SAT. JUNE 28: ALL OUT TO DC |
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Join people from across the country for an emergency national march on Washington this Saturday, June 28 to protest and demand "Stop the War on Iran!” Trump and Netanyahu have launched an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iran, threatening to engulf the entire Middle East or even the world in devastating conflict. But the people of the United States reject this war!
This demonstration is being organized by the ANSWER Coalition, National Iranian-American Council, Palestinian Youth Movement, The People’s Forum, CODEPINK, Democratic Socialists of America and many other organizations.
Trump lied when he was running for office, pretending to be a pro-peace candidate. Now, just five months into his term, he has started a new forever war in the Middle East! Trump is also lying when he says Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon — even the US government’s intelligence agencies publicly say that is not true.
Trump is partnering with wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to carry out this assault. This is an extension of the genocide the Palestinian people have been subjected to for the past 20+ months. And Israel is an extension of U.S. interests in the region, carrying out terrible atrocities with its arsenal paid for by our tax dollars.
As he announced that he had attacked Iran, Trump outrageously said that “now is the time for peace” and wants Iran to negotiate at gunpoint. But this could spiral at any moment into an open-ended US bombing campaign, a “boots on the ground” invasion, or an all-out regional war. Now is the critical moment to protest in huge numbers and stop this war!
Join us in Washington, D.C. to demand that Trump cease all aggression against Iran, and end all aid to Israel. All out to DC on June 28! |
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Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
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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) Brad Lander Tried to Escort Immigrants Facing Arrest. He’s Not Alone.
A growing army of volunteers has mustered at immigration courts during a month-old campaign to detain people showing up for routine hearings.
By Luis Ferré-SadurnÃ, June 19, 2025
The New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, was arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday outside an immigration court as he escorted a man facing arrest. Credit...Olga Fedorova/Associated Press
When Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, was arrested on Tuesday by federal agents at an immigration courthouse in Manhattan, Mr. Lander said he had simply been trying to escort an immigrant whom agents wanted to detain.
His arrest underscored a trend that has emerged in New York City’s immigration courts: A growing number of volunteers and activists have begun showing up to escort immigrants out of courthouses amid President Trump’s month-old campaign to arrest people showing up for routine hearings.
During the past few weeks, a loose network of immigration activists and advocates has sprung up in the city’s three main immigration courts. Their goal, they say, is to help immigrants who show up without lawyers to navigate a labyrinthine and daunting system, and to accompany migrants past federal officers, who are often masked and not wearing uniforms.
Before, volunteers might have accompanied immigrants to hearings, but only in recent weeks have they had to consider what happens when they leave “because ICE wasn’t waiting on the other side of the door before,” said Camille J. Mackler, the founder and executive director of Immigrant ARC, a collaborative of immigration legal services providers. “We really are just there to bear witness in a nonviolent way.”
Mr. Lander, who is running for mayor, maintained that is what he was trying to do on Tuesday when federal officers approached an immigrant named Edgardo to arrest him. Video shows Mr. Lander appearing to hold on to Edgardo and refusing to let go as officers were trying to arrest the man over Mr. Lander’s protestations.
The Department of Homeland Security saw it differently. The agency accused Mr. Lander of assaulting and obstructing federal officers as they were performing their duties, all to boost his mayoral campaign.
The altercation thrust the work of the volunteer escorts into the national debate about Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, due process rights and the behavior of federal immigration agents.
Why are people accompanying migrants at courthouses?
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency initiated a national operation last month to begin arresting certain immigrants as they leave court hearings.
The new tactic works like this: An immigrant appears for a hearing in an immigration court to determine whether they can lawfully remain in the country. Suddenly, the government prosecutor asks the judge to dismiss the case. The dismissal terminates certain legal protections that the immigrant had, allowing ICE agents in the hallway to apprehend the person and place them in an expedited deportation process.
As ICE began showing up at immigration courts, so did more and more volunteers — activists, faith leaders, lawyers and everyday New Yorkers looking to get involved.
They often provide immigrants, many of whom lack lawyers, with legal guidance, though not necessarily representation. They pass out fliers written in Spanish, French, Arabic and other languages informing them of their rights and explaining the government’s new arrest strategy. And they take down their name, country of origin and case number so that relatives can be contacted if they are detained and to look up where they are being held.
Then, the volunteers try to walk with some migrants — especially those at risk of being arrested because their cases were just dismissed — out of the hearing rooms and past federal officers.
“They are armed, and a lot of them are masked,” said Allison Cutler, an immigration lawyer at the New York Legal Assistance Group, which provides legal help to low-income people, including immigrants. “People are terrified as soon as they step foot out of the elevator.”
What can federal agents do?
ICE officers are responsible for detaining noncitizens who are violating federal immigration laws. But federal officers are generally permitted to arrest anyone who attempts to obstruct an arrest, which is a federal crime.
“We can’t have anyone interfering with our ICE arrest operations,” Todd Lyons, the ICE acting director, told Fox News after Mr. Lander’s arrest.
“We’ve always said that if anyone impedes our arrest operations, no matter who you are, you will be taken into custody,” Mr. Lyons said.
As of Wednesday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had said it was reviewing the incident, had not brought charges against Mr. Lander.
Asked about volunteers accompanying people in immigration courts, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for D.H.S., said, “Anyone who actively obstructs or assaults law enforcement, including U.S. citizens, will of course face consequences which include arrest.”
Have the volunteers prevented arrests?
The main goal of accompanying immigrants, volunteers say, is to provide comfort and safety to people who are often afraid of showing up in court, especially during the string of arrests, and to make sure they are not alone if they are detained.
It is difficult to gauge whether volunteers are deterring ICE agents from moving in for arrests. Before he was detained, Mr. Lander had shown up at the courts twice and escorted out immigrant families who appeared at risk of arrest after their cases were dismissed, walking them by federal agents.
“Does this excessive accompaniment mean that somebody didn’t get detained?” Ms. Mackler, the leader of Immigrant ARC, said. “Obviously, we would love for that to be the outcome, but more important, the goal would be to make sure that the person isn’t alone.”
Federal agents have continued to arrest immigrants even when they are surrounded by volunteers, occasionally leading to volatile altercations between the officers and activists.
Mr. Lander had been appearing at immigration court in conjunction with Immigrant ARC. Ms. Mackler said that her organization had trained volunteers not to act in a way that would provoke or escalate a situation with law enforcement officers.
“Our instructions for our volunteers are to not engage or interfere with law enforcement,” she said. “But I’m also not going to tell a New York City elected official how he shows up to protect New Yorkers.”
Who else is showing up at the courts?
Immigration courts — which are operated by a branch of the Department of Justice called the Executive Office for Immigration Review — are open to the public.
In recent weeks, they have attracted more immigration lawyers looking to help migrants who do not have attorneys and members of the public who observe and document court proceedings to ensure transparency and accountability.
Visitors are generally allowed to sit in during hearings after passing through metal detectors in the lobbies of the three Manhattan courthouses that have immigration courts.
Judges can close certain proceedings to the public, especially those involving people who are sharing sensitive personal information during asylum hearings.
Democratic politicians have descended on the courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza, which also houses ICE offices where detained immigrants have sometimes been held for days in overcrowded conditions.
On Wednesday, Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman, both Democrats, sought to conduct an oversight visit to the 10th floor but were denied access by the ICE deputy field office director, William Joyce.
“Because we were told not to,” Mr. Joyce told the congressmen during an exchange in the lobby.
“We will continue to go up the chain, and we will get answers,” Mr. Goldman later said at a news conference.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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2) Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.
A panel rejected a lower court’s finding that it was likely illegal for President Trump to use state troops to protect immigration agents from protests.
By Charlie Savage and Laurel Rosenhall, Published June 19, 2025, Updated June 20, 2025
National Guard troops were stationed in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center last week. Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times
A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.
A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely-triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.
“Affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination, we conclude that he likely acted within his authority in federalizing the National Guard,” the court wrote, in an unsigned opinion on behalf of the entire panel.
The ruling was not a surprise. During a 65-minute hearing on Tuesday, the panel’s questions and statements had telegraphed that all three judges — Mark J. Bennett, Eric D. Miller and Jennifer Sung — were inclined to let Mr. Trump keep controlling the Guard for now, while litigation continues to play out over California’s challenge to his move.
Mr. Trump praised the decision, saying in a Truth Social post late Thursday that it supported his argument for using the National Guard “all over the United States” if local law enforcement can’t “get the job done.”
Mr. Newsom, in a response on Thursday, focused on how the appeals court had rejected the Trump administration’s argument that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard could not be reviewed by a judge.
“The president is not a king and is not above the law,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of U.S. military soldiers against citizens.”
The Trump administration had urged the appeals court to find that the judiciary could not review Mr. Trump’s decision to take control of a state’s National Guard under the statute he invoked, which sets conditions like if there is a rebellion against governmental authority that impedes the enforcement of federal law.
The appeals court declined to go that far.
Supreme Court precedent “does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the president could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith,” the appeals court wrote.
But, the judges said, the violent actions of some protesters in Los Angeles had hindered immigration enforcement, and that was sufficient for the judiciary to defer to Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke the call-up statute.
The appeals court also rejected the state’s contention that the call-up order was illegal because Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent the directive to a general in charge of the National Guard, even though the statute says any such edict must go “through” the governor. The court said the general was Governor Newsom’s agent, and that was good enough.
“Even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s” order stripping Mr. Trump of control of the guard, the ruling added.
The state could choose to ask the full appeals court to rehear the matter, or it could directly ask the Supreme Court to intervene. But the state might also just move on from the current part of the dispute, since the ruling on Thursday pertains to a short-lived temporary restraining order that will soon be obsolete anyway.
Either way, litigation in the case is set to return on Friday to the San Francisco courtroom of a Federal District Court judge, Charles Breyer, for a hearing. He is weighing whether to issue a more durable preliminary injunction restricting what Mr. Trump can do with some 4,000 National Guard troops or 700 active-duty Marines his administration has also deployed into the city.
Judge Breyer’s temporary restraining order concerned only the National Guard and whether it was lawful for Mr. Trump to mobilize them under federal control. At the hearing on Friday, he is also set to address a state request to limit troops under federal control to guarding federal buildings, and to bar them from accompanying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the workplace raids that sparked the protests.
That request centers on a 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, that generally makes it illegal to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Trump administration has argued that the troops are not themselves performing law enforcement tasks, but rather are protecting civilian agents who are trying to arrest undocumented migrants.
Mr. Hegseth suggested that he might not obey a ruling from the lower court, telling senators on the Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that he doesn’t “believe district courts should be setting national security policy.”
Conditions in Los Angeles have calmed significantly over the past week, and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles announced on Tuesday that she was ending the downtown curfew, a week after it had first been imposed. She said local law enforcement efforts have been “largely successful” at reimposing order.
California officials have said from the beginning that local and state police could handle the protesters, and that Mr. Trump’s decision to send in federal troops only inflamed matters. But speaking with reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he felt empowered to send troops anywhere violent protests erupt.
“We did a great job. We quelled that thing,” the president said of the demonstrations in Los Angeles. “And the fact that we are even there thinking about going in, they won’t bother with it anymore. They’ll go someplace else. But we’ll be there, too. We’ll be wherever they go.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
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3) This Loophole Buried in Trump’s Bill Is Anything but Beautiful
By Brad Setser, June 20, 2025
Mr. Setser served as an official in the Treasury Department in the Obama administration.
Paulo Nunes dos Santos/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
It is hard to think of a less coherent pair of policies: President Trump’s tax policy encourages the very offshoring that his tariffs are intended to stop.
Take the more than $600 billion pharmaceutical industry. Over the past few months, Mr. Trump and his associates have repeatedly criticized companies’ moves to offshore much drug making, particularly to Ireland. “We can’t be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 13.
But the tax incentives in Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax and spending package helped generate this problem in the first place — a problem that would continue under the Republican bill under consideration. Mr. Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created a loophole that made it far more profitable for the pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, to manufacture some of their most profitable drugs in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, that is what happened, with America’s imports of pharmaceuticals soaring to $250 billion in 2024, way up from $110 billion in 2016.
American companies now report earning about $350 billion in profits annually in the world’s major centers of corporate tax avoidance, which include Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore and a handful of others. And while the major drug companies have mastered the art of taking advantage of the loopholes created by the 2017 law, semiconductor equipment producers and other Big Tech companies use the same special tax break.
Fortunately, it isn’t too late to make sensible changes that would raise revenue and get rid of this strange incentive.
Republicans tend to blame Ireland’s lower corporate tax rate for the proliferation of corporate tax avoidance, but the real incentive comes from this obscure corner of our tax code. It offers a far lower 10.5 percent tax rate for global profits if a global company moves the profits from its intellectual property offshore. The tax rate for domestic profits, in contrast, is 21 percent. The tax break was created by Republicans who were searching for a compromise that would stop companies from moving their headquarters overseas without fully ending tax competition and the associated pressure on U.S. corporate tax rates.
That provision did stop the trend of companies moving their headquarters overseas. But it also didn’t take long for pharmaceutical companies to realize that they could cut their total tax bill in half by transferring their intellectual property (like, say, a patent for a new drug) to a subsidiary overseas. And to satisfy a different and equally obscure provision of the tax code, they needed to move their manufacturing as well. Soon, Big Pharma began reporting to the I.R.S. that it earned almost all of its income abroad. They have all but stopped paying domestic corporate taxes.
Apple uses the same 2017 provision in a different way, and thanks to the lower tax rate on its foreign sales, its overall tax rate has been around 15 percent in a typical year. And it is likely that Apple is now paying the largest share of its corporate tax in Ireland — a country where it doesn’t make or sell very much.
Mr. Trump wants to solve these problems — and almost every problem — with tariffs. But tariffs are an indiscriminate tool. They risk raising the price of all medicines and certainly will increase the prices of many generic medicines that are far more affordable than their patent-protected cousins. Generic medicines are sold at razor-thin margins, so their makers cannot eat the tariff out of their profits. A far better policy would be to just get rid of these strange tax quirks in the “big, beautiful bill” to begin with. Passing the Close the Round-Tripping Loophole Act that the Senate Finance Committee members Ron Wyden, Mark Warner, Raphael Warnock and Peter Welch just introduced would be a very welcome step in the right direction.
Fixing the tax code is about putting the interest of the United States ahead of the interest of large global companies. It doesn’t make sense for an “America First” president to push with one lever and pull with another. Better to get the tax policy right at the start.
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4) Pro-Palestinian Activists Break Into U.K.’s Biggest Air Base in Security Breach
The Palestine Action group said two of its members had entered R.A.F. Brize Norton on electric scooters and sprayed red paint in aircraft engines and on the runway.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, June 20, 2025
R.A.F. Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, southern England, houses about 5,800 service personnel. Credit...Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In a startling breach of security, activists from a Pro-Palestinian group on Friday broke into Britain’s largest air force base and damaged two aircraft in what they said was a protest against the country’s military support for Israel.
The group, called Palestine Action, posted footage online showing two people using electric scooters to move around the base, R.A.F. Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, which is used for overseas operations.
In a statement, Palestine Action said that two activists had sprayed red paint into the turbine engines of two Airbus Voyagers and damaged them with crowbars, as well as spraying more red paint on the runway to “symbolize Palestinian bloodshed.” The group said that the two people who carried out the vandalism “managed to evade security and arrest” during the incursion in the early hours of Friday morning.
In a statement, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the incident “disgraceful,” saying: “Our Armed Forces represent the very best of Britain and put their lives on the line for us every day. It is our responsibility to support those who defend us.”
Palestine Action has carried out a series of acts of vandalism at high-profile and supposedly secure locations, including defense manufacturers.
Thames Valley Police, the force responsible for the area, said in a statement that officers were working with the Ministry of Defense and with the R.A.F. to investigate. Inquiries “are ongoing to locate and arrest those responsible,” the force noted.
In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said, “We strongly condemn this vandalism of Royal Air Force assets. We are working closely with the police who are investigating.”
The ministry did not immediately respond to a question on whether it would open a review of security at the site.
Grant Shapps, a former British defense secretary, wrote on social media that there needed to be a “full security review.”
“Storming an RAF base isn’t protest — it’s a national security breach,” he wrote. “The blame lies squarely with these reckless activists, but ministers must now explain how on earth it was allowed to happen.”
In its statement on Friday, Palestine Action claimed that the targeted planes “can carry military cargo and are used to refuel” military aircraft, including fighter jets, from the British, Israeli and militaries.
But Greg Bagwell, a former senior R.A.F. commander and a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said the planes damaged by the group were incompatible with Israeli fighter aircraft and could not be used to refuel them.
“They couldn’t have gotten a more wrong aircraft,” he said in an interview. “They have targeted aircraft that are not the aircraft they think they are.”
The Israeli Air Force flies American-built fighter planes such as the F-15, the F-16 and the F-35A, Mr. Bagwell said, all of which can only be fueled with a boom-style method that is not used by the planes that were damaged on Friday.
Palestine Action has previously conducted vandalism and protests at sites in Britain operated by the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and at companies with links to that firm, and also at other defense companies.
Several activists have been prosecuted over the protests, including five people who were imprisoned last year for causing about $1.3 million of damage to a weapons equipment factory in Glasgow in June 2022.
Britain’s largest R.A.F. base, Brize Norton houses about 5,800 service personnel, 300 civilian staff members and 1,200 contractors.
Mr. Bagwell said that he believed many military bases around the world were vulnerable to the kind of intrusion the group made on Friday.
“Airfields are large pieces of real estate that have miles of fence line,” he said. “It’s not an easy piece of territory to protect everywhere. Anybody with a wire cutter or ladders could be able to get in.”
Adding more human protection or electronic monitoring along every part of a major military base like Brize Norton would be very expensive. But Mr. Bagwell said that officials needed to take the risk seriously.
He said that the breach showed that it would not have been difficult for terrorists or agents of a foreign government to have done something more sinister at the base.
“It was exactly the sort of activity that the likes of Russia and Iran would like to promote,” he said. “This time it was a protester, but next time it could be someone who was doing something on behalf of others.”
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5) Famine and Genocide are Changing Society in Gaza
By Tareq S. Hajjaj
—Mondoweiss, June 19, 2025
Palestinians carry food parcel, distributed by ‘Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation’ as people struggle with hunger during ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza City on June 16, 2025. Photo by Omar Ashtawy APAImages
Ahmad Mosabih, 16, carried what he deemed suitable for a journey that was not meant for someone his age. He took an iron hammer, fifty centimeters long, placed a utility knife in his pocket, and left his home at 3 a.m. with one goal: to obtain a sack of flour.
Ahmad had been preparing for this trip since the night before. Once he was ready at dawn, he set out from the western part of Gaza City, from the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, heading southwest towards the al-Nabulsi roundabout. This location is the gateway to northern Gaza through which aid trucks pass. The trucks belong to merchants, commercial companies, or humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza. Regardless of who is operating them, they’re Ahmad’s only hope for a temporary lifeline.
The journey from Tal al-Hawa to the al-Nabulsi roundabout takes just under an hour. Ahmad, accompanied by some of his relatives and neighbors, found thousands of people waiting when they arrived, scattered into groups and looking out apprehensively for any approaching truck. Everyone was trying to get food, but they were also well aware of the dangers: the possibility of gunfire by Israeli forces — which has become a daily occurrence — and the threat of theft or robbery from other Gazans if they do manage to secure a sack of flour.
Ahmad, who later felt immense pride for returning safely, did not feel that pride as he stood among the crowd waiting for flour, but life had forced his hand.
The war has erased the details of social life and left nothing but destruction, and a harrowing daily journey in the attempt to survive. This has been the reality for the thousands of Palestinians making the harrowing trip each day to the aid distribution centers run by the Israeli-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and every time Israeli forces open fire on the crowds and commit another aid massacre.
Ahmad returned to his displacement shelter in Tal al-Hawa at noon, carrying a sack of flour. That was his victory. Yet the transformations in Ahmad’s life extend far beyond securing food, and all of Gaza’s population has undergone the same transformation.
Societal transformation: fighting for survival
Since the war began, the majority of Gaza’s residents have lived in displacement centers, struggling each day to access the bare minimum of life’s necessities. Famine takes hold, eases slightly, then recurs, but the whole time, the killing never stops.
Living under such conditions for prolonged periods has changed society. The new society that is emerging in Gaza, one born under bombardment and annihilation, is all about fighting for food and survival.
“What would drive me to go on a journey like this?” Ahmad muses. “What would make me wake up so early in the morning and set off on a journey filled with death? A stray bullet could hit me. Or maybe a missile like the one that the Israeli army fires on hungry people.”
“I might survive the army and make it home, but I might find a thief waiting for me,” Ahmad continues. “I’ve learned through this war that if you are not strong, your bread will be taken by those stronger than you.”
“This war has turned us into monsters,” Ahmad says. “This was never our life. This was never our nature. This was not what we woke up to do every day.”
Ahmad talks about how life was different, how homes were full of food, and the land was always cultivated. “Now our land is planted with tanks, missiles, and the blood of the fallen,” he says.
He no longer has the luxury of thinking about the future. When asked about it, he defines “the future” as the next day. “If I survive today, I may talk about tomorrow, but there’s no guarantee I’ll live to see it.”
To live knowing you are being exterminated
Nabil Hammou, 39, can be identified by a circular dust stain on his pants left from sitting on the sidewalk all day. He laments how this is not the life he once knew.
A university graduate with a master’s degree, Nabil used to work at a private company, but his life was turned upside down when his home in Shuja’iyya was destroyed, after which he moved in with his sister-in-law in al-Wihda Street in Western Gaza City.
Despite the hardship, Nabil considers himself fortunate to have found a roof after the bombing and that he did not end up in a tent. Yet driven by embarrassment, he feels compelled to leave the house from morning to night, spending his day outside and only returning to sleep beside his family at night.
To him, this daily sacrifice gives his sister-in-law the space and privacy she deserves. He gives her the day and takes the night.
“Look at us,” says Nabil. “I sometimes feel ashamed when people pass by and see me sitting in the same place all day. No one knows why I’m here. Some think I’m a beggar. Others assume I have no place to go. And in truth, I don’t.”
Nabil chooses the street so he isn’t a burden on those hosting him. As he sits, others join him from among the displaced. It would seem he is not the only person in this situation.
Dozens of people now spend their days walking the streets, not because they have nothing to do, but because they have nowhere else to go. Many stay with relatives temporarily in overcrowded homes or live in tents unfit for daytime shelter in the extreme heat. They end up on the streets and in public spaces, passing the time away outside walls that are not theirs.
But the new social structure emerges most starkly in the tents. Encampments for the displaced hold no privacy. Thin pieces of fabric separate one family from another, and bathing and using the restroom require long waits. Children are born into hunger and raised in a nothingness characterized by want.
In the coastal Mawasi area of Khan Younis, Amina al-Sayyed, 52, sits in her tents and describes the societal changes she has observed. “Killing is now routine,” she says. “Not an hour passes without hearing that someone was martyred or a whole family has been wiped out. It shapes our children’s consciousness. It’s all they talk about.”
“Not long ago, my five-year-old son witnessed a massacre in Mawasi Khan Younis,” she continues. “He came to me and said, ‘I saw a salad of people.’ That expression crushed me, the way he described it. That’s how he processed the scattered and torn bodies.”
She explains that her children’s lives have drastically changed. Most of their days are spent waiting in lines: bread lines, food distribution lines, aid lines.
“Their lives have changed — or, more accurately, their childhoods are over,” Amina explains. “They are now all responsible for things they cannot provide — food and safety.”
Amina says her children go to sleep every night afraid, and not a day has passed when she has seen them sleep peacefully. But the most devastating thing, she says, is to continue living knowing you are being actively exterminated, and being unable to stop it.
“We are being exterminated… and we know we are being exterminated,” Amina says. “The world knows it, it sees it. But it continues.”
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6) The Israel-Iran conflict may be about to reach a dangerous new level
Reports that the US’s ‘bunker buster’ bombs could destroy Iran’s Fordow uranium facility are now in doubt
Paul Rogers, 20 June 2025
Donald Trump’s decision to allow “two weeks” to decide whether the US will join in Israel’s assault on Iran may be an effort at conflict resolution via diplomacy, or may have more to do with waiting for a second aircraft carrier strike group, the USS Nimitz, to arrive in the Middle East next week.
To give the US president the benefit of the doubt, he may genuinely hope to do some kind of deal with the Iranians. If that is so, it will be bad news for Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whose war aims are reliant on the direct involvement of the US.
Israel does not appear to have the conventional ‘bunker buster’ weapons needed to attack Iran’s underground Fordow uranium enrichment plant – but it has been widely assumed that the US does. Without carrying out such an attack, Netanyahu’s aim of wrecking the core of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will fail, and he will be in trouble politically.
Netanyahu’s predicament is made worse as Trump’s pause has enabled the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the UK to arrange a meeting with their Iranian opposite number, Abbas Araghchi. That meeting is expected to take place in Geneva later today, although Tehran has not confirmed Araghchi’s attendance.
The direction of this war over the next month depends very much on how far the US is involved. Israel would not be able to continue the war without the steady provision of weapons from the US, and even with that, an anonymous US official this week told the Wall Street Journal that Israel is running short of some of its anti-missile systems.
Beyond that, though, Israel is also reliant on a steady stream of intelligence coming from Washington, coupled with more direct involvement. The US Navy now has two air defence destroyers deployed to the eastern Mediterranean. These are directly linked to Israel’s missile detection systems, which are, in turn, linked with a powerful long-range radar run by US military personnel from within Israel.
Politically, this is an important consideration for Trump. Much of the domestic US opposition to Trump extending the war comes down to a desire to avoid putting US soldiers in harm’s way. In practice, though, the US already has a uniformed military presence in Israel and has done so for close to 20 years. American soldiers were deployed to run its Raytheon X-band radar system in 2009, two years after it was established near Dimona in southern Israel. While the radar is multidirectional, it is particularly focused on missiles launched from Iran.
As to Netanyahu’s war aims, they are essentially fourfold. First is in Gaza, where Israel is making life appallingly difficult for Palestinians in the hope they will be forced to leave and can be replaced by Jewish settlers. Where and how they would go is not clear, but whatever happens, the Israeli prime minister wants to see the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in full and permanent control of the area.
The second aim is to annexe the whole of the occupied West Bank. There, too, Israel is already making life increasingly difficult for three million Palestinians, having imposed something approaching a complete lockdown on the area since the start of the assault on Iran.
While there are too many Palestinians in the West Bank to force them out entirely, far-right members of Netanyahu’s government would argue that, unlike in Gaza, those who do leave would have somewhere to go, given the common border with Jordan.
That far-right faction likely sees the conflict’s end result as a million Palestinians having been forced out of the West Bank and the area’s Jewish settler population, estimated to now be around 700,000, doubling in size. For them, this would represent a secure Israel, with the Palestinians decidedly second-class citizens who form a useful pool of low-cost labour.
The idea of a depopulated and then resettled Gaza and a ‘rebalanced’ West Bank may be little more than a pipedream, but must be taken seriously, especially when you look at Israel’s two other war aims. One is military dominance of neighbouring countries, not in the sense of large garrisons, but mainly through overwhelming air power. After all, Israel has repeatedly bombed targets in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – the latter with direct US and British involvement – and will certainly do so in Iraq if ISIS rears its head.
There is a sense in the IDF and the current Israeli government that the country is invincible in military force projection. This extends to Netanyahu’s final war aim: destroying Iran’s nuclear programme and terminating its regime. These two aims go together, as destroying the nuclear programme makes little sense if the current regime, or anything like it, is still in power in Tehran.
The best option, as Israel sees it, might be a thoroughly weakened Iran that is politically fragmented with little centralised power for any one faction, rather than the election of a new democratic government. As the then-US ambassador in Wellington, Paul Cleveland, said during a 1986 spat between the US and New Zealand over nuclear-armed US warships visiting local ports: “Sometimes it is more difficult to deal with a messy democracy like New Zealand than with some Asian dictatorships.”
One development this week could significantly change the shape of the conflict, though. It has been widely reported that the US has a conventional weapon capable of destroying Iran’s Fordow facility. That is now in doubt, with officials in the Pentagon reportedly questioning whether even the US’s 13.6 tonne GBU-57 bomb would be powerful enough.
Instead, destroying Fordow might require the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. There is no indication that the US has such a weapon; the earth-penetrating B61-7 nuclear bomb it developed in the 1980s was withdrawn in the mid-2010s, and there is no suggestion that the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which the Pentagon was rumoured to be working on in the early 2000s, exists today.
Israel, though, is another matter. It first developed nuclear weapons at the end of the 1960s with French assistance and has maintained a substantial arsenal of around 90 warheads, with enough stored plutonium for around 200 more. Given Israel’s advanced technological nuclear capabilities, its six decades of experience and its perceived targeting requirements, it would be surprising if it hasn’t considered nuclear earth penetrating warheads.
If that is so, it could take the current confrontation with Iran to a very dangerous new level.
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7) Sheltering in a Bunker, Iran’s Supreme Leader Names Potential Successors
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not only picked replacements in his chain of military command in case they are killed in Israeli strikes, he has also named three senior clerics to replace him should he, too, be slain.
By Farnaz Fassihi, June 21, 2025
Farnaz Fassihi has lived and worked in Iran, has covered the country for three decades and was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
"Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the country’s most prominent human rights activist, has spent decades in and out of jail, pushing for democratic change in Iran. But even she warned against the attacks on her country, telling the BBC this past week that 'Democracy cannot come through violence and war.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/world/middleeast/iran-ayatollah-israel-war.html
People marching under a mural of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Friday in Tehran. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Wary of assassination, Iran’s supreme leader mostly speaks with his commanders through a trusted aide now, suspending electronic communications to make it harder to find him, three Iranian officials familiar with his emergency war plans say.
Ensconced in a bunker, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has picked an array of replacements down his chain of miliary command in case more of his valued lieutenants are killed.
And in a remarkable move, the officials add, Ayatollah Khamenei has even named three senior clerics as candidates to succeed him should he be killed, as well — perhaps the most telling illustration of the precarious moment he and his three-decade rule are facing.
Ayatollah Khamenei has taken an extraordinary series of steps to preserve the Islamic Republic ever since Israel launched a series of surprise attacks last Friday.
Though only a week old, the Israeli strikes are the biggest military assault on Iran since its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and the effect on the nation’s capital, Tehran, has been particularly fierce. In only a few days, the Israeli attacks have been more intense and have caused more damage in Tehran than Saddam Hussein did in his entire eight-year war against Iran.
Iran appears to have overcome its initial shock, reorganizing enough to launch daily counterstrikes of its own on Israel, hitting a hospital, the Haifa oil refinery, religious buildings and homes.
Iran’s top officials are also quietly making preparations for a wide range of outcomes as the war intensifies and as President Trump considers whether to enter the fight, according to the Iranian officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ayatollah’s plans.
Peering inside Iran’s closely guarded leadership can be difficult, but its chain of command still seems to be functioning, despite being hit hard, and there are no obvious signs of dissent in the political ranks, according to the officials and to diplomats in Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei, 86, is aware that either Israel or the United States could try to assassinate him, an end he would view as martyrdom, the officials said. Given the possibility, the ayatollah has made the unusual decision to instruct his nation’s Assembly of Experts, the clerical body responsible for appointing the supreme leader, to choose his successor swiftly from the three names he has provided.
Normally, the process of appointing a new supreme leader could take months, with clerics picking and choosing from their own lists of names. But with the nation now at war, the officials said, the ayatollah wants to ensure a quick, orderly transition and to preserve his legacy.
“The top priority is the preservation of the state,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. “It is all calculative and pragmatic.”
Succession has long been an exceedingly delicate and thorny topic, seldom discussed publicly beyond speculations and rumors in political and religious circles. The supreme leader has enormous powers: He is the commander in chief of the Iran Armed Forces, as well as the head of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch. He is also a Vali Faqih, meaning the most senior guardian of the Shiite faith.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, also a cleric and close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who was rumored to be a front-runner, is not among the candidates, the officials said. Iran’s former conservative president, Ibrahim Raisi, was also considered a front-runner before he was killed in a helicopter crash in 2024.
Since the war started, Ayatollah Khamenei has delivered to the public two recorded video messages, against a backdrop of brown curtains and next to the Iranian flag. “The people of Iran will stand against a forced war,” he said, vowing not to surrender.
In normal times, Ayatollah Khamenei lives and works in a highly secure compound in central Tehran called the “beit rahbari” — or leader’s house — and he seldom leaves the premises, except for special occasions like delivering a sermon. Senior officials and military commanders come to him for weekly meetings, and speeches for the public are staged from the compound.
His retreat to a bunker shows how furiously Tehran has been struck in a war with Israel that Iranian officials say is unfolding on two fronts.
One is being waged from the air, with Israeli airstrikes on military bases, nuclear facilities, critical energy infrastructure, commanders and nuclear scientists in their apartment buildings in tightly packed residential neighborhoods. Some of Iran’s top commanders were summarily wiped out.
Hundreds of people have also been killed and thousands of others injured, with civilians slain across Iran, human rights groups inside and outside the country say.
But Iranian officials say that they are fighting on a second front, as well, with covert Israeli operatives and collaborators scattered on the ground across Iran’s vast terrain, launching drones at critical energy and military structures. The fear of Israeli infiltration among the top ranks of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus has rattled the Iranian power structure, even Ayatollah Khamenei, officials say.
“It is clear that we had a massive security and intelligence breach; there is no denying this,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Ghalibaf, in an audio recording analyzing the war. “Our senior commanders were all assassinated within one hour.”
Iran’s “biggest failure was not discovering” the months of planning Israeli operatives had conducted to bring missiles and drone parts into the country to prepare for the attack, he added.
The country’s leadership has been preoccupied with three central concerns, officials say: an assassination attempt against Ayatollah Khamenei; the United States’ entering the war; and more debilitating attacks against Iran’s critical infrastructure, like power plants, oil and gas refineries and dams.
Should the United States join the fight, the stakes would multiply significantly. Israel says that it wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but experts say that only the United States has the bomber — and the enormous 30,000-pound bomb — that might be capable of penetrating the mountain where Iran has built its most critical nuclear enrichment facilities, Fordo.
Iran has threatened to retaliate by attacking American targets in the region, but that would only risk a wider, and possibly more devastating, conflict for Iran and its adversaries.
The fear of assassination and infiltration within Iran’s ranks is so widespread that the Ministry of Intelligence announced a series of security protocols, telling officials to stop using cellphones or any electronic devices to communicate. It has also ordered all senior government officials and military commanders to remain below ground, according to two Iranian officials.
Almost every day, the Ministry of Intelligence or the Armed Forces issue directives for the public to report suspicious individuals and vehicle movements, and to refrain from taking photographs and videos of attacks on sensitive sites.
The country has also been in a communication blackout with the outside world. The internet has been nearly shut down, and incoming international calls have been blocked. The Ministry of Telecommunications said in a statement that these measures were to find enemy operatives on the ground and to disable their ability to launch attacks.
“The security apparatus has concluded that, in this critical time, the internet is being abused to harm the lives and livelihoods of civilians,” said Ali Ahmadinia, the communications director for President Masoud Pezeshkian. “We are safeguarding the security of our country by shutting down the internet.”
On Friday, the Supreme National Security Council took it a step further, announcing that anyone working with the enemy must turn themselves into the authorities by the end of the day on Sunday, hand over their military equipment and “return to the arms of the people.” It warned that anyone discovered to be working with the enemy after Sunday would face execution.
Tehran has largely emptied out after orders by Israel to evacuate several highly populated districts. Videos of the city show highways and desolate streets that are typically clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic. In interviews, residents of Tehran who remained in the city said security forces had set up checkpoints on every highway, on smaller roads and at entry points in and out of the city to conduct ad hoc searches.
Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist politician and a former vice president, said in a telephone interview from Tehran that Israel had miscalculated Iranians’ reaction to the war. Mr. Abtahi said that the deep political factions that are typically in sharp disagreement with one another had rallied behind the supreme leader and focused the country on defending itself from an external threat.
The war has “softened the divisions we had, both among each other and with the general public,” Mr. Abtahi said.
Israel’s attacks have set off a resurgence of nationalism among many Iranians, inside and outside the country, including many critical of the government. That sense of common cause has emerged in a torrent of social media posts and statements by prominent human rights and political activists, physicians, national athletes, artists and celebrities. “Like family, we may not always agree but Iran’s soil is our red line,” wrote Saeid Ezzatollahi, a player with Iran’s national soccer squad, Team Melli, on social media.
Hotels, guesthouses and wedding halls have opened their doors free of charge to shelter displaced people fleeing Tehran, according to Iranian news media and videos on social media. Psychologists are offering free virtual therapy sessions in posts on their social media pages. Supermarkets are giving discounts, and at bakeries, customers are limiting their own purchases of fresh bread to one loaf so that everyone standing in line can have bread, according to videos shared on social media. Volunteers are offering services, like running errands to checking on disabled and older residents.
“We are seeing a beautiful unity among our people,” said Reza, 42, a businessman, in a telephone interview near the Caspian Sea, where he is taking shelter with his family. Using only one name to avoid scrutiny by the government, he added: “It’s hard to explain the mood. We are scared, but we are also giving each other solidarity, love and kindness. We are in it together. This is an attack on our country, on Iran.”
Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the country’s most prominent human rights activist, has spent decades in and out of jail, pushing for democratic change in Iran. But even she warned against the attacks on her country, telling the BBC this past week that “Democracy cannot come through violence and war.”
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8) Detention Is Over for Students Trump Seeks to Deport. Not His Crackdown.
An effort to expel students the administration says are a national security threat has given way to a broad campaign that touches many corners of American life.
By Jonah E. Bromwich and Luis Ferré-SadurnÃ, June 21, 2025
“The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here,” Mahmoud Khalil said after he was released. Credit...Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Masked immigration agents seizing a graduate student on a suburban street. Officers marching into campus housing and arresting another, ignoring his distraught wife as she asks where he is being taken. They have been among the defining images of President Trump’s second term.
But with Mahmoud Khalil’s release on bail from federal detention on Friday, the early phase of the Trump administration’s high-profile crackdown on international students who have spoken out in favor of Palestinian rights appears to have ended for now.
As a detention campaign — an attempt to confine the students while their deportation cases play out — Mr. Trump’s efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. In addition to Mr. Khalil, many of the other administration’s most prominent targets have been freed, while immigration agents have been barred from even trying to detain others.
Judges in those cases have sent an unequivocal message: The administration cannot detain people solely because of their speech.
“The unanimity of federal court decisions on this issue should send a clear message to the executive branch that it cannot snatch people off the streets for peacefully protesting and put them in prison indefinitely,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “The federal courts have unequivocally protected the First Amendment rights of the noncitizen protesters in these cases, literally across the country.”
Mr. Trump’s second term has been rife with similar efforts to suppress disfavored speech, as the administration bars news outlets from the Oval Office and cancels federal grants on the basis of words that its officials dislike. And while many of those efforts have been legally unsuccessful, it is difficult to measure their broader political effect.
In the case of the high-profile student protesters, if one of the president’s goals was to stifle the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses, his administration has succeeded in some ways. The abrupt detention of foreign students may have had a profoundly chilling effect on international students, who could see Mr. Khalil’s monthslong detention as a warning.
“I am now regularly advising noncitizens to consider whether they want to engage in political speech,” Ms. Mukherjee said. “Of course, they should have a right to do so under the First Amendment, but there are potentially life-altering, devastating consequences for doing so.”
Mr. Khalil experienced those consequences firsthand. A Columbia University graduate student, he became one of the most recognizable faces of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the school’s campus. He was arrested in March, detained and sent to Louisiana, where he was held for more than three months, missing his graduation and the birth of his firstborn child.
A lawyer for Mr. Khalil, Marc Van Der Hout, said that the administration’s political campaign against his client and other university students had been a failure.
“There has been worldwide outrage and outcry about what they have been doing,” he said. “The public as a whole has condemned this approach and condemned this attempt to silence people for speaking out on Gaza in particular.”
Mr. Khalil and other students who have been released from confinement remain in dire legal circumstances. Most are still in deportation proceedings in immigration court, where Trump administration lawyers are pushing for their expulsion from the United States. The proceedings, typically complex and overseen by immigration judges, could take months and still result in their being forced out of the country.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security condemned the judge’s decision to release Mr. Khalil on bail. The agency argued that only an immigration judge had the authority to make that determination. In a statement, the department accused the judge of undermining the voters’ will and suggested the government would appeal the decision. The Justice Department appealed on Friday evening.
“This is yet another example of how out-of-control members of the judicial branch are undermining national security,” the department said. “Their conduct not only denies the result of the 2024 election, it also does great harm to our constitutional system by undermining public confidence in the courts.”
The release of a small group of students is a welcome reprieve for them and their supporters, but the reality is that the Trump administration has broadened its efforts, moving aggressively to curb the number of all foreign students in the country as it seeks to expel immigrants in general.
The administration has tried to strip hundreds of students of their visas, targeting some for their involvement in protests or because they had broken laws while targeting many others without a clear reason.
The State Department recently adopted rules to vet the social media accounts of student visa applicants who may have “hostile” views toward the United States. And the federal government has sought to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, although the effort was temporarily blocked by a judge on Friday.
Greg Chen, a senior director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that Mr. Khalil’s detention under an obscure and rarely used provision of immigration law should be seen “through the lens of how they are targeting a very broad swath of individuals.”
“The administration has actually stepped into a deep cesspool by trying to target people who are students that are contributing to the country,” Mr. Chen said, adding that “the public is starting to see the lie behind the administration’s statement that it is going to target people that are going to pose public safety threats.”
The student detentions, which began just weeks after Mr. Trump took office, quickly signaled that his deportation campaign would be aggressive. But although it began with several arrests made in the name of national security, it has expanded well beyond America’s college campuses.
The individual detentions have given way to roundups at Florida construction sites, New York immigration courts and Los Angeles workplaces, resulting in more than 100,000 people being arrested since late January. Many of them have been deported.
The targets now are not students with well-connected academic communities behind them. Instead, they are millions of longtime residents and recent arrivals who are undocumented and often lack resources, and the attention that made cases like Mr. Khalil’s difficult to ignore.
Upon his release from detention in Jena, La., on Friday, Mr. Khalil immediately began to speak out on their behalf. He said he hoped to return there one day to find that the detention center had been turned into a museum testifying to what he called America’s racist policies against immigrants.
“The hundreds of men I left behind me shouldn’t be there in the first place,” he said. “The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here.”
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9) Dodgers Pledge Aid to L.A. Families Affected by Trump Crackdown
Pressed by Angelenos, including a large Latino fan base, the Dodgers promised support but stopped short of denouncing ICE raids that have outraged much of the metropolis.
By Jesus Jiménez, Reporting from Los Angeles, Published June 20, 2025, Updated June 21, 2025
Demonstrators at Dodger Stadium on Thursday protested raids on immigrants in the Los Angeles area. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times
The Los Angeles Dodgers, facing mounting pressure from their Latino fan base, announced on Friday that they had committed $1 million in financial help for families of immigrants who have been “impacted by recent events in the region.”
The announcement, while oblique on exactly which “recent events” the team was responding to, came after days of calls from community leaders and fans to signal support for its heavily Latino fan base as federal immigration raids have been reported across the Los Angeles area. The raids over the past two weeks have stoked fear and anxiety among many immigrant families, especially Latinos.
While the team’s announcement fell short of denouncing the federal immigration enforcement efforts, as some fans had hoped for, the Dodgers said more “community efforts” would be shared soon.
“What’s happening in Los Angeles has reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people, and we have heard the calls for us to take a leading role on behalf of those affected,” Stan Kasten, the president and chief executive of the Dodgers, said in a statement on Friday. “We believe that by committing resources and taking action, we will continue to support and uplift the communities of Greater Los Angeles.”
The Dodgers, last year’s World Series champions and perennial contenders for a decade, carry weight nationally, but to walk through Dodger Stadium is to get a glimpse of how many Latino supporters make up the team’s fan base.
Songs in Spanish blare over the ballpark’s speakers in between innings. Restrooms are labeled in English and Spanish. Fans can opt for a Michelada over a regular ballpark beer.
That prevalence of Latino culture is why some Angelenos began to question why the Dodgers had been so quiet as immigration raids have been reported almost daily over the past two weeks in communities in and around Los Angeles.
In a statement, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles thanked the Dodgers for the financial support.
“These last weeks have sent shockwaves of fear rippling through every neighborhood and have had a direct impact on our economy,” Ms. Bass said. “My message to all Angelenos is clear: We will stick together during this time and we will not turn our back on one another — that’s what makes this the greatest city in the world.”
Demands on the Dodgers to call out the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement grew on Thursday, when federal immigration agents were seen near a Dodger Stadium parking lot. Protesters quickly descended outside the ballpark to protest.
It was unclear exactly what unfolded outside the gates of Dodger Stadium on Thursday. The Dodgers said that ICE agents arrived at the ballpark and asked for permission to use the parking lots, but the team did not allow them. The Department of Homeland Security appeared to deny that claim.
“This had nothing to do with the Dodgers,” the department said on social media. adding that U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles were in the stadium parking lot “very briefly” but that they were not there for an operation.
Adding confusion to the episode, the Los Angeles branch of Enforcement and Removal Operations, which operates within ICE, said on social media that its agents were “never there.”
On Friday, more than 50 leaders signed a letter sent to Mark Walter, the chairman and controlling owner of the Dodgers, demanding that the team take a stand against ICE raids. The letter also asked that the team support local organizations that protect immigrants, and commit to ensuring that team property is not used to help immigration enforcement operations.
“This is the moment for the Dodgers to stand with the families whom masked agents are tearing apart,” the letter said. “Children who may have sat in your seats enjoying a game now come home with no parents to receive them and no word of their whereabouts or well being other than reports of inhumane treatment in detention centers across California and the Southwest.”
The letter noted that of the estimated $752 million the team made in revenue last year, about $300 million was generated by Latino families, who make up about 40 percent of the team’s fan base.
Hours before the Dodgers’ game on Friday, the gates around Dodger Stadium were quiet, but another protest was planned for Saturday.
The Dodgers have for decades maintained a large Latino fan base that was propelled in the 1980s when the Mexican pitching phenomenon Fernando Valenzuela debuted with the team and created a frenzy known as “Fernandomania.” Since then, the Dodgers have continued to have popular Latino players on the team, such as Adrián González.
Across Major League Baseball, Latino players have made up a large contingent of the league’s players born outside the United States, many of whom are able to play in the United States through special visas.
This year, nearly 30 percent of the league’s players were born outside the country, including 63 players from Venezuela and 26 from Cuba, according to Major League Baseball. Both countries were included in a partial travel ban issued by the Trump administration this month, but a statement from the White House detailing the ban did not mention P-1 or H2-B visas, which are commonly issued to professional baseball players born outside the United States, according to a University of Michigan study on Latino influence in baseball.
And President Trump, mindful that Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympics in 2028 and that much of the 2026 World Cup will be played in the United States, has gone out of his way to shield athletes from his immigration and travel policies.
But the Dodgers’ relationship with its Latino fans has been especially complicated, and at times tense, over the years. Behind that tension is the origin story of how Dodger Stadium was built.
Before Dodger Stadium was built, the land was home to three communities — Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop — widely known as Chavez Ravine. Those who lived there, largely Mexican Americans, were displaced in the 1950s when the City of Los Angeles said the land was needed to build affordable housing. The housing was never built. Instead, a new stadium was later built for the Dodgers after the team moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn.
In recent years, the City of Los Angeles has faced calls for reparations on the land that became Dodger Stadium. One group that had helped lead that effort is Buried Under the Blue, a nonprofit organization that has sought to raise awareness about the history of the displacement.
In a statement this week, Buried Under the Blue called out the Dodgers on the team’s silence and apparent reluctance to speak out about the raids.
“As ICE targets undocumented families in neighborhoods across Los Angeles, we see history repeating itself: fear, evictions, police violence,” the organization said. “Once again, the Dodgers — who profit from land that was stolen — are only speaking up because of public pressure.”
Emmett Lindner contributed reporting from New York.
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10) A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.
The University of Florida student won an academic honor after he argued in a paper that the Constitution applies only to white people. From there, the situation spiraled.
By Richard Fausset, Reporting from Gainesville, Fla., June 21, 2025
The granting of an academic award to a white supremacist who wrote a law school paper promoting racist views set off months of turmoil on the University of Florida campus. Credit...Jacob Langston for The New York Times
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.
That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it?
The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”
Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.
But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic.
Well beyond the classroom, bigoted and extremist views are on the rise and vying for mainstream acceptance, raising questions about whether principles of neutrality and free-speech rights are proper and adequate responses to the threats.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, recently allowed millions of people to view Kanye West’s new song saluting Hitler when other platforms removed it. Vice President JD Vance criticized European governments’ efforts to ostracize far-right political parties, on the grounds that doing so violates principles of free speech.
At the University of Florida, the story of the book award took a dramatic turn soon after Ms. McAlister defended the decision to honor Mr. Damsky with it. It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school. He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion.
Mr. Damsky’s hateful posts drew shock and fear in some corners of the university. According to Hillel International, the university has the largest number of Jewish undergraduate students in the country. Its student body is 48 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian and 5 percent Black, according to school data.
A spokesman for the university declined to answer questions related to this article or to make any administrators available for interviews. But in emails to Mr. Damsky obtained by The New York Times, university officials wrote that his posts had made numerous students fear for their safety. The officials also cited another student’s claim that Mr. Damsky had described his paper as concluding “on a call for extralegal violence,” which Mr. Damsky denies.
In an interview, Mr. Damsky said that he belonged to no organization or group, and that he did not pose a physical threat to anyone. He said he was being unfairly targeted for sharing his ideas, and blithely shrugged off the criticism. The disciplinary measures he faces could result in expulsion. He said he planned to fight them vigorously.
“You know,” he said, “I’m not, like, a psychopathic ax murderer.”
Mr. Damsky said his ideas were well formed before he started law school, shaped by reading authors like Sam Francis, a white nationalist, and Richard Lynn, who argued for white racial superiority and eugenics.
He grew up around Los Angeles and studied history at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he wanted to become a prosecutor, he said, after watching progressive-minded California prosecutors adopt policies that he believed were soft on crime.
Many law students learned about his extremism last fall, when a draft of a paper he wrote for a different class was passed among students and faculty members. Mr. Damsky, who just completed his second year of law school, assumes that a fellow student shared it with others. Like his paper for the originalism seminar, it also argued the Constitution was written exclusively for white people. It went on to suggest that nonwhites should be stripped of voting rights and given 10 years to move to another country.
In January, Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University, began a stint as a visiting scholar at the school. It was not long, she said, before a number of Black and Jewish students came to her with concerns about Mr. Damsky.
Ms. Chatman was struck, in part, by her own experiences at the school in contrast to Mr. Damsky’s award. She had proposed teaching a class during her time there called “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.” But administrators at the law school changed the name to “Entrepreneurship,” she said, before listing it in the course catalog.
She attributed the change to Florida lawmakers’ crackdown on diversity-oriented language and themes in public education, a push that preceded the Trump administration’s broader war on progressive ideology.
“I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” Ms. Chatman said, referring to Mr. Damsky, “but my class can’t be called ‘Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.’”
As the spring semester got underway, word spread that Mr. Damsky had won the book award in Judge Badalamenti’s originalism seminar.
Mr. Damsky’s paper includes arguments similar to those recently adopted by the Trump administration, including a call to “reconsider” birthright citizenship, and an assertion that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution.”
It also argues that courts should challenge the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to vote for nonwhite citizens.
Mr. Damsky concluded the paper by raising the specter of revolutionary action if the steps he recommended toward forging a white ethno-state were not taken. “The People cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,” he wrote, adding that if the courts did not act to ensure a white country, the matter would be decided “not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.”
Ms. Chatman called Mr. Damsky’s arguments “anti-intellectual” and absurd: “We fought a whole Civil War that freed slaves and said ‘We The People’ now means everyone.”
As the spring semester got underway, word spread that Mr. Damsky had won the book award in Judge Badalamenti’s originalism seminar.
Mr. Damsky’s paper includes arguments similar to those recently adopted by the Trump administration, including a call to “reconsider” birthright citizenship, and an assertion that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution.”
It also argues that courts should challenge the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to vote for nonwhite citizens.
Mr. Damsky concluded the paper by raising the specter of revolutionary action if the steps he recommended toward forging a white ethno-state were not taken. “The People cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,” he wrote, adding that if the courts did not act to ensure a white country, the matter would be decided “not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.”
Ms. Chatman called Mr. Damsky’s arguments “anti-intellectual” and absurd: “We fought a whole Civil War that freed slaves and said ‘We The People’ now means everyone.”
Mr. Damsky’s argument that at least some of the framers meant for the Constitution to apply only to white people is by no means a new one. Evan D. Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University, notes that the argument can be found in the Ku Klux Klan’s founding organizational documents from the late 1860s.
Among originalists, though, this interpretation has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.
While Mr. Damsky’s papers were written in a formal style consistent with legal scholarship, his social media posts have been blunt, crass and ugly. A critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.” He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler.
Judge Badalamenti, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, was one of two instructors of the class in which Mr. Damsky won the award. A member of the conservative Federalist Society, he has earned praise from both liberals and conservatives over the course of his career. The class was co-taught by Ashley Grabowski, a lawyer and Federal District Court clerk who, like the judge, is an adjunct professor at the law school.
Ms. Grabowski did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Damsky said he assumed that it was the judge who graded his paper. He also said that the judge “is not a white nationalist.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I would prefer it if he was.”
Students took their complaints to Ms. McAlister, the interim dean. She addressed the granting of the award to Mr. Damsky in at least two town-hall-style meetings, according to an email she wrote to students and an article in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper. In the February email, the dean wrote that the law school, as a public institution, was bound by the First and 14th Amendments, meaning that no faculty member may “grade down a paper that is otherwise successful simply because he or she disagrees with the ideas the paper advances.”
Institutional neutrality, she wrote in her email, “is not agreement or complicity with the ideas that any community member advances.”
“It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”
Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.
If it were a good paper, he said, “you should put aside your moral qualms and give it an A.”
A number of students disagree, but several declined to be interviewed on the record for fear that criticizing the school, or a sitting federal judge, would harm their future job prospects.
One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.
Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.
“You could imagine,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview, that “having someone in your office who espouses those kinds of beliefs would cause significant mistrust in the fairness of prosecutions.”
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11) Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, June 21, 2025
A vigil in Minnesota for Melissa and Mark Hortman. Credit...Galen Fletcher for The New York Times
It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the past 10 years of American political life.
There was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a far-right extremist killed a counterdemonstrator. There was the 2018 Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh, where a shooter killed 11 people (all of whom were Jewish) and wounded six others at a synagogue. Echoing the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory, the perpetrator blamed Jewish people for bringing migrant “invaders” into the United States. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social media website Gab, a haven for online white supremacists. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
There was also the 2019 slaughter in El Paso, where a shooter targeted Latinos — killing 23 people and injuring 22 others — after posting a manifesto in which he condemned “cultural and ethnic replacement” and a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States. Nor should we forget the 2022 Buffalo supermarket attack, in which still another shooter citing the great replacement conspiracy theory targeted members of a minority group, killing 10 people (all of whom were Black) and wounding three others.
In a piece written just after the Buffalo shooting, my colleague David Leonhardt, citing data from the Anti-Defamation League, observed that out of 450 killings committed by political extremists from 2012 to 2022, about 75 percent were committed by right-wing extremists, with more than half connected to white supremacists. “As this data shows,” he concluded, “the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.”
What’s critical for us to understand that this isn’t a problem of the fringe. Not only was President Trump permissive of right-wing violence throughout his first term — consider his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville — but after losing his bid for re-election, he also led an organized effort to overturn the results, culminating in a riot in the Capitol. And what was one of his first acts back in office? He pardoned the rioters, in as clear an endorsement of violence on his behalf as one can imagine.
In the years since the Jan. 6 attack, supporters of Trump, honoring his demands to “stop the steal,” engaged in a campaign of intimidation and harassment toward election workers. Trump himself used one of the attacks — the assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of a former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi — as fodder for jokes and entertainment. Speaking of entertainment: There is also much to be said about the right-wing media ecosystem, where prominent voices indulge and even endorse violence against their political opponents.
None of this is to say that political violence can’t come from the political left. We have seen two instances over the past month of violence with a left-wing valence: In Washington, D.C., a man gunned down two Israeli Embassy staff members, and in Boulder, Colo., a man threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, injuring twelve people.
Even so, the point is that the preponderance of political violence in the United States comes from extremists on the right, one of whom has been charged with attacking two Minnesota state lawmakers last week — State Representative Melissa Hortman and State Senator John Hoffman, both Democrats — killing Hortman, her husband and her dog and wounding Hoffman and his wife.
The man accused of the shootings, Vance Boelter, has been identified as a Trump supporter and an adherent of a far-right Christian movement. He was motivated, it appears, by his opposition to abortion, which makes him one of many men in recent memory who have killed in the name of “life.”
All of this taken together shows us why it is important to not treat this bout of political violence as a generalized problem of American political life. It is, instead, a specific problem of a specific ideological tendency: one obsessed with the maintenance of rigid hierarchies of race and gender and willing to defend them by any means necessary.
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12) The Pentagon described an operation involving B-2 stealth bombers, fighter aircraft and submarine-launched cruise missiles.
By Helene Cooper and John Ismay, Reporting from Washington, June 22, 2025
Senior Pentagon officials on Sunday described an extraordinary coordinated military operation targeting Iran that took place under utmost secrecy and showcased what the American military was capable of when it put in place its doctrine of using air and naval forces to strike an adversary.
But neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could immediately say whether Iran still retained the ability to make a nuclear weapon. Mr. Hegseth repeated President Trump’s assertion from the previous night that the nuclear sites had been “obliterated.” General Caine did not.
The final battle damage assessment for the military operation against Iran, General Caine said, was still to come. He said the initial assessment showed that all three of the Iranian nuclear sites that were struck “sustained severe damage and destruction.”
Mr. Hegseth and General Caine, appearing before reporters in the Pentagon’s briefing room for the first time since they took office, described an intricate operation that began at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home to the B-2 stealth bombers used in the strikes, and hit three nuclear sites in a span of less than a half-hour — 6:40 p.m. to 7:05 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday.
The bombers took off in secrecy on Friday night from Missouri for the more than 7,000-mile trip, which involved multiple refuelings. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to reach the skies above Iran, where they struck the heavily fortified nuclear site at Fordo, as well as facilities at Natanz.
The operation used 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs — often referred to as “bunker busters” — with the first two dropping at 2 a.m. Sunday local time, General Caine said. A U.S. Navy submarine also launched more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles, he said. Those were directed at a third site, Isfahan.
General Caine said that Iran had not deployed fighter jets or surface-to-air missiles to hit back at the American warplanes. “Throughout the mission, we maintained the element of surprise,” he said, adding that “we are currently unaware of any shots fired at the U.S. strike package on the way in.”
The strikes were the first operational use of the GBU-57, Mr. Hegseth said. It is a 30,000-pound guided bomb that contains the explosive power of approximately 5,500 pounds of TNT and is designed to attack deeply buried targets. It can be carried only by B-2 stealth bombers.
General Caine said the operation “was designed to severely degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure.”
The main portion of the attack was carried out by seven B-2 bombers that launched from the United States from midnight Friday into Saturday morning, the general said, while additional B-2s headed over the Pacific Ocean as “a decoy.”
The flight to the target area over Iran took 18 hours, the chairman said, and required “multiple in-flight refuelings” from tanker aircraft before linking up with fighter escorts and entering Iranian airspace.
At approximately 5 p.m. Eastern time, just before the American warplanes flew over Iran, a U.S. Navy submarine in the region launched the Tomahawk missiles, General Caine said.
Fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes flew ahead of the B-2s, according to the general, indicating that either F-35 or F-22 fighters — or a combination of the two, along with older warplanes — attacked additional sites on the ground, including Iranian air defenses, in preparation for the stealth bombers’ approach.
The lead B-2 dropped two of the bombs on “the first of several aim points at Fordo,” and a total of 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators were used to attack “two nuclear target areas” in Iran, according to the Pentagon.
In total, “approximately 75 precision-guided munitions” were used during the operation, inclusive of the penetrator bombs and cruise missiles, General Caine said.
The operation’s name was “Midnight Hammer.” General Caine called it a “highly classified mission with very few people in Washington knowing the details of the plan.”
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13) ‘An Existential Threat’: Food Banks Brace for Fallout From Trump Cuts
New York City food banks aren’t sure how they will survive the administration’s funding cuts, which could also affect the programs they turn to for help.
By Sarah Maslin Nir, June 22, 2025
Delcina Williams, right, and her sister Doreena Davidson. Ms. Williams, 75, looks for beans at food banks to make soup after she runs out of money each month. Anna Watts for The New York Times
Dressed in heels to run errands, or surrounded by tasteful art in her chicly decorated apartment, Delcina Williams maintains a public facade that defies her reality. She is by many measures destitute, reliant on food stamps and an $1,100 monthly Social Security check that she said leaves her with only a handful of dollars a day for food after rent, utilities and caring for her twin sister, who has Alzheimer’s.
Ms. Williams, 75, said she was once an editor for a fashion magazine and a doo-wop singer. She and her twin, Doreena Davidson, are breast cancer survivors. But now Ms. Williams spends her days going from food bank to food bank, seeking navy beans and split peas for soup — a meal that can stretch after she inevitably runs out of money each month.
It is, she said, a demoralizing experience. And recent moves in Washington to cut federal funding for food benefits have filled many New Yorkers like Ms. Williams with mounting panic.
“It’s tearing me up already,” Ms. Williams said as she carted home 16 ounces of frozen ground beef, four cans of tuna fish, scallions and oranges from the Food Bank for NYC Community Kitchen and Pantry on West 116th Street in Harlem. “Every month I’m praying to my bank account.”
A new bill championed by President Trump calls for cutting $295 billion in federal spending over the next decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps, according to the Congressional Budget Office. “What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Williams said. “I know he doesn’t need it, but the rest of us do.”
More than 65 percent of food pantry users are employed, according to the Poverty Tracker by Robin Hood, an anti-poverty group, and Columbia University. Experts say that is a reflection of the city’s affordability crisis. Average monthly visits to pantries and soup kitchens have shot up 85 percent since 2019, according to an analysis of FeedNYC data by City Harvest, a food rescue nonprofit. Almost three million New Yorkers struggle to put food on the table, according to data from Feeding America, a philanthropic organization.
On top of surging demand, food banks also anticipate increased prices because of tariffs on steel that have raised the cost of canned food.
But even as the need has skyrocketed, the banks’ ability to meet it has abruptly fallen. In March, the Department of Government Efficiency took aim at Biden-era initiatives that had provided over $1 billion in grants to states to buy local food. Trump administration-backed cuts of the Emergency Food Assistance Program hacked away millions of pounds of deliveries to food banks.
“I have honestly never been as concerned as I am now,” said Randi Dresner, the president and chief executive of Island Harvest Food Bank, which serves Long Island.
The $2 million grant program Island Harvest used to buy products from Long Island farmers, the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, will end this summer instead of next as originally planned. No new grants will be issued after current funding expires. And the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal would eliminate the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Supplemental Food Program, and the more than $1 million the food bank uses to supply monthly food boxes to about 6,000 older people. Another $1.7 million that the organization was supposed to receive from the program this year was also frozen.
“There is a broad-brush cutting across all social services,” Ms. Dresner said. “That concerns me for our neighbors that are most vulnerable.”
The results of Trump administration policies have already been dramatic for food banks like the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which serves about 48 million meals a year — 20 million more than before the pandemic — according to Thomas A. Nardacci, the chief executive officer.
Every year, the Regional Food Bank receives 400 tractor-trailers of food from the U.S.D.A.’s emergency assistance program — strawberries from California, citrus from Florida and meat from the Midwest. But cuts to the program will slice the number of trucks in half, costing about 5.8 million meals. This year, 27 trailers, equal to about 750,000 meals, have already been canceled.
“The whole charitable food system, we are all living in fear right now,” Mr. Nardacci said. “Because the need is as high as ever.”
The potential cuts to food stamps are also a major concern. New rules would further restrict who is eligible and expand the group of recipients who are required to have jobs to qualify. The version of the bill approved by the House of Representatives also proposes to divert some of the costs of the program to the states.
Under the scheme, New York would have to bear about a quarter of the cost. “The idea that we would be punished by the federal government with a 25 percent cost share, which would cost us $1.8 billion, is really an existential threat to the idea of SNAP being a safety net,” said Nicole Hunt, the director of public policy and advocacy for Food Bank for NYC.
Food banks say they are scrambling.
“Which issue do you fight first?” said David G. Greenfield, the chief executive officer and executive director of Met Council, which provides kosher and halal food to over 600 distribution sites. “You are going to fight SNAP cuts that is going to reduce millions of meals around the country? Or do you fight the actual food cuts? Or do you fight the tariff challenges?
“It is like dealing with water from a fire hose.”
Many food bank leaders have been frantically lobbying Washington, they say, with little to show for their efforts. Recently, at a summit in Albany that was supposed to be about food procurement, anxiety about the proposed cuts dominated the conversation, Ms. Hunt said.
Zac Hall, the senior vice president of Food Bank for NYC’s programs, said, “The amount of void that will be created by these SNAP cuts is insurmountable.”
For people already on the edge, there is little room to absorb further cuts. Ms. Williams, who lives in public housing in Harlem with her twin sister, is trying to figure out how to survive.
As she stirred the black bean soup that she hoped would last them the week, Ms. Williams said she felt helpless. But there was something she could do: From her food pantry haul she removed a few loaves of French bread and some greens and hung the bag of produce on her neighbor’s door.
They need the help too.
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14) Vera Rubin’s Legacy Lives On in a Troubled Scientific Landscape
A powerful new telescope will usher in a new era of cosmic discovery, but in a political climate vastly different from when it was named for a once overlooked female astronomer.
By Katrina Miller, June 22, 2025
Katrina Miller visited the Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop Cerro Pachón in Chile in May.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory at Cerro Pachón, Chile. Credit...Marcos Zegers for The New York Times
In January, the American Astronomical Society hosted a panel to discuss how the Vera C. Rubin Observatory would transform scientific studies of dark matter, dark energy and the faintest corners of the cosmos.
All six panelists, each holding a leadership role related to the observatory, were women.
The message, intentional or not, was clear: The legacy of the astronomer Vera C. Rubin, for whom the observatory was named, was not just the way her work revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the universe. It was also the way Dr. Rubin charted a path for women and other historically underrepresented groups in science to do the same.
“The universe is universal,” Sandrine Thomas, the deputy director of construction at the observatory, said at the panel.
The telescope is now poised to begin the widest, deepest scan of the southern sky in an altered political climate, one in which American science is facing sharp cuts to funding, research project cancellations and rollbacks of programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I.
Astronomers worry about what that means for the future of the observatory, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation and was renamed in 2019 near the end of the first Trump administration for Dr. Rubin.
“She was the ultimate role model for women in astronomy in the generation after her,” said Jacqueline Mitton, an astronomer based in England and an author of a biography of Dr. Rubin.
That the observatory bears her name seems to have “inspired its leadership to embrace what she stood for,” Dr. Mitton added, which gives “ongoing reality to her legacy.”
In the 1970s, Vera Rubin, with her colleague Kent Ford, deduced from the swirling motion of distant galaxies that there was more to the universe than what met the telescopic eye, an invisible substance known as dark matter.
“It is one of the major achievements of modern cosmology,” said Sandra Faber, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who spent a summer as Dr. Rubin’s assistant. “Gravitationally, it’s the dog that wags the tail of everything else in the universe.”
But Dr. Rubin faced barriers as one of the few women in her field. She was discouraged from pursuing a career in astronomy and was denied access to state-of-the-art telescopes. Astronomers initially dismissed her evidence of dark matter. And though her work pioneered a new understanding of the universe, she never won a Nobel Prize, to the chagrin of many.
Many astronomers described Dr. Rubin as a staunch supporter of other women in the field.
“She will be director of the observatory one day,” Dr. Rubin wrote in a recommendation letter for Dr. Faber, who would go on to become the first female astronomer at the Lick Observatory in California. Decades later, Dr. Faber would fulfill that prophecy, in a sense, when she served as interim director of the University of California Observatories.
Astronomy and astrophysics aim to be more gender inclusive today. Part of that effort has been recognizing those whose contributions were overlooked. At federal science agencies, it has included the choice to name the observatory after Dr. Rubin, and a NASA space telescope after Nancy Grace Roman, the agency’s first chief of astronomy.
“Everyone’s heard of Einstein and Feynman and all these other male physicists,” said Leanne Guy, the data management scientist at the Rubin Observatory, who did not learn about Dr. Rubin until well into her scientific career. That’s telling, she said, “on how the contributions of women scientists just haven’t really been at the forefront of anything.”
The new observatory was formerly named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. But in 2019, two members of Congress, Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas and Jenniffer González-Colón of Puerto Rico, led the charge to change the observatory’s name in honor of Dr. Rubin. Their bill became law in December 2019, and the National Science Foundation announced the renaming the following January.
Astronomers celebrated the decision as a fitting commemoration of Dr. Rubin, who died in 2016.
“I thought, it’s about time,” said Hiranya Peiris, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Peiris noted that though the number of women in science had increased during her career, the statistics are still not where she would like to see them. Astronomy’s demographics are better than in physics, she said, but “you still see a lack of senior women in very high-profile roles.”
Some viewers of the Rubin panel in January interpreted six women representing the observatory as a sea change.
Dr. Guy, one of the panelists, emphasized that she and her colleagues hadn’t been chosen to speak because they were women but because they had earned their positions.
“When I started as a university student, you never would have found a panel like this,” she said. “This is a really visible and concrete reflection of the times.”
The team running the Rubin has a history of prioritizing the values encapsulated in D.E.I. It has provided resources for child care at scientific meetings, recruited researchers from minority-serving institutions and worked to develop tools for visually impaired astronomers. Rubin’s education and public outreach program, designed to engage a diverse audience in cosmic discovery, is among the first to be fully funded in the construction phase of an observatory.
But as the Rubin Observatory ushers in a new era of science, so too has the Trump administration.
Four days after the panel in January, President Trump issued an executive order that called for an end to D.E.I. across the federal government, citing “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
Sweeping changes ensued across scientific agencies as they worked to comply with the order. Institutions took down webpages that had once expressed a commitment to D.E.I. Many research grants including D.E.I. activities were canceled by federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation.
Rubin was not exempt from the changes. Private messaging channels set up for L.G.B.T.Q. members involved in the observatory were temporarily retired. Language disappeared from the observatory’s website that described science as male-dominated and noted the observatory’s work to increase participation from historically excluded groups.
In May, the Trump administration proposed a budget that, if passed by Congress, would cut funding to the National Science Foundation by 56 percent. A significant reason for that reduction, per the budget request, was the elimination of D.E.I. efforts.
Later that month, staff members at the Rubin Observatory expressed concern about the future of scientific funding but were hesitant to speculate about what that might mean for the telescope.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Alan Strauss, the head of Rubin’s education and public outreach team. But so far, he said, his team has not received any pushback about their work, even as other federally funded STEM education programs have been cut.
“I’m not picking it up,” Dr. Strauss said. “What I’m getting is a lot of enthusiasm for this stuff.”
Dr. Guy said she did not plan to change her approach as a member of the observatory. “Our uniting principle is science,” she said.
Astronomers remain cautiously optimistic about Rubin’s future — both in continuing to promote the values of the woman it is named for and that the observatory will be able to reach its goals, even in the fraught funding landscape.
Dr. Rubin’s legacy, they said, will live on.
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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15) Israel widens its targets in another series of strikes on the Iranian capital.
Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 23, 2025
A plume of smoke billowed over Iran’s capital Tehran in a screen grab taken from a video posted on social media on Monday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military pounded Tehran on Monday with a series of strikes targeting structures that belong to the Iranian government, according to the office of Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz.
The strikes illustrated that Israel was continuing to widen its targets. They came shortly after Iran fired missiles at Israel on Monday morning, sending Israelis running to safe rooms and public shelters for the second time in hours.
Since launching its campaign against Iran earlier this month, the Israeli military has hit Iranian nuclear facilities, scientists and senior military commanders, but it has also struck targets lacking a clear link to Iran’s nuclear program or ballistic missiles, including the state broadcaster.
According to the defense minister’s office, Israel’s strikes in Tehran on Monday targeted the headquarters of the Basij, a volunteer force under the umbrella of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that has used brutal tactics to crack down on protests in Iran, and Evin prison, the notorious facility holding political prisoners.
Israel also struck access routes to Fordo, the heavily fortified nuclear-enrichment site that the United States bombed on Sunday, the Israeli military said.
President Trump claimed on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally and completely obliterated.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that the American military caused “very big damage” to Fordo, but he clarified that Israel still did not know the full extent.
Morteza Heidari, the spokesman for crisis management in the province where Fordo is, on Monday reported an “attack on the Fordo nuclear site,” according to the government-affiliated Mehr and Tasnim news agencies. He said there was no danger to the public from the strikes, the news agencies said.
Later on Monday, the Israeli military said it had targeted other forces under the Revolutionary Guards, including ones that it described as being responsible for dealing with domestic threats. It also said it had hit missile and radar production sites and missile storage infrastructure.
The impact and extent of the strikes were not immediately clear. But videos verified by The New York Times showed the moment of the blast at an entrance into the Evin prison, and clouds of smoke emanating from a metal gate below a sign that reads ‘Evin Detention Facility’ in Farsi.
The reports of the strikes on the Evin prison caused particular concern in France because two French citizens, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, are detained there.
“We are worried that Cécile and Jacques are going to die under bombs,” Noémie Kohler, Ms. Kohler’s sister, told Franceinfo radio on Monday. “We still have no way of contacting them,” she added. “We are absolutely panicked.”
France has accused Iran of detaining Ms. Kohler and Mr. Paris for over three years on baseless spying charges and has repeatedly demanded their release.
The strikes on Evin — which is close to apartment blocks and a popular hiking route — also hit a main power line that caused outages in two large districts of Tehran, according to the national electricity company Tavanir. It said in a statement distributed broadly to government-affiliated news agencies that it was able to repair the outages within an hour.
Iranian news outlets also reported that the Israeli military hit a building near the Iranian Red Crescent Society, an emergency response service. A video posted by the government-affiliated Mehr news agency, and verified by The Times, showed smoke rising in the area. It was not clear what was in the building that had been struck.
Erika Solomon and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting to this article.
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16) Claims of potential rights violations further strain E.U.-Israeli relations.
By Jeanna Smialek and Aaron Boxerman, Jeanna Smialek reported from Brussels, and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, June 23, 2025
Relations between Israel and the European Union have become even more fraught after the bloc found that Israel’s actions in Gaza, including the blockade of aid to the enclave, may have violated human rights obligations.
A review by the European Union’s diplomatic service investigated whether Israel had violated a provision in a treaty that came into force in 2000 and underpins relations between the two sides. Critics of Israel have called for the bloc to suspend the treaty, accusing the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of violating the rights of Palestinians en masse. Israel has rejected the accusations.
The review referred to a number of issues that could have constituted a breach of Israel’s obligations. Those included Israeli restrictions of essential goods and food into Gaza, attacks that the report said had caused a “significant number of casualties,” and military strikes on hospitals and medical facilities.
Under the terms of the treaty, the European Union and Israel agreed that their relationship “would be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles.”
European Union member states are sharply divided on Israel, meaning that a major shift in policy may be hard to pass. But the report’s conclusions underscored growing frustrations, including among some of Israel’s closest allies, over the handling of the war in Gaza.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, was expected to present the findings of the review to a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday. The conclusions from the review were circulated among member states on Friday.
Israel strongly rejected the findings. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a response to the European Union, shared with The Times, that the review was “a complete moral and methodological failure,” and pointed out that it “opens with an admission that it lacks the ability to verify its own statements.”
Israeli officials defended the restrictions on aid as security measures intended to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons or diverting aid supplies. The United Nations and other international aid agencies have criticized some of the measures as a form of collective punishment, and they say that Israel has not provided evidence that Hamas systematically diverted international aid.
The back-and-forth underscored how tense relations between the European Union and Israel have become. The situation has become more complicated after Israel launched a major assault on Iran last week, one that now involves the United States. Israel and the United States say the military attack was intended to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. Iran says that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, and has denied building a weapon.
E.U. officials have spoken about the conflict with Iran cautiously. Some have spoken more positively about the Israeli and American attacks, while others have held off. Many have urged a return to diplomacy to resolve the crisis.
“Everybody agrees that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon,” Ms. Kallas said on Monday as she headed into the foreign ministers’ meeting, before explaining that officials would talk both about Iran and about the report on Israel.
“And then, of course, the discussion is, what more can we do?” Ms. Kallas said of the Israel review.
Finding Israel in violation of its human rights obligations under its agreement with the European Union would be symbolically important, but it is not clear what it would mean in practical terms. Imposing sanctions, for instance, would require unanimity among member states — which is unlikely to be reached. The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, for example, is an ally of Mr. Netanyahu and would almost certainly not agree to impose restrictions on Israel.
The review has also been overshadowed by events in Iran. Some European officials and diplomats have said that the conflict with Tehran should not distract from what is happening in Gaza, but the combination of events has left Brussels struggling to agree a unified stance toward Israel.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, announced on Sunday that officials would hold a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss the “escalating situation in the Middle East and its effects on Europe.”
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17) The Global A.I. Divide
WHERE A.I. DATA CENTERS ARE LOCATED
Only 32 nations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, have A.I.-specialized data centers.
As countries race to power artificial intelligence, a yawning gap is opening around the world.
By Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur Graphics by Karl Russell and June Kim, June 21, 2025
Nicolás Wolovick, a computer science professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina. “We are losing,” he said. Sarah Pabst for The New York Times
Last month, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, donned a helmet, work boots and a luminescent high-visibility vest to visit the construction site of the company’s new data center project in Texas.
Bigger than New York’s Central Park, the estimated $60 billion project, which has its own natural gas plant, will be one of the most powerful computing hubs ever created when completed as soon as next year.
Around the same time as Mr. Altman’s visit to Texas, Nicolás Wolovick, a computer science professor at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, was running what counts as one of his country’s most advanced A.I. computing hubs. It was in a converted room at the university, where wires snaked between aging A.I. chips and server computers.
“Everything is becoming more split,” Dr. Wolovick said. “We are losing.”
Artificial intelligence has created a new digital divide, fracturing the world between nations with the computing power for building cutting-edge A.I. systems and those without. The split is influencing geopolitics and global economics, creating new dependencies and prompting a desperate rush to not be excluded from a technology race that could reorder economies, drive scientific discovery and change the way that people live and work.
The biggest beneficiaries by far are the United States, China and the European Union. Those regions host more than half of the world’s most powerful data centers, which are used for developing the most complex A.I. systems, according to data compiled by Oxford University researchers. Only 32 countries, or about 16 percent of nations, have these large facilities filled with microchips and computers, giving them what is known in industry parlance as “compute power.”
The United States and China, which dominate the tech world, have particular influence. American and Chinese companies operate more than 90 percent of the data centers that other companies and institutions use for A.I. work, according to the Oxford data and other research.
In contrast, Africa and South America have almost no A.I. computing hubs, while India has at least five and Japan at least four, according to the Oxford data. More than 150 countries have nothing.
Today’s A.I. data centers dwarf their predecessors, which powered simpler tasks like email and video streaming. Vast, power-hungry and packed with powerful chips, these hubs cost billions to build and require infrastructure that not every country can provide. With ownership concentrated among a few tech giants, the effects of the gap between those with such computing power and those without it are already playing out.
The world’s most used A.I. systems, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are more proficient and accurate in English and Chinese, languages spoken in the countries where the compute power is concentrated. Tech giants with access to the top equipment are using A.I. to process data, automate tasks and develop new services. Scientific breakthroughs, including drug discovery and gene editing, rely on powerful computers. A.I.-powered weapons are making their way onto battlefields.
Nations with little or no A.I. compute power are running into limits in scientific work, in the growth of young companies and in talent retention. Some officials have become alarmed by how the need for computing resources has made them beholden to foreign corporations and governments.
“Oil-producing countries have had an oversized influence on international affairs; in an A.I.-powered near future, compute producers could have something similar since they control access to a critical resource,” said Vili Lehdonvirta, an Oxford professor who conducted the research on A.I. data centers with his colleagues Zoe Jay Hawkins and Boxi Wu.
A.I. computing power is so precious that the components in data centers, such as microchips, have become a crucial part of foreign and trade policies for China and the United States, which are jockeying for influence in the Persian Gulf, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. At the same time, some countries are beginning to pour public funds into A.I. infrastructure, aiming for more control over their technological futures.
The Oxford researchers mapped the world’s A.I. data centers, information that companies and governments often keep secret. To create a representative sample, they went through the customer websites of nine of the world’s biggest cloud-service providers to see what compute power was available and where their hubs were at the end of last year. The companies were the U.S. firms Amazon, Google and Microsoft; China’s Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei; and Europe’s Exoscale, Hetzner and OVHcloud.
The research does not include every data center worldwide, but the trends were unmistakable. U.S. companies operated 87 A.I. computing hubs, which can sometimes include multiple data centers, or almost two-thirds of the global total, compared with 39 operated by Chinese firms and six by Europeans, according to the research. Inside the data centers, most of the chips — the foundational components for making calculations — were from the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia.
“We have a computing divide at the heart of the A.I. revolution,” said Lacina Koné, the director general of Smart Africa, which coordinates digital policy across the continent. He added: “It’s not merely a hardware problem. It’s the sovereignty of our digital future.”
‘Sometimes I Want to Cry’
There has long been a tech gap between rich and developing countries. Over the past decade, cheap smartphones, expanding internet coverage and flourishing app-based businesses led some experts to conclude that the divide was diminishing. Last year, 68 percent of the world’s population used the internet, up from 33 percent in 2012, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency.
With a computer and knowledge of coding, getting a company off the ground became cheaper and easier. That lifted tech industries across the world, be they mobile payments in Africa or ride hailing in Southeast Asia.
But in April, the U.N. warned that the digital gap would widen without action on A.I. Just 100 companies, mostly in the United States and China, were behind 40 percent of global investment in the technology, the U.N. said. The biggest tech companies, it added, were “gaining control over the technology’s future.”
The gap stems partly from a component everyone wants: a microchip known as a graphics processing unit, or GPU. The chips require multibillion-dollar factories to produce. Packed into data centers by the thousands and mostly made by Nvidia, GPUs provide the computing power for creating and delivering cutting-edge A.I. models.
Obtaining these pieces of silicon is difficult. As demand has increased, prices for the chips have soared, and everyone wants to be at the front of the line for orders. Adding to the challenges, these chips then need to be corralled into giant data centers that guzzle up dizzying amounts of power and water.
Many wealthy nations have access to the chips in data centers, but other countries are being left behind, according to interviews with more than two dozen tech executives and experts across 20 countries. Renting computing power from faraway data centers is common but can lead to challenges, including high costs, slower connection speeds, compliance with different laws, and vulnerability to the whims of American and Chinese companies.
Qhala, a start-up in Kenya, illustrates the issues. The company, founded by a former Google engineer, is building an A.I. system known as a large language model that is based on African languages. But Qhala has no nearby computing power and rents from data centers outside Africa. Employees cram their work into the morning, when most American programmers are sleeping, so there is less traffic and faster speeds to transfer data across the world.
“Proximity is essential,” said Shikoh Gitau, 44, Qhala’s founder.
“If you don’t have the resources for compute to process the data and to build your A.I. models, then you can’t go anywhere,” said Kate Kallot, a former Nvidia executive and the founder of Amini, another A.I. start-up in Kenya.
In the United States, by contrast, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI have pledged to spend more than $300 billion this year, much of it on A.I. infrastructure. The expenditure approaches Canada’s national budget. Harvard’s Kempner Institute, which focuses on A.I., has more computing power than all African-owned facilities on that continent combined, according to one survey of the world’s largest supercomputers.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said many countries wanted more computing infrastructure as a form of sovereignty. But closing the gap will be difficult, particularly in Africa, where many places do not have reliable electricity, he said. Microsoft, which is building a data center in Kenya with a company in the United Arab Emirates, G42, chooses data center locations based largely on market need, electricity and skilled labor.
“The A.I. era runs the risk of leaving Africa even further behind,” Mr. Smith said.
Jay Puri, Nvidia’s executive vice president for global business, said the company was also working with various countries to build out their A.I. offerings.
“It is absolutely a challenge,” he said.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, said the company had started a program to adapt its products for local needs and languages. A risk of the A.I. divide, he said, is that “the benefits don’t get broadly distributed, they don’t get democratized.”
Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, Google, Amazon, Hetzner and OVHcloud declined to comment.
The gap has led to brain drains. In Argentina, Dr. Wolovick, 51, the computer science professor, cannot offer much compute power. His top students regularly leave for the United States or Europe, where they can get access to GPUs, he said.
“Sometimes I want to cry, but I don’t give up,” he said. “I keep talking to people and saying: ‘I need more GPUs. I need more GPUs.’”
Few Choices
The uneven distribution of A.I. computing power has split the world into two camps: nations that rely on China and those that depend on the United States.
The two countries not only control the most data centers but are set to build more than others by far. And they have wielded their tech advantage to exert influence. The Biden and Trump administrations have used trade restrictions to control which countries can buy powerful A.I. chips, allowing the United States to pick winners. China has used state-backed loans to encourage sales of its companies’ networking equipment and data centers.
The effects are evident in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
In the 2010s, Chinese companies made inroads into the tech infrastructure of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, which are key American partners, with official visits and generous financing. The United States sought to use its A.I. lead to push back. In one deal with the Biden administration, an Emirati company promised to keep out Chinese technology in exchange for access to A.I. technology from Nvidia and Microsoft.
In May, President Trump signed additional deals to give Saudi Arabia and the Emirates even more access to American chips.
A similar jostling is taking place in Southeast Asia. Chinese and U.S. companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Nvidia, Google and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, are building data centers in Singapore and Malaysia to deliver services across Asia.
Globally, the United States has the lead, with American companies building 63 A.I computing hubs outside the country’s borders, compared with 19 by China, according to the Oxford data. All but three of the data centers operated by Chinese firms outside their home country use chips from Nvidia, despite efforts by China to produce competing chips. Chinese firms were able to buy Nvidia chips before U.S. government restrictions.
Even U.S.-friendly countries have been left out of the A.I. race by trade limits. Last year, William Ruto, Kenya’s president, visited Washington for a state dinner hosted by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Several months later, Kenya was omitted from a list of countries that had open access to needed semiconductors.
That has given China an opening, even though experts consider the country’s A.I. chips to be less advanced. In Africa, policymakers are talking with Huawei, which is developing its own A.I. chips, about converting existing data centers to include Chinese-made chips, said Mr. Koné of Smart Africa.
“Africa will strike a deal with whoever can give access to GPUs,” he said.
If You Build It
Alarmed by the concentration of A.I. power, many countries and regions are trying to close the gap. They are providing access to land and cheaper energy, fast-tracking development permits and using public funds and other resources to acquire chips and construct data centers. The goal is to create “sovereign A.I.” available to local businesses and institutions.
In India, the government is subsidizing compute power and the creation of an A.I. model proficient in the country’s languages. In Africa, governments are discussing collaborating on regional compute hubs. Brazil has pledged $4 billion on A.I. projects.
“Instead of waiting for A.I. to come from China, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, why not have our own?” Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said last year when he proposed the investment plan.
Even in Europe, there is growing concern that American companies control most of the data centers. In February, the European Union outlined plans to invest 200 billion euros for A.I. projects, including new data centers across the 27-nation bloc.
Mathias Nobauer, the chief executive of Exoscale, a cloud computing provider in Switzerland, said many European businesses want to reduce their reliance on U.S. tech companies. Such a change will take time and “doesn’t happen overnight,” he said.
Still, closing the divide is likely to require help from the United States or China.
Cassava, a tech company founded by a Zimbabwean billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa, is scheduled to open one of Africa’s most advanced data centers this summer. The plans, three years in the making, culminated in an October meeting in California between Cassava executives and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, to buy hundreds of his company’s chips. Google is also one of Cassava’s investors.
The data center is part of a $500 million effort to build five such facilities across Africa. Even so, Cassava expects it to address only 10 percent to 20 percent of the region’s demand for A.I. At least 3,000 start-ups have expressed interest in using the computing systems.
“I don’t think Africa can afford to outsource this A.I. sovereignty to others,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava’s chief executive. “We absolutely have to focus on and ensure that we don’t get left behind.”
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17) Autism Rates Have Increased 60-Fold. I Played a Role in That.
By Allen Frances, June 23, 2025
Dr. Frances is a psychiatrist. He chaired the American Psychiatric Association’s task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Maria Medem
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the causes. I should know, because I am partly responsible for the explosion in rates.
The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I chaired the task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M.-IV. Sometimes called the “bible of psychiatry,” the D.S.M. influences medical practice, insurance coverage, education and treatment selection.
In the third edition of the D.S.M., published in 1980, autism was tightly defined and considered extremely rare. Criteria for the diagnosis required a very early onset (before age 3) of severe cognitive, interpersonal, emotional and behavioral problems.
But my task force approved the inclusion of the new diagnosis, Asperger’s disorder, which is much milder in severity than classic autism and much more common. In doing so, we were responding to child psychiatrists’ and pediatricians’ concerns for children who did not meet the extremely stringent criteria for classic autism, but had similar symptoms in milder form and might benefit from services.
Based on careful studies, our task force predicted that the addition of Asperger’s disorder would modestly increase the rate of children given an autism-related diagnosis. Instead, the rate increased more than 16-fold, to one in 150 from an estimated one in 2,500 in the span of a decade. It has been climbing more gradually ever since and is one in 31 today. Our intentions were good, but we underestimated the enormous unintended consequences of adding the new diagnosis.
The resulting explosion in cases included many instances of overdiagnosis — children were labeled with a serious condition for challenges that would better be viewed as a variation of normal. It also sowed the seeds of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine beliefs as people wondered how to explain the rising cases.
Many large studies have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines don’t cause autism. The role, if any, of environmental toxins is still to be determined, but there is no known environmental factor that can explain the sudden jump in diagnoses. The changes we made to the diagnosis in the D.S.M.-IV can.
Why did autism-related diagnoses explode so far beyond what our task force had predicted? Two reasons. First, many school systems provide much more intensive services to children with the diagnosis of autism. While these services are extremely important for many children, whenever having a diagnosis carries a benefit, it will be overused. Second, overdiagnosis can happen whenever there’s a blurry line between normal behavior and disorder, or when symptoms overlap with other conditions. Classic severe autism had so tight a definition it was hard to confuse it with anything else; Asperger’s was easily confused with other mental disorders or with normal social avoidance and eccentricity. (We also, regrettably, named the condition after Hans Asperger, one of the first people to describe it, not realizing until later that he had collaborated with the Nazis.)
In 2013, the next edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual, the D.S.M.-V, eliminated Asperger’s disorder as a stand-alone diagnosis and folded it into the newly introduced concept of autism spectrum disorder. This change further increased the rate of autism by obscuring the already fuzzy boundary between autism and social awkwardness.
It is difficult to accurately diagnose autism spectrum disorder. There is no biological test; symptoms vary greatly in nature and severity; clinicians don’t always agree; different diagnostic tests may come up with different conclusions; and the diagnosis is not always stable over time, meaning that many people diagnosed as children no longer meet criteria for diagnosis if evaluated later as adolescents or adults. Diagnostic inaccuracy contributes to falsely elevated rates, which can lead to misconceptions that an “epidemic” is occurring.
Social networking has also been a powerful force in increasing autism diagnoses. While online communities can provide valuable information, support, social interactions, validation, resources and even dating opportunities, they can also promote inaccurate self-diagnosis. This is especially true as more and more people with mild symptoms get labeled autistic. As it has lost its dire connotations, some people turn to the diagnosis as a way to feel less shame and guilt around social awkwardness or difficulties in juggling tasks.
Of course, there are many people for whom expanded diagnostic criteria for autism and greater awareness have been helpful in providing much-needed treatment and school services. A positive result has been identifying people who would have been missed before or misdiagnosed as having another mental disorder.
Still, we should be concerned about the increasing tendency to mislabel socially awkward behavior as autistic. A diagnosis of autism can shape both external perception (how others respond to you) and internal (how it affects your self-esteem, behavior and expectations). Diagnoses, especially in children, should be written in pencil, not engraved in stone or rendered eternal in medical records. A false diagnosis of autism can haunt someone for life and be very difficult to remove from medical records. Overdiagnosing autism also often misallocates very scarce resources away from the more severely impaired people who most need them.
The history of psychiatry is full of diagnoses, like multiple personality disorder or adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, that seem to be used to explain all sorts of mental distress and disability and quickly take off in popularity. I worry that clinicians and parents are sometimes too quick to embrace an autism spectrum diagnosis.
The explosion in autism rates has become fodder for Mr. Kennedy’s conspiracy theories. He has redirected federal research efforts away from the real science that could elucidate the causes of autism. He has instead hired David Geier, a longtime vaccine skeptic, who is reportedly seeking access to public health databases to hunt for a link between vaccines and autism. Mr. Kennedy also recently fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee that advises on vaccine safety and efficacy. Among their replacements is a doctor who has called the term anti-vaxxer “high praise” and a nurse who serves on the board of an organization that has linked childhood vaccines to autism.
Mr. Kennedy’s statements that people suffering from autism don’t pay taxes, implying they are useless, has created outrage among patients and families. His proposed autism registry is a scary invasion of privacy.
Figuring out how to accurately diagnose and appropriately treat autism is incredibly hard and the source of many fraught conversations among researchers, clinicians, people who have autism and their families. We need a health secretary with the good judgment to judiciously help us navigate these thorny questions and properly allocate scarce research resources. Instead, we have Mr. Kennedy, who has only served to sow confusion with false promises, to trigger anger with disparaging comments and to replace funding for real science with wasteful false science.
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