said, is that the importance of citations is drilled into young researchers even in the earliest stages of their careers.
“You want to always go back to the original source, and you want to make sure that source is correct,” she said.
Christina Caron contributed reporting.
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3) Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.
By Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, May 30, 2025
Sheera Frenkel reported from Washington and San Francisco, and Aaron Krolik from New York.
Alex Karp, a co-founder and the chief executive of Palantir, at a forum in Washington in April. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government. Caroline Gutman for The New York Times
Migrants apprehended by U.S. agents in November. President Trump could potentially use government data to police immigrants. Paul Ratje for The New York Times
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.
Some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work. The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.
This month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it.
“Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses,” Ms. Xia said. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.”
Mario Trujillo, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the government typically collected data for good reasons, such as to accurately levy taxes. But “if people can’t trust that the data they are giving the government will be protected, that it will be used for things other than what they gave it for, it will lead to a crisis of trust,” he said.
Palantir declined to comment on its work with the Trump administration and pointed to its blog, which details how the company handles data.
“We act as a data processor, not a data controller,” it said. “Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted. ”
The White House did not comment on the use of Palantir’s technology and referred to Mr. Trump’s executive order, which said he wanted to “eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars.”
Some details of Palantir’s government contracts and DOGE’s work to compile data were previously reported by Wired and CNN.
Palantir, which was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp and Mr. Thiel and went public in 2020, specializes in finding patterns in data and presenting the information in ways that are easy to process and navigate, such as charts and maps. Its main products include Foundry, a data analytics platform, and Gotham, which helps organize and draw conclusions from data and is tailored for security and defense purposes.
In an interview last year, Mr. Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, said the company’s role was “the finding of hidden things” by sifting through data.
Palantir has long worked with the federal government. Its government contracts span the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the pandemic, the Biden administration signed a contract with Palantir to manage the distribution of vaccines through the C.D.C.
Mr. Trump’s election in November boosted Palantir’s stock, which has risen more than 140 percent since then. Mr. Karp, who donated to the Democratic Party last year, has welcomed Mr. Trump’s win and called Mr. Musk the most “qualified person in the world” to remake the U.S. government.
At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.
A Treasury Department representative said that the I.R.S. was updating its systems to serve American taxpayers, and that Palantir was contracted to complete the work with I.R.S. engineers.
Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.
Some D.H.S. officials exchanged emails with DOGE officials in February about merging some Social Security information with records kept by immigration officials, according to screenshots of the messages viewed by The New York Times.
In a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, did not address Palantir’s new work with the agency and said the company “has had contracts with the federal government for 14 years.”
Palantir representatives have also held talks with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education to use the company’s technology to organize the agencies’ data, according to two Palantir employees and officials in those agencies.
The Social Security Administration and Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The goal of uniting data on Americans has been quietly discussed by Palantir engineers, employees said, adding that they were worried about collecting so much sensitive information in one place. The company’s security practices are only as good as the people using them, they said. They characterized some DOGE employees as sloppy on security, such as not following protocols in how personal devices were used.
Ms. Xia said Palantir employees were increasingly worried about reputational damage to the company because of its work with the Trump administration. There is growing debate within the company about its federal contracts, she said.
“Current employees are discussing the implications of their work and raising questions internally,” she said, adding that some employees have left after disagreements over the company’s work with the Trump administration.
Last week, a Palantir strategist, Brianna Katherine Martin, posted on LinkedIn that she was departing the company because of its expanded work with ICE.
“For most of my time here, I found the way that Palantir grappled with the weight of our capabilities to be refreshing, transparent and conscionable,” she wrote. “This has changed for me over the past few months. For me, this is a red line I won’t redraw.”
Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz and Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reporting.
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4) Israel Seeks to Clear Much of Northern Gaza, Warning of Dangerous Combat to Come
Many in the area have already been displaced at least once during the war and little humanitarian aid is arriving amid widespread hunger.
By Lara Jakes, May 30, 2025
Lara Jakes has written about Middle East diplomacy for more than a decade.
Palestinians flee parts of northern Gaza on Friday after the latest evacuation order from the Israeli military. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A sweeping new evacuation order by Israel’s military covers much of northern Gaza, warning residents that these areas will soon turn into dangerous combat zones.
Many of the inhabitants have already been displaced at least once during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which began almost 20 months ago. And little humanitarian aid has been reaching the area, where hunger is widespread.
Maps show that only a few neighborhoods in northern Gaza City were still unaffected by evacuation orders over the past 10 days. The latest order, issued Thursday night, urged residents of northern Gaza to move west toward the Mediterranean coast.
“From this moment on, the mentioned areas will be considered dangerous combat zones,” Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a statement on social media late Thursday. He said residents of northern Gaza had been warned several times to leave.
Northern Gaza is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But most humanitarian aid has not been reaching the area for months.
Three aid distribution centers set up this week by an Israeli and American-backed system to bypass Hamas militants are all in southern and central Gaza. The United Nations and other aid organizations have declined to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the group behind the new aid mechanism, describing it as a militarized distribution operation that violates humanitarian principles.
As hungry Gazans grow more desperate by the day and aid distribution continues to fall far short of needs, insecurity and chaos around distribution sites and food storage areas are growing.
Patience among much of the international community is growing thin, largely because of the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. Even Israel’s allies such as France, Britain and Canada have been threatening repercussions unless there is immediate action to ease the dire conditions in Gaza.
“It’s very clear today that we cannot let this situation last,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Friday at a security forum in Singapore. “If there is not a response to the humanitarian situation in the next few hours today, we will have to harden the collective position.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry shot back in a statement saying the government was facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid. “The facts do not interest Macron,” it said.
The lack of aid distribution in northern Gaza has forced residents to wait for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to dig boreholes for water to drink, even if it is not clean.
Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid, selling it for profit and using it as a tool to control Gazans. Israel has stated that one of its chief goals in the war is to uproot Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the conflict.
Israel had barred aid from entering Gaza in March, when a cease-fire agreement broke down. The new distribution centers opened this week and were thronged by desperate people seeking food.
The United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have criticized the aid centers as woefully insufficient to meet the basic needs for Palestinians’ survival after the Israeli blockade brought much of the territory to the brink of famine.
On Friday, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said it had enough food, blankets, medical supplies and hygiene kits for 200,000 people sitting in a warehouse in Amman, Jordan, a three-hour drive from Gaza.
“An unhindered, uninterrupted flow of supplies must be allowed in,” the agency said in a statement.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said on Friday that it had delivered 2.1 million meals in its first four days of service and planned to build additional sites across Gaza, including in the northern region, in the weeks ahead.
The new evacuation order comes as Israel and Hamas consider a new cease-fire proposal that would free a few dozen Israeli hostages, alive and dead, still being held in Gaza, and release hundreds of Palestinians prisoners held by Israel.
On Friday, the Hamas official Basem Naim said his group was still reviewing the latest proposal offered by Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s chief envoy to the negotiations.
American and Israeli officials said Mr. Witkoff’s proposal, which has Israel’s support, would allow the flow of aid into Gaza through U.N.-run operations and an initial 60-day cease-fire as negotiations continued.
Hamas officials suggested it did not contain strong enough guarantees on ending the war — one of the chief sticking points in the cease-fire negotiations. But they have stopped short of rejecting it outright.
Israel is insisting on having the option to resume fighting if Hamas does not surrender and disarm. Hamas is demanding firm guarantees that a temporary cease-fire would lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
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5) In Emaciated Children, Gaza’s Hunger Is Laid Bare
Aid began to trickle into the territory this week. But there is never enough.
Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Written by Vivian Yee, May 30, 2025
Saher Alghorra reported from northern Gaza, and Vivian Yee from Cairo.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42 percent of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 34 pounds to 21 pounds. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an esophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.
The starvation of Gaza can be measured in the jutting ribs of a 6-year-old girl. In the twig-like thinness of her arms. In the pounds she and those around her have lost. In the two tomatoes, two green chili peppers and single cucumber a destitute child can buy to feed his family that day.
Until last week, Israel had blocked all food, fuel and medicine from entering the Gaza Strip for 80 days, attempting to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli hostages it still holds as negotiations over a cease-fire remain deadlocked.
With international alarm surging over its total blockade, Israel allowed in a drip of aid starting last week. That enabled some bakeries to reopen. But humanitarian officials said it did little to alleviate Gaza’s enormous needs and to stop the territory’s slide toward famine. Limited amounts of food began being distributed to residents on Tuesday under a much-criticized plan backed by Israel.
In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.
There is never enough.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42 percent of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 34 pounds to 21 pounds. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an esophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.
People struggle to find fuel for hospital generators, cars and cooking stoves. Families have resorted to burning wood or even trash. Here, Bashir Sami Ashour’s family cooked soup over an open fire in Gaza City, in the north.
Pastry shops like this one, along with grocery stores, have long since run out of anything to sell. Bakeries have no fuel to bake with.
There is no electricity and little clean water available in Gaza, so people dig for whatever water they can find. Then, like this boy in Jabaliya camp, they lug it away in plastic containers — an ever harder task for people weakened by malnutrition.
Vegetable markets in Gaza City were bustling before the war. But with nothing being imported and Gaza’s farmland mostly destroyed or inaccessible because of evacuation orders, there is now little produce for sale.
What few fruits and vegetables are available are far too expensive for most families, so if they buy at all, they buy by the piece, not by the usual kilogram. This week, locally grown tomatoes cost $11.30 per kilogram — about two pounds — and locally grown cucumbers cost $10 per kilogram at this market in Gaza City.
A mother living in a tent tried to feed eight children from a few small bowls of food.
Ordered by the Israeli military to leave growing swaths of Gaza, people have been herded into ever-smaller zones. About 90 percent of Gaza’s population of roughly two million has been displaced from home. Most have been displaced multiple times since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led a deadly surprise attack on Israel, drawing a crushing military retaliation.
Najwa’s family was displaced from Shajaiye to Gaza City and now lives in a tent. The Jordanian authorities, who heard about her case, are trying to evacuate her to receive medical care abroad, her family said.
With bakeries closed for lack of wheat flour and fuel, people grind pasta down into flour that they can bake into bread.
Lentils, too, are being ground into flour for patties or bread. In all, people bring between 400 and 500 kilograms of lentils, rice, pasta and other dry goods a day, some of it saved from when more aid was entering Gaza, to Gaza City’s Jaber Mill, which grinds it down. The owner, Ahmed Jaber, said some people had no choice but to grind up spoiled or rotten supplies.
Residents of the northernmost part of Gaza have fled the fighting to this school, now a shelter, in Gaza City. They line up their buckets to reserve a turn to fill them whenever the school’s water main starts pumping or when a water truck comes by. Those who arrive too late miss their chance.
As bakeries closed and aid groups ran out of supplies to distribute to families, local charity kitchens, including this one in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, became some of the only places many Palestinians in Gaza could find food.
Adeel Adeeb Sukkar ran one kitchen in Gaza City, relying on donations from relatives abroad to provide free meals to 500 desperate displaced families a day.
By Sunday, with his stocks gone, he had been forced to close.
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6) White House Unveils New Details of Stark Budget Cuts
The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, Published May 30, 2025, Updated May 31, 2025
“Mr. Trump also targeted the nutritional program for women, infants and children, which helped about 6.7 million poorer recipients last year afford food. His budget proposed to roll back a policy that had increased the benefits low-income families receive for fruits and vegetables under the program. Georgia Machell, the president of the National WIC Association, which represents providers, estimated in a statement Friday that the move would result in breastfeeding mothers seeing those monthly benefits drop to $13 from $54, while for young children, the monthly allowance would be reduced to $10 from $27. … And as part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/white-house-budget-trump.html
The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.
The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.
The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.
The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.
The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.
The maximum award would be capped at $5,710 for the 2026-7 award year, a decrease of more than $1,600. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget attributed the cap to a pre-existing shortfall in the program. So while it did not propose to cut spending on Pell grants, the Trump administration also opted against providing new money to sustain the student aid at its existing level.
Mr. Trump also targeted the nutritional program for women, infants and children, which helped about 6.7 million poorer recipients last year afford food. His budget proposed to roll back a policy that had increased the benefits low-income families receive for fruits and vegetables under the program.
Georgia Machell, the president of the National WIC Association, which represents providers, estimated in a statement Friday that the move would result in breastfeeding mothers seeing those monthly benefits drop to $13 from $54, while for young children, the monthly allowance would be reduced to $10 from $27.
The Office of Management and Budget maintained that the top-line funding level for the program had not changed and that it would still serve eligible participants.
And as part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday.
“For the past 50 years, every significant medical breakthrough, especially in the treatment of cancer, has been linked to sustained federal investment in research” by the institute, the American Cancer Society Action Network said in a statement. “This commitment has contributed to the remarkable statistic of over 18 million cancer survivors currently living in the U.S. today.”
The cut to cancer research is part of a roughly $18 billion reduction at the National Institutes of Health that Mr. Trump revealed earlier this month, as the White House aims to consolidate health agencies and their research centers.
Democrats immediately rebuked Mr. Trump on Friday for the deep proposed cuts to domestic programs.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations panel, described the blueprint as a “draconian proposal to hurt working people and our economy, and it is dead on arrival in Congress as long as I have anything to say about it.”
The White House did not include some key details in its updated budget, including estimates of tax revenues, and it did not offer a full set of spending proposals for the Pentagon, though it promised those in June. The omissions also angered Democrats, who said the timing and nature of the administration’s blueprint — released late on a Friday — only served to highlight the magnitude of its proposed cuts.
Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought, “are clearly hiding their policy goals, because they would hurt the middle class, the working class and the vulnerable,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who leads her party on the House Appropriations Committee.
Republicans are also racing to advance a package of tax cuts that could include additional reductions in federal spending. And the White House plans to send Congress a separate request next week to claw back about $9 billion in funds that lawmakers previously authorized, predominantly targeting money for public broadcasting and foreign aid.
Mr. Vought described the spending targeted for rescission this week as “waste and garbage,” and signaled the administration would seek to rescind other funds. He said the focus is on funds identified by the Department of Government Efficiency, the team of aides known as DOGE until recently overseen by the tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“We are doing everything we can to make the DOGE cuts permanent,” Mr. Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox Business this week.
Mr. Vought added that the president could also try to halt some enacted funding on his own, using an authority known as impoundment to bypass Congress on spending. The budget director said that option was “still on the table.” But using it could presage a major battle over the power of the nation’s purse, which the Constitution affords to lawmakers.
Christina Jewett contributed reporting.
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7) Trump Officials Deported Another Man Despite Court Order
A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”
By Mattathias Schwartz and Alan Feuer, May 30, 2025
The Trump administration deported a 31-year-old Salvadoran man minutes after a federal appeals court barred his removal while his case proceeded, the government admitted in a court filing this week.
In its filing, the government denied that it had violated the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, instead blaming “a confluence of administrative errors.” The filing argues that because the process of deporting the man, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, had already started before the court issued its formal order, at 9:52 a.m. May 7, that meant the order had not been violated.
The plane carrying Mr. Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador did not take off from Alexandria, La., until 10:20 a.m. Eastern time, according to the government’s timeline. The government had also previously given the court what the judges called “express assurance” that it would not schedule a deportation for him until the next day.
The deportation deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration’s legal tactics and administrative errors as it has sought to carry out the president’s aggressive vision of deporting as many as one million immigrants during his first year in office. In at least three other deportation cases, federal judges have determined that Trump officials expelled people from the country in violation of standing court orders.
In an interview, one of Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s lawyers disputed the government’s characterization of the deportation as a mistake, saying it appeared to be part of a larger pattern of the administration ignoring court orders. “It would be an absurd level of mistake,” said Matthew Borowski, the lawyer, comparing it to a chef pouring in pepper instead of salt. “Verifying the paperwork and putting the right people on the plane is their job.”
The questions raised by the court over the deportation were reported earlier by Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in Western New York.
In a filing on Wednesday in response to questions from the three-judge appellate panel, the government detailed a series of communication lapses between an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Buffalo, which was responsible for monitoring Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s legal case, and one in Louisiana, where he was being held.
Administration lawyers emailed the Buffalo office at 10:08 a.m. May 7, but the office did not flag the court’s order in ICE’s internal system until 10:45 a.m., after the flight had taken off, an ICE official told the court.
Mr. Melgar-Salmeron, who had been affiliated with the MS-13 street gang and had previously served two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, was appealing an order for his removal, fearing he could be sent to prison in El Salvador and persecuted there, his lawyer said. He had disavowed MS-13 and now has a wife and four children in Virginia, Mr. Borowski said. He said his client’s family believes Mr. Melgar-Salmeron is being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The appellate judges have not yet indicated how they will respond. Mr. Borowski said he would soon file papers asking the court to appoint a special master who could determine whether any officials should be held in criminal contempt.
In each of the other cases where migrants have been deported despite court orders, the judges have subsequently issued new orders instructing Trump officials to take steps toward bringing them back to the United States so they could be afforded due process.
The best known of the cases is arguably that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was arrested on March 12 by federal immigration agents in Maryland after living in the state for nearly six years under the protection of a judicial order that barred him from being returned to his homeland because he might face danger there.
Three days after he was taken into custody, Mr. Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador — the one place the order forbade him from being sent — in what officials later called an “administrative error.” For more than two months now, Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen, has been locked in one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons despite three court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — instructing the White House to “facilitate” his release.
Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling the case in Federal District Court in Maryland, has spent the past few weeks trying to determine whether to hold the administration in contempt for not complying with those orders. But the Justice Department, acting on the behalf of the White House, has repeatedly stonewalled her efforts to get information about the steps the administration has taken to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.
In a similar case, another federal judge in Maryland, Stephanie A. Gallagher, has ordered the administration to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man, known in court papers as Cristian, who was expelled to El Salvador on the same set of flights as Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Cristian, who was convicted of possessing cocaine, had sought asylum in the United States, but was nonetheless expelled to El Salvador in violation of a settlement agreement that immigration lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security reached in the waning days of the Biden administration.
Under that agreement, unaccompanied minors who arrive in the United States and claim asylum cannot be removed from the country until their cases are fully resolved.
Judge Gallagher’s order directing the administration to take steps toward bringing Cristian back to the United States was affirmed this month in a scathing ruling by a federal appeals court in Virginia, which noted the Trump administration’s serial efforts to sidestep court rulings.
“As is becoming far too common,” one of the appeals court judges, Roger Gregory, wrote, “we are confronted again with the efforts of the executive branch to set aside the rule of law in pursuit of its goals.”
Like Judge Xinis, Judge Gallagher has been trying to get to the bottom of the White House’s recalcitrance. Last week, she ordered Trump officials to send her an update by Wednesday about what they had done to secure Cristian’s return. When the officials failed to follow her instructions, the judge reprimanded them sharply, saying they had “utterly disregarded” her directives.
“Defendants’ untimely response,” she wrote, “is the functional equivalent of, ‘We haven’t done anything and don’t intend to.’”
In yet another case, the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to comply with a judge’s order to bring back a wrongfully deported immigrant.
Last week, Judge Brian E. Murphy issued a ruling in Federal District Court in Boston, telling the White House to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico even though he said he had been raped and kidnapped there. Judge Murphy determined that the man, known only as O.C.G., had been sent to Mexico in violation of an order the judge issued in April forbidding immigrants from being expelled to a country not their own without having a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their removal.
Immigration officials initially asserted that O.C.G. had not sought to contest his deportation to Mexico, but then reversed themselves, saying that they were unable to find any officers had properly informed him of his removal or heard him say that he accepted it.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration said it was taking steps to follow Judge Murphy’s order. Immigration authorities made contact with O.C.G.’s legal team over the weekend and were working to bring him back to the United States on a charter flight, according to the two-page filing in the case.
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8) N.Y.P.D. Is Helping Federal Agents Investigate Migrants. Should It?
A Palestinian woman accused of overstaying her visa has been detained in Texas. Her case has raised questions about whether the police should cooperate with the Trump administration.
By Maria Cramer, May 31, 2025
In March, a federal investigator asked the New York Police Department for information about a woman who had been arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University and was now detained for overstaying her visa.
The woman, Leqaa Kordia, 32, was being investigated for money laundering, the investigator said, and the Department of Homeland Security needed help. The police handed over her birth date, address and the name of a possible associate. An officer also provided the woman’s sealed arrest report.
But a month later, during an immigration court hearing, the only evidence of money laundering that federal prosecutors presented was a $1,000 MoneyGram transfer that Ms. Kordia had sent to relatives in Gaza.
The judge, Tara Naselow-Nahas, was unimpressed.
“Based on the evidence, I do not find that the respondent poses a danger to the United States,” she said and ordered that Ms. Kordia be released on a $20,000 bond. Ms. Kordia remains at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas as prosecutors seek a reversal of the decision.
But the judge’s ruling and questions about the federal government’s credibility have civil libertarians asking whether the Police Department should reconsider its cooperation with the Trump administration.
The city’s sanctuary laws forbid the department from divulging information in immigration cases, which are civil matters, but the police often cooperate with federal authorities on criminal cases, usually in joint investigations into crimes like sex trafficking, drug and gun dealing, and terrorism.
Ms. Kordia’s case is the rarer instance in which federal agents have asked about a criminal inquiry that does not involve a joint investigation. In those cases, the department also expects officers to cooperate, vetting requests through superiors and maintaining a record of information released. But the department has no written guidelines or procedures for assessing such requests beyond a brief description.
Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch said Thursday that the police were watching closely to ensure that federal officials were truthful, but that cooperation with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations and the F.B.I. was crucial to keeping New Yorkers safe from terrorism, trafficking and transnational crime.
“Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE,” she said during a budget hearing before the City Council, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “The short, straight answer to this is no.”
“The only way these investigations are successful is by N.Y.P.D. detectives working seamlessly with federal agents on a daily basis,” she added.
But some say the department must ask more and harder questions. They contend that a long-established trust has been breached because federal authorities, struggling to meet President Trump’s demands to deport as many immigrants as possible, are misleading — even lying — to local law enforcement officers and judges.
“The N.Y.P.D. should think through its own systems and its own processes,” said Anne Venhuizen, senior staff attorney for the Bronx Defenders, which represents the indigent in court. “They are potentially violating sanctuary laws by not having a more fulsome practice of verifying that the information they’re getting is accurate.”
Local police officers in other states, predominantly in the South, have cooperated for years as ICE has apprehended people accused of immigration violations. Now, other states are falling in line with Mr. Trump’s demands. On May 22, Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire signed two bills requiring police departments to help ICE.
New York and other cities with sanctuary laws, such as Boston and Chicago, have a trickier path, cooperating on criminal matters but not civil immigration. And events in recent months have cast a shadow on the actions of federal law enforcement.
In March, a judge approved a warrant for ICE agents to search for Yunseo Chung, a Columbia junior who had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The decision was based on an agent’s sworn statement that the university was breaking a federal law that prohibited the harboring of “removable aliens.” But Ms. Chung is a permanent resident, and her lawyers accused ICE of lying to the judge.
In April, the federal government sued the City of Rochester, in New York, after its Police Department ordered more training for officers who had helped ICE agents handcuff immigrants. City officials have said that immigration officers lied when they called the police on March 24 and said they needed help with an emergency stop on a city road.
In January, police officers in Millcreek, Utah, suspected that ICE agents were lying when they said they had stopped an American man because he had tried to hit them with his car. In fact, the man said, he had honked while the agents were detaining a woman and they pulled him over and pointed a gun at him.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the cases.
“This federal government has completely blurred the lines between valid criminal enforcement and immigration enforcement,” said Meghna Philip, director of special litigation at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. “In our present reality, if anything, there should be a presumption of noncooperation with immigration authorities.”
The New York police said that the federal agent who had asked about Ms. Kordia had provided contact information, as well as a name, shield number and case number, and they believed that was sufficient. Commissioner Tisch said Thursday that she had put federal agencies on notice.
“I am nobody’s fool,” she said. “If we were to find that a federal agency had not been honest with us, if we were told that a records request was for a criminal investigation, but in fact that was not true, then that would be a tremendous breach of our trust. And we would need to reconsider how we do business with that federal agency. I have been very upfront about that with all our federal partners.”
Homeland Security Investigations did not return repeated requests for comment.
Pushing back on federal requests would harm cooperation that flourished after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Christopher Mercado, a retired New York police lieutenant who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But, he said, “I’m going to be honest with you: The feds may not always be transparent with the P.D.”
Federal investigators may fear that giving too much information could compromise an investigation or a confidential informant, he said. Historically, local police officers have accepted that.
“Those relationships are always going to be important and we don’t want to burn them,” Mr. Mercado said.
Ms. Kordia, a waitress from Paterson, N.J., who came to the United States from the West Bank in 2016 and lived with her mother, an American citizen, has not been charged with any crimes and is accused only of overstaying her visa.
She went to the demonstration in New York on April 30, 2024. She was accused of blocking a gate and arrested with dozens of other protesters, according to a police report that also said she had no record of criminal complaints or investigations. The report was sealed after her case was dismissed.
Court records filed by Ms. Kordia’s lawyers suggest that agents with Homeland Security Investigations did not start looking into her until March, almost a year after her arrest.
From March 5 until March 13, the day she was detained, federal agents interviewed people who knew her, including her mother and uncle.
They set up a trace on her WhatsApp account and subpoenaed records from MoneyGram, according to court documents. She had sent the $1,000 to her aunt on behalf of her mother, who could not figure out how to send the funds through MoneyGram, according to her family and lawyers.
After Ms. Kordia learned that ICE wanted to question her, she hired a lawyer and they went to the agency’s Newark field office to explain. But her lawyer was barred from the meeting and Ms. Kordia was immediately detained and put on a plane to Texas.
The following day, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused Ms. Kordia of taking part in “pro-Hamas protests,” and the federal investigator asked the New York Police Department about the supposed money laundering investigation.
An officer who works at the police’s Real Time Crime Center, a hub that provides detectives with data, gave an agent from Homeland Security Investigations the sealed arrest report, which state law forbids. The Police Department has said it is investigating the officer’s actions.
In court papers, Ms. Kordia’s lawyers have said that she has been kept in miserable conditions at Prairieland, where cockroaches skitter across the floor and guards have refused to honor her requests for halal meals.
Hamzah Abushaban, a cousin who came to visit her in Texas soon after her arrest, said he was shocked. She had lost 50 pounds, had dark circles under her eyes and seemed confused about why she was there.
“I’ve never seen her look like that,” said Mr. Abushaban. “She looked like death.”
Ms. Kordia’s future in the United States remains uncertain. Prosecutors have said that federal investigators are still investigating her for financial transactions overseas.
Before her arrest, Ms. Kordia had been trying to start a business selling candles and balloons. She had found a small space about five minutes from her mother’s house in Paterson that she planned to rent.
During the immigration court hearing in April, the judge asked Ms. Kordia about the space. Was she still renting it?
Ms. Kordia replied simply, expressing little emotion.
“I had it for one night,” she said. “That’s it. Then I came here.”
Mary Beth Gahan contributed reporting.
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9) A Hurricane Season Like No Other
By Michael Lowry, May 31, 2025
Mr. Lowry is a hurricane specialist and a storm surge expert for WPLG, the ABC television affiliate in Miami.
Nicholas Kempton
As darkness descended on the Gulf of Mexico in October, a 1970s-era U.S. government turboprop plane neared the eye of the newly formed Hurricane Milton. When the plane’s first radar scan arrived by satellite communications, I pounced and took to the airwaves, describing to viewers what I saw inside the storm: a dreaded vortex alignment signaling the early stages of rapid intensification. On social media I put it more plainly: “Katy bar the door, this one’s about to put on a show.”
And Milton did just that, strengthening at a breathtaking rate over the next 24 hours to a 180-mile-per-hour Category 5 monster, the strongest Gulf hurricane in almost 20 years. But there was no October surprise on the Florida coast because we’d had ample warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane hunters — enough time for people in the highest-risk areas to safely evacuate and businesses to prepare for the worst.
But as we head into what NOAA forecasts will be another active Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downsizing the agency, which houses the National Weather Service, the hurricane hunters and many other programs crucial to hurricane forecasters. Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow.
The National Weather Service costs the average American $4 per year in today’s inflated dollars — about the same as a gallon of milk — and offers an 8,000 percent annual return on investment, according to 2024 estimates. It’s a farce for the administration to pretend that gutting an agency that protects our coastlines from a rising tide of disasters is in the best interests of our economy or national security. If the private sector could have done it better and cheaper, it would have, and it hasn’t.
Losing the hurricane hunters would be catastrophic, but that would be only the forerunner wave in a brutal, DOGE-directed tsunami to weather forecasting. In just three months DOGE has dealt the National Weather Service, which operates 122 local forecast offices around the country, the equivalent of over a decade of loss to its work force. Some offices have hemorrhaged 60 percent of their staff members, including entire management teams.
National Weather Service forecast offices — typically staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — are the source of all weather warnings received by Americans by phone, TV and radio. Without these warnings and data, local weather broadcasts and private weather apps couldn’t operate.
With dozens of local forecast offices struggling to maintain 24/7 operations, NOAA put out a mayday on May 13 asking remaining staff members to temporarily vacate their posts to salvage what was left of the nation’s critical warning network. Nearly half of local forecast offices are critically understaffed, with a vacancy rate of 20 percent or higher, and several are going dark for part of the day, increasing the risk of weather going undetected and people going unprotected and unwarned.
The staff reshuffling is just the latest move from an agency fighting for survival. Weather balloons, a mainstay of data collection for more than 60 years, usually launch twice a day from 100 sites around North America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. But recently some of their flights were reduced or suspended so that limited staffs can tend to other priorities.
Even in the satellite era, weather balloons have been shown to markedly improve forecast accuracy, so much so that twice-daily launches are commonly supplemented with up to four launches a day ahead of major hurricane threats. The extra balloons increase forecast confidence and allow time-sensitive decisions like evacuation orders to be made sooner. On the precipice of a new hurricane season, balloon launches are down 15 to 20 percent nationwide, throwing the nation into a risky experiment that nobody wanted to run.
Within NOAA, research and forecasting are inextricably linked. In new budget documents released Friday, the White House proposed eliminating NOAA’s research wing, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which lends mission-critical support to the hurricane hunters. Taking a sledgehammer to OAR would shatter decades of progress in hurricane forecasting, one of the roaring success stories of predictive sciences. The fate of the agency’s research arm is now in the hands of Congress.
Thirty years ago, forecasters couldn’t detect a hurricane until it formed, and once it formed, we were lucky to give two or three days’ notice that it might strike land. Today, our forecast models — developed, maintained and improved by NOAA scientists and their supercomputers — routinely and reliably predict hurricanes sometimes a week or more before the first puff of clouds. At two or three days out, we’re able to whittle hurricane forecasts to within a county or two.
Rapidly intensifying hurricanes like Milton remain difficult to forecast, eluding conventional satellites and outpacing weather prediction models. In recent years, however, NOAA has developed powerful high-resolution hurricane models that both see the small details and skillfully forecast episodes of rapid intensification. Slashing funding for NOAA research and development would effectively unplug these world-class models and eviscerate the institute that supplies the only rapid-intensification prediction tools available to forecasters. Without them, forecasters like me are flying a plane in the clouds with no navigation system. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I’ve spent over two decades working to reduce the loss of life from hurricanes, from revolutionizing the way we forecast and warn for storm surge at the National Hurricane Center to overhauling FEMA’s hurricane response and recovery plans to guiding viewers on air at The Weather Channel and at stations in hurricane-prone South Florida through dozens of storms. Hurricanes aren’t an afterthought to the more than 60 million Americans living in the hurricane zone. They’re our highest priority during the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30. I’ve not seen a bigger threat to weather and climate science than what we’re witnessing now.
The irreparable harm the Trump administration is doing will imperil the nation’s longstanding weather warning network for hundreds of millions of Americans in the decades ahead. It’s only a matter of time before the next Milton is at our doorstep — but with our weather intelligence severely compromised, will we know it?
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10) Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement
By Robert Macfarlane, May 30, 2025
Mr. Macfarlane is a poet, a nonfiction writer and the author of “Is a River Alive?”
MarÃa Medem
In early May, an orange floral fire burned across Northern California riverbanks in celebration: an explosion of poppies, goldenrod and other native plants, marking the first spring after the biggest de-damming project in U.S. history liberated the Klamath River from its confinements.
The recovery of the wider Klamath watershed began last year with the demolition of four dams, and the free-flowing river now provides roughly 400 miles of restored habitat for salmon and steelhead trout. It’s also creating wetlands, helping the regrowth of forests and brush and leading to major improvements in water quality.
The Klamath’s revival is a beacon of hope at a time of deep ecological gloom for the United States. President Trump and his administration have made clear their intention to drastically de-prioritize the natural world in favor of economic interests. Rivers and other freshwater bodies are among the ecosystems most vulnerable to this rapid reorientation.
In declaring a national energy emergency, a Trump executive order effectively waived large portions of the Clean Water Act to fast-track energy projects, weakening protections for free-flowing rivers and increasing the risk of watershed pollution from mining and drilling. River health is also now threatened by the administration’s drive to expand American timber production; logging degrades water quality by increasing soil erosion and sediment runoff. By narrowing the definition of “the waters of the United States,” the Environmental Protection Agency has made it easier for pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides and mining waste to enter bodies of water.
The doctrine of human supremacy, which waxes strong in the current administration, portrays life as a hierarchy with humans at the top, rather than a web within which humans are entangled. Consider that a scant 0.0002 percent of Earth’s total water flows in rivers at any given time, yet rivers have been vital, fragile accomplices to human flourishing for thousands of years. To view rivers only as sources and drains is to reduce them to base functions rather than to see them as the life-giving, world-shaping forces they are.
Over the past 20 years, a powerful movement has emerged that contests human exploitation of the natural world. It is usually known as the rights of nature movement, and it calls for recognizing the inherent, inalienable rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist and flourish. At its best, the rights of nature movement challenges anthropocentric presumptions, which are embedded in our laws and imaginations.
Rivers have become this movement’s particular focus and rallying point. In 2008, in an act of great moral imagination, Ecuador revised its constitution to recognize the rights of nature and make the country the guarantor of those rights. In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that proposed gold mining would violate the rights of a cloud forest and its associated river system; the ruling forced two mining companies to abandon their claims to the area. In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, the Maori word for New Zealand, was recognized in a parliamentary act as a “spiritual and physical entity.” A body of river guardians was appointed to speak for the river, with the mandate of protecting and enhancing its mauri, or life force.
The momentum and visibility of the rights of nature movement are snowballing. For the past two years the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for nature, has been awarded to water-rights activists. In 2024, the prize recognized the lawyer Teresa Vicente for her work saving the grievously polluted Mar Menor lagoon in Spain from ecological collapse; her grass roots campaign led in 2022 to the Spanish Parliament granting legal rights to the lagoon, a first for Europe. This April, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari received the prize for a three-year campaign resulting in the landmark legal recognition of the Marañón River in Peru as a living entity with the inherent rights to exist, flow, give life to animals and plants and remain free of pollution.
If the idea of a river bearing rights seems radical to the point of being absurd, remember that corporations, under U.S. and British law, are nonhuman entities with a wide suite of rights, including the right to a fair trial and rights to certain privacies.
Perhaps surprisingly, the rights of nature movement is extremely active in the United States. The Eco Jurisprudence Monitor, which tracks such legal initiatives around the world, details 156 rights of nature initiatives in America, far more than in any other country. Among them is the Yurok Tribe’s 2019 resolution, which declared the rights of the Klamath River “to exist, flourish and naturally evolve” and “to have a clean and healthy environment free from pollutants.”
Mr. Trump’s administration will surely be hostile to rights of nature thinking. For a fundamental incommensurability exists between a worldview that perceives rivers as assets and a worldview that sees them as alive. To recognize rivers as life-giving forces and as rights-bearing presences is a profound and hopeful position. It offers philosophical grounds for resistance to the present administration’s shortsighted drive to gut environmental regulation and reduce the natural world to dollar value.
Rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance, they revive with remarkable speed. Lazarus-like, their life pours back. The first salmon was detected swimming upstream of where the Klamath dams had once stood just three days after the completion of the dams’ removal last September. Within a month, 6,000 salmon had migrated up into the newly accessible habitat. As Barry McCovey, a senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, told the BBC, “the river is healing itself.” And as rivers heal, they heal us in return.
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11) Over 20 Killed Near Aid Distribution Site in Gaza, Palestinian Health Officials Say
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack. The Israeli military denied any of its fire had harmed people within the site.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 1, 2025
Displaced Palestinians returning on Sunday from a food distribution center in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 20 people were killed on Sunday in southern Gaza near an aid distribution site, according to local health officials, as hungry Palestinians gathered en masse hoping to receive some food from the facility.
It was not immediately clear who had opened fire in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its paramedics had evacuated at least 23 killed and 23 wounded from the area, all with gunshot wounds. In a statement, Gaza’s health ministry gave a higher toll of 31.
The Israeli military said it was not aware of any injuries caused by Israeli fire “within the humanitarian aid site,” but did not immediately rule out shooting nearby. Hamas accused Israeli forces of attacking people who had gathered to seek food. The New York Times could not verify the circumstances of the attack.
Over the past week, Israel has launched a contentious plan to overhaul aid distribution in Gaza. Israeli officials say the new system — run mainly by American contractors — of four sites in southern Gaza would prevent Hamas from seizing the food, fuel and other goods, but aid agencies have criticized the initiative.
Huge crowds of Gazans have headed for the new aid sites, hoping to receive a box of food supplies. While some days have gone relatively smoothly, there have also been chaotic scenes, including one instance in which Israeli forces fired what they described as warning shots.
The United Nations and other major humanitarian relief groups have boycotted the sites, accusing Israel of wielding aid as part of its military strategy. U.N. officials said there was little evidence that Hamas systematically diverted relief. Critics in Israel have warned the effort could be the first step toward establishing formal Israeli rule over Gaza.
The new arrangement was drawn up by Israeli military officials and their associates and stipulates that Israeli forces secure the perimeter of four aid sites in southern Gaza. U.S. security contractors are overseeing the distribution of boxes of food there as part of the newly-created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
On Sunday, the foundation reiterated that it was unaware of any attacks in or around its distribution sites. “Our aid was again distributed today without incident,” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said, adding that reports to the contrary were “fomented by Hamas.”
The violence took place a day after the Trump administration rejected Hamas’s response to a cease-fire proposal. On Saturday night, the United States had suggested a two-month truce to free hostages. Hamas officials argued that the proposal did not go far enough to ensure that the cease-fire would become permanent, an issue that has long been the main sticking point with Israel in the truce talks.
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Mideast envoy, denounced Hamas’s response as totally unacceptable, saying it “only takes us backward.”
For more than two months, the Israeli authorities imposed a near-total blockade on Gaza, stopping shipments of food, fuel and medicine from entering the enclave in what they called an attempt to pressure Hamas over stalled cease-fire talks.
Since the restrictions were imposed, many Gazans have gone hungry as stockpiles of food dwindled. Communal soup kitchens closed and doctors have reported increasing amounts of malnutrition, including among children. Israel finally began relaxing the ban on humanitarian aid in mid-May.
On Tuesday, chaos erupted at a distribution site in what remained of Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood. Large groups of Palestinians — forced to crowd into small, fenced-in corridors — burst through barriers into the area.
The Israeli military said soldiers fired “warning shots in the area outside the compound” in an effort to restore control. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation denied any “civilians or individuals involved with the distribution of aid” were harmed in the incident.
The International Committee of the Red Cross later reported that its nearby field hospital had received about 48 people — including women and children — suffering from gunshot wounds on Tuesday night. The organization did not say whether the two incidents were connected.
Reporting was contributed by Gabby Sobelman, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Iyad Abuheweila and Myra Noveck.
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12) U.S. Says Hamas Response to Gaza Cease-Fire Proposal ‘Only Takes Us Backward’
Officials said Hamas was seeking changes on guarantees for a permanent end to war. That has long been the core sticking point with Israel.
By Aaron Boxerman, Ronen Bergman and Abu Bakr Bashir, May 31, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv and Abu Bakr Bashir from London.
Displaced Palestinians north of Gaza City on Friday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The White House denounced Hamas’s response on Saturday to a new American cease-fire proposal as totally unacceptable and said it “only takes us backward” after the group sought firmer guarantees that the deal would lead to a permanent end to the war.
Under the U.S. proposal, which was floated by Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Mideast envoy, Israel and Hamas would halt the fighting in Gaza for at least 60 days, during which some hostages would be freed in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel. And there would be further U.S.-backed negotiations on a permanent end to the war.
That issue has long been the core sticking point in the truce negotiations. Hamas has been willing to free the remaining Israeli and foreign captives in Gaza as part of a broader deal to end the war. Israel has vowed to continue fighting until Hamas lays down its arms and sends it leaders into exile.
Mr. Witkoff laid the blame on Hamas for the impasse, saying in a statement that its response “only takes us backward.” He said Hamas should accept the U.S. framework as the basis for further intensive negotiations, “which we can begin immediately this coming week.”
A Hamas official outside of Gaza had said earlier on Saturday that the group was seeking amendments to the Witkoff proposal around the guarantees for ending the war decisively.
An Israeli official said Hamas had demanded stronger guarantees that the temporary truce would pave the way for the end of the conflict that began almost 20 months ago. Both the Israeli and the Hamas officials requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he is willing to reach a temporary cease-fire with Hamas to free hostages, he has ruled out ending the war unless the group meets Israel’s conditions — which the group has rebuffed for the time being. Mr. Netanyahu’s office released a statement on Saturday saying Hamas was “persisting in its refusal.”
U.S. officials and other mediators have tried to cobble together a new truce since Israel ended the last cease-fire with Hamas in mid-March. But they have struggled to overcome the basic divide in Israel and Hamas’s war aims.
Hamas said on Saturday that it had submitted an answer to the proposal that aimed to achieve a permanent cease-fire, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and ensure the flow of aid to desperate and hungry Palestinians in Gaza. The wording indicated that the group was seeking more than the current proposal’s guarantee of a temporary pause in hostilities.
The group said if there was agreement, it would turn over 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 others in exchange for an agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners.
About 20 living hostages and the bodies of more than 30 others are believed to still be in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel ended a two-month cease-fire in mid-March — citing a deadlock in talks on the next steps in the truce. Israeli forces then resumed attacks in Gaza while blockading humanitarian aid from entering the enclave, a ban that Israel relaxed only last week.
While Israel and Hamas have both dug into their respective bargaining positions, both sides have also faced rising international pressure lately to halt the fighting.
Palestinians in Gaza, furious and exhausted after more than a year of war, hunger and bombardment, have held rare protests against Hamas calling for the group to leave the enclave it has ruled since 2007. And since resuming its offensive in March, Israel has killed several senior Hamas leaders in Gaza.
On Saturday night, the Israeli military announced that it had killed Muhammad Sinwar, one of Hamas’s top remaining military leaders in Gaza, in airstrikes earlier this month. Mr. Sinwar was the brother of Yahya Sinwar, the former Hamas leader killed by Israeli forces last year and an architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel that ignited the war.
There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas. The Palestinian group has shied away from immediately announcing the deaths of its fighters and commanders during the war.
Meanwhile, Israel’s traditional allies, including the Trump administration, have expressed growing impatience and even anger over the protracted war, the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza that have created a risk of famine, and Israel’s threats to significantly widen the offensive against Hamas.
Israel went to war after Hamas-led Palestinian militants launched the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 as hostages, mostly civilians. Israel’s devastating assault in Gaza has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
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13) M.I.T. Class President Barred From Graduation Ceremony After Pro-Palestinian Speech
According to the school, the student delivered a speech, which denounced M.I.T.’s ties to Israel, that had not been preapproved.
By John Branch, May 31, 2025
At a schoolwide ceremony on Thursday at the institute’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., Megha Vemuri commended students who protested on behalf of Palestinians and denounced M.I.T.’s ties with Israel. Credit...Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The 2025 class president of M.I.T. was barred from a graduation ceremony on Friday after delivering a pro-Palestinian speech during a commencement event the day before. The student, Megha Vemuri, is the latest to face discipline after using a graduation as a forum to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
At a universitywide ceremony on Thursday at M.I.T.’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., Ms. Vemuri commended students who protested on behalf of Palestinians and denounced M.I.T.’s ties with Israel. The Boston Globe reported last year that based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, M.I.T. reported receiving $2.8 million in grants, gifts and contracts from Israeli entities between 2020 and 2024.
School officials confirmed that they later told Ms. Vemuri that she was prohibited from attending the undergraduate ceremony on Friday.
“MIT supports free expression but stands by its decision, which was in response to the individual deliberately and repeatedly misleading Commencement organizers and leading a protest from the stage,” a school spokesperson said in a statement.
The school said that Ms. Vemuri, who grew up in Georgia, will receive her degree. Sarat Vemuri, her father, said that she was a double major, in computation and cognition and linguistics, and was told that she will receive her diploma by mail.
He otherwise referred questions to his daughter, who provided a statement saying that she was not disappointed to miss Friday’s ceremony.
“I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide,” she wrote.
She added that she was “disappointed” in M.I.T.’s response, saying school officials “massively overstepped their roles to punish me without merit or due process.”
College campuses have been contending with protest encampments and accusations of antisemitism since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza. Those tensions, coupled with the Trump administration’s attacks on universities, have left some school communities wrestling with how to balance civility and safety with open expression and debate.
And at some schools students looking to make a statement have seized on end-of-year ceremonies as a powerful platform, delivering speeches that diverged from the remarks they had told school officials they would make.
At New York University in mid-May, officials withheld a diploma from, a student, Logan Rozos, after he referred to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” in a commencement speech.
At George Washington University, a graduate named Cecilia Culver used her speech to urge others to not donate to the school and repeated requests for it to divest from companies doing business in Israel. The university barred her from campus and university-sponsored events.
At M.I.T., Ms. Vemuri was one of nine speakers at Thursday’s ONEMIT Commencement Ceremony.
Ms. Vemuri’s speech, read from wrinkled sheets of paper, was about four minutes long and addressed her classmates and some of their efforts to protest Israel.
“You showed the world that M.I.T. wants a free Palestine,” she said, adding, “the M.I.T. community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.”
After Ms. Vemuri left the dais to cheers, Sally Kornbluth, the school president, spoke next. She paused as some in the audience chanted.
“OK, listen folks,” she said. “At M.I.T., we believe in freedom of expression. But today is about the graduates.”
Ms. Kornbluth has found herself on this type of tightrope before. In December 2023, she was one of three university presidents called to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee pressed the officials over their responses to campus protests and allegations of antisemitism.
Ms. Kornbluth managed to avoid the level of criticism levied at Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who were soon replaced by their schools.
Throughout most of the 2023-24 school year, pro-Palestinian encampments and tense standoffs played out on many campuses across the country. Last year’s graduation ceremonies were often used as forums for protest, including orchestrated walkouts. Generally, protesters and speakers were not disciplined.
But universities, especially elite ones like M.I.T. and its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, have been under even more pressure since President Trump took office in January. His administration is yanking federal funding for grants and research, launching investigations into diversity programs and trying to cut international enrollment.
Schools everywhere feel the threat, and hope to avoid the government’s scrutiny.
Ms. Vemuri’s speech prompted criticism from the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, a key ally of President Trump.
“Ignorant. Hateful. Morally bankrupt. Where is the shame—or appropriate response from the institution?” he wrote on X. “Have your children avoid MIT & the Ivy League at all costs.”
Jack Begg contributed research.
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14) U.K. Faces Most Serious Military Threat Since Cold War, Starmer Says
Prime Minister Keir Starmer cited “growing Russian aggression” as he outlined ambitious rearmament plans, including building up to 12 attack submarines.
By Stephen Castle and Mark Landler, Reporting from London, June 2, 2025
Prime Minister Keir Starmer walking past a Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarine at a shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, England, in March. Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain promised on Monday to bring his country to “war-fighting readiness” as he announced plans to build up to 12 new attack submarines and invest billions of pounds in nuclear and other weaponry as part of new military strategy for a more dangerous world.
“The threat we now face is more serious, more immediate and more unpredictable than at any time since the Cold War,” Mr. Starmer said at a media conference on Monday morning, pointing to “war in Europe, new nuclear risks, daily cyberattacks,” and “growing Russian aggression,” in British waters and skies.
“I believe that the best way to deter conflict is to prepare for it,” Mr. Starmer added, speaking at an industrial facility in Glasgow, ahead of the release of the government’s strategic defense review, which will outline plans to increase production of drones and increase stockpiles of munitions and equipment.
Britain’s ambitious rearmament plan comes against the gathering clouds of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, American disengagement from Europe and rising global tensions. Mr. Starmer presented his plans hours after one of the most intense aerial bombardments of the three-year war, with Ukrainian drones striking air bases deep in Russian territory.
The review, led by George Robertson, a former secretary general of NATO, was set up last year soon after Mr. Starmer won a general election. But its task was given fresh urgency amid growing evidence of President Trump’s weakened commitment to European security and his ambivalent and at times ingratiating attitude toward President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The review is scheduled for release on Monday afternoon but among the recommendations made public in advance by the government were the procurement of up to 7,000 British-built long-range weapons and the creation of a new cybercommand, alongside an investment of a billion pounds, equivalent to $1.35 billion, in digital capability.
Money will be invested in protecting critical British underwater infrastructure as well as in drones which have proved highly effective in the war in Ukraine.
More than £1.5 billion of additional funding will be put into repairing and renewing housing for the military as the government aims to help recruitment and retention in the British Army, where numbers have fallen to the lowest level since the Napoleonic era.
On Monday, the government stressed the benefits for the domestic economy of investing in rearmament, but the question hanging over the new strategy is how much, in fiscally strapped times, the British government can afford to spend.
Mr. Starmer has promised to increase Britain’s outlay to 2.5 percent of gross national product, paying for it by diverting resources from overseas aid development. Speaking to the BBC, he said Britain needed “to go on from there,” but added that he could not set a precise date for when that number would rise to 3 percent until he was sure of exactly where the money would come from.
In a statement, the government said its conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarine fleet would be significantly expanded, with up to 12 new vessels to be built as part of a security alliance with the United States and Australia, known as Aukus, which is designed to counter China’s growing influence.
The government described the new strategy as a “landmark shift in our deterrence and defense: moving to warfighting readiness to deter threats and strengthen security in the Euro Atlantic area.”
Speaking on Monday, Mr. Starmer was at pains to restate Britain’s commitment to NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance, a strategy he has pursued by assiduously cultivating Mr. Trump on security and trade issues.
But among the eye-catching recommendations expected from the review is one to consider purchasing fighter jets capable of firing tactical nuclear weapons, a potential harbinger of declining British dependence on the American nuclear umbrella.
Writing on social media, Mike Martin, a lawmaker for the Liberal Democrats and a military veteran, said that the details known so far about the review were a “sign that the U.K. government no longer fully trusts the Americans to be engaged in European security.”
He wrote: “The drop dead giveaway is the air dropped nuclear weapons,” adding that “this is a key capability that the US provides that enables nuclear escalation without going all the way up to destroying Moscow with nuclear weapons fired from our submarines.”
British governments have produced defense reviews at least once a decade since World War II: The last one was conducted in 2021 and updated in 2023.
Mr. Robertson, who is now a member of the House of Lords, was assisted by Fiona Hill, a former adviser to the first Trump administration, and Richard Barrons, a former deputy chief of Britain’s defense staff. Ms. Hill, a British-born expert on Russia, emerged as a vocal critic of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Mr. Putin after she left the National Security Council in July 2019.
The tone of the latest document is likely to be different from that produced four years ago in which the Conservative government of Boris Johnson promised to bind itself closer to the United States. That review laid out Mr. Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain,” one that his successors largely discarded and which Mr. Starmer has replaced with an effort to reset ties with the European Union.
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15) Gaza Cease-Fire Negotiations Hit a New Impasse Over an Old Dispute
For 18 months, Hamas has pushed for a permanent truce while Israel has held out for a temporary one. That wide gap has stymied efforts to end the war.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 2, 2025
Israeli military strikes on Gaza have added to the suffering of Palestinian civilians as cease-fire talks have dragged on. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Through nearly 20 months of war in Gaza, a changing carousel of mediators and negotiators have tried — and failed — to reach a lasting truce between Hamas and Israel. William J. Burns and Brett McGurk led the way for the Biden administration, before Steve Witkoff tried on behalf of President Trump.
Whoever the mediator, one intractable dispute has consistently prevented a deal. Hamas wants a permanent cease-fire that would essentially allow the group to retain influence in postwar Gaza. Israel wants only a temporary deal that would allow it to renew its failed efforts to defeat Hamas.
Now, once again, that fundamental difference is the main obstacle to a new truce. After a renewed flurry of mediation from Mr. Witkoff and his team last week, Hamas sought stronger guarantees that any new cease-fire would evolve into a permanent cessation of hostilities.
Though the proposed new deal would officially last for 60 days, Hamas pushed for a clause that guaranteed “the continuation of negotiations until a permanent agreement is reached.” That wording would technically allow for the 60-day cease-fire to be extended indefinitely, scuppering Israeli hopes of returning to battle.
Hamas’s demand drew a familiar response from Israel. “Hamas’s response is totally unacceptable and is a step backward,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
This new version of an old dispute has not immediately collapsed the negotiations. Egypt and Qatar, the two main Arab mediators, released a joint statement on Sunday in which they pledged “to intensify efforts to overcome the obstacles facing the negotiations.”
Even as Mr. Witkoff condemned Hamas’s response, saying that it “only takes us backward,” he suggested on social media that talks over the details of a truce could “begin immediately this coming week” if the group softened its position.
Hamas subsequently said it was ready “to immediately begin a round of indirect negotiations to reach an agreement on the points of contention.” But, as ever, it included a caveat: those negotiations must lead “to a permanent cease-fire and a full withdrawal of the occupation forces.”
As has been the case throughout the war, much will depend on the United States’ willingness to push Israel and Hamas to reach a compromise. It was President Trump’s pressure that convinced Mr. Netanyahu to accept a temporary truce in January. Mr. Netanyahu then broke the cease-fire two months later after consulting the Trump administration, a White House spokesman said at the time.
It is hard to foresee an imminent breakthrough unless one side crosses the red lines that they have consistently set since the final weeks of 2023. Israeli officials have suggested they could agree to a permanent truce if Hamas disarmed and its leaders left Gaza for exile. While some Hamas officials have expressed openness to some kind of compromise over their weapons, the group has publicly rejected the premise.
In the meantime, Palestinian civilians in Gaza face growing hardship, amid continuing Israeli airstrikes, widespread food shortages, and a chaotic start to a new Israeli-backed aid distribution scheme. And in Israel, the families of hostages held in Gaza are no closer to seeing their loved ones. More than 4,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel resumed fighting in March, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
On both sides, internal dynamics could prove decisive in shaping what happens next. Growing dissent against Hamas could encourage the group to agree to a temporary truce to shore up its short-term control over Gaza. A rise in looting, as well as Israel’s assassination of key Hamas leaders, have highlighted the group’s weakening grip on the territory.
In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition could collapse if he agrees to end the war. But it is unclear if he can drag out the conflict indefinitely. The Israeli military is mainly staffed by reservists who have spent much of the last 20 months away from their day jobs and families.
Many of them are exhausted and, if the war continues, there are growing concerns that a significant number will refuse to serve as often or for such long stretches. That would make it hard for Israel’s military leadership to staff ground operations, let alone implement a full occupation that would require tens of thousands of troops to sustain.
Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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