Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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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) Canadian Citizen Dies at ICE Detention Center in Florida
The death of Johnny Noviello, 49, came as ICE agents have made sweeping arrests across the United States as part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration. The cause is under investigation.
By Hannah Ziegler, June 26, 2025
Johnny Noviello, 49, was found unresponsive on Monday at the Bureau of Prisons Federal Detention Center in Miami. Credit...Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
The authorities are investigating the death of a Canadian citizen who died Monday in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency said in a statement.
The man, Johnny Noviello, 49, was found unresponsive on Monday at around 1 p.m. at the Bureau of Prisons Federal Detention Center in Miami, according to the statement, which was released on Wednesday. Medical staff administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation, automated external defibrillator shock and called 911, ICE said. Mr. Noviello was pronounced dead by the Miami Fire Rescue Department at 1:36 p.m., the agency said.
ICE said that it had notified the Canadian consulate of Mr. Noviello’s death. The Canadian consulate did not immediately return phone and email requests for comment on Thursday.
Mr. Noviello entered the United States in 1988 with a legal visa status and became a lawful permanent resident in 1991, the agency said. In October 2023, he was convicted of charges of racketeering and drug trafficking in Volusia County, Fla., and was sentenced to 12 months in prison.
Court records show that Mr. Noviello and his father were arrested and charged in 2017 with selling drugs, including hydrocodone and oxycodone, at an auto sales shop in Daytona Beach, Fla.
ICE agents arrested Mr. Noviello on May 15 at the Florida Department of Corrections probation office, and he was being detained pending removal proceedings because he had violated U.S. drug laws, according to the agency.
His death came as ICE agents have made sweeping arrests across the United States as part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Mr. Trump has issued several executive orders this year aimed at deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, and ICE arrests in courts, restaurants, hotels and factories have prompted widespread protests.
Mr. Noviello is the 10th person to die in ICE custody this year and the fourth person to die in custody in Florida, according to the agency’s website.
Rylee Kirk contributed research.
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2) Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist, June 27, 2025
Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, New York’s Jewish comptroller, cross-endorsed in the ranked-choice Democratic mayoral primary. Credit...Heather Khalifa/Associated Press
In 2023, a branch of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat opened in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, not far from where I live. The eatery trumpets its politics; the seafood section on the menu is headed “From the River to the Sea,” which I found clever but some of its Jewish neighbors considered threatening. An uproar grew, especially online, so Ayat made a peace offering.
In early 2024, it hosted a free Shabbat dinner, writing on social media, “Let’s create a space where differences unite us, where conversations flow freely, and where bonds are forged.” Over 1,300 people showed up. To serve them all, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, Ayat used 15 lambs, 700 pounds of chicken and 100 branzino fish. There were also sandwiches from a glatt kosher caterer, a six-foot-long challah and a klezmer band.
The event captured something miraculous about New York City, which is, for all its tensions and aggravations and occasional bursts of violence, a place where Jews and Muslims live in remarkable harmony. In Lawrence Wright’s recent novel set in the West Bank, “The Human Scale,” a Palestinian American man tries to explain it to his Palestinian cousin: “It’s not like here. Arabs and Jews are more like each other than they are like a lot of other Americans. You’ll see them in the same grocery stores and restaurants because of the halal food.”
Eating side-by-side does not, of course, obviate fierce and sometimes ugly disagreements. But while outsiders like to paint New York as a roiling hellhole, there’s an everyday multicultural amity in this city that’s low-key magical.
I saw some of that magic reflected in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and especially in the Muslim candidate’s alliance with New York’s Jewish comptroller, Brad Lander. They cross-endorsed, urging their followers to list the other second in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The two campaigned together and made a joint appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and Lander was beside Mamdani when he delivered his victory speech.
Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics have sparked enormous alarm among some New York Jews, but he’s also won considerable Jewish support. In a poll of likely Jewish voters done by the Honan Strategy Group in May, Andrew Cuomo came in first, with 31 percent of the vote, but Mamdani was second, with 20 percent. On Tuesday, he won most of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of progressive Jews, and held his own on the similarly Jewish Upper West Side.
“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others. After he gave an interview to Der Blatt, an ultra-Orthodox Yiddish newspaper, Rabbi Moishe Indig, the leader of a faction of Hasidic Jews, told The New York Times, “As mayor, we wouldn’t have a problem with him.” (Though Indig considered adding Mamdani to his endorsement slate, he ultimately decided against it.)
So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism. A Republican running for local office in Long Island posted on X that Mamdani will try to shut down “every single synagogue” and Jewish nonprofit in the city. “Evacuate NYC immediately,” wrote the Republican Jewish Coalition, a political group.
Some on the right have responded to his triumph with anti-Muslim hysteria. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, as if Mamdani, a man who campaigned with drag queens and promised public funding for trans health care, wants to impose Shariah law. Her House colleague Andy Ogles called for him to be denaturalized and deported.
I can certainly understand why Jews who see anti-Zionism and antisemitism as synonymous find Mamdani’s rise alarming. There’s no question that he sympathizes with the Palestinians over the Israelis. New York’s past mayors — even the left-leaning Bill de Blasio — supported Israel reflexively. After the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on war crimes charges, Cuomo joined his defense team. Mamdani, by contrast, has said he’d enforce the warrant if Netanyahu ever comes to New York.
One needn’t even be an ardent backer of Israel to have reservations about Mamdani. I’m worried about his inexperience, and I suspect he won people over by making economic promises that he can’t keep. Even though my own stance on Israel’s prime minister is closer to Mamdani’s than to Cuomo’s, I thought it was a terrible mistake for Mamdani to try to justify the phrase “globalize the intifada” on a podcast this month. He’s right, of course, that the literal meaning of intifada is simply “struggle,” but context matters. Mamdani should understand why many Jews find the words threatening, particularly after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington and the firebombing, just this month, of people in Colorado demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages.
He has consistently denounced antisemitism, and has spoken movingly about Jewish fear, including on the podcast that tripped him up. But Mamdani shouldn’t give the nervous people he aspires to represent any reason to doubt that he’ll protect them. He struck the right tone on the night of the primary, when he promised that while he won’t “abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality,” he would also “reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”
Ultimately, though, New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel, no matter how much Cuomo wanted it to be. Mamdani won because of his relentless focus on affordability and our quality of life, and his ebullience, optimism and authenticity. At a time when the Democratic Party is ossifying into a gerontocracy, its leaders dependent on focus-grouped talking points, he’s young and energetic and comfortable speaking extemporaneously. In a cynical and despairing time, he gave people hope.
He benefited, too, from being underestimated. No one is underestimating him now. In the general election, he’ll be facing the disgraced mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, and possibly an independent Cuomo as well. The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition. Adams is even planning to appear on the ballot line of a fake political party called “EndAntisemitism.”
Mamdani’s opponents will try to reduce him to a caricature, some mutant offspring of Jeremy Corbyn and Yahya Sinwar. They will say they’re doing it for the Jews, and plenty of Jews will believe them. But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring. He won in part because he is so obviously a product of the New York we love.
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3) El Salvador Police Say Quotas and Rumors Fueled Bukele’s Mass Arrests
Tens of thousands of people were jailed as part of President Nayib Bukele crackdown on gangs. Some police officers now admit they arrested people on flimsy or nonexistent evidence to meet quotas.
By Annie Correal, June 27, 2025
Annie Correal has been covering El Salvador and President Nayib Bukele’s prison system.
Relatives watched as recently arrested men were transferred to prison in April 2022, early in an anti-gang campaign that has imprisoned about 80,000 people. Credit...Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
The police arrested men based on neighborhood gossip or innocent tattoos, the families of those swept up in El Salvador’s mass arrests have long claimed.
Now, some police officers who were part of President Nayib Bukele’s sweeping crackdown on gangs are saying the same thing.
Nearly a dozen officers from El Salvador’s national police described facing intense pressure to meet arrest quotas, according to a Human Rights Watch report released this week, as well as three officers from that group who spoke directly to The New York Times, and the leader of the country’s main group advocating for police officers.
The quotas were imposed after Mr. Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022, which remains in effect today, and oversaw a campaign of mass arrests, the officers and report said.
Mr. Bukele’s plan resulted in an astounding turnaround for the tiny Central American country, which for decades had been racked by gang violence. El Salvador quickly became one of the safest countries in the region, a feat Mr. Bukele touted at the White House after he imprisoned some of President Trump’s deportees.
But the officers and police group leader said arbitrary arrests helped drive that turnaround — as did a fear among the police that they, too, could be dragged to jail as gang collaborators if they defied orders.
They also said some officers abused their powers under the state of emergency.
“Bukele publicizes his security policies as a positive model for the world, but the police officers we spoke with tell a completely different story,” said Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch.
Asked for comment, the Salvadoran police referred questions to a spokeswoman for the presidency, who did not respond.
Officers interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals. Like many Salvadorans, some stood by Mr. Bukele’s security strategy even as they described how it had gone too far.
“The tool is not badly designed,” said one officer. “It’s how it has been applied.”
Exhausting the database
Police officers said in interviews that the emergency decree, at first, helped them quell gangs like MS-13 that had terrorized communities.
But when police and security forces exhausted the database of known gang members, they nonetheless had to keep making arrests—because government officials believed there were tens of thousands of collaborators.
“That’s when we started to come out and say we didn’t agree,” one officer said, adding that his unit was told to keep making five arrests a day.
To meet quotas, officers resorted to flimsy evidence, including anonymous calls or neighbors’ tips, several officers said. The unofficial policy, one said, was “arrest first, investigate later.”
Months of chaos ensued, as officers snatched boys and men from work or their beds.
The head of the group of national police, Marvin Reyes, said in an interview that officers pushed back but faced punishment if they disobeyed. They were told, “Look, if you don’t come in with the daily quota, don’t come into the base at all.”
A teeming prison system
As officials demanded more arrests, El Salvador’s prison population soared from about 30,000 in early 2022 to about 110,000 this year, according to recent government figures.
Police had believed that people arrested in the early push would quickly be released after investigations, interviewed officers said.
But the legal system “crumbled completely” under Mr. Bukele, one officer said. Lawmakers lifted the limit on how long people brought in on gang charges could be held without a trial. Most of those detained in early 2022 are still behind bars.
“Their homes, their jobs. They’ve lost their lives,” he said. “Everything that defines them as a person.”
Demanding cash and sex
As Mr. Bukele extended the state of emergency, several officers said, some members of the police used the decree to extort people — demanding money or sometimes sex to stave off arrest.
People were detained on a whim. A food vendor was put in handcuffs for briefly blocking a police vehicle, one officer recounted.
Mr. Reyes said that incidents of extortion had become rare, and that officers implicated in such cases had been harshly punished. Now, he said, the police can only arrest people under the emergency powers if they have prior charges of gang violence, reducing arbitrary arrests.
But under Mr. Bukele, he said, the police force had been turned into a political tool and had violated human rights. The police had been ordered to arrest dissidents and anyone who spoke out, Mr. Reyes said, and the damage from mass arrests was irreparable.
“The people they incarcerated — they ruined their lives completely,” he said. Some had died in prison, he said. “Correcting that will not be possible.”
The psychological toll on officers, he added, had been significant.
One officer, who said he had refused to do anything “illegal” under the state of emergency, said he had been reassigned, demoted and ridiculed for refusing to carry out orders.
He said he would not quit, out of a survival instinct, if nothing else. If he left the force, he said, the authorities would build a case against him.
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4) Israel Suggests It Could Strike Iran Again to Counter New Threats
Israel’s defense minister said Israel would strike if Iran seeks to develop long-range missiles or advance its nuclear program, despite a truce.
By Erika Solomon and Johnatan Reiss, June 27, 2025
A woman in Tehran crying near her home, which was hit by an Israeli airstrike this week. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Israel’s defense minister said he would pursue a “policy of enforcement” against Iran despite a cease-fire, aiming to prevent Tehran from rebuilding its air power, advancing nuclear projects or developing “threatening long-range missiles.”
The comments by Defense Minister Israel Katz to local news channels on Thursday evening suggested that Israel was contemplating more strikes on Iran even after President Trump announced a truce between the two countries on Tuesday.
Iran’s foreign minister warned on Thursday night that his country would respond to anything it considered a breach of the cease-fire.
Mr. Katz, speaking to Israel’s Channel 12, said the Israeli military was still finalizing what he called an “enforcement policy” with Iran.
“We have the determination to implement it: preserving aerial superiority, preventing the advancement of nuclear projects and preventing the advancement of threatening long-range missiles,” he said.
Such a wide-ranging Israeli interpretation of threats from Iran could imperil the truce, which ended a 12-day war that the United States briefly joined when its war planes bombed three Iranian nuclear sites.
The war did significant damage to Iranian nuclear sites and air defenses, and Iran may seek to rebuild its strategic infrastructure.
Mr. Katz’s comments may have been directed at his local audience, particularly the hawkish government’s base of supporters. But the remarks could also lay the groundwork for a confrontation with Washington.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump would push back against the policy that Mr. Katz outlined. Israel may also choose to wait and see the results of any future diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.
Mr. Trump was outraged when the cease-fire got off to a shaky start, and both sides appeared to violate the truce with rocket fire in the early hours.
He directed his strongest criticisms at Israel, even at one point posting messages on social media when he was concerned it might strike Iran again. He warned it would be a “MAJOR VIOLATION” if Israel were to bomb Iran and demanded that the country “BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”
Mr. Katz told Channel 12 that Israel does not need U.S. approval to attack Iran in the future.
“We are saying unequivocally, once the Iranians violate, we will strike.”
He said Israel’s policy would be similar to what it has done in the aftermath of its war against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. The United States brokered a truce to end that war as well after Israel killed most of the group’s leadership.
Since then, Israel has bombed targets in Lebanon frequently, even though Hezbollah has refrained from attacks on Israeli territory.
Israel has justified some of those strikes by saying that they were aimed at preventing Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm. Mr. Katz told another network, Channel 13, that Israel’s policy on Iran would be “like in Lebanon — just times 100.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, warned that “Iran is not Lebanon,” in an interview with state television on Friday.
“We do not accept any cease-fire or halt in operations that implies an agreed-upon arrangement,” he said, adding that he had “serious doubts” about Israel’s commitment to the deal.
He pointed to Israel’s frequent airstrikes in Lebanon and Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to break a cease-fire with Hamas in March to restart military operations in the Gaza war.
“They declare a truce, but assume that the other side is weak, then proceed to violate it themselves and attempt to prevent any response,” he said.
Iran still has ballistic missiles and launchers, despite the damage it has sustained from Israeli and U.S. strikes. It could still inflict blows that Israel would likely need to take into account should it choose to strike again.
Mr. Araghchi vowed that Iran would “decisively respond to any breach by the Zionist regime.”
Euan Ward contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
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5) Starmer Backtracks on Planned Social Cuts After Pushback From His Own Party
The British prime minister had pressed ahead with the proposal, but a parliamentary vote on it was expected to fail.
By Stephen Castle, Reporting from London, June 27, 2025
Protesters in wheelchairs held placards reading “They say cut back, we say fight back” and “Welfare not warfare” during a demonstration outside Downing Street in central London in March. Credit...Benjamin Cremel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain reversed course on proposed cuts to a key social welfare benefit on Friday after pressure from critics, the latest in a series of political retreats that have shaken his leadership.
Numerous lawmakers in his own Labour Party had opposed the changes, which would have raised the eligibility requirements for payments to disabled people and were expected to affect hundreds of thousands of claimants. So the government said on Friday that it would weaken the proposals by applying them only to new applicants.
The legislation is designed to reduce the country’s ballooning welfare bill. The government is hoping that its concession will be sufficient to win a vote in Parliament, scheduled for Tuesday, that it had looked almost certain to lose.
Mr. Starmer’s reversal follows a similar retreat over a plan to restrict payments to help retirees with winter fuel costs, and a change of heart when he opted to hold a national investigation into child sexual exploitation and abuse — an inquiry that he had previously rejected.
The welfare changes were proposed in the hope of reducing government spending by 5 billion pounds, about $6.9 billion. But Friday’s turnabout leaves the government, despite its large parliamentary majority, in a political crisis less than a year after achieving a decisive general election victory.
Opposition critics have predicted that to make up the shortfall, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, will have to raise taxes, cut government spending elsewhere or break her self-imposed rules on borrowing.
Despite clear signs of opposition from more than 120 lawmakers within his governing Labour party, Mr. Starmer had insisted for days that he would press ahead with the initial plan, and even dismissed the protests.
The government put its best spin on its concessions, which were announced in the early hours of Friday, arguing that negotiations with lawmakers had strengthened its plans.
“We are moving forward with our reform plans, but we’re going to get it right,” Stephen Kinnock, a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care, told Times Radio. “My experience is the public really likes it when politicians listen, engage, recognize where changes are needed and take action accordingly.”
Under the revised plans, changes to the eligibility for some welfare benefits — including one known as personal independence payment, or PIP, which assists people who have both long-term physical and mental health conditions — will now apply only to future applicants, not to existing claimants as had been proposed.
A package of financial help to support people who are able to work to get back into employment is also expected to be fast-tracked.
Britain’s welfare costs have been mounting, and the government says that since the coronavirus pandemic, the number of approved PIP payments has more than doubled — rising from 13,000 a month to 34,000.
That surge has been largely driven by an increase in the number of people who report anxiety and depression as their main condition, and the government predicts that spending on working-age disability and incapacity benefits could increase to about £70 billion a year by 2029.
Ministers argue that, in addition to curbing the welfare system’s rising costs, they want to help people who can work to get back into employment.
Meg Hillier, one of the most prominent Labour rebels, said she would now support the legislation, an indication that the concession could be enough to win Tuesday’s vote. She described the move in a statement as a “positive outcome that has seen the government listen and engage” with the concerns of Labour lawmakers.
But some Labour lawmakers are unhappy with the changes, because new claimants for disability payments will be treated differently from those who currently receive the aid. One Labour lawmaker, Peter Lamb, wrote on social media that the concessions were “insufficient” and that he would vote against the bill.
The opposition Conservative Party similarly pointed to that split between current and future requirements.
“The latest ‘deal’ with Labour rebels sounds a lot like a two-tier benefits system, more likely to encourage anyone already on benefits to stay there rather than get into work,” Helen Whately, who speaks for the Conservatives on work and welfare-related issues, said in a statement
Within the Labour Party, some critics are blaming Ms. Reeves, because she was the driving force behind the plans to curb winter fuel payments that prompted the first retreat, as well as some of the proposed welfare cuts.
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6) Pro-Palestinian Activists Arrested Under Terrorism Law in U.K. Air Base Break-In
The powers used against the members of a group called Palestine Action are more usually employed in cases of planned jihadist or far-right violence.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, June 27, 2025
“The ban would make it a criminal offense to be a member of Palestine Action, to raise money for the group, to “invite support” or arrange meetings for it, to display its logo or to fail to disclose information about any banned activities to the police.”
A demonstration in London on Monday in support of Palestine Action. The group posted footage online on June 20 showing two activists moving around an R.A.F. base on scooters before using red paint to damage two planes. Credit...Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The police in Britain have used a counterterrorism law to arrest three people over a pro-Palestinian group’s recent incursion at a British military base in a rare use of such powers against acts of vandalism.
This week, the British government announced an intention to ban the group, called Palestine Action.
The arrests were made on Thursday under a 2000 law that allows enhanced detention for those “suspected to be a terrorist,” the police said. The powers are commonly used against people suspected of planning jihadist or far-right attacks to give investigators more time to question them.
A police statement released on Friday did not identify the suspects but described them as a 29-year-old woman and two men aged 36 and 24. The police said that they had also arrested a 41-year-old woman on suspicion of assisting an offender.
The four arrested are being held during the investigation into the break-in by Palestine Action at Brize Norton, Britain’s largest Royal Air Force base, in the early hours of June 20. The group posted footage online showing two activists moving around the base on electric scooters before using red paint to damage two military planes.
Palestine Action has previously targeted facilities linked to military companies, including Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer. The group also vandalized President Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland in March.
Mr. Trump referred to its members as “terrorists” and called for them to be “treated harshly” after activists defaced the resort’s clubhouse with red paint and daubed “Gaza is not 4 sale” on part of the golf course.
The British home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who is responsible for law enforcement and national security, said on Monday that Palestine Action would be deemed a terrorist group and banned. She said that its actions had put Britain’s national security at risk and met the legal definition of terrorism because those terms included “serious damage to property.”
Orders to ban groups under terrorism laws are usually passed without a vote in Parliament. But some lawmakers opposed to the ban are expected to debate the measure when it is formally introduced on Monday. There is a mechanism that would prompt a vote, but the Labour government’s large majority means that, even in that case, the order would be most likely pass.
The ban would make it a criminal offense to be a member of Palestine Action, to raise money for the group, to “invite support” or arrange meetings for it, to display its logo or to fail to disclose information about any banned activities to the police.
Palestine Action will be listed alongside more than 80 groups that Britain has barred as terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and the Islamic State, as well as the Atomwaffen Division and other white supremacist groups.
Jonathan Hall, the British government’s adviser on terrorism legislation, said in an interview that to his knowledge, the Palestine Action ban would be the “first time that a group has been proscribed on the basis of serious damage to property” rather than for carrying out or supporting serious violence.
Rights groups and several left-wing British politicians have opposed the ban, and Palestine Action has threatened to sue. It called the ban “unhinged” and said it was “plainly preposterous” to list the group with terrorist organizations like the Islamic State. Palestine Action has raised about $220,000 in crowdfunding for legal action against the British government.
Both the arrest powers used on Thursday and the move to bar Palestine Action are based on the Terrorism Act 2000, which was introduced under a Labour government headed by Tony Blair.
It defines terrorism as the use or threat of action that involves serious violence against a person or endangers someone’s life, involves serious damage to property, creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or is intended to seriously disrupt or interfere with an electronic system.
Under the law, such threats or actions must be intended to influence the government or intimidate the public, and be “for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.”
When the legislation was originally being debated in Parliament, several lawmakers questioned whether the terrorist definition would include activists who targeted Royal Air Force bases, military planes and submarines to stop their use in what protesters viewed as war crimes.
A Home Office minister at the time, Charles Clarke, said that the government did not intend for it to apply to “direct action” or any “domestic, industrial or environmental action,” and the clause on damaging property was subsequently retained.
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7) Honey, We Shrunk the Cod
Two new studies add to the evidence that human activity, from fishing to urban development, is driving the evolution of wild animals.
By Emily Anthes, June 27, 2025
Call it the case of the incredible shrinking cod. Thirty years ago, the cod that swam in the Baltic Sea were brag-worthy, with fishing boats hauling in fish the size of human toddlers. Today, such behemoths are vanishingly rare. A typical Eastern Baltic cod could easily fit in someone’s cupped hands.
Experts have suspected that commercial fishing might be to blame. For years, the cod were intensely harvested, caught in enormous trawl nets. The smallest cod could wriggle their way out of danger, while the biggest, heaviest specimens were continually removed from the sea.
One simple explanation for the phenomenon, then, was that the fish were not actually shrinking: Rather, they were simply eliminated as soon as they grew big enough to be caught.
But a new study suggests that intense fishing was driving the evolution of the fish. Small, slow-growing cod gained a significant survival advantage, shifting the population toward fish that were genetically predisposed to remaining small. Today’s cod are small not because the big individuals are fished out but because the fish no longer grow big.
The data, which were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of evidence that human activities like hunting and fishing are driving the evolution of wild animals — sometimes at lightning speed.
“Human harvesting elicits the strongest selection pressures in nature,” said Thorsten Reusch, a marine ecologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and an author of the new paper. “It can be really fast that you see evolutionary change.”
The imprint that humans are leaving on other species is not always quite so visible. In a second study published this week, researchers at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, reported that over the past century, increasing human development may have driven changes in the skulls of local rodents. But some of these changes were subtle, and they were not the same across species.
“We are comparing two species in the same area that were supposedly exposed to the same pressure,” said Anderson Feijó, the assistant curator of mammals at the Field Museum and an author of the rodent study, which was published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology on Thursday. “But the way they dealt is totally different, because their biology is different.”
Go Fish
In the new cod study, researchers studied a set of unusual biological specimens: a collection of otoliths, the tiny, bonelike structures located in the inner ear of most fish. Otoliths grow in size over the course of a fish’s life, adding rings much as a tree trunk does. By examining these rings, scientists can estimate the age and growth rate of individual fish.
The researchers used a newly developed chemical technique to analyze otoliths collected from Eastern Baltic cod harvested between 1996 and 2019, when the collapse of the population prompted a fishing ban. They found that fish harvested in more recent years were significantly smaller, with slower growth rates, than those from the beginning of the period. From 1996 and 2019, the average length of the cod declined by 48 percent.
Then, the researchers sequenced and analyzed the DNA of each individual fish. For the older specimens, this was a tricky task, requiring the researchers to recover degraded DNA from otoliths that had been stored in paper bags, at room temperature, for decades. “We had to work with a little dirt, a little slime, some blood traces that were sticking to the otoliths,” Dr. Reusch said.
Ultimately, the team identified a variety of genomic regions and variants associated with growth rate. A statistical analysis revealed that over time, these variants were changing in correlated, nonrandom ways — suggesting that there was some external selective force acting on the genome and the population.
That is a “signal of selection,” said Kwi Young Han, a postdoctoral researcher at GEOMAR and an author of the paper.
The results didn’t prove that fishing is what drove this selection; warming temperatures would also be expected to favor smaller cod. But the size changes that the scientists documented far exceed what would be expected from temperature alone.
The genetic changes could have long-term consequences for the population and help explain why it hasn’t bounced back since the 2019 fishing ban. “It’s 2025 right now, and we don’t see any big fish still,” Dr. Han said.
Rodent Roundup
In the second study, researchers examined hundreds of rodent specimens contained in the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History. The specimens had originally been collected from around the Chicago metropolitan area between 1898 and 2023. The scientists focused on the skulls of two different species: eastern chipmunks and eastern meadow voles. Each skull was analyzed for specific characteristics, including its particular collection site and how highly developed the area was.
The researchers found that over time, as Chicago grew more urban, the chipmunks’ skulls became larger — but their rows of teeth grew shorter. These seemingly opposing trends may have been driven by a change in diet, the scientists said. Urbanization, with its abundance of human food and trash, could have made it easier for chipmunks to pack on weight year round, leading to larger body sizes. At the same time, the robust teeth that helped chipmunks extract calories from nuts and seeds may have become less essential.
Voles, in contrast, did not show significant changes in skull size over time, perhaps because their more restrictive diets — mostly grasses and other plants — and reclusive natures made them less likely to dine on human food, Stephanie Smith, a research scientist at the Field Museum and an author of the study, said. “Voles are kind of much more secretive,” she said. “They’re not as out-and-about and stealing people’s French fries.”
But their skulls showed signs of other changes. Vole skulls collected from more urban areas were flatter than those found at less developed sites. The bony structure that houses parts of the middle and inner ear — known as the auditory bulla — also tended to be smaller in vole skulls from urbanized areas.
There is some evidence from other species that larger auditory bullae may be associated with enhanced hearing. Perhaps urban voles evolved smaller auditory bullae to help dampen the urban din, Dr. Smith said.
Voles live “down in the ground, near all of the train noises, all of the vibrations from people walking around, cars, buses, everything,” Dr. Smith said. “So our thought here is that, potentially, this change in the auditory bulla could be related to filtering out excess sound.”
It’s just a hypothesis, Dr. Smith stressed, and one that requires much more study. But the findings help illustrate the enormous diversity of ways in which humans are inadvertently reshaping other species, whether out in the open ocean or in our backyards.
“There is evolution happening everywhere, all the time,” Dr. Smith said. “You just have to know where to look for it.”
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8) Concerns Grow Over Dire Conditions in Immigrant Detention
Mass immigration arrests have led to overcrowding in detention facilities, with reports of unsanitary and inhumane conditions.
By Miriam Jordan and Jazmine Ulloa, June 28, 2025
Far from public view, the toll of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is unfolding in overcrowded detention facilities across the country.
Some immigrants have gone a week or more without showers. Others sleep pressed tightly together on bare floors. Medications for diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic health problems are often going unprovided. In New York and Los Angeles, people have been held for days in cramped rooms designed for brief processing, not prolonged confinement, and their lawyers and family members have remained in the dark about their whereabouts.
The nation’s immigration detention system is buckling under the weight of record numbers as the Trump administration intensifies its enforcement agenda with raids on workplaces and arrests at immigration courts. More than 56,000 immigrants were in government custody on June 15, exceeding the current capacity of 41,000.
“These are the worst conditions I have seen in my 20-year career,” said Paul Chavez, litigation and advocacy director at Americans for Immigrant Justice in Florida, which represents detainees. “Conditions were never great, but this is horrendous.”
At least 10 immigrants have died in ICE custody in the six months since Jan. 1, including two at a facility in Miami, the Krome detention center, where detainees earlier this month formed a human “S.O.S.” sign in the yard. At least two of the deaths were suicides, in Arizona and Georgia. (An average of about seven deaths a year occurred in ICE custody during the four years of the Biden administration.)
Immigration detentions have soared since late May, when Stephen Miller, the White House aide overseeing immigration policy, set a goal of 3,000 arrests per day.
To accommodate the swelling numbers, the administration has expanded contracts with prison operators and pushed for a substantial funding increase to secure additional capacity. The House version of the budget reconciliation bill proposes $45 billion for immigration detention, more than 10 times the current budget.
Many immigrants already have outstanding deportation orders, and others agree to voluntarily leave the country. In those cases, ICE officials are able to swiftly put them on planes or buses out of the country. But many others are entitled to court hearings, which take time, and ICE is either releasing those detainees on bond, which also requires a court hearing, or holding them in custody if they are deemed a flight risk.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, categorically denied all claims of overcrowding and poor conditions at its facilities. A spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement that all detainees “are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”
Ms. McLaughlin added that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had called on states and local government to help with beds and detention space, and she noted that multiple court rulings have led to delays in deporting immigrants.
“Despite a historic number of injunctions, D.H.S. is working rapidly overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination — home,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
But interviews with more than two dozen former detainees, lawyers, family members and lawmakers suggest that conditions in facilities across the country have become unsanitary, intolerable and in some cases, for detainees with health problems, unsafe.
Marcelo Gomes, an 18-year-old Brazilian from Milford, Mass., was pulled over on his way to volleyball practice in late May. Mr. Gomes, who has lived in the United States on a long-expired visa since age 7, said in an interview that he spent six days in a windowless, overcrowded room at an ICE field office before being released on bond.
There was one toilet for 35 to 40 men, who had no privacy when using it, he said. They slept on the concrete floor in head-by-toe formation with aluminum blankets to cover them.
He lost seven pounds in six days, he said, because the food was poor and the portions tiny. “It was so bad,” he said, “I used water to drink it down.”
Mr. Gomes said he was not able to shower or change his clothes the entire time he was there.
At the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., run by the GEO Group, a private prison firm, conditions have deteriorated as the population has significantly increased, according to Global Rights Advocacy, a nonprofit, and La Resistencia, a grass-roots group.
Alejandra Gonza, a human-rights lawyer, said that detainees told her that guards have been so overworked that they have delivered food close to midnight and have failed to provide yard time or disburse funds sent by their families to buy food, hygiene products and make phone calls.
She said she knew of some detainees who had been placed in prolonged solitary confinement or on suicide watch after complaining about conditions.
In Alaska, immigrants transferred from the Tacoma facility have been locked up in a state corrections facility in Anchorage.
“We are very concerned about the mental health and well-being of these individuals,” Cindy Woods, a lawyer at the A.C.L.U. of Alaska, said in testimony to the State Legislature last week.
“Many of them are struggling with the punitive setting and the isolation from family and lack of access to religious effects,” she said.
She said that detainees had been pepper-sprayed during a conflict over access to their belongings, and that they had regularly been placed on lockdown when the facility was understaffed.
After a tour that his staff members took in May to a facility in Estancia, N.M., Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, reported that several detainees complained that they had been given few opportunities to shower, had been limited to two bottles of drinking water per day and were unable to flush their toilets for days at a time.
A California lawmaker, Representative Judy Chu, posted on X that she had visited a detention center in the remote desert town of Adelanto and seen detainees “held in filthy, inhumane conditions” who had been unable to communicate with lawyers or family members.
“They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” she said in a video.
In a statement, Christopher V. Ferreira, a GEO Group spokesman, said that facilities run by GEO like those in California, Pennsylvania and Washington, provided round-the-clock medical care, proper diets and visitation services. Mr. Ferreira said the detention centers were monitored by federal overseers to ensure they met strict standards on food, safety and health care.
“Our contracts also set strict limits on a facility’s capacity,” he said. “Simply put, our facilities are never overcrowded.”
Immigrants have been locked up for several days at a time at an ICE processing facility in the basement of a federal building in downtown Los Angeles that is intended to hold people for less than 12 hours, until they are released or transferred to a detention center.
“They’re packing people in there as if they were sardines,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel, a legal nonprofit. “It’s a horror show.”
He said ICE authorities were preventing people from contacting lawyers and urging them to agree to swift deportation. “It’s a no-constitutional-rights zone,” he said.
Javier, 55, a Mexican day laborer who was arrested by agents in front of a doughnut shop in Pasadena, Calif., at 5:40 a.m. last week, said that about 60 men were jammed into the frigid, filthy space downtown.
“We felt like we were in a cage,” said Javier, who has lived in the United States for 28 years but did not want his last name used to avoid jeopardizing his immigration case. “They would take out five men and bring in 10 more.”
He said there was “utter despair and fear” in the room. The immigrants were forced to share one foul toilet; the other was out of order.
Javier was transferred to Adelanto, but lawyers with Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a nonprofit, secured his release because he is undergoing treatment for cancer.
In an industrial corner near Newark, four men escaped this month from the Delaney Hall detention facility after a melee broke out over the deteriorating conditions, according to lawyers who spoke with their detainee clients. Gwyneth Hesser, a lawyer with the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit, said that her diabetic client now being held there could face “a life-threatening” situation without the diet and medical attention needed to manage his condition.
“He can’t eat bread or carbs, and that’s almost all they’ve given him,” Ms. Hesser said.
He has not received insulin regularly, she said. On June 16, he was found lying on the floor after his glucose level spiked, according to Ms. Hesser, who reviewed medical records of the incident.
In New York, immigration lawyers and federal lawmakers have struggled to gain access to the 10th floor of a federal building in Lower Manhattan, another intake center designed to hold immigrants for just a few hours. In recent weeks, lawyers said, their clients have reported being forced to sleep on the floor or on benches during days-long stays.
As with other detainees around the country, many who start off in Manhattan are quickly transferred out.
Anne Pilsbury, a lawyer in New York City, said that her client, a Honduran man who has lived in the United States for years, was handcuffed in front of her when he reported for an ICE check-in on June 9. She later learned that he had been held in the Lower Manhattan building overnight and sent to a jail on Long Island the next day.
“From that point, every time I checked the government’s detainee locator system, it would either have no information or it would show a new jail,” she said, “but when I called that facility, they would tell me he had been moved.”
Since being detained, the man, who is a construction worker and father of four children, has been held in Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio.
Raiza, whose 20-year-old son was arrested at immigration court in Manhattan in May, setting off protests, said he was subsequently transferred from New York to Texas to Louisiana to Pennsylvania.
He also described unsavory conditions. At the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pa., he told his mother during phone calls that he had spotted worms in the sink they used to drink water and was served rotten food.
Cynthia Myers, a Chicago woman whose husband was detained while awaiting asylum, said he was placed in an overcrowded facility in Monroe, La. Detainees there, he told her, were “constantly intimidated and pressured by staff to self-deport, with no regard for their rights or due process.”
Several of those interviewed said that ICE officials appeared to be trying to free up space by encouraging detainees to accept quick deportation.
A lawyer in Arizona, Nera Shefer, said that some of her clients had recently been offered $1,000 by the authorities if they agreed to immediate voluntary departure. She said all of them had declined.
“It seems they are randomly picking people, and telling them, ‘You want to leave? We’ll pay you because we need your bed,’” she said.
Steven Richand Albert Sun contributed reporting.
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9) Newsom Signs Budget That Includes Health Care Cuts for Undocumented Immigrants
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a budget bill on Friday that depends in part on rolling back those benefits to help close a $12 billion deficit.
By Laurel Rosenhall, Reporting from Sacramento, Published June 27, 2025, Updated June 28, 2025
“The California budget for the fiscal year that starts Tuesday relies on prohibiting new enrollment of undocumented immigrants in the state’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, starting in January. Adults between the ages of 19 and 59 who were already enrolled will have to pay a new $30 monthly premium beginning in 2027. And the state will eliminate dental care in July 2026 for undocumented adults and other noncitizens. Medi-Cal serves roughly 15 million people, including 1.6 million undocumented immigrants.”
A “Hands off Medi-Cal” town hall meeting in Bakersfield, Calif., earlier this year. In signing the new budget bill, Gov. Gavin Newsom backtracked on an earlier promise to insure all low-income residents, regardless of their immigration status. Credit...Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a California budget on Friday that relied on scaling back health care for undocumented immigrants, even as he and other California Democrats in recent weeks have condemned the Trump administration for cracking down on immigrant workers.
In signing the budget, Mr. Newsom backtracked on his earlier pledge to insure all low-income residents, regardless of their immigration status. But it came as the state faced a $12 billion deficit, driven in part by a large cost overrun in the state’s insurance plan for undocumented immigrants, and it would have been politically difficult to cut programs for citizens without reducing benefits for undocumented immigrants.
When Mr. Newsom initially proposed the cuts in May, it was seen as a centrist pivot for a governor who is a potential presidential candidate in 2028. But after President Trump sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles nearly three weeks ago to thwart protesters, Mr. Newsom returned to his role as a liberal antagonist of the Republican administration and accused Mr. Trump of endangering American democracy.
The California budget for the fiscal year that starts Tuesday relies on prohibiting new enrollment of undocumented immigrants in the state’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, starting in January. Adults between the ages of 19 and 59 who were already enrolled will have to pay a new $30 monthly premium beginning in 2027. And the state will eliminate dental care in July 2026 for undocumented adults and other noncitizens.
Medi-Cal serves roughly 15 million people, including 1.6 million undocumented immigrants.
Because the federal government does not pay for most health care for undocumented immigrants, it costs California more to insure noncitizens than it does to cover citizens. Democrats have argued that the state has a moral responsibility to provide health care to its immigrant work force, and they have said that preventative treatment can avert more costly emergency care down the road.
Democrats who control the State Capitol cast their decisions on Friday as a necessary move to help close the budget deficit and said it was not an ideological shift away from supporting immigrants. Some choked back tears in emotional floor speeches about their undocumented family members as they voted for cuts to Medi-Cal.
“My mother took me to dental appointments on Medi-Cal,” said Assemblyman Jose Solache, a Democrat who said his parents were undocumented before they became citizens many years ago through an amnesty.
“Lord knows it’s not perfect,” he said of the budget. “But we have a responsibility.”
Other Democratic-led states have also rolled back health care for undocumented immigrants this year to help solve their budget problems. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois signed a budget this month that eliminates such benefits for low-income noncitizens between the ages of 42 and 64. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and state lawmakers also reduced immigrant benefits in May to help balance their budget.
The California cuts for undocumented immigrants were contained in a separate bill that Mr. Newsom was expected to sign in the coming days. But that was just a procedural matter; the main budget bill that he signed on Friday relies on those reductions to balance the state’s ledger.
While legislators cast their votes, Mr. Newsom held a news conference to draw attention to the much deeper cuts that he said California would experience if Mr. Trump signs the Republican budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress.
The governor called it a “cruel and damaging” proposal and said it could put $28 billion in federal funding for California at risk. He projected that 3.4 million Californians could lose their health care because of proposed work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks.
Republicans have also proposed penalizing states, like California, that use their own funding to provide health care to undocumented immigrants who are not eligible for Medicaid.
While California “has prided itself” on offering Medi-Cal to many noncitizens, Mr. Newsom said that “we also put a limit on it.”
Republicans said on Friday that the state should go much further and completely eliminate health insurance for undocumented immigrants.
“I think a lot of Californians have concerns about prioritizing noncitizens with scarce taxpayer resources,” said Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, a Republican.
The cuts to health care for undocumented Californians that Democratic lawmakers approved Friday were similar to those Mr. Newsom proposed in May after it became clear earlier this year that the program had cost billions of dollars beyond projections. Many more people signed up for Medi-Cal than the state had projected when it expanded eligibility last year to low-income, undocumented residents of all ages.
Mr. Newsom initially angered many progressive allies with his proposal in May, including some Democratic lawmakers who did not vote for the plan on Friday. Since he called for the cuts, federal immigration raids have become more frequent in parts of California, fueling ire among Democrats who represent immigrant communities.
Assemblywoman Sade Elhawary, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said earlier this month that if the state approved the cuts to undocumented immigrant health care, “we are no better than the Trump administration.”
“We’re just doing harm in a different way,” she said.
California had been on a decade-long path of expanding public health care to undocumented residents, culminating last year with the full expansion Mr. Newsom once touted as “universal health care for all.”
Sonja Diaz, a civil rights lawyer who founded the Latino Politics and Policy Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision by state leaders to reverse course reflected broader changes in the political climate.
“For a state like California to pull back and to create caveats on this issue is telling of how strong MAGA’s influence is,” she said.
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
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10) Israel’s Military Appears Poised to Expand Into Gaza City Amid Cease-Fire Calls
President Trump urged Israel and Hamas to “make the deal,” but it was unclear if any significant progress has been made toward an agreement.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 29, 2025
The Israeli military issued broad evacuation orders on Sunday for neighborhoods of Gaza City, amid growing calls for a cease-fire deal from President Trump.
The notifications for people to leave parts of Gaza City, where Israeli troops have refrained from operating for months, as well as other areas in northern Gaza, came as the Israeli military warned that it would intensify operations that would expand west toward the city center. Residents were instructed to move south.
It was not clear if the military’s evacuation orders heralded a new phase in its offensive, a return to areas that were partly destroyed in previous rounds of fighting, or if they could be a pressure tactic to try to get Hamas to concede to Israel’s terms for ending the war.
Attention in Israel and Washington has refocused on Gaza since Israel’s 12-day war with Iran ended on Tuesday. The military campaign in Gaza — which was ignited by the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel — has lasted more than 630 days and is one of Israel’s most protracted and deadliest wars.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing increasing pressure at home to end the conflict by agreeing to a cease-fire deal that would see Hamas release the hostages still being held in the enclave. Those hostages include up to 20 people who were taken captive in the October 2023 attack and are believed to still be alive, along with the remains of about 30 others.
Mr. Trump on Sunday publicly pressed for a deal. “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!! DJT,” he wrote on social media, hours after arguing that Mr. Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial be canceled since it would interfere with “the process of negotiating a deal with Hamas.”
In an unusual move, a panel of three Israeli judges agreed on Sunday to delay Mr. Netanyahu’s scheduled testimony by a week. The move was announced after the prime minister attended a special court hearing, behind closed doors and accompanied by two of Israel’s security chiefs, to press for a postponement of his upcoming court appearances.
The court has been cross-examining Mr. Netanyahu this month in two scheduled court appearances each week. Mr. Netanyahu has argued for a delay in his cross-examination based on national security imperatives, the details of which he has not publicly disclosed.
In recent days, the judicial authorities had rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s requests for a two-week postponement, saying the reasons he had provided were too general and unconvincing. It was not immediately clear what changed their minds. In the decision on Sunday, the judges said they would also consider Mr. Netanyahu’s request to delay his testimony for a second week, based on developments.
Mr. Trump had suggested on Friday that there could be an agreement between Israel and Hamas within a week. But Mr. Trump has offered no details on what may have changed, and analysts said it was unclear what his claim was based on.
There has been no advancement in the cease-fire talks, according to an Israeli official and another person familiar with the matter.
Israel and Hamas do not negotiate directly. But no Israeli negotiating teams have been dispatched to mediating countries, such as Qatar and Egypt — a sign that the two sides remain far apart, at least on the contours of the type of two-phased deal that has been discussed so far through the traditional channels. Still, it is possible that higher level discussions might be happening separately and in secrecy.
It was not immediately clear how many people might be affected by Sunday’s evacuation orders from the Israeli military. Gaza City and other areas in the northern part of the enclave were largely emptied earlier in the war following previous evacuation orders. But hundreds of thousands of residents of northern Gaza returned home during a two-month cease-fire, which collapsed when Israel resumed fighting in mid-March.
Negotiations since then for a renewed cease-fire have been at an impasse. Israel says it has accepted various versions of a proposal put forward by Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy, which calls for a roughly two-month cease-fire and the release of about half the living hostages, along with the remains of some others. Talks for a permanent cease-fire would take place during that period, but the longstanding sticking points appear to remain unresolved.
Hamas says it will only release all the hostages in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an internationally guaranteed end of the war.
Israel has said the war can only end if Hamas’s surrenders and disarms, and it has demanded that the group’s leaders go into exile. Hamas has rejected those conditions.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 killed about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel’s counter offensive has killed more than 56,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its data but has said more than half of the dead are women and children.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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11) After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge
The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?
By Roger Cohen, Reporting from Dubai, June 29, 2025
In Tehran on Tuesday, the morning of a cease-fire with Israel. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.
Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.
“For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,” said Ms. Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. “I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women’s rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn’t catch the real spies.”
Those spies, mainly from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran’s highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called “a golden opportunity for change.” That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the United States briefly joined.
The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran’s national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah’s death would “end the conflict.” The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on.
It does so despite the collapse of its “axis of resistance” that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies.
Yet Mr. Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. “The Islamic Republic won,” he said in a video broadcast on Thursday from a secret location, laying to rest rumors of his demise.
His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power.
“To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic’s survival is always a victory,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
Revolution at a Crossroads
Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident.
President Pezeshkian appears to favor a liberalizing makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of “an opportunity to change our views on governance.”
It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favor strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system.
Mr. Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed “to achieve anything significant.” But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on Thursday that the country’s nuclear facilities had sustained “significant and serious damage.”
Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the “color revolutions” that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr. Khamenei and his entourage.
They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the United States have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country’s single most powerful institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Guards number 150,000 to 190,000 members, Ms. Vakil said. With control over vast swaths of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government’s survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar al-Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall last year.
Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas.
Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. “The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”
This weakness appears deep. The “victory” claimed by Mr. Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence.
“I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei’s priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear program, the missile program and armed proxies, all now in shreds,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations under secretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader.
“Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,” Mr. Feltman recalled. “His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”
Paranoia, Institutionalized
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr. Khamenei’s predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. It was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important.
The Islamic Republic’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power.
War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion. The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Ayatollah Khomeini drank from “the poison chalice,” as he put it, and accepted an end to the war.
The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in light of U.S. military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall.
“The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimization that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,” Ms. Vakil said.
All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalized. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country’s profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured.
At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than two million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s liberalizing Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote.
Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed.
More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab. The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that aging clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder.
The government’s ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it.
So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed.
“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management.
“But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favor stability,” he added.
A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Gulf States, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr. Khamenei, but out a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity.
“For now, I don’t see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,” said Mr. Feltman. “But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programs.”
Iran at an Impasse
Ms. Saberi’s hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents’ home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it.
She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, “would be a one-way ticket.” But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures.
“Iran’s in our heart, it’s in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,” she said. “My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.”
That diaspora is scattered in many places, not least Dubai, where during the fighting I spent time with another Iranian family who yearn to go home to Tehran but are afraid to do so right now. One evening, we watched a powerful movie, directed by Bahman Kiarostami, the son of the legendary Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and by Rahi Rabani.
The 2024 movie, denied release by the authorities in Iran, is a vivid depiction of the ravages within a single Iranian family brought on by differences over the theocratic government. An authoritarian and religious father cannot accept his daughter’s decision to reject the hijab, and she cannot accept the way he sees her as a bad person merely for doing so.
“We want an Islamic Republic,” says the father.
“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, so there’s no solution,” says the daughter, who is in her 30s.
Another member of the family, a young girl in hijab, is the most relaxed, convinced that the best solution is to live and let live: “If they don’t wear hijab and go to hell, it’s on them,” she says with a smile.
The title of the movie is “Impasse.”
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12) We Know Exactly Where the Supreme Court’s Change of Heart Has Come From
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, June 28, 2025
Will Matsuda for The New York Times
The heart of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. CASA is that the Constitution does not permit the exercise of arbitrary power and is certainly not a document that gives to any single individual the authority to rewrite the law.
This may seem to be a strange dissent to issue in a case that deals narrowly with the legality of nationwide injunctions, the practice by which federal courts block the application of laws and executive orders for the entire nation as a way of issuing temporary relief pending further appeal. But this particular case regarding nationwide injunctions had to do with the Trump administration’s order overturning birthright citizenship, a right established in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment and reaffirmed in subsequent legislation and jurisprudence.
In 1898, the Supreme Court held that birthright citizenship applies to every person born in the United States. The only exceptions are those people who do not fall under the jurisdiction — which is to say, the laws — of the United States. In 1868, at the time the amendment was ratified, that meant foreign diplomats and members of Native tribes.
The children of everyone else are citizens if they are born on American soil. Driven by his nativist vision for the United States, President Trump sought to subvert this, with an executive order limiting birthright citizenship to only those with at least one parent who is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order, issued on the president’s first day back in office, was set to take effect on Feb. 19.
This was an outright attack on the Constitution. However much Donald Trump and Stephen Miller might want it to be otherwise, undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States — they can be arrested and tried in criminal courts, for instance — and thus their children, who are also subject to that jurisdiction, are American citizens if born on American soil.
The blatant illegality of the president’s executive order meant immediate legal backlash. Several states and parties filed lawsuits and a federal court quickly held that the executive order was plainly unconstitutional, freezing it nationwide.
Now, even skeptics of the nationwide injunction — such as myself! — would have to admit that this is a case where, given the stakes and the circumstances, it would be wise to prevent the president’s order from taking effect pending further litigation and review. Not so the Supreme Court.
In a decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a six-justice majority held that a nationwide injunction was not an appropriate method of relief, and that those affected by the executive order would have to either file suit themselves or join a class action. The court issued a 30-day hold for the president’s executive order, so that plaintiffs would have time to file in court. In her opinion, she also affirmed that courts can grant “complete relief” that affects third parties. It is possible, then, that plaintiffs can achieve the results of a nationwide injunction without use of the practice itself.
And yet, it still should be said here that this is a strange vehicle for the conservative majority to tackle the question of nationwide injunctions. There were ample opportunities under President Biden to do so, and the Biden White House even asked the court to consider the issue. It said no.
As far as I can tell from the outside, none of the nationwide injunctions issued under Biden seemed to test the court’s patience. The conservative majority seemed content to allow district courts to operate as normal. It is only now, under President Trump, that the conservatives have had a change of mind. And they’ve done so in the context of an executive order that exemplifies this president’s lawlessness and open contempt for the Constitution.
It is generally not polite, in writing about the court, to note thepartisan affiliations of the justices. But here I think it’s appropriate, since for as much as there are real merits to ending nationwide injunctions, it is also difficult to escape the conclusion that a Republican-appointed majority with an expansive view of executive power is working, again, to give as much freedom of action to a Republican president, in this case, the Republican president who secured their supermajority.
To return to Justice Jackson’s dissent, she notes that by ending the practice of nationwide injunctions in this particular circumstance, the majority has empowered a lawless president to violate the rights of American citizens, who then have no particular relief other than what they can get in a slow-moving judicial process. The majority, Jackson argues, is missing the forest for the trees. The nature of the Constitution, from the original document to its amendments, is that it is a brief against the exercise of arbitrary power. And here is the Supreme Court blessing a president’s exercise of arbitrary power as if the executive were the sovereign lord of the nation and not a mere servant of the Constitution.
It’s worth quoting at length from Jackson’s dissent:
The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.
“The Founders of the United States of America,” she continues, “squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the People are the rulers and we have rule of law.”
The majority, Jackson argues, has created a law-free zone of arbitrary power which is “unlikely to impact the public in a randomly distributed manner.”
“Those in the good graces of the Executive,” she writes,
have nothing to fear; the new prerogative that the Executive has to act unlawfully will not be exercised with respect to them. Those who accede to the Executive’s demands, too, will be in the clear. The wealthy and the well-connected will have little difficulty securing legal representation, going to court, and obtaining injunctive relief in their own name if the Executive violates their rights. Consequently, the zone of lawlessness the majority has now authorized will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular — i.e., those who may not have the wherewithal to lawyer up, and will all too often find themselves beholden to the Executive’s whims.
It is hard to know for certain whether the Republican majority understands the legal world it’s building and the power it has given to the president. My view, like Jackson’s, is that it is laying the groundwork for the exercise of arbitrary power, unaccountable save for the next election — an American-style presidential dictatorship.
What I Wrote
I wrote my column this week on masked ICE officers and how their assertion of the right to anonymity is an extension of the president’s belief in his own impunity:
As a federal agent, an ICE officer is a public servant whose ultimate responsibility lies with the people. And the people have the right to know who is operating in their government. If an ICE officer does not want to risk identification — if he does not want the public he serves to hold him accountable for his actions — then he can choose another line of work.
In the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1997 political thriller “The Assignment.” And I joined my colleagues David French and Carlos Lozada to discuss President Trump’s foreign policy on The Opinions podcast.
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13) Catholic Bishops Try to Rally Opposition to Trump’s Immigration Agenda
Leading prelates are expressing outrage at the drive toward mass deportation.
By Elizabeth Dias, June 29, 2025
Bishop Michael M. Pham of San Diego, center right, was the first bishop named by Pope Leo in the United States. He recently went to a courthouse to support migrants waiting for hearings. Credit...Gregory Bull/Associated Press
As the Trump administration escalates its aggressive deportation campaign, Roman Catholic bishops across the United States are raising objections to the treatment of migrants and challenging the president’s policy.
For years many bishops focused their most vocal political engagement on ending abortion, rarely putting as much capital behind any other issue. Many supported President Trump’s actions to overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeted Democratic Catholic politicians who supported abortion access.
But now they are increasingly invoking Pope Leo XIV’s leadership and Pope Francis’s legacy against Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, and prioritizing humane treatment of immigrants as a top public issue. They are protesting the president’s current domestic policy bill in Congress, showing up at court hearings to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to put compassion for humans ahead of political allegiances.
The image in Los Angeles and elsewhere of ICE agents seizing people in Costco parking lots and carwashes “rips the illusion that’s being portrayed, that this is an effort which is focused on those who have committed significant crimes,” said Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of Washington, in an interview from Rome.
“The realities are becoming more ominous,” he said. “It is becoming clearer that this is a wholesale, indiscriminate deportation effort aimed at all those who came to the country without papers.”
Cardinal McElroy, who has frequently spoken against Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was named the archbishop of Washington as one of Pope Francis’s final major actions in the United States, reflecting the Vatican’s desire to counter the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Immigration arrests are rising sharply, and ICE has a goal of apprehending 3,000 people a day.
“A very large number of Catholic bishops, and religious leaders in general, are outraged by the steps which the administration is taking to expel mostly hardworking, good people from the United States,” Cardinal McElroy said.
President Trump campaigned on aggressive immigration tactics, and polls before his inauguration captured broad support among Americans for deportations. Since then, Americans have “mixed to negative views” of the administration’s immigration actions, according to an early June survey by the Pew Research Center.
The Trump administration has said the aggressive immigration tactics are necessary to protect public safety because some illegal immigrants are violent criminals.
Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism six years ago, articulated his personal views in an interview last month, saying that immigration “at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years” was destructive to the common good.
“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,” he added.
“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.”
It is not clear how much influence the bishops will have on the issue. In Congress, there has been little debate between the two chambers over the immigration portion of the policy bill. The bishops expressing concern stand in opposition to the voices of key Catholics in executive leadership, including Mr. Vance.
“We as a church unfortunately don’t have the kind of megaphone that the administration does,” said Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. “It’s a real challenge to reach even Catholics, especially when maybe one out of five who identify as Catholic make it to Mass on Sunday.”
Pope Leo XIV, an American and Peruvian citizen, has from the beginning of his papacy called for the need to respect the dignity of every person, “citizens and immigrants alike.” After his election in May, his brother John Prevost said that Leo was “not happy with what’s going on with immigration. I know that for a fact.” But so far the new pope has not directly weighed in publicly on Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign.
On Thursday, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, implored Congress to “make drastic changes” to Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill, despite its anti-abortion provisions.
He wrote that the bill failed to protect families including “by promoting an enforcement-only approach to immigration and eroding access to legal protections.”
Leading Catholic prelates including Cardinal McElroy and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark went even further in an interfaith letter to Senate leadership on Thursday night, strongly urging them to vote against the bill entirely.
In their letter they claimed that the bill, which calls for billions of dollars to bolster ICE, would spur immigration raids, harm hard-working families and fund a border wall that would heighten peril for migrants.
“Its passage would be a moral failure for American society as a whole,” the letter states.
The letter was organized by Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, N.M., who attended an ecumenical protest against the bill last week.
“This draconian, heavy-handed, meanspirited way that the country is dealing with immigrants today, it is not fair, it is not humane, it is not moral,” he said. “It’s something we have to really be earnest about, and do everything we can within the law to make our voices heard.”
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, has long supported immigration reform and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program that shields from deportation people who were brought into the United States as children and did not have citizenship or legal residency. But as the recent raids were executed in Los Angeles, his criticism of the Trump administration became more direct.
“This is not policy, it is punishment, and it can only result in cruel and arbitrary outcomes,” he wrote in a recent column.
In an interview, he pointed to the example of Bishop Michael M. Pham of San Diego, the first bishop named by Pope Leo in the United States. Bishop Pham, who fled to America from Vietnam as a child, recently went to a courthouse to support migrants waiting for hearings.
“We may have to do that,” Archbishop Gomez said.
More than a third of the Catholic church in the United States is Hispanic. In recent weeks, priests have increasingly reported that families are not leaving their homes to come to Mass, because they are afraid.
Still, many Catholics support Mr. Trump. The president increased his share of Catholic voters in 2024, receiving the majority of their support unlike in 2020, and his support from Hispanic Catholic voters also grew, to 41 percent from 31 percent, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
Progressive and moderate Christians have expressed concern over Mr. Trump’s immigration plans for years, particularly fearing the consequences of his re-election. At his inaugural prayer service, Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pleaded with the president to “have mercy” on vulnerable people, particularly immigrants and children who were afraid. Mr. Trump lashed out, and a Republican member of Congress called for her deportation.
At a private retreat in San Diego this month, bishops discussed the crisis at length over meals.
“No person of good will can remain silent,” Archbishop Broglio, the bishops’ conference president, said in an opening reflection that was made public for churches, to reach immigrant families. “Count on the commitment of all of us to stand with you in this challenging hour.”
Bishops still oppose abortion, in alignment with church teaching. But immigration “has become more and more a serious situation” that must be addressed, said Bishop Seitz, who chairs the bishops’ committee on migration.
In his area, auxiliary bishops and religious sisters in El Paso have been showing up at immigration court to stand alongside migrants who are appearing at required hearings. Some of the migrants have been seized by ICE agents.
Cardinal McElroy and several other top prelates have had private conversations with senior members of the Trump administration on this issue this month. They are also working with their priests to address pastoral needs on the ground.
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14) Glastonbury ‘Appalled’ by Band’s Chant Against Israel’s Military
The band Bob Vylan led a crowd in a chant of “Death, death to the I.D.F.” while performing at Glastonbury, Britain’s biggest music festival.
By Ali Watkins and Alex Marshall, June 29, 2025
Alex Marshall reported from the Glastonbury Festival, in Pilton, England.
Bobby Vylan of the band Bob Vylan crowdsurfing during the Glastonbury music festival on Saturday. Credit...Leon Neal/Getty Images
The organizers of Glastonbury music festival said on Sunday that they were “appalled” by statements made onstage during a performance by the British punk duo Bob Vylan, in which the lead singer led the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
Glastonbury, Britain’s biggest music festival, had already been facing criticism for its decision to allow Kneecap, an Irish-language rap group, to perform on Saturday, despite pressure from broadcasters and politicians to cut the act after the band voiced anti-Israel statements and one member faced a terrorism charge.
Kneecap’s performance was such a draw at the festival that the arena was already full for Bob Vylan’s set an hour beforehand.
The chants by Bob Vylan’s singer, which were broadcast live on the BBC, drew immediate condemnation from politicians in the United Kingdom.
Israel’s embassy in the United Kingdom, as well as some Jewish groups, accused Glastonbury of promoting hate. Avon and Somerset police said on Saturday that they were reviewing video footage from the stage to determine if any criminal offenses had been committed.
“With almost 4,000 performances at Glastonbury 2025, there will inevitably be artists and speakers appearing on our stages whose views we do not share, and a performer’s presence here should never be seen as a tacit endorsement of their opinions and beliefs,” said a statement on the Instagram accounts of the Glastonbury Festival and Emily Eavis, one of the festival’s organizers, on Sunday. “However, we are appalled by the statements made from the West Holts stage by Bob Vylan yesterday.”
The statement added: “Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the Festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence.”
The band members could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
On Instagram on Saturday night, the band’s lead singer, Bobby Vylan, posted a selfie with a cup of ice cream, captioned: “While zionists are crying on socials, I’ve just had late night (vegan) ice cream.”
In April, Kneecap lost its U.S. visa sponsor after making anti-Israel statements at Coachella.
The next month, the police in Britain charged Mo Chara, one of the band’s rappers, with a terrorism offense for displaying the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, onstage at a London show last November.
Several festivals and venues dropped the band from their lineups.
The BBC had said previously that it would cut off its traditional Glastonbury livestreaming for Kneecap’s performance on Saturday. But it did broadcast Bob Vylan’s performance live. During the show, dozens in the crowd waved Palestinian flags.
“You know this is live on the BBC so we have to be careful what we say,” Mr. Vylan said during the set on Saturday.
The punk duo is known for political songs with lyrics that touch on issues including racism, poverty and toxic masculinity.
He went on to chant several pro-Palestinian messages and voiced support for “our mates Kneecap.” He led the crowd in a chant of “Free, free Palestine!” before pivoting into a separate phrase.
“Aye, but have you heard this one though,” the singer said. “Death, death to the I.D.F.!”
Comments in support of Palestinians are common from Glastonbury stages, but the chant was unusual and fewer fans chanted along than to other declarations.
The band is scheduled to go on a U.S. tour this fall, with dates scheduled across the country. As of Sunday, those dates remained on the band’s website.
“I think the BBC and Glastonbury have got questions to be answered about how we saw such a spectacle on our screens,” Wes Streeting, Britain’s health secretary, told Sky News on Sunday.
He called the comments a “shameless publicity stunt.”
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