On July 30, organizations across the Bay Area gather to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday, protest billions funneled for prisons, instead of health, and call for improved and expanded Medicare for all
San Francisco, CA—As pressure mounts nationwide over cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare and other statewide organizations gather to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday.
On Wednesday, July 30, speakers will gather for a press conference at noon, in front of Pier 33, where the Alcatraz Ferry boards. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Dough Burgum visited Alcatraz last week, saying that the visit was made to "start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals" meaning detaining individuals rounded up by ICE raids.
“Making America Safe Again?”, said Dr. Ana Malinow, lead organizer for The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare. “We disagree. Building a prison in Alcatraz (and possibly paying the for-profit prison company GEO Group to build and run it) drains money from the public coffers that should be used to expand and improve Medicare for all, not for exploitation and suffering.”
From 2-4 pm, activists will gather at the Harry Bridges Plaza, in front of the Ferry Building, to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday. The celebratory rally seeks to turn growing national outrage over the privatization of Medicare and gutting of national public health programs into organized protest by calling for:
· Recognition of healthcare as a human right
· The elimination of private health insurance and for-profit care delivery models
· Legislation to establish a National Single Payer program that ensures comprehensive coverage for all
· A transformation of care delivery, freeing caregivers from corporate control to focus on patient well-being
Organizers say this marks a pivotal moment in healthcare activism.
“Americans are fed up with a system where private insurers siphon public funds, overload care with red tape, and put profits ahead of people’s health. After the passing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, we witnessed a wave of public outrage that exposed just how deeply this resentment runs. We’re channeling that energy into a celebration of Medicare and a determined push for improved and expanded Medicare for All—one that delivers affordable, high-quality healthcare to everyone, free from profit,” said Ligia Montano, Organizing and Partnership Director at Senior Disability Action.
This year’s rally comes on the heels of the passage of H.R. 1, whose policies could result in up to 3.5 million Medi-Cal recipients losing their health insurance. Federal cuts to Medicaid funding could lead over time to the loss of up to 217,000 health care jobs in California and reduce state and local tax revenues by up to $1.7 billion. In response, organizers are pushing for Improved and Expanded Medicare for All free from profit, that would eliminate:
· Medical debt
· Denials of care
· Financial barriers like copays and deductibles
· Privatization schemes such as Medicare Advantage overpayments
· Cuts to Medi-Cal
Organizers stress that now is the time to move health care from a profit-centered industry to a people-centered system, ensuring equity, access, and dignity for all people in the U.S.
For more information about National Single Payer, visit: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
The mission of The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare is to protect Medicare as a public good. Medicare must not be surrendered to middlemen nor value-based payment schemes which incentivize providers to withhold medical care in pursuit of profit. Medicare and its Trust Fund must be safeguarded for the good of all current as well as future beneficiaries in the US and its territories using grassroots organizing, outreach, education, advocacy, and mobilizing with allies on the path to single payer health care.
Contact: Dr. Ana Malinow Cell: 713-417-6381 anamalinow@gmail.com
Steve Zeltzer Cell: 415-867-0628 lvpsf@igc.org
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Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
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:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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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”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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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) The World Must See Gaza’s Starvation
By Mohammed Mansour, July 24, 2025
Mr. Mansour is a senior nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee in Gaza.
Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Anadolu, via Getty Images
The ground shook as another airstrike slammed down nearby, a thunderclap ripping through the makeshift field clinic. Inside, panic surged. A baby wailed from one corner; a mother screamed for help in another.
Amid toppled boxes of therapeutic food, I held a skeletal boy no older than 4 — limbs limp, eyes sunken. Just moments before, I had managed to feed him a spoonful of nutritional, peanut-rich paste. As I was readying another, an explosion knocked the food from my hands and scattered dust into the boy’s open mouth. He didn’t flinch; he was too weak even to cry.
It was the end of June. I cradled the boy in silence, surrounded by war.
I am a senior nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee, one of the few organizations that is still able to deliver aid in Gaza. On a typical day, my colleagues and I screen hundreds of children for malnutrition at mobile clinics across the territory. We provide therapeutic food for kids who are at risk of starvation and counsel parents who are doing their best to care for their daughters and sons under unimaginable conditions.
Nearly half a million Gazans now face catastrophic levels of food insecurity, one of the worst hunger crises in the world today. They are on the brink of starvation; roughly 100,000 children and women are facing severe acute malnutrition, the harshest diagnosis. After the Israeli government imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza in March, I saw a sharp rise in hunger, especially among infants and toddlers, that has not abated. More and more mothers sit beside their sick children, clinging to hope. More and more fathers come to me with empty hands and tired eyes, asking if there’s anything — anything — we can give.
Gaza’s entire humanitarian infrastructure is under siege. Officially, Israel’s aid blockade ended in May. But the new system of food distribution that Israel has set up isn’t working and is making it harder for us to do our work. Increasing hostilities, Palestinians who are waiting for aid being killed in the hundreds, blocked crossings, delays in permissions and critical shortages of fuel, medical supplies, water and food are making it nearly impossible to reach families in need.
Mothers arrive at our clinics exhausted, often after walking for hours carrying malnourished babies in their arms. They ask, “Will my child survive?” or “Do you have any milk or food?”
These are questions we can’t always answer. Today, many children in Gaza are so hungry they may never recover, and our supplies are critically low. Therapeutic food, high-energy biscuits and basic medicine arrive sporadically and must be rationed. Sometimes we are forced to turn families away or ask them to return later, knowing later may be too late. I often think of a 2-year-old boy whom we tried to help this month. He was severely malnourished, his condition deteriorated quickly, and he passed away because we didn’t have enough to give. We had so little then. We have less now.
It’s not just children who are starving; parents tell me they’ve gone days without proper food. They skip meals so that their children can eat, even if it’s just a few bites of bread, if they can find any. They are not statistics to me. These are people I see each day, the people I live with. They tell me, “We’ve lost everything, but we can’t lose our children.”
Before the war, my family lived an ordinary life in Gaza City. My older daughter, Sela, went to school each morning with a backpack nearly her size. After work, we would visit relatives, share meals or take evening walks. Our lives were not without hardship, but they had structure, dignity and dreams. Now those days are distant.
Since our home was destroyed in an airstrike, we’ve spent months in tents and temporary shelters, exposed to the cold and heat, with little access to clean water or electricity. The markets are nearly empty. I used to be able to buy 15 loaves of bread for $1; now just one loaf costs $3 or $4. On many days, we eat once. On some, not at all.
Sela, who is now 8, hasn’t seen a classroom since the war began. She often asks, “Baba, when can I go back to school?” This is another question I can’t answer. Some 645,000 children in Gaza are out of school. I don’t know of any playgrounds left — only ruins. My daughters, Sela and Ayla, who is 19 months old, flinch at every loud noise.
Most days, I work in an overcrowded shelter in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, with barely enough phone signal to send an email or join a call. The shelters are packed by the thousands — loud and filled with uncertainty — but they are the only safe places left. Like us, about 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many several times. I do my best to serve people who are simply trying to survive. I coordinate with our teams across Gaza to keep programs running despite the war, despite shortages, despite power cuts.
I haven’t seen my mother in months; she lives in the south, closer to Rafah, and needs care. I worry constantly about her, but the roads are unsafe, and movement is restricted. She still calls to check on me. Her calm voice on the other end of the line gives me strength. “Don’t give up,” she says. “They need you.”
She’s right. People need us. Every colleague I know is carrying a personal trauma. Some have lost homes. Some have lost family members. Some are grieving while still showing up for others. That, to me, is the definition of courage.
I want Sela and Ayla and all of the children we see at our clinics to grow up in a place where they feel safe and cared for, where textbooks replace rubble, where sleep comes easily without fear of what the night might bring and where they go to bed with full bellies — not from scraps, but from real, nourishing food. Every child deserves that, regardless of who they are or where they live.
We need the world to see us. Gaza is fading from the headlines, but the suffering continues. Every day, quietly, relentlessly. The international community must act: to open access to aid, to protect civilians and to demand an end to this devastation.
We are exhausted, but we endure. We have to. Our children are watching.
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2) U.S. Conducts Rare Raid in Syria, Killing a Senior Islamic State Leader
The military gave few details on the ground operation, but counterterrorism raids have typically involved helicopter-borne Special Operations commandos.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, July 25, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/us/politics/us-raid-syria-isis.html
Near the Citadel of Aleppo in May. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
U.S. military forces conducted a rare raid in northwestern Syria on Friday, killing a senior Islamic State leader and two other ISIS insurgents, the Pentagon’s Central Command said.
In a statement, Central Command said that U.S. forces killed the leader, Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, and his two adult sons in the Aleppo area.
Central Command provided few details on the ground operation, but military counterterrorism raids — as opposed to airstrikes — have typically involved helicopter-borne Special Operations commandos, often supported by attack planes and drones.
Such ground operations are riskier than drone strikes because they put troops in harm’s way. They often mean that the target is particularly important and likely to be near civilians to try to ward off an air attack. And the location of the raid may contain sensitive information — like computer hard drives, cellphones and other data — that could help counterterrorism forces plan future raids.
“These ISIS individuals posed a threat to U.S. and coalition forces as well as the new Syrian government,” Central Command said in a statement, which noted that three women and three children who were at the location of the raid were unharmed.
A Pentagon official said on Friday that there were no American casualties in the mission.
The raid comes just weeks after President Trump signed an executive order in late June that lifted most of the U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, tightening his embrace of the country’s new government despite concerns about its leaders’ past ties to Al Qaeda.
The move, which ended decades of American policy toward Syria, delivered on a surprise announcement by Mr. Trump in May during a trip to the Middle East. At a stop in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump met with President Ahmed al-Shara of Syria, who assumed power in December after his fighters deposed the longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Trump declared Mr. al-Shara, who previously led a rebel group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, “young, attractive” and “tough,” and said Syria deserved “a chance” to rebuild after a devastating civil war that began in March 2011.
Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York, said in an email, “Publicizing the raid makes sense, as the U.S. may be eager to highlight the anti-ISIS fight, in partnership with Turkey and Syria, particularly the latter, in an effort to show the lengths Damascus is going to in order to make tangible changes and accede to U.S. demands.”
Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said in the statement that “U.S. Central Command is committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS terrorists that threaten the region, our allies and our homeland.”
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3) No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
Israel has long restricted or completely blocked aid to Gaza on the argument that Hamas steals it to use as a weapon of control over the population.
By Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 26, 2025
Palestinians with food handouts northwest of Gaza City last month. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.
But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.
In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.
Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.
More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.
Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.
David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.
Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.
The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.
The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.
Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
An internal U.S. government analysis came to similar conclusion, Reuters reported on Friday. It found no evidence of systematic Hamas theft of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, the report said.
“For months, we and other organizations were dragged through the mud by accusations that Hamas steals from us,” said Georgios Petropoulos, a former U.N. official in Gaza who oversaw aid coordination with Israel for nearly 13 months of war.
The senior military officials and others interviewed by The Times spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the military or government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, the military said that it has been “well documented” that Hamas has routinely “exploited humanitarian aid to fund terrorist activities.” But the military did not dispute the assessment that there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole aid from the United Nations.
The Israeli government and military have often clashed over how to conduct the war in Gaza. Early last year, top commanders urged a cease-fire with Hamas to secure the release of hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s government instead expanded the ground operation in southern Gaza.
Israel used the rationale that Hamas steals aid when it cut off all food and other supplies to Gaza between March and May. In March, after a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza,” and he declared that Israel would prevent anything from entering the territory.
That blockade, and problems with a new aid system that launched in May, brought hunger and starvation in Gaza to the current crisis levels.
For most of the war, the U.N. was the largest single source of aid entering Gaza, according to data from the Israeli military unit that oversees policy in the territory.
Now, the new aid system is managed instead by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F., a private American company led by a former C.I.A. agent. It was intended to eventually replace international aid organizations and the U.N. role.
But it has only a few distribution hubs, compared with hundreds under the former U.N.-run operation.
The new system’s rollout at the end of May was quickly followed by near-daily episodes of deadly violence near distribution sites. Desperate and hungry Palestinians must go to the few aid distribution sites located in areas controlled by Israeli forces. The hours of operation are limited and supplies run out, so crowds arrive early, with some walking for miles to get there.
After concluding that Hamas had not stolen from the United Nations on a regular basis, members of the Israeli military met in mid-March with Mr. Netanyahu’s military adviser to discuss the government’s emerging plans for a new aid system, according to the officials interviewed by The Times.
At the meeting, they said, military officials expressed concerns about the intention for G.H.F. to be the sole provider of aid for all of Gaza and presented a plan to expand the U.N. role in parts of Gaza where the private group was not expected to operate.
The military officials in the meeting also suggested that the United Nations could distribute other types of aid that the G.H.F. does not hand out, such as medical supplies.
But the government initially dismissed the military’s plan, according to three of the people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Times.
Eventually, when the military warned of looming hunger in Gaza in May, the government changed its position and allowed the United Nations and other organizations to distribute aid along with the G.H.F.
Since May 19, when Israel allowed emergency supplies to resume entering Gaza after its two-month blockade, half of the aid has been distributed by the United Nations and international organizations, with the other half coming through the G.H.F., the Israeli military says.
Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid.
Israel has long had tense relations with the United Nations, which spilled over into open hostility during the Gaza war. Israel accuses the organization of bias and says that it was infiltrated by Hamas, including claims that U.N. staff took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that started the war.
Israel has accused the United Nations of failing to collect truckloads of aid sitting idle near a border crossing into northern Gaza.
The United Nations, in turn, says the Israeli military has not provided enough secure routes to send those trucks in. It accuses Israel of destroying Gaza and blocking critical aid.
This past week, Israel refused to renew the visa of Jonathan Whittall a senior U.N. humanitarian official who oversees humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the official had “spread lies about Israel.”
Mr. Petropoulos, the former U.N. official in Gaza, welcomed the notion that some Israeli officials had recognized the U.N.-led aid system as effective during the war. But he said he wished that endorsement had come much sooner.
“If the U.N. had been taken at face value months ago, we wouldn’t have wasted all this time and Gazans wouldn’t be starving and being shot at trying to feed their families,” he said.
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4) How Seeking Food in Gaza Has Become So Deadly
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed over the past month near aid hubs set up under a new Israeli-backed system, according to Gaza health officials.
Hosted by Rachel Abrams, Produced by Clare Toeniskoetter, Rachelle Bonja and Mooj Zadie, Edited by Maria Byrne, With Paige Cowett and Ben Calhoun, Original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, Engineered by Chris Wood, July 24, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/podcasts/the-daily/gaza-palestine-aid-food.html?
Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
TRANSCRIPT:
Ghada Al-Kurd
Well, this is Ghada Al-Kurd from Gaza.
[Sighs]
We are really starving. Honestly, there is nothing to be eaten here in Gaza. I’m not eating anything.
[APPREHENSIVE MUSIC]
We are losing too much weight. For me, maybe, I lost more than 10 kilos now. And my bones, you can see my bones now. Soon I’ll be a skeleton.
It’s very hard. I couldn’t imagine in my life that I’ll be in this situation, like starving in 2025.
Rachel Abrams
From “The New York Times,” I’m Rachel Abrams. And this is “The Daily.”
The suffering in Gaza has reached new depths. And now finding food, which was already scarce, has become a deadly endeavor.
Israeli forces have opened fire on crowds of desperate, hungry people who are trying to access aid sites established by a new and controversial humanitarian group. Hundreds of people have been killed, according to Gaza health officials. Today, my colleague Aaron Boxerman on who is behind the distribution system and why it’s been so deadly. It’s Thursday, July 24.
Aaron, welcome back to the show. It’s about 7:00 PM where you are in Jerusalem, I think. So we really appreciate you making the time for us.
Aaron Boxerman
Always great to be here.
Rachel Abrams
So, Aaron, to start, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has obviously been dire since the start of the war. But in recent weeks, the situation seems to have deteriorated even further. Specifically, we’ve been hearing reports about hundreds of Palestinians that have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to reach what limited aid has actually gotten into Gaza. So can you explain what has been going on at these aid sites. And why have these people been killed?
Aaron Boxerman
So, first of all, you’re absolutely right, Rachel. We’ve seen for many months now that for many, many Gazans, finding food and water has been an endless daily struggle. And the situation was really exacerbated earlier this year when Israel put a blockade on basically all food, medicine, and fuel entering Gaza for nearly three months.
Since then, the blockade was eased. Aid is going back into the Gaza Strip. But the way that it’s being distributed has been totally upended.
And so we’re seeing a situation on the ground that we haven’t really seen during the course of this nearly two-year war. In less than two months, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and wounded near new aid distribution sites that are under the control of the Israeli military. And Palestinians in Gaza, who’ve spoken to us, have described how just getting a box of food for themselves and their family has become a life-threatening endeavor.
Rachel Abrams
Do we know exactly how many people have died?
Aaron Boxerman
All of these incidents are difficult to assess from the outside. The Israeli military doesn’t allow international journalists into Gaza so that we could report and investigate these incidents freely. But according to Gaza health officials, over a thousand people have been killed, more than 600 of them near these new aid distribution sites.
Israeli officials have broadly disputed those figures. They’ve suggested that they’re exaggerated. But they also haven’t provided any alternative death toll.
Rachel Abrams
So this new aid system, what about it is resulting in all of these deaths?
Aaron Boxerman
So there’s a number of factors. And if we want to understand the new aid system, we have to understand what it replaced. So much of the international aid that was entering the Gaza Strip, that was reaching its two million people, was going through a system coordinated by the United Nations, which ran or coordinated a big network of hundreds of sites across the Gaza Strip, where aid would be distributed to Gazans more or less where they were. And Israel had long been critical of that system.
Rachel Abrams
Why?
Aaron Boxerman
Israeli officials said that Hamas was profiting off the existing system, either by diverting aid or by selling aid. And they essentially said that as the current aid system was set up, they were essentially providing a lifeline to Hamas. That these hundreds of trucks of aid that were going in were undermining Israel’s ability to topple the Palestinian-armed group that had launched the deadliest attack on its civilians in Israeli history on October 7, the attack that triggered the war.
Rachel Abrams
Is that credible, the idea that Hamas was basically seizing on this food, this aid that was coming in?
Aaron Boxerman
As far as we know, there have been incidents where, for example, gunmen have hijacked aid convoys, where they’ve stolen bags of flour from aid trucks. But it’s really hard to tell whether this is Hamas or other gangs. And then there’s the bigger question of whether this is systemic, if it’s happening on a large scale. The United Nations says that they haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that. And Israel, as well, hasn’t presented a lot of evidence publicly to back up that claim.
And another reason that Israel was sort of frustrated and skeptical with the old UN-dominated system was long-standing tensions between Israel and the UN. Many Israeli leaders have called the United Nations biased. And there’s a fundamental mistrust between Israel and the United Nations about the humanitarian situation as a whole.
Rachel Abrams
Israel has consistently said that the UN is exaggerating or is not correct or saying that it’s worse than it is, right?
Aaron Boxerman
Yeah. Israel has frequently said that UN officials are distorting the reality on the ground. At various points, Israeli officials also said that there was no wide-scale humanitarian crisis in Gaza, even as UN officials and aid workers on the ground were describing a very different picture. And so many of our listeners have probably seen videos of people in need of food in Gaza, videos that show crowds of hungry Gazans trying to get aid.
But Israel and the UN have been at odds, really, throughout much of the war about the nature and the depth of the crisis in Gaza. So we see that there are these long-standing tensions between Israel and the United Nations. And Israel, basically, wanted to make a new aid distribution system in a way that officially was described as neutral and independent.
Rachel Abrams
So talk about that new system. Describe it for us.
Aaron Boxerman
So earlier this year, in the spring, we started hearing about how Israel was starting to brief the aid community. They were starting to brief UN workers and tell them, there’s going to be a huge overhaul in terms of how aid is done in Gaza. And then about a month later, we started to understand that there was a separate group that was going to be involved that circumvented the United Nations and that really circumvented every existing aid organization that we were aware of.
It was going to be carried out by a totally new organization, which had been established seemingly for this purpose, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. But who was behind this organization? How was this organization formed? All of that was murky.
There were not a lot of public details about who and what and how this organization was going to function. And so my colleagues and I, Patrick Kingsley, Natan Odenheimer, and Ronen Bergman began looking into it.
Rachel Abrams
So what did you all find?
Aaron Boxerman
So what my colleagues found was that even though the project was billed as neutral and independent, it was actually an Israeli creation. As far back as the earliest weeks of the war, a whole host of people — businessmen, tech people, military officials — they all started meeting. And they came up with this plan that would basically replace the aid system in Gaza as we knew it to that point.
And all throughout 2024, they lobbied for the idea. They met with Israeli leaders. And they really built up a coalition of support for the project. Essentially, the idea that they had was that private contractors would distribute aid in Gaza.
These would be in areas that were controlled by the Israeli military, where Israel would be overseeing what was going on, even though Israel would not be responsible for handing out the aid. And that would circumvent what Israeli officials saw as a problematic United Nations system and enable Israel to exert more control over the flow of aid. And eventually, they decided that those private companies would be American ones.
Rachel Abrams
American companies, why American?
Aaron Boxerman
Well, it appears Israel didn’t want this to be a project that had an Israeli face. So they looked abroad for help. The people behind the idea tried to bring on board respected humanitarians who would really provide legitimacy to the project. The Israeli government even reached out to the UN to see if they would work under these new conditions.
But they, as well as much of the international aid community, really wanted nothing to do with this. They said that working so closely with Israel would compromise their independence. And they were really worried that the combination of Israeli soldiers and crowds of Palestinians desperate for aid would lead to violence.
And so many of the people whose names were floated to potentially help with the project, including a former head of the World Food Program, said no. But one of the people they did manage to get was someone named Jake Wood, who’s a former US Marine. He becomes the executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a set up as a nonprofit in the United States and which basically serves as the public face of the group. And it raises funding to fund the group’s operations.
And it’s not really clear who is actually providing much of the funding to this group. We know that the US government has said, publicly, that they’ve provided $30 million. The foundation has said that they’ve received more than a hundred million dollars from an unnamed European country. But a lot about the group’s finances, a lot about how this group has been operating is still very murky and has not been disclosed to the public.
Rachel Abrams
Do we have any sense about whether Israel is providing any funding for it?
Aaron Boxerman
That’s another big mystery. There’s been a lot of speculation about it. But at the end of the day, we really don’t know for sure whether Israel has provided financial backing. We know that they support it, that they’ve advocated for it. But in terms of financial backing, we just don’t know for sure yet.
Rachel Abrams
I see.
Aaron Boxerman
So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, that’s the public-facing element. But there’s also the people that are really carrying this out on the ground. That’s a different company.
It’s called Safe Reach Solutions. And it’s run by Phil Reilly, who’s an ex-CIA officer. And under this system, Reilly and the contractors who work for him are basically going to be the ones who are overseeing security at the aid sites themselves.
Rachel Abrams
And what would that look like?
Aaron Boxerman
So really the idea was that there would be four sites at least to start. And they would be in southern and central Gaza. And that’s a huge reduction. Remember, the UN had about 400 distribution sites across the Gaza Strip.
These four new sites would be in areas that are under Israeli military control. So Palestinians, if they wanted to get aid from the sites, would have to walk through areas with armed Israeli soldiers. And only after that, they would arrive at these aid sites, which were run by American contractors. And again, that was really one of the biggest issues for the humanitarian community.
Rachel Abrams
What specifically was the complaint or the concern?
Aaron Boxerman
Well, they thought it was going to be really dangerous, basically. I mean, they thought that Gazans would have to walk really long distances to get to these places, that there was going to be huge amounts of crowding as desperate people tried to get to a small number of sites. And they were really worried about the potential for Israeli soldiers or contractors to use force to control these large crowds of people arriving.
And another concern that the United Nations and other people raise about this was that Israeli leaders, at the time, were already suggesting that they wanted to move a huge number of Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south. And they worried that this whole idea of creating a new aid system was actually just a strategy for forcibly displacing huge numbers of Palestinians, by ensuring that the only place where they could get aid was going to be in this very small area of southern Gaza.
And so they saw this as not really an aid system, but as a military strategy, as a way for the Israeli military to sort of conveniently hem off a large number of people in a small area by using food, essentially, as a way to keep people in a small part of Gaza. And so there’s been all this criticism before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation even opens its doors at the end of May.
And just hours before it’s set to start distributing aid for the first time, when Jake Wood, the organization’s public face who defended it, then resigns suddenly. In the middle of the night, he puts out a statement which says, it is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan, while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
He essentially repeats many of the criticisms which the United Nations and which other people had made of the foundation. And this is really another blow to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was set to open its first site for aid distribution just hours later.
Rachel Abrams
We’ll be right back.
So, Aaron, before the break, you talked about how this new aid distribution system launched, despite what sounds like a lot of criticism from many different quarters. Talk to us about the early days. How did the launch go?
Aaron Boxerman
So it started in late May. And it’s been difficult to really get a sense of what’s going on, because Israel doesn’t allow us to freely move around in Gaza, and visit, and see the sites for ourselves in an independent way. And so my colleagues and I managed to speak to several people who tried to get aid from those sites during those first few extremely chaotic days.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
So I got on the phone with a man named Mohammed Sugger. He’s 43 years old. He lives in a half-destroyed apartment in the southern Gaza City of Khan Younis, with his three kids and his mom.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He went to one of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites on June 1. So that was just a few days after it opened.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He told me that he learned that the site was going to be open at 5:00 AM. And he wanted to get there as early as possible, so that he’d be at the front of the line.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
So Mohammed told me that he left his house in the middle of the night and began walking to the distribution site, which is several kilometers away from his house in Khan Younis.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He arrived in the area at about 3 o’clock in the morning. It was still dark. And he waited along with other people near the distribution site, inside the perimeter controlled by the Israeli military.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
Everybody was pushing, pushing. They’re trying to get forward. A lot of Gazans, including Mohammed, were worried that if they weren’t at the front of the line, there wouldn’t be any food left and they would have walked for hours in the dark basically for nothing.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And then he said there was an announcement from a drone, basically telling people to get back. But there were so many people and basically nobody could move back. And then —
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He said he started hearing what he described as warning shots, but the crowd was still pressing forward.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And that’s when, according to Mohammed, people started getting shot. And everybody dropped to the ground out of fear.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And he says, there was an old woman next to him who got shot in the leg.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He remembers someone yelling, my grandma, my grandma. But he says there was basically nothing they could do. People were just too scared to move, so no one could help them.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And later, the sun came up. It started to grow light out. He said he could see bodies from people who had been shot. And despite all of this —
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
— Mohammed actually goes to the site. He says that he ran as fast as he could. He grabbed one of the boxes that was on the floor. And he tried to run away as quickly as possible, because he was scared that after all of that, somebody might attack him on the way back and steal the food that he’d fought so hard to get.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And he said the situation at the aid site was a kind of race for food. It was almost like, everybody was sort out for themselves. Everybody racing each other to try to get a box of food.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
That’s the level of chaos and desperation that Mohammed said he saw.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
Rachel Abrams
That is just a horrific story. What details from it have you been able to confirm? And what do we know about how many people died that day?
Aaron Boxerman
It’s absolutely a horrific story. And when we heard stories, both Mohammed’s and stories like it, we try to verify and confirm them as much as possible, which is often difficult to do in Gaza. But here’s what we do know.
We know on that morning, early on June 1, the Red Cross, which has a field hospital in Rafah nearby, had a mass casualty influx shortly after the shooting near the aid site began. More than 170 people arrived. Most of them had gunshot wounds or shrapnel wounds. 21 of them were declared dead upon arrival.
And the patients who survived, the wounded, said that they’d been trying to reach an aid distribution site. So the Red Cross, in its statement, doesn’t say who shot them. But Mohammed and other Palestinians who we spoke to who were there that day, said that it was Israeli soldiers.
Now, this was an extremely contested incident. The Israeli military denied shooting civilians near or at the aid site. But an Israeli military official later briefed reporters and told them that Israeli troops had fired what the official described as warning shots at, quote, “several suspects,” as the crowds of Palestinians had approached them during a period when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site wasn’t open yet.
Rachel Abrams
OK, so that’s what the Israeli military said. What about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? What did they say?
Aaron Boxerman
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that it was unaware of any attacks in or around its site. And that all the aid was distributed between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM, which is when the site was open. But according to Palestinian witnesses and the Israeli military official who spoke to reporters, the incident seemed to have been about a kilometer away from the site. And —
Archived Recording 1
Today there was another deadly shooting involving civilians at a food distribution center in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— we’ve seen similar episodes recur —
Archived Recording 2
Palestinian health officials say four people were killed this morning at a food distribution center in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— again —
Archived Recording 3
Medics said at least 38 Palestinians were killed today in new shootings near food distribution centers in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— and again.
Archived Recording 4
At least 49 people have been killed while waiting for trucks across Gaza over just 24 hours, according to Palestinian health officials.
Aaron Boxerman
We’ve seen incidents where crowds of Palestinians seeking aid from these sites in southern Gaza have repeatedly come under fire —
Archived Recording 5
At least eight people have been killed in the last 24 hours and 74 injured.
Aaron Boxerman
— including as recently as this week.
Archived Recording 6
32 people are confirmed dead after they tried to reach an aid site in southern Gaza. This is according to Gazan hospital officials.
Archived Recording 7
Israeli troops say they’ve had to control rowdy crowds trying to get to these sites. The foundation says there’s been no violence in or near the sites themselves.
Rachel Abrams
Aaron, you mentioned that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation only has four aid distribution sites set up. And that’s compared with 400 sites that were in place before this new system took over. I think that everybody can understand why crowded situations can be more dangerous generally, but especially in a place like Gaza. But in these situations that we’ve been talking about, people are actually getting shot near these aid sites, right? So it feels like there’s probably something else going on besides simply that these sites are incredibly crowded.
Aaron Boxerman
You’re absolutely right to point to crowding as an issue. But really, I think the fundamental problem goes back to what the original critics from the United Nations and from the aid community said at the beginning, which is that thousands of people are crossing Israeli military lines in a war zone. And they’re going to aid sites, which, unlike in the past, are now surrounded by Israeli soldiers. That is the deadly combination that we’ve seen.
Now, it’s important to point out, the United Nations and other aid organizations are still bringing some aid into Gaza. And there have also been some shootings linked to their distribution. But the majority of the deaths reported by Gaza officials took place in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites.
Rachel Abrams
Obviously, live ammunition is not an accepted form of crowd control. Has Israel explained why this has happened over and over again?
Aaron Boxerman
At times, they’ve said that Israeli soldiers fired warning shots at people who approached them and who posed a kind of threat. They’ve also basically disputed the casualty tolls that come out of Gaza. They say that casualties that are released by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is a branch of the Hamas-run administration in the Gaza Strip, are not reliable. And at times, they’ve accused people that have echoed these reports of mass casualties of distorting reality.
Rachel Abrams
So it basically sounds like Israel is denying that this is a huge issue.
Aaron Boxerman
So the Israeli military says that they’ve learned lessons, that they’re working on renovating some of the sites, that they’re trying to ensure that whatever incidents there have been don’t recur. But just last weekend, we saw two deadly incidents, one related to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, another related to the World Food Program convoy, where Israeli soldiers reportedly opened fire, killing and wounding dozens of people.
And so, unfortunately, we’ve seen these deadly shootings are continuing. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has also rejected a lot of these reports. But at the same time, they’ve said that mostly they’re speaking about what happens at their sites or immediately around their sites. So they’re not really commenting as much on what happens to people on the way to the site, which is, at least in our reporting, when a lot of the deadly shootings, unfortunately, have taken place.
Rachel Abrams
And what about the US and all of this? Has the US said anything? Because as you mentioned, the US is providing at least a chunk of funding to this effort.
Aaron Boxerman
So the US has emerged as a staunch defender of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. After Jake Wood, the former executive director, left the initiative, they brought in a new head, an evangelical leader named Johnnie Moore, who’s seen as quite close to President Trump. And, in fact, the $30 million in funding from the State Department was actually authorized weeks after these reports of shootings began to emerge. So that certainly feels like a real vote of confidence in the new system, even as the Trump administration was actually cutting foreign aid elsewhere in the government.
Rachel Abrams
Obviously, this war has invited international condemnation. And I’m curious whether we have heard from the International community in response to this effort specifically.
Aaron Boxerman
So it’s been condemned by many, including Israel’s own allies. Countries that are historically supportive of Israel, like the United Kingdom and Germany and France, have expressed a lot of skepticism about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And just earlier this week, a coalition of around 30 countries issued a joint statement where they really condemned this new system, which they said deprived Gazans of their human dignity.
Rachel Abrams
Have any of those condemnations moved the needle at all, just in terms of Israel acknowledging any kind of problem or conceding that this aid distribution system had issues that perhaps it didn’t earlier recognize?
Aaron Boxerman
So publicly, at least, Israeli officials have defended the initiative. But there’s also a reason to believe that they’re not totally thrilled with how it’s turned out. After all, Israel promised that this was going to be an orderly system, not just for the sake of Gazans, but also because the whole reason behind this overhaul was to prevent the aid from going to Hamas or benefiting Hamas.
But the rollout has been so messy and so disorganized that it doesn’t really seem like anyone is checking who’s coming to pick up these boxes of aid. So some officials and analysts have suggested that even by the Israeli’s own standards, it’s not clear whether they’ve been so successful. But at the end of the day, this is all really symptomatic of a much bigger problem with Israel’s whole approach to Gaza.
Rachel Abrams
How do you mean?
Aaron Boxerman
All these scenes of desperation and chaos, they all really underscore that right now, nobody is really responsible for governing in Gaza, for providing for the welfare of Gazans, and for instituting law and order. The Israeli military has decimated the Hamas government, which used to run Gaza. And it hasn’t allowed anything to come up in its place.
So the result has been anarchy. Now, this might be the result of bad planning. But there are also critics of Israel who have argued that for Israel, the chaos in Gaza could also be part of a larger strategy, either to further weaken Hamas or just to make the situation in Gaza so unlivable that Palestinians might volunteer to leave on their own.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
So we’re now nearly two years into this war. We’re at almost 60,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza health officials. There’s rising malnutrition. The Israeli military now controls much of the Gaza Strip. And ordinary Gazans are still just trying to survive from one day to the next.
Rachel Abrams
Aaron, thank you so much.
Aaron Boxerman
Thank you.
Rachel Abrams
On Wednesday, more than a hundred aid agencies and human rights groups, including Save The Children and Doctors Without Borders, warned that, quote, “mass starvation was spreading across Gaza.” The joint statement adds to growing calls for Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid and for the war to end. Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the group’s claims, saying that the organizations were echoing Hamas’ talking points.
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know today. Columbia University has agreed to pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it failed to do enough to stop the harassment of Jewish students. The settlement is part of a sweeping deal to restore the university’s federal research funding, which the White House had canceled. Columbia had been the earliest target of the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the country’s most elite academic institutions. As part of the settlement, the university also agreed to a number of different terms, including the appointment of a provost to oversee Middle Eastern studies and the appointment of three dozen public safety officers with arrest powers.
And on Wednesday, a judge sentenced Bryan Kohberger, who was convicted of killing four Idaho college students in 2022, to life in prison with no chance of parole. Friends and family members of the victims spoke of their loss, with one telling the killer to quote, “Go to hell.” Others demanded to know why he had committed his crimes. Mr. Kohberger declined to speak or explain his motives.
[THEME MUSIC]
Today’s episode was produced by Claire Toeniskoetter, Rachelle Bonja, and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Maria Byrne with help from Paige Cowett and Ben Calhoun, fact-checked by Susan Lee. It contains original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
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5) What Iranians Lost When Israel Bombed Its Most Notorious Prison
By Sahar Delijani, July 26, 2025
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American writer in New York City.
Tarini Sharma
The clock in Evin Prison stopped just before noon on June 23. That was the hour Israeli bombs tore through the compound, heavily damaging the health clinic, visitation center, administrative buildings and multiple wards — including the infamous Ward 209, where Evin’s many political prisoners were held. The attack took place amid 12 days of Israeli airstrikes, an unlawful war targeting Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. But Evin is no military site: It is known for holding the regime’s dissenters and critics.
Israeli authorities called the strike on Evin “symbolic”— an attack on a prison that represented “oppression for the Iranian people.” In a social media post, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar suggested it was a strike aimed at liberation. That symbolism did not ring true for the many Iranians killed in the blasts: visiting family members, social workers, medical staffers, teenage conscripts tasked with escorting prisoners and inmates, among them transgender prisoners whose ward was reduced to rubble. Anguished families were left scrambling for news of their loved ones. Prisoners who were already at risk were pushed into deeper peril — relocated to distant prisons, cut off from support and left to endure even harsher conditions under the unrelenting grip of a regime that punishes survival itself.
If there’s anything symbolic in Israel’s bombing of Evin Prison, it is the false and dangerous narrative that wars help those fighting to bring democracy to Iran. Far from weakening the Islamic Republic’s apparatus of repression, Israel’s war has emboldened it, rolling back the fragile gains won through years of homegrown civil defiance. It has sabotaged decades of grass-roots organizing and collective labor by Iran’s civil society, tearing through the very scaffolding of democratic resistance and undermining the only force capable of changing Iran from within: the Iranian people.
I come from a long lineage of resistance to repression and tyranny. I was born in Evin Prison in 1983. My parents were secular leftist activists who fought to overthrow the Shah, and after the 1979 revolution continued their activism against the newly established Islamic Republic. In 1983, when my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father were arrested along with thousands of other political activists. After I was born, I stayed with her for a month before I was taken from her arms and given to my grandparents, who raised me while my parents remained behind bars. They were eventually released after serving yearslong sentences.
My parents’ arrest came during a wave of mass detentions and intimidation targeting the regime’s political opponents. By 1983, as the Iran-Iraq war raged on, the regime used the conflict to justify a sweeping crackdown, framing dissent as treason in times of national crisis. My mother and father’s imprisonment took place amid a ruthless campaign of repression that would culminate in 1988 in the bloodiest political purge in Iran’s post-revolutionary history.
Few things are more dangerous than a dictatorship in panic. The deeper the fear, the more ruthlessly it strikes back. That summer, weakened by eight years of war with Iraq and determined to consolidate power, the Iranian regime launched a campaign of executions against political prisoners it deemed unrepentant. Thousands were killed, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. My uncle Mohsen was among them. The 1988 massacre remains seared into the collective memory of Iranians, an open wound in the nation’s conscience.
Today a similar cycle of violence is at risk of repeating. The once abstract threat of foreign invasion, long invoked to justify crackdowns, became real, giving the regime cover to escalate repression in the name of security. Now a familiar purge is underway in Iran. Dissidents, activists, journalists, writers, minority leaders, community organizers and protesters of the 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising are facing a renewed crackdown by authorities. Many face execution, accused of “espionage” for Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan residents were deported in days. Ordinary people live in fear of an ever-deepening oppression.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in particular — born out of outrage at the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly wearing her mandatory hijab improperly — was one of the largest pro-democracy revolts in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. The uprising struck at the very core of the regime’s patriarchal, authoritarian and theocratic foundations, initiating a profound shift in society. Now it is precisely these brave women and men who face persecution as the Islamic Republic moves to reclaim control.
The harrowing aftermath of the Evin Prison bombing mirrors what has unfolded across Iran since Israel’s attacks. According to testimonies from political prisoners inside Evin, Iranian security forces stormed the prison just hours after the airstrikes — not to offer aid or protection to prisoners fearing further strikes but to turn their guns on them, aiming at terrified inmates’ heads and chests as they forced them back into blown-out cells. The prisoners were then chained together, shackled at hand and foot and marched at gunpoint through the wreckage and, darkness, past corpses in body bags, before they finally reached buses bound for other prisons.
The injustice of these cruel acts is twofold for Iranians: It’s not just that the oppressive regime is carrying them out, it’s also that the bombs of “liberation” were dropped by Israel, a country that has committed unspeakable violence for the last 22 months in Gaza, killing and starving Palestinians.
Israel’s assault has shattered something deep within the Iranian people, sparking a realization that decades of fragile gains in the civil rights struggle could be set back in a few days, that outside forces could bomb their way into their lives and homes with no accountability. With chilling clarity, we witnessed how swiftly our generational fight for democracy could be cast aside as futile and insignificant, too slow for warmongering powers that trade in conquest, not change and justice. In this moment, we see how alone we truly are in our fight for a better life.
Two prominent political prisoners, Mehdi Mahmoudian and Abolfazl Ghadyani, captured the stark reality of the aftermath of the war in a letter they wrote from Evin Prison: “On one side, Iran was under attack by Netanyahu’s government, which has been accused of ‘war crimes’ by the International Criminal Court. On the other, the Islamic Republic — also accused of ‘crimes against humanity’ by U.N. legal experts for its suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement — kept prisoners behind bars under wartime conditions.”
As the dust from the Israeli airstrikes settles and the ruins of Evin are laid bare, the picture is now clear: Iranians are still caught between a ruthless regime that extinguishes life under the hollow claim of protecting a revolution and foreign powers that drop missiles on innocent people under the treacherous guise of liberation.
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6) More Freedom, Less Violence: Some States Look to European Prisons
States of all political stripes, including Oklahoma, North Dakota and Massachusetts, have sent officials to tour prisons in Germany in search of ways to improve conditions for American inmates.
By Shaila Dewan, Photographs by Lena Mucha For The New York Times. July 25, 2025, Shaila Dewan reported from Berlin.
At Tegel Prison in Berlin, maximum-security prisoners have many of the same freedoms as minimum-security prisoners in the United States. Credit...Lena Mucha for The New York Times
It was a lovely spring day in Berlin when a tour bus pulled up outside a maximum-security prison called Tegel. Cobblestones, bike racks and blooming azaleas gave it the air of a college campus.
But what Shannon Davison, a deputy prison warden from North Dakota, noticed were security threats.
Ms. Davison, part of a delegation of U.S. prison officials who were there to learn about Germany’s system, clocked them in seconds. Inmates working outside the gate. Guards using vape pens, potentially a valuable commodity. Broom handles, a cart with metal wheels and cell windows that opened.
There were other things you simply would not see in an American prison, like a warden casually placing a giant ring of keys on the floor beside her chair.
“They treat their maximum-security prisoners like minimum-security prisoners,” Ms. Davison marveled. And yet, Tegel Prison is far less violent than many American prisons.
Over the course of a week, officials from Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oklahoma toured four German prisons where inmates wore street clothes, maintained their right to vote, cooked their own meals, played in soccer leagues and learned skills like animal husbandry and carpentry. One, called the Open Prison, allowed residents to come and go for work, school and errands.
A growing number of American states are looking abroad for ideas that can be adapted to their state prison systems, most often to Scandinavian countries famous for the IKEA-utopia design of their correctional institutions, but also to places like Germany and New Zealand.
In the past two years, California, Arizona and Oklahoma’s prison systems have shifted their focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment. In 2022, Pennsylvania opened a unit known as Little Scandinavia, and last year Missouri began a similar transformation project in four prisons. Six other states have established European-style units for younger prisoners.
The efforts are still small, dwarfed by the sheer size of the American prison population, and limited by political and financial roadblocks. Prison conditions are not a priority for voters, polls show, and changes are sometimes unwelcome.
In March, thousands of corrections officers in New York state walked off the job to protest new limitations on the use of solitary confinement, saying they would make their jobs more dangerous. In Arizona, a new head of prisons who had sought to make them more humane faced sharp criticism after a prisoner who had been moved out of maximum security killed three fellow inmates. And harsh punishments are part of the American DNA. President Donald J. Trump has said he would “love” to send American convicts to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Still, making prison life more like normal life is catching on in some surprising places.
“I’m amazed by how quickly these ideas are taking off across the United States,” said Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Prisoner advocates say the changes make communities safer by better preparing prisoners for their eventual release, and create a less stressful environment for prison workers. But the real catalyst is that U.S. prisons are in crisis, struggling with severe staffing shortages, crumbling facilities and frequent violence. Inmates in U.S. prisons often endure extreme temperatures, vermin-infested food and years, or even decades, in solitary confinement. High-profile cases have brought attention to prolonged shackling, fatal beatings and sexual abuse.
“It’s unsustainable, which is why we have to change the justice system to lock up only those who are a danger to others,” said Tricia Everest, the secretary of public safety for Republican-led Oklahoma.
The state once had the country’s highest incarceration rate. But in 2016, voters approved measures to lower the penalties for some crimes and to direct the savings into mental health and substance abuse treatment. Ms. Everest has presided over the closure of four prisons.
European prisons are far safer than those in the United States, experts say, with lower recidivism rates and healthier, happier employees. In Berlin, which has 3.9 million residents and operates a correction system analogous to that of an American state, suicides are rare and homicides are virtually nonexistent.
Of course, the United States has higher crime than European countries. Its system of prisons and jails is the largest in the world, incarcerating nearly 2 million people, according to the World Prison Brief, which tracks global data on incarceration.
Change on that scale is difficult to accomplish, especially when the American public can be skeptical of spending money on what they regard as prisoners’ comfort.
Even in states that have been noted for overhauling some aspects of their criminal justice system, like Georgia and Texas, prison conditions can remain abysmal. Georgia was singled out by the Justice Department last year for failing to protect inmates from “frequent, pervasive violence,” and in March a federal judge declared the heat in Texas prisons to be “plainly unconstitutional.”
By contrast, German prison officials say they consider loss of liberty to be punishment enough. The courts have ruled that new prisons must provide single-occupancy cells at least 10 square meters in size. Many have kitchens where residents may cook their own meals. One prison for young adults is experimenting with removing bars from some of the windows, on the premise that looking at bars is depressing.
Many of the rules were made in response to the shame of the country’s Nazi past, when prisons were used to suppress dissent and concentration camps held unspeakable horrors.
“What it all boils down to is the core principle, human dignity,” said Deputy Warden Johanna Schmid as she led the group through Tegel Prison’s leafy courtyards.
At Heidering Prison, Andreas Kratz, the warden, showed off a visiting room with a kitchenette, bed, crib and balcony. Time with family, German officials said, helps prisoners maintain the ties they will need to stay out of trouble when they are released.
In the United States, privacy, time outside of cells and family visits are considered risky, and “over-familiarity” between correction officers and inmates is prohibited. German prisons take the opposite approach, known as dynamic security. Correction officers are expected to develop relationships with inmates and know when problems may arise.
Yvonne Gade, a correction officer in a ward that houses a small number of prisoners deemed particularly dangerous, shrugged off concerns about their access to a gym with free weights.
“It would be a huge potential for violence if you locked them up all the time,” she said.
Prisons in Europe are certainly not perfect. The Americans and Germans shared frustrations over gangs and a recent influx of synthetic marijuana.
Some of Germany’s problems show just how different the system is: In one facility for young adults, a resident set his curtain on fire using a lighter he was permitted to have. In Saxony-Anhalt in April, a prisoner was accused of killing his wife during a five-hour, unsupervised conjugal visit.
The idea of showing U.S. policymakers how European prisons work originated with a civil rights lawyer named Don Specter, whose lawsuits have led to changes to the California prison system. In 2011, he accompanied a group of students on a visit to prisons in Germany and Scandinavia, and was struck by how it changed the “hearts and minds” of people with diverse political views.
“It seemed that the magic sauce was actually seeing it in person,” Mr. Specter said.
When Mr. Specter was awarded a large attorney’s fee in one of his cases, he used it to fund a trip abroad for prison officials in 2013. Out of that grew the Global Justice Exchange Project at the Vera Institute of Justice, which organizes regular trips to Germany, and a program at the University of California, San Francisco called Amend, which has worked with Washington, Oregon, California and other states to change prison culture.
Working with Vera, six states have gone on to create special units for 18- to 25-year-olds that allow more frequent visits with family, shared responsibility for resolving conflicts and more out-of-cell time.
The effect of these transformations is difficult to measure, in part because many of the units are quite new, and in part because doing research in prison is inherently complex. But a randomized, controlled trial in South Carolina showed that residents who were placed in the special units were 73 percent less likely to be disciplined for violence and 83 percent less likely to be sent to restrictive housing.
Such efforts can also improve staff morale. Guards whose interactions with prisoners go beyond shackling and unshackling them are likely to consider their work more meaningful, said Dr. Reiter, the criminology professor.
Throughout the German tour, U.S. officials were intrigued, but also wrestled with how much of what they saw would work at home. The biggest obstacle was cost, especially increasing staff-to-inmate ratios when states are already struggling to recruit officers. But even simple acts like a guard and inmate sharing a cup of coffee could require an overhaul of longstanding policies designed to prohibit fraternization.
Differing concepts of liability also get in the way. In Germany, prisoners can use the toilet behind a closed door, while in the U.S. toilets are typically installed in open cells, said Colby Braun, director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“You live in your bathroom,” he said. “With another person.”
When the state was planning a new prison, designers tried for a more dignified arrangement but could not achieve it, Mr. Braun said, because of a requirement that officers be able to see prisoners on their rounds.
The officials compared notes on how to overcome political resistance in their own states. Mr. Braun said he tried to develop relationships with lawmakers so he could fend off proposals he viewed as counterproductive, like a recent one that would have ended the use of rehabilitation programs and halfway houses.
On the other hand, the Massachusetts delegation was frustrated because, they said, its liberal legislature did not want to replace their prisons, some of which are more than 100 years old, even though new ones could make incarceration more humane.
For her part, Ms. Everest of Oklahoma said she had learned how to speak the language of her state’s legislators and law enforcement officers.
“I don’t do criminal justice reform. It’s been politicized,” she said. “We are modernizing the system.”
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
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7) Removal of Castro and Guevara Statues Ignites Outcry in Mexico City
The Cuban Revolution leaders joined forces in Mexico in 1955. A local mayor removed a memorial to them, drawing protests and condemnation from Mexico’s highest office.
By James WagnerPhotographs by Marian Carrasquero, Reporting from Mexico City, July 26, 2025
Statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, before their removal, at Tabacalera Park in Mexico City in 2021. Credit...Eyepix/NurPhoto, via Associated Press
The bench in Jardin Tabacalera after the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were removed.
The bench in Jardin Tabacalera after the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were removed.
When Fidel Castro first met Che Guevara in Mexico City in 1955, they began planning a guerrilla war that would sweep Cuba and change the course of Latin American history.
Mr. Castro became Cuba’s Communist leader, defying the United States for decades. Mr. Guevara, an Argentine, became a legend to his supporters and enemies alike, even after he was executed in Bolivia in 1967. In 2017, Mexicans commemorated their meeting with statues, linking Mexico to a pivotal moment in the Cold War.
But the statues were removed last week by a local Mexico City mayor, setting off a political firestorm that has drawn in the country’s president and reignited a debate about how to recognize a divisive history.
The local mayor, Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, said the statues were improperly installed and that the men should not be honored, calling them “murderers” who “continue representing a lot of pain.” She pointed to people who were silenced, jailed and killed under Mr. Castro’s nearly half-a-century reign, and to how Cuba still struggles with food and electricity shortages.
“I understand that there are people who see Fidel and Che as their revolutionary figures, but governing isn’t about choosing which victims to show solidarity to,” Ms. Rojo de la Vega said in an interview.
But her actions have provoked protests and condemnation, including from Mexico’s highest office. President Claudia Sheinbaum, who leads the leftist Morena party, denounced the removal this week, calling it “total intolerance” and “illegal.” She said Ms. Rojo de la Vega’s argument was “hypocritical,” because the local mayor had once vacationed in Cuba.
Ms. Rojo de la Vega, 39, argued her actions were legal and said that her trip to Cuba was 10 years ago, before she ran for office, and she has since learned more and developed her position.
She also drew attention to past decisions of Ms. Sheinbaum, who was the mayor of Mexico City before she became president.
In 2020, Ms. Sheinbaum had a plaque commemorating Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, a former Mexican president known as a right-wing authoritarian, removed because it “alluded to an era of repression and ignominy in the country’s history.”
That year, she also oversaw the removal of a Christopher Columbus monument, calling it part of an effort to “decolonize” the city’s statue-filled main boulevard.
So Ms. Rojo de la Vega — who is not a Morena member — said she did not expect a controversy when she had the statues hauled away. “In my opinion, we were acting the same way” as Ms. Sheinbaum, she said.
“You have to be consistent,” she added. “I don’t think a dictator is any less of a dictator if they’re from the left, the center or the right.”
The statues were first installed in late 2017 by Ricardo Monreal, then the municipal chief and still a key politician in Ms. Sheinbaum’s party. The cast bronze figures, weighing over 550 pounds with their bench, depicted the men seated and in conversation, and cost roughly $32,000 in public funds then.
The statues, which were once vandalized with paint, were removed in 2018 because of inadequate government approvals. A city committee that oversees public monuments approved their re-installation in 2020.
Ms. Sheinbaum said that any removal must be decided by the committee, which said this week that the statues were improperly removed.
Ms. Rojo de la Vega argued that the committee does not have authority over art paid for by the municipality, citing Mexico City’s 2017 Constitution, which gave municipalities more autonomy.
Since taking over as local mayor in October, she said, her office has heard weekly from residents complaining about the statues.
But people in the area have also defended the memorial. On Sunday, more than 200 people gathered where the statues once sat and demanded they be reinstalled. Some dressed in revolutionary outfits or donned Communist symbols, and many carried images of Mr. Castro, Mr. Guevara or the Cuban flag.
The Cuban Embassy in Mexico City did not respond to a request for comment. Its ambassador, Marcos Rodríguez Costa, wrote on social media last week, “The true Revolution is not made of stone or bronze.”
Others simply argued that the history should be memorialized regardless of politics.
“Beyond whether you sympathize ideologically or not, it cannot be denied that the Cuban Revolution historically changed the story of Latin America and the world,” said Olivia Garza Joa, a protest organizer and vice president of the José Martí Association of Cuban Residents in Mexico.
For now, the statues are covered in Bubble Wrap and hidden in a municipal facility. Although Ms. Rojo de la Vega has suggested auctioning them off to recoup some funds — Ms. Sheinbaum called that illegal — the local mayor said her team was in discussions with federal and city officials. The statues could be sent to a museum or another part of Mexico City, she said.
Mere feet from where the figures once sat, though, a bust of Mr. Guevara remained.
The municipality had not yet determined who paid for it, Ms. Rojo de la Vega said, and thus who had the authority to remove it.
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8) No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Baby Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals
After Israeli restrictions on aid, hunger has risen across Gaza. Doctors and nurses, struggling to find food themselves, lack the resources to stem the surge.
By Patrick KingsleyBilal Shbair and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem; Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza; and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel, July 27, 2025
Hanin Barghouth with her 3-month-old daughter, Salam, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza this week. At birth, her doctor said, Salam weighed roughly 6.6 pounds, and three months later, she weighs only 8.8 pounds — at least three pounds underweight. Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
In several of the hospitals still functioning in Gaza, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborn babies, in some cases giving them water alone.
And at least three major hospitals lack the nutritional fluids needed to properly treat malnourished children and adults.
Those scenes were described in interviews starting Friday with seven doctors — four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the United States. All of them worked this past week in four of the territory’s main hospitals.
After months of warnings, international agencies, experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months. At least 56 Palestinians died this month of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on Saturday by the Gaza Health Ministry.
As starvation rises, medical institutions and staff, already struggling to treat war wounds and illness, are now grappling with rising cases of malnourishment.
Weak and dizzy, medics are passing out in the wards, where colleagues revive them with saline and glucose drips. Persistently short of basic tools such as antibiotics and painkillers, doctors are also running out of the special intravenous drips used to feed depleted patients.
In all four hospitals, the doctors described how they are increasingly unable to save malnourished babies and are instead forced to simply manage their decline. The babies are too weak to be flooded with nutrients, which could overload their system and cause them to suffer “refeeding syndrome,” which could kill them.
In some cases, the fluids that the doctors can safely give to the babies are not enough to prevent them from dying.
“I have seen ones that are imminently about to pass away,” said Dr. Ambereen Sleemi, an American surgeon who has been volunteering since early July at the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The babies were brought to the hospital “starving and malnourished,” Dr. Sleemi said in a phone interview on Friday, “and they haven’t been able to get them back from the brink.”
Dr. Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who volunteered at the same hospital until Wednesday, described the shock of seeing a skeletal infant who looked only days old, but was in fact seven months.
“The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice,” Dr. Maynard said in a phone interview on Friday. “I saw the severity of malnutrition that I would not have thought possible in a civilized world. This is man-made starvation being used as a weapon of war and it will lead to many more deaths unless food and aid is let in immediately.”
Asked for comment, COGAT, the Israeli military department that oversees aid to Gaza, said it “continues to work in coordination with international actors to allow and facilitate the continued entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, in accordance with international law.” Late on Saturday night, the Israeli military began to drop airborne aid over northern Gaza, and said it would pause its military activity for several hours day in key areas to make it easier to deliver aid by land.
One-third of Palestinians in Gaza are forced to go without food for days in a row, the World Food Program said recently. Of the young children and pregnant women treated at clinics run by Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, roughly one-fourth are suffering from malnutrition, the medical aid group said last week.
Doctors say that many other people have likely died from different conditions and injuries that could have been cured or healed if the victims had not been so weakened by malnourishment. Starvation is causing more mothers to suffer miscarriages or give birth prematurely, to malnourished babies with weakened immune systems and medical abnormalities.
“The result is a rise in infections, dehydration and even immune collapse in infants,” said Dr. Hani al-Faleet, a pediatric consultant at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. “The immediate cause of death in some of these cases is simple: The baby doesn’t get enough to eat, and neither does the mother.”
Starvation has risen sharply since Israel’s total blockade on food aid to Gaza between early March and late May, doctors and rights groups say. While Israel has since allowed food in, it introduced a new method of distribution that is flawed and dangerous, making it almost impossible for Palestinians to find food safely or affordably.
Before March, food handouts were mainly distributed under a U.N.-led system from hundreds of points close to where people lived. Now, they are supplied from a handful of sites run by Israeli-backed private American contractors that, for most Palestinians in Gaza, can be reached only by walking for miles through Israeli military lines.
Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of people walking these routes, turning the daily search for food into a deadly trap.
Some food is still available from shops in Palestinian-run areas, but only at astronomic prices that are unaffordable to the largely unemployed civilian population. A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of flour costs up to $30, and a kilogram of tomatoes costs roughly $30; meat and rice are largely unavailable on the open market.
That has forced many Palestinians to routinely choose between two often fatal options: risk death by starvation, or risk death by gunfire to reach food aid sites that are likely to have run out of supplies by the time many arrive.
Israel publicly says the new aid system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing the aid. But Israeli military officials have acknowledged to The New York Times that they have no proof that Hamas has systematically stolen food supplied by the United Nations, the main provider of aid to Gaza during most of the war. Israel says that its soldiers have fired “warning shots” to quell unrest along the roads leading to the aid sites. Dr. Maynard and Dr. Sleemi described injuries that indicated soldiers had systematically fired at people’s torsos.
Israel also blames the United Nations for failing to deliver enough food to alleviate the situation. Israel said on Saturday that it had destroyed up to 100 truckloads of food in recent months because aid groups could not distribute the food before it passed its use-by date. U.N. officials say that Israeli restrictions have made it difficult to send convoys through an active war zone.
The food shortages add another challenge to an already very difficult environment for doctors.
“Some staff members have collapsed in operating rooms. Others have fainted in emergency wards because they have not received any proper food,” said Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “The burden on them is immense.”
Salam Barghouth, a 3-month baby girl treated for malnutrition this week at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza, is among the youngest Palestinians failed by the new aid distribution system. Her mother, Hanin Barghouth, 22, is too weak to walk to the new distribution sites. Her father, Akram Barghouth, 27, has never managed to reach the sites before the aid runs out, Ms. Barghouth said.
Like most Gazans, the parents are jobless, rely on donations from relatives and friends and said they survive mostly on falafel balls that cost roughly 10 times their prewar price.
As a result, Ms. Barghouth regularly skips meals and says she has lost 29 pounds, a fifth of her body weight, since the start of the war. She cannot produce enough breast milk to feed Salam, who was born on April 21, after Israel started the blockade.
At Salam’s birth, according to Dr. al-Faleet, her doctor, she weighed roughly 6.6 pounds. Three months later, she weighs only 8.8 — at least three pounds underweight, the doctor said.
“I’m breastfeeding her as much as I can, and when I can’t, I give her formula — but that’s only when I have it,” Ms. Barghouth said. She is reaching the end of a container of formula that she said cost roughly $120, approximately two and a half times the amount it costs outside Gaza.
“She came into the world during a war,” Ms. Barghouth added, “and I’m fighting every day to keep her alive in it.”
While Salam Barghouth can still access medical support in central Gaza, other starving children farther to the north are struggling to find it because aid groups have found it harder to bring supplies to them.
One of them is Yazan Abu al-Foul, 2, a child living with his family in a damaged building beside a beach in Gaza City. His ribs, spine and hip bones jut from his body. An aunt, Riwaa Abu al-Foul, said Yazan’s family cannot find enough food to feed him and hospital staff in his area have told them that they cannot provide him with inpatient care.
“They told us there is a shortage of materials and equipment,” Ms. Abu al-Foul said in a phone interview on Saturday.
Doctors at hospitals in northern, central and southern Gaza described similar hardships in interviews on Friday and Saturday.
“There are no nutritional supplements, no vitamins, no premature infant formula, no amino acid intravenous solutions — nothing,” said Dr. Abu Salmiya from Al-Shifa Hospital. “Their bodies need these basics, and without them they will die.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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9) Israel Says It Has Paused Some Military Activity in Gaza as Anger Grows Over Hunger
Operations in three parts of the enclave were temporarily halted on Sunday to allow more aid to enter the territory, the Israeli military said. It was unclear if the decision would relieve the hunger crisis in Gaza.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 27, 2025
Palestinians waiting for food at a charity kitchen in Gaza last week. Aid agencies and many countries say Israel is responsible for a hunger crisis in the territory. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel said it had paused military activity in parts of Gaza on Sunday to allow in international aid, amid growing outrage over the severe hunger faced by Palestinians in the territory.
The decision was a sharp reversal by Israel and followed growing international pressure over the dire conditions in Gaza, where nearly one in three people has not been eating “for multiple days in a row,” the U.N. World Food Program says.
Israeli forces will pause operations in at least three parts of Gaza from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. to allow aid to flow in, the Israeli military said in a statement. They will also designate permanent routes for U.N. convoys to deliver aid, it added.
It was unclear whether the policy change would allow enough aid to reach hungry Gazans. Israel has announced similar tactical pauses in the past with mixed results.
Aid agencies and many countries, including some traditional allies, say Israel is responsible for the situation after first blocking and then restricting aid deliveries to Gaza for months.
Six Palestinians died of malnutrition-related causes over the past day, including two children, Gaza’s health ministry said. More than 50 Palestinians have died this month from starvation, the ministry said, and medical workers are themselves increasingly struggling to find food.
Israel has also continued military operations. At least 13 people were killed Sunday by Israeli forces in central Gaza near an aid distribution point, according to Al Awda hospital. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.
Israel has blamed the United Nations and its partners for the hunger crisis, accusing them of failing to bring hundreds of truckloads of aid through Gaza’s border crossings. The United Nations says that Israel has thrown up bureaucratic obstacles and frequently rejects requests to coordinate deliveries.
Israeli officials had also long argued that Hamas was diverting humanitarian aid. But Israeli military officials later said they had no proof Hamas was systematically stealing U.N. relief supplies.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other government politicians were largely silent on the policy shift. But Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, called for Israel to completely shut down the flow of aid and fully reconquer Gaza.
Aid groups welcomed the ability to bring food into Gaza without fear of Israeli bombardment, but they said a full cease-fire was likely the only way to end the crisis.
“Together, we hope these measures will allow for a surge in urgently needed food assistance to reach hungry people without further delays,” the World Food Program said.
Jordan and the United Arab Emirates also dropped air dropped aid into Gaza in coordination with Israel, the Israeli defense ministry and Jordanian state media said. But aid experts said the deliveries were insufficient.
Foreign countries parachuted aid into Gaza last year, but stopped doing so after attempted deliveries killed several people and landed in Israel by mistake.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called airdrops a “distraction,” and that they were “expensive, inefficient & can even kill starving civilians.”
In March, Israel blockaded Gaza for nearly three months, barring the entry of almost all food, fuel and medicine. It relented at the end of May after Israeli military officials privately warned that the enclave was at risk of widespread starvation.
Instead of relying on the previous U.N.-coordinated process to deliver aid, Israel instead overhauled the whole process, creating aid sites operated by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Under the new system, armed American security contractors patrolled Israeli-backed aid sites in southern and central Gaza, forcing Palestinians to walk miles through Israeli military lines in hopes of finding food.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near the sites after Israeli soldiers opened fire on crowds, according to Gaza health officials and the Israeli military, which described their actions as “warning shots” to disperse Palestinians they said were a threat.
Attempts by the United Nations and other aid agencies to deliver food have also led to tragic scenes as hundreds of desperate Palestinians rushed to seize supplies. In one instance, the Israeli military opened fire on crowds seeking to get aid, killing dozens, according to Gaza officials.
Almost 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas, including thousands of children, the Gaza health ministry says. Those figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.
Israel’s allies initially backed the country’s military counterattack in Gaza. But as the fighting continues and the Palestinian death toll skyrockets, some have started calling for an end to the war.
President Trump has said the war in Gaza must come to an end. But, at least publicly, he has avoided putting substantial pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to immediately stop the fighting.
Last week, Israel and the United States withdrew their negotiators from cease-fire talks with Hamas in Doha, Qatar after accusing the group of intransigence. Hamas officials said they had made concessions in their latest counterproposal.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting in Rehovot, Israel.
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10) Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Ship of Activists and Aid
It was at least the third vessel blocked this year while challenging Israel’s naval blockade and seeking to deliver supplies by sea to a population facing rising starvation.
By Pranav Baskar, July 27, 2025
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship leaving a southern Italian port for Gaza earlier this month. Credit...Giovanni Isolino/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli navy intercepted a ship aiming to bring aid to Gaza this weekend, Israeli officials and pro-Palestinian activists said, in at least the third case this year in which a vessel has been stopped while challenging Israel’s naval blockade of the enclave.
The ship was rerouted to Israel and all its passengers were safe, Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement early Sunday.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an activist group, said it had organized the mission by the ship, which it called the Handala, to aid a population in Gaza facing rising starvation. The Israeli foreign ministry called the ship the Navarn, using another name associated with the vessel.
The ship was roughly 40 nautical miles from Gaza when it was intercepted, according to a statement by the activist group, which opposes the nearly two-decade-old naval blockade of Gaza. Twenty-one activists from 12 countries were on board, the group said, adding that the ship carried supplies like baby formula, diapers, food and medicine from Italy, from where it set sail last week.
One of those aboard was a French member of the European Parliament, Emma Fourreau, according to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s website.
The group’s efforts to reach Gaza by sea have been repeatedly thwarted. In May, a Gaza-bound aid ship called Conscience was crippled by explosions and an ensuing fire, stopping the mission off the coast of Malta. In June, Israel intercepted the coalition’s second effort, the Madleen, whose passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and another French member of the European Parliament, Rima Hassan.
After the latest vessel was stopped, the coalition described the Israeli navy’s actions as a “violation of international maritime law.”
Adalah, an Israeli human rights group whose lawyers have represented flotilla participants detained by Israel in the past, said the vessel had been taken to the port of Ashdod. It added that “despite repeated demands, Israeli authorities have refused to allow Adalah’s lawyers access to the detained activists to provide legal consultation.”
Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza, with Egypt’s help, after the Islamic militant group Hamas took control over the coastal strip in 2007. Israeli officials say the measure was necessary to prevent the smuggling of weapons into the territory.
Since Hamas led the October 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the current war in Gaza, living conditions in the territory have steadily deteriorated, and Israel has tightly controlled the flow of aid into the territory by land, sea and air.
Its restrictions have drawn condemnation from many nations and rights groups, and on Saturday night the Israeli military announced that it would revive the practice of dropping aid from airplanes, and make it easier for aid convoys to move through Gaza by land.
Before the ship was captured, the activist coalition published a statement saying that two vessels believed to be operated by the Israeli military were nearby. At that point, the ship altered its course toward the Egyptian coast, the statement said.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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11) ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
Glenn Valley Foods tried to verify every hire through a federal system. After a raid, the company is wondering how it can keep going.
By Eli Saslow, Visuals by Erin Schaff, July 27, 2025
They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. “Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,” he said.
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.
“So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,” he said.
“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president’s advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the American economy. Trump had vowed to pursue “blood-thirsty criminals” during his campaign, but he had also promised the “largest mass deportation in history,” which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the work force was foreign-born.
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice. Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company’s frozen steak.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
“Then we pick up our hiring,” Rohwer said.
He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,” Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. “We’re caught up in a broken system.”
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company’s newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno’s second day as the H.R. director. He still didn’t have an office and he’d never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review.
“How many people did you lose total?” Moreno asked.
Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. “They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
“I think I can help you with that part,” Moreno said.
He had spent the last 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the Midwest, and he’d shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem. Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and Social Security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work.
In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications.
Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinize IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren’t fake, and then interview each potential employee in person. He had memorized regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about some aspect of their documentation.
“I ask where they were born, what town, where they traveled,” Moreno said. “Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don’t want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.”
“Yes. I like that,” Hartmann said. “Because we can’t go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.”
Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years. More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7 a.m. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door. He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces.
His first thought was that maybe one employee had gotten into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. “We’re going to be busy here,” one of the agents said.
They moved past Hartmann into the factory, shouting instructions in Spanish, telling workers to come out with their hands up. Most complied, but a few dozen people started to scream and run. A group of five women clambered up stacks of packing pallets. Other workers enclosed themselves inside industrial freezers, only emerging after they lost feeling in their arms and hands.
Hartmann saw a maintenance worker named Marvin Zepeda, 37, who scampered into the rafters with his tool belt. Zepeda was responsible for cleaning offices, and his colleagues had once nominated him for employee of the month because of his ability to laugh and tell jokes even while checking mousetraps. Now Zepeda squeezed into a crawl space in the ceiling and resisted orders to come out, allegedly holding agents off by displaying his box cutter and other tools. An agent shot him with a stun gun. Zepeda pulled the probes out of his leg, retreated farther into the crawl space and threw tools in the direction of the agents. They shocked him again and threatened to send in a dog. Finally, a factory manager went into the crawl space, calmed Zepeda down and helped convince him to surrender. Agents restrained his wrists and led him out of the factory. Zepeda spotted Hartmann in the lobby and flashed him a smile and a thumbs-up as the agents walked him toward a bus with the windows blacked out.
“The whole thing just gutted me, and obviously I had it easy,” Hartmann told Moreno.
“It’s terrible for everyone,” Moreno said. “I’ve seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.”
“The ripple effects,” Hartmann said, nodding. He pulled up a roster of the company’s former employees and started to read through names: Ruiz. Gonzalez. Hernandez. Rodriguez.
“That’s the part I keep thinking about,” Hartmann said. “What happens to these people?”
It had taken three days for Elizabeth Rodriguez’s family to figure out where she was. Her children had seen the raid on Facebook and watched online videos that showed Rodriguez, 46, being marched onto a bus in her factory smock and hard hat. Her eldest son, Omar, 23, searched through detention records and contacted her co-workers, the police and local politicians. “Where are they taking her?” he kept asking, until his mother finally called from a detention center across the state.
“This call will be limited to 15 minutes,” a recording warned, and his life had been revolving around those phone calls ever since.
Now Omar felt his phone ringing again in his pocket and checked the number. “Mom Jail,” the caller ID read. He answered and waited for the line to connect.
His parents had spent the last 25 years in Omaha, building an undocumented life with such care that to Omar it started to feel “normal, even stable,” he said. His parents met in Mexico and eventually crossed the border together on foot in their teens. They married, found work in Nebraska and bought a small house on the outskirts of downtown where they could raise their four children, all U.S. citizens. A few months earlier, Omar had encouraged his mother to hire a lawyer to help her explore a path to citizenship. She had a “perfect case,” the lawyer wrote: No criminal record. Longstanding ties to the community. A steady job with good reviews.
She took on extra hours to pay legal fees and nursed sores on her feet. It wasn’t in her nature to complain, not even now, about the raid, the detention center or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach.
“How are you?” Omar asked in Spanish, once Elizabeth came on the line. Her children crowded onto the couch and gathered around the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Tell me about all of you. Are you eating? Sleeping?”
“Don’t worry,” Omar said. “Everything’s OK.”
This was how they survived these calls: each side reassuring the other even as they continued to unravel. Omar was working the graveyard shift at a local call center to help pay for groceries. His two younger sisters, 17 and 13, were trying to cook for the family from her mother’s recipes. Omar’s younger brother, 7, was waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking, until Omar took him to the emergency room. Doctors said he was suffering from panic attacks. He had never spent a night away from Elizabeth, and he didn’t know what it meant to be undocumented, or detained, or deported. The family had decided it was best to tell him that his mother was still at work.
“I’ll be home soon,” she told him now.
“When?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m trying my best.”
“You have five minutes remaining on this call,” the automated voice said.
Omar took the phone so they could talk through the logistics of her case. She had declined the government’s offer of $1,000 and a free plane ticket to self-deport back to Mexico. Omar was in the final stages of borrowing $5,000 to pay for her bond so she could be released to her family while her deportation case played out in the courts.
They had all begun drafting letters to submit on her behalf. Omar’s oldest sister, 17, had written about how her mother had supported her through episodes of depression, helping her find a therapist and switch schools. “I am still alive because of my mother,” she wrote to the judge. “Now that she’s gone, it’s like I’m breaking a little more every day. I fear what will happen to us if she can’t come home.”
“You have one minute remaining,” the automated voice said.
“Are you still there?” Omar asked.
“Yes. I’m here. I love all of you,” she said, and the children took turns saying goodbye.
“Everything is going to work out,” Omar told her, but the line was already dead.
The factory was empty. The machines sat silent. Back orders continued to pile up as a skeleton crew arrived at 7 a.m. to restart the manufacturing lines.
Hartmann walked through the lobby, handing out coffees and greeting eight new employees who were reporting for their first day. They had already been interviewed and hired, but they couldn’t start until they were authorized to work through E-Verify, so a manager named Daisy Hernandez took their IDs and I-9 forms into her office and started punching in the numbers.
None of the eight new hires were U.S. citizens. They had submitted paperwork based on green cards, alien registration numbers, temporary visas and work authorizations. Hernandez tried to log into E-Verify, but her password didn’t work. She tried again, and the account was locked.
“How’s it going?” Hartmann asked, as he stopped by her office, but the answer was implied: The new employees were waiting in the break room. The manufacturing lines were falling further behind. Hernandez called Glenn Valley’s former H.R. manager for help, and a few minutes later Hernandez was logged back into the account. She typed a new set of names into the same system and checked the first employee.
“The information entered did not match D.H.S. records.”
“Down to seven,” Hernandez said. She set the application to the side and moved on to the next.
“Alien authorized to work,” it said.
Cruz. Rivas. Lopez. Dominguez. “Authorized to work,” it said, and even if the system had failed them before, it was still what the government suggested they use. Hernandez printed out a batch of company IDs and brought them into the break room, where seven new employees were waiting for their final words of training.
“Thanks for being here in our time of need,” Hartmann said, as he glanced around the room, registering all the people who were still missing.
Another manager briefed the employees on food safety and handed out white smocks and construction hats. Then he opened the factory door to a rush of cold air and the clatter of machines. The workers lined up alongside a company slogan printed at the entrance.
“Together we achieve more,” it read, and they stepped onto the factory floor.
Erin Schaff contributed reporting.
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12) José Andrés: People of Good Conscience Must Stop the Starvation in Gaza
By José Andrés, Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen, July 27, 2025
Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Forty years ago, the world’s conscience was shocked into action by images of emaciated children and starving babies dying in their mothers’ arms. There was a surge in international aid, airdrops of food and activism from the world’s most popular artists. Thanks to the news media and events such as Live Aid, we could not look away from the hungry in Ethiopia.
A generation later, people of good conscience must now stop the starvation in Gaza. There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.
This is not a natural disaster triggered by drought or crop failures. It’s a man-made crisis, and there are man-made solutions that could save lives today. The hunger catastrophe in Gaza is entirely caused by the men of war on both sides of the Erez crossing: the ones who massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ones who have been killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the more than 21 months since.
We are far beyond the blame game of who is the more guilty party. We don’t have the time to argue about who is holding up the food trucks.
A starving human being needs food today, not tomorrow.
As the occupying force, the Israelis are responsible for the basic survival of civilians in Gaza. Some people may find this unfair, but it is international law. To that end, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed aid group, put a new plan in place that distributes food from a few hubs, which forced desperately hungry people to walk for miles and risk their lives. At the time it was created, international aid groups warned this would be dangerous and ineffective. Those warnings have sadly proved true.
It’s time to start over.
Food cannot flow quickly enough to Gaza right now. The World Food Program, led by its American executive director, Cindy McCain, said last week that one-third of Gaza’s population had not eaten for multiple days in a row. Small children are dying of starvation in numbers that are rising rapidly.
World Central Kitchen, the international aid group I founded, works with our partners in Gaza to cook tens of thousands of meals a day. Last week we resumed cooking a limited number of hot meals after a five-day pause caused by a lack of ingredients. It was the second time we were forced to stop cooking because of food shortages this year. Our teams on the ground are committed and resilient, but our day-to-day ability to sustain cooking operations remains uncertain.
Since the start of the war, we have prepared and distributed more than 133 million meals across Gaza, through large field kitchens and a network of smaller community kitchens. We have delivered thousands of meals to displaced Israeli families, including last month when Israeli towns and cities came under intense missile attacks from Iran.
The Israeli government has claimed that Hamas is stealing the food in Gaza. It also says it is doing “everything possible” to feed Palestinians.
Here is the reality we have seen on the ground. Before Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid, which started in March, our convoys experienced very little violence or looting. After the blockade was lifted, the situation worsened significantly, with widespread looting and anarchy. It is rare now for trucks entering Gaza to make it safely to our kitchens or those of other aid groups without being looted. Drivers and kitchen workers are often attacked by armed groups of unknown origin.
The blockade that was supposed to pressure what’s left of Hamas only strengthened these gunmen and gangs. It precipitated mass deprivation and the collapse of society in Gaza.
Our proposal is to change how we feed people, secure distribution and scale up quickly.
First, we urgently need to open humanitarian corridors accessible to all aid groups operating in Gaza, to ensure that food, water and medicine can arrive safely and at scale.
Second, we need to substantially increase production of hot meals. Unlike bulk food supplies, hot meals have little resale value for organized gangs.
Third, we need to feed people where they are. We must deliver meals to where the Palestinian people are sheltering, rather than expect them to travel to a few distribution points, where violence often breaks out.
Fourth, we want to prepare one million meals a day, not tens of thousands. We estimate this would require five large cooking facilities in safe zones, where bulk food supplies can be delivered, prepared and distributed without risk of violence. These large kitchens would also supply hundreds of smaller community kitchens at the neighborhood level throughout Gaza, empowering communities as essential partners.
This proposal is dependent on securing food, equipment and vehicles. By itself, it won’t be sufficient. We want to see all aid groups operating in Gaza able to work freely in their own way.
I understand that many Israelis are still grieving and are focusing first on their own. On the long list of those who continue to suffer, there are the surviving hostages, the traumatized families and the wounded soldiers.
We have seen in the past several months how Israel is able to pursue what it sees as its national interest with courage. The challenge of feeding starving Palestinians is no different.
We are approaching the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of two holy temples in Jerusalem. It is a solemn day of suffering and remembrance.
The Book of Isaiah reminds us that fasting is not enough. The true fast is to share our bread with the hungry and give our clothes to the naked.
“If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness,” it reads. If we want to light the darkness, we need to extend our soul to the hungry. And we need to do it now.
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13) What Will It Cost to Renovate the ‘Free’ Air Force One? Don’t Ask.
To hide the cost of renovating the plane Qatar donated to President Trump, the Air Force appears to have tucked it inside an over-budget, behind-schedule nuclear modernization program.
By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and flown around the world in the cramped press section of Air Force One. Eric Schmitt has covered the Pentagon for 35 years, riding on far less comfortable planes, July 27, 2025
The Boeing 747-8 from Qatar at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after President Trump took a tour of the plane in February. Renovation will begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump makes no secret of his displeasure over the cost of renovating the Federal Reserve headquarters — around $2.5 billion, or even higher by the president’s accounting.
But getting the White House to discuss another of Washington’s expensive renovation projects, the cost of refurbishing a “free” Air Force One from Qatar, is quite another matter.
Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties, the techniques being used to hide the cost of Mr. Trump’s pet project are inventive.
Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.
In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)
Qatar’s defense minister and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the final memorandum of understanding a few weeks ago, paving the way for the renovation to begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. The document was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
Mr. Trump’s plane probably won’t fly for long: It will take a year or two to get the work done, and then the Qatari gift — improved with the latest communications and in-flight protective technology — will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said.
Concerns over the many apparent conflicts of interests involved in the transaction, given Mr. Trump’s government dealings and business ties with the Qataris, have swirled since reports of the gift emerged this spring. But the president himself said he was unconcerned, casting the decision as a no-brainer for taxpayers.
“I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” the president said in May. “I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”
It is free in the sense that a used car handed over by a neighbor looking to get it out of his driveway is free. In this case, among the many modifications will be hardened communications, antimissile systems and engine capabilities to take the president quickly to safety as one of the older Air Force Ones did on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda attacked the United States. And there is the delicate matter of ridding the jet of any hidden electronic listening devices that U.S. officials suspect may be embedded in the walls.
Then, of course, it has to be stuffed with the luxuries — and gold trim — with which the 47th president surrounds himself, whether he is in the Oval Office or in the air. The jet’s upper deck has a lounge and a communications center, while the main bedroom can be converted into a flying sick bay in a medical emergency.
So it’s no surprise that one of Washington’s biggest guessing games these days is assessing just where the price tag will end up, on top of the $4 billion already being spent on the wildly-behind-schedule presidential planes that Boeing was supposed to deliver last year. It was those delays that led Mr. Trump to look for a gift.
Air Force officials privately concede that they are paying for renovations of the Qatari Air Force One with the transfer from another the massively-over-budget, behind-schedule program, called the Sentinel. That is named for the missile at the heart of Washington’s long-running effort to rebuild America’s aging, leaky, ground-launched nuclear missile system.
The project was first sold to Congress as a $77.7 billion program to replace all 400 Minuteman III missiles, complete with launch facilities and communications built to withstand both nuclear and cyber attack. By the time Mr. Trump came back into office, that figure had ballooned by 81 percent, to $140 billion and climbing, all to reconstruct what nuclear strategists agree is the most vulnerable, impossible-to-hide element of America’s nuclear deterrent.
And that was the number before the Air Force announced a few months ago that it would have to dig all new silos across Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota, because the old Minuteman silos were leaking and crumbling.
The first of the Minutemans were installed 55 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president and Leonid Brezhnev was inside the Kremlin. Washington and Moscow had a combined total of more than 30,000 nuclear weapons pointed at each other. (Today it is closer to 3,100.)
The good news is that in the first Trump administration, the Air Force got rid of the command-and-control systems that still used 8-inch floppy disks, proving that the so-called deep state can get something done when it digs, well, deep.
Some nuclear strategists argue that the ground-based nuclear weapons do not need to be replaced at all; they are far more vulnerable than weapons traveling under the sea on stealthy submarines, or that can be loaded on bombers. But the Pentagon doesn’t want to part with a third of the nuclear “triad,” and the silos and their command posts are big employers in the rural West.
They serve another function in the second Trump administration. The modernization program has proved to be the perfect thing if you were determined to hide how much you are spending on an airplane, especially one equipped to order up a nuclear strike, if needed.
In testimony before Congress in June, Troy E. Meink, the Air Force secretary, said that he thought the cost of the Air Force One renovations would be manageable. “I think there has been a number thrown around on the order of $1 billion,” he said. “But a lot of those costs associated with that are costs that we’d have experienced anyway, we will just experience them early,” before Boeing delivers its two Air Force Ones. “So it wouldn’t be anywhere near that.”
“We believe the actual retrofit of that aircraft is probably less than $400 million,” he said.
If so, that would be a bargain. But engineers and Air Force experts who have been through similar projects have their doubts that it can be accomplished for anything like that price. Members of Congress express concern that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane. When asked last week, the Air Force said it simply could not discuss the cost — or anything else about the plane — because it’s classified.
(For collectors of such bureaucratic evasions, yes, the Air Force is willing to discuss the cost of building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but not the cost of renovating the president’s aircraft.)
Only at the Pentagon could someone reprogram $934 million and expect no one to notice. The coffers were refilled with the passage of the budget reconciliation bill several weeks ago, budget officials say.
“The more we learn about this deal, the more disturbing it becomes,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who serves on the Armed Services Committee. “The security implications of accepting a private plane from a foreign nation as Air Force One and the resulting ethical concerns a gift of that sizes creates were already significant.”
But it was more worrisome, Ms. Shaheen said, that “this administration is diverting funds from the nuclear modernization budget to finance costly renovations to this plane.”
In doing so, she said, “we’re weakening our credibility to fund a vanity project for President Trump.”
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14) ‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has
J By Charlie English, Mr. English is the author of, among other books, “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.” July 27, 2025
Matt Lipps for The New York Times
I traced a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” to the library of the social sciences department at Warsaw University, a literary treasure trove heavy with the scent of dust and old paper, and so jammed with shelves that in places the only way to move around was sideways. For months I had been searching for this particular volume, a book that had played, in my view, a small but significant role in winning the Cold War.
There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.
While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States.
First published in English in 1949, Orwell’s novel describes the dystopian world of Oceania, a totalitarian state where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a huge government department called the Ministry of Truth. The ministry is ironically named: Its role is not to safeguard the truth but to destroy it, to edit history to fit the present needs of the party and its leader, Big Brother, since, as the slogan runs, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In the real Soviet system, every country had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, modeled on the Moscow template. In Poland, the largest Eastern European nation outside the Soviet Union, this censorship and propaganda apparatus was called the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances, and its headquarters occupied most of a city block in downtown Warsaw.
From art to advertising, television to theater, the Main Office reached into all aspects of Polish life. It had employees in every TV and radio station, every film studio and every publishing house. Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed even to buy a ream of paper. Books that did not conform to the censor’s rules were pulped.
The result was intellectual stultification, what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a logocracy, a society where words and language were manipulated to fit the propaganda needs of the regime. In the logocracy, the Warsaw Pact was said to protect Poland from attack by “revisionist” German neo-Nazis and “Western imperialists,” even though the main imperialist threat came from the East.
Troublesome people, inconvenient facts and awkward areas of journalistic inquiry were removed from public life. It was forbidden to reference the fraught history of Russo-Polish relations, for instance, or the secret police massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, or mention the fact that Poland had a giant alcoholism problem. People existed in a world of Orwellian “doublethink,” believing certain things to be true at home, but adopting a very different, party-sanctioned “truth” outside it.
Orwell was made a “nonperson” in the Soviet Union, after the publication of his satire of the Russian Revolution, “Animal Farm,” in 1945. It was dangerous even to mention the author’s name in print there, and when “1984” was published it was banned in the Eastern Bloc in all languages. But when copies of the novel did slip through the Iron Curtain, they had enormous power. The book was “difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess,” Milosz wrote, but Orwell — who had never visited Eastern Europe — fascinated people there because of “his insight into details they know well.”
What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West.
The C.I.A. program operated across the Eastern Bloc and assigned specialist editors for each country, from Hungary to the mighty Soviet Union itself. But it was in Poland that the books were most warmly received, partly because the Warsaw regime was more liberal than others in Eastern Europe and partly because Poland had a long tradition of underground literature dating back to tsarist times. From the late 1970s, banned books would also be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in Poland, often on presses bought and smuggled by associates of the C.I.A. program, amplifying the literature’s effect.
The first Polish translation of “1984” was published in France in 1953, by the Polish émigré Jerzy Giedroyc, a C.I.A. asset known to the agency by the cryptonym QRBERETTA. It was a copy of this edition that I found that day at Warsaw University. In 1957, this copy was given with a few other contraband titles to a Polish art critic who had been allowed to travel to Paris, who carried it back to Poland through the border. Inside the Eastern Bloc, the book spent the next three decades performing the task for which it had been published: quietly undermining Soviet Communism from within.
By the mid-1980s, Poland was flooded with uncensored publications, some smuggled in, many printed underground. The system of Communist Party censorship started to break down, and in losing its grip on information, the Polish state lost its grip on the people too. The Communists were forced to hold semi-free elections in June of 1989, which were won by the opposition movement, Solidarity. After Poland came the deluge: A year later, all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been replaced by democratically elected governments.
In the mid-2020s, “1984” is again being restricted, this time by conservative, Trump-aligned politicians in the United States. In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, which according to the governor “puts parents in the driver’s seat” when it comes to their children’s education. In fact SF 496 forces Iowa schools to remove from their libraries thousands of books of which cultural conservatives disapprove.
Mostly, SF 496, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, bans books that feature L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters or progressive themes such as feminism or are written by people of color. But the legislation also sweeps up several authors whose works lampoon totalitarianism and that were sent east by the C.I.A. book program, including Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell, whose “1984” and “Animal Farm” are both on banned lists.
SF 496 is but one cog in the growing apparatus of American censorship, as conservative action groups seek to ban books around the country. PEN America has documented close to 16,000 bans (instances in which a book has been withdrawn or access to it has been restricted because of its content) in schools since 2021, with 10,046 in the 2023-24 school year alone. The censorship efforts are mostly driven by Republican state legislators and parental-rights groups. Florida takes the lead, with more than 4,561 book bans recorded in that school year — including in one case a graphic novel adaptation of “1984” — via a combination of new state laws and parental pressure. Next come Iowa (with 3,671 book bans that year), Texas (538), Wisconsin (408), Virginia (121) and Kentucky (100).
Banning books doesn’t stop at the local level.This year, after Mr. Trump signed three executive orders aimed at combating “wokeness,” the Department of Defense’s education agency removed and reviewed more than 500 titles from its school system, including, according to one report, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which the C.I.A. had sent to the Eastern Bloc. Federal funding agencies have compiled a list of more than 350 banned words and phrases, including “women,” “diversity” and “ethnicity.”
In the Cold War, the United States chose “freedom” — democratic freedom, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom and freedom of choice — as its key point of difference with the Soviet enemy. Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents from both parties have wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of the “free world” that they led. When Ronald Reagan — who spearheaded the Cold War “freedom” agenda and oversaw an upswing in C.I.A. literary programs — spoke to the British Parliament in 1982, he invoked “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” It was no coincidence that George Minden, the leader of the C.I.A. book program, once described his operation as “an offensive of free, honest thinking.”
Mr. Trump, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis and their fellow travelers expound the virtues of the First Amendment while dismantling guardrails against disinformation and working to suppress political ideas they oppose. Book bans aren’t their only tool. They also block access for independent journalists, intimidate news organizations and defund outlets they perceive as hostile to the MAGA agenda, including NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.
There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)
The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”
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