*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
|
|
|
Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Abrego Garcia Was Beaten and Tortured in El Salvador Prison, Lawyers Say
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was made to kneel overnight, denied bathroom access and confined in an overcrowded cell with bright lights and no windows, his lawyers say.
By Alan Feuer, Published July 2, 2025, Updated July 3, 2025
A poster showing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia during a news conference with his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, outside the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., in April. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, was beaten, deprived of sleep and psychologically tortured during the nearly three months he spent in Salvadoran custody, according to court papers filed on Wednesday evening by his lawyers.
The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Maryland, detailed a litany of horrors that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said he suffered while being held at the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons.
His lawyers said that he and 20 other Salvadoran men who were deported to the prison from the United States on March 15 were once made to kneel overnight “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”
During the time he spent there, the lawyers said, Mr. Abrego Garcia was “denied bathroom access and soiled himself.” He and other prisoners were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell that had no windows, but was outfitted with bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day.
When Mr. Abrego Garcia first arrived at the prison, his lawyers maintained, he was greeted by an official who told him, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.”
Two weeks later, the lawyers added, he had lost nearly 31 pounds.
The court papers offer a startling glimpse of the conditions under which Mr. Abrego Garcia was held. Even though his description aligns with what is known about the prison and the treatment of detainees, the more than 200 Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT on the same set of flights that day were placed in a separate cell block, leaving it unclear whether they were subject to different conditions.
The papers were submitted to Judge Paula Xinis, who had issued the initial order in April instructing the Trump administration to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador. The papers included a revised version of the original complaint the lawyers filed in March seeking his return from Salvadoran custody. They asked Judge Xinis to immediately free their client from custody in the United States.
Mr. Abrego Garcia is currently being held by federal authorities in Nashville after the Trump administration, in a surprising move, brought him back from El Salvador last month after weeks of asserting it was powerless to do so. But the Justice Department stated that it had returned him for a specific reason: to stand trial on a federal indictment accusing him of having taken part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
The new filing by his lawyers appeared to undercut charges that he was a member of MS-13 as well as a specific accusation lodged by President Trump himself that his tattoos indicated he belonged to the gang.
The filing claimed that Salvadoran prison officials recognized that Mr. Abrego Garcia “was not affiliated with any gang” and acknowledged that his tattoos “were not gang-related,” going so far as to tell him at one point, “Your tattoos are fine.”
A spokeswoman for El Salvador’s president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Almost from the moment that Mr. Abrego Garcia was back on U.S. soil, there has been uncertainty about what might happen to him next.
It remains unclear if he will remain in jail on his criminal charges as the case moves through the courts or will be released on bail and placed instead into immigration custody as an undocumented migrant. It is also possible that he could be expelled from the country again just weeks after the Trump administration brought him back.
Along with their revised complaint, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed separate papers on Wednesday evening, repeating their request to Judge Xinis to issue a new order that would effectively bar him from being sent out of the country until further notice.
Later on Wednesday night, the Justice Department was expected to ask the federal judge in his criminal case to reverse another judge’s decision allowing his release and keep him locked up on the indictment as he awaits trial.
Much of the confusion has stemmed from ambiguous — even contradictory — statements from the Trump administration and from what appears to be dueling views from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security about how to handle the case.
Early last month, things seemed somewhat clearer.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced at a news conference on June 6 that Mr. Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States to face immigrant smuggling charges in Federal District Court in Nashville. She insisted that he would be re-deported only after his criminal case was over.
“Upon completion of his sentence,” Ms. Bondi said, “we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
But last week, a Justice Department lawyer introduced a new twist. During a hearing in Maryland, the lawyer, Jonathan Guynn, told Judge Xinis that the administration planned to expel Mr. Abrego Garcia again — this time, not to El Salvador but to an unnamed third country.
While Mr. Guynn made clear that there were “no imminent plans” to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia, other Trump officials immediately sought to clarify his comments. In some ways, their efforts only further muddied the waters.
First, a White House spokeswoman posted a message on social media describing news accounts of Mr. Guynn’s statements as “fake news.” Then an administration official, repeating what Ms. Bondi had said at her news conference, asserted that the Justice Department was still planning to try Mr. Abrego Garcia before deporting him again.
All of this was sufficiently perplexing to the lawyers handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s criminal case that they made an unusual request to a federal magistrate judge in Tennessee. Even though the judge, Barbara D. Holmes, had already decided that their client should be freed from criminal custody and handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, they asked her to delay his release for at least two weeks, concerned that if the transfer took place, D.H.S. might soon re-deport him.
The Justice Department agreed to the request. But in a filing to Judge Holmes, the department appeared to leave open the possibility of the thing it said would not happen — that D.H.S. might, in fact, expel Mr. Abrego Garcia again.
“The prosecution intends to see this case to resolution,” lawyers for the department told the judge. “Yet as stated before this court as recently as June 25, 2025, D.H.S. will and must follow their own process, relevant regulations, the existing federal statutory scheme, and appropriate case law in handling the defendant’s future immigration proceedings and potential deportation.”
In the coming days, there will be two hearings — one in Maryland and one in Tennessee — that will help determine what will happen to Mr. Abrego Garcia.
The first is scheduled for Monday in front of Judge Xinis who will consider, among other things, the request for the new order to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia in the United States. Such an order, if granted, would come months after her original decision, handed down in April, instructing the Trump administration to bring him back from overseas.
The second hearing is set to take place on July 16 in front of Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., the district court judge who is handling the criminal case. Judge Crenshaw is expected to reconsider the ruling by Judge Holmes freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia from criminal custody. He might also weigh in on the question of deportation.
Until then, Mr. Abrego Garcia will remain in the hands of federal jailers in Tennessee, placed there protectively by his lawyers.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) Supreme Court Lets Trump Deport Eight Migrants to South Sudan
The court’s order followed a broader one last month allowing removals to countries with which migrants have no connections.
By Adam Liptak and Mattathias Schwartz, July 3, 2025
Adam Liptak reports on the Supreme Court, and Mattathias Schwartz reports on federal courts.
The United States has held eight migrants at a military base in Djibouti while court cases played out. But an official said the Trump administration would now promptly send the men to South Sudan. Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the government to deport eight men who have spent more than a month held under guard on an American military base on Djibouti to South Sudan, granting a request from the Trump administration.
An administration official said it would promptly send the men, who hail from countries around the world, to the war-torn nation. Neither the United States nor South Sudan has said what will happen to the men on their arrival.
This was the second time the court has ruled in the case. Last month, in a broader ruling that was unsigned and offered no reasoning, the court paused a trial judge’s order that had barred the administration from deporting migrants to countries other than their own unless they had a chance to argue that they would face torture.
Lawyers for the eight men rushed back to the trial judge, who blocked their removal again. The administration then asked the justices to clarify that last month’s order properly applied to the men, too.
Thursday’s Supreme Court order, which was unsigned but included two pages of reasoning, said that it did.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the ruling could have grave consequences.
“What the government wants to do, concretely,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death.”
In May, the government loaded eight men onto a plane said to be headed to South Sudan, a violence-plagued African country where only one held citizenship.
After Judge Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston intervened, their flight landed instead in the East African nation of Djibouti.
The men, who have all been convicted of serious crimes in the United States, have been detained at Camp Lemonnier, a military base, ever since. They spend almost all their time inside a modular, air-conditioned container that the military usually uses as a conference room, according to court filings. Under constant guard, they wear shackles around their ankles, except when showering, using the bathroom or meeting remotely with their lawyers, a member of their legal team has said.
Before coming to the United States, they hailed from Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba and Myanmar. Just one is from South Sudan.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, welcomed Thursday’s ruling.
“These sickos will be in South Sudan by Independence Day,” she said.
Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the migrants, said the ruling comes “at the expense of the lives of eight men who are now subject to immediate removal to a war-torn country to which they have no ties.”
In a court filing last month, the administration said it had received “credible diplomatic assurances” from the government of South Sudan that the men would not be tortured. But Ms. Realmuto said she had no direct knowledge of those assurances and did not know what the South Sudanese government in Juba intended to do with the men after they landed.
In a filing by the migrants’ lawyers, an expert on South Sudan said it was likely that the men would by detained by the country’s security forces and then experience “torture, or conditions that amount to torture,” at their hands.
The court’s first involvement with the case came last month, when the justices first paused Judge Murphy’s ruling that all migrants whom the government seeks to deport to countries other than their own must first be given a chance to show that they would face risk of torture.
Within hours, lawyers for the eight men returned to Judge Murphy, asking him to continue blocking the deportations of the group.
Judge Murphy, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denied the motion as unnecessary. He said he had issued a separate ruling last month, different from the one the Supreme Court had paused, protecting the men in Djibouti from immediate removal.
He added that Justice Sotomayor had made the same point in her dissent from the ruling, which Justices Kagan and Jackson joined. “The district court’s remedial orders are not properly before this court because the government has not appealed them,” she wrote.
In Thursday’s ruling, the majority rejected that distinction, paused both sets of rulings and allowed the deportations to South Sudan.
Justice Kagan, who dissented previously, this time issued a concurring opinion. “I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote.
Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, said the court’s new order continued to give Judge Murphy inadequate guidance.
“Today’s order not only excuses (once again) the government’s undisguised contempt for the judiciary; it also leaves the district court without any guidance about how this litigation should proceed,” she wrote.
“Today’s order,” she added, “clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
Thursday’s order was the latest in a series of rulings related to immigration decided by the justices in summary fashion on what critics call the court’s shadow docket.
Some early decisions insisted on due process — notice and an opportunity to be heard — for migrants before they are deported.
More recent orders lifted protections for hundreds of thousands of people who had been granted temporary protected status or humanitarian parole, allowing them to be deported. And the rulings concerning so-called third-country deportations to places other than migrants’ home nations appeared to give little weight to due process.
The court’s recent moves have been cheered by the Trump administration, which has been negotiating with countries around the world to get them to accept deportees to help speed its efforts to remove thousands of migrants. “Fire up the deportation planes,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said after the court’s ruling on third-country deportations last month.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Trump Is Waging War on His Own Citizens
By Greg Grandin, July 4, 2025
Mr. Grandin is a professor of history at Yale and the author of “America, América.”
No president in the history of the Republic has used the word “America” as effectively as Donald Trump — not as a symbol to invoke unity but as kerosene to keep the home fires of our culture wars burning.
America, America: Make it great. It already is great. Keep it great. America must. America will. America First. “America,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the driver of much of his nativist domestic policy, “is for Americans and Americans only.”
But what does it mean to be an American if armed, masked men can sweep anybody, citizen or not, off the street, forcing people into unmarked S.U.V.s — to be, if Mr. Trump has his way, disappeared to remote Louisiana or taken to a prison camp in El Salvador?
Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship. His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.
Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill. Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said — not debt, not Medicaid cuts — compared to securing “ICE money.” Now, the agency — which already acts like a secret police — will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations.
Mr. Trump’s war on citizenship goes hand in hand with his politicization of the name of America, and though the first is unprecedented in its intensity, the second taps into a long, well, American tradition, one as old as the nation itself.
During the first half of the 1700s, most people living in the Western Hemisphere referred to the entire New World as America. Then, around the 1760s, in reaction to the British crown’s efforts to establish tighter control over its American possessions, dissident British subjects started using America in two senses, to mean both the New World and their sliver of that world, the narrow slip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea.
In 1777, the Articles of Confederation named the new country the United States of America but also referred to it as just America. That rhetorical conflation of the entire New World with one part of that world was aspirational, for many in the United States expected the nation to encompass the entire hemisphere, or at least soon reach the Pacific Ocean.
George Washington was among the first to appropriate America exclusively for the United States: “The name of American,” he told U.S. citizens in his 1796 Farewell Address, “belongs to you.” In contrast, the revolutionaries who sought to throw off Spanish rule did not claim the name America as their own.
For them, America symbolized not nationalism but internationalism. The Colombian political leader Francisco de Paula Santander wrote in 1818 that it mattered little where, exactly, he was born, for he “is nothing less than an American, and my country is any corner of America that isn’t ruled by the Spanish.” Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule, hoped that a free America — all of it — would lead humanity into a future ruled by law and justice.
Some within the United States shared this vision. In his 1821 Fourth of July oratory, John Quincy Adams previewed the kind of optimistic patriotism later associated with presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, saying that “America” gave the world the principles of “equal liberty, of equal justice and of equal rights.”
Adams’s vision was more hopeful than real. In the decades to come, slavery expanded, Indian removal and westward expansion accelerated and a bellicose nationalism, the kind today represented by MAGA, found its voice.
Adams watched in despair at what he called the “Anglo-Saxon, slaveholding exterminator of Indians” became a heroic national archetype. The momentum for war against Mexico built, especially after white “Texian” slaver-settlers broke free in 1836 from Mexican rule. Texans sharped the supremacist edge of white identity in opposition to Mexico, in the fantasy held by many that the new Texas Republic was just a steppingstone to turning the entire continent into a homeland for Anglo-Saxons. The Lone Star flag, said Texas’ president, Sam Houston, would be “borne by the Anglo-Saxon race” over Mexico and Central America. “Americanize this continent” by “the sword,” urged Ashbel Smith, another Texas statesman and slaver.
Battle-bred Anglo-Saxonism became, as Adams feared, a driving feature of Americanism, its virtues defined against the imagined vices of Spanish Americans. “Good, stable, just, equal, republican government will never exist in the Spanish republics,” wrote The New York Morning Herald in 1839, “until the Anglo‑Saxon race shall have possession of the reins of government over all South America.” The new Spanish American republics were, in other words, the world’s original “shithole” countries.
The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and then, the following year, invaded Mexico. By 1848, the U.S. Army had won the war, and though there were many excitable expansionists in favor of seizing “all Mexico,” the opposing opinion of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina won the day. Calhoun warned that incorporating the “mixed races” of Mexico into the United States would undermine “Caucasian” rule.
The United States couldn’t take them in as citizens. “Ours is the government of the white man,” Calhoun said. And there were too many Mexicans to make slaves. Congress limited itself to taking just Mexico’s less densely populated northern half.
Spanish America came up with a lasting response to Anglo-Saxonism, following William Walker’s 1855 invasion of Nicaragua. Walker, a Tennessean mercenary allied with Southern slavers, failed in his bid to “Americanize” Nicaragua, but his actions so outraged Spanish Americans that they began to talk of there being two irreconcilable Americas. Affixing the adjective “Latin” to America, they cast themselves as more humanist, spiritual and attuned to the social interdependence of human existence than their grubbing, individualistic, egotistic, conquering, enslaving “Saxon” neighbors to the north.
Today, the use of “America” to refer to the United States has become routine; most English speakers use it without hostile intent. Still, many Latin Americans bristle when representatives of the United States claim the name America as if there were no Latin America. And when someone like Mr. Miller says “America is for Americans,” the malice is palpable.
Writing in 1971, the Uruguayan journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano declared: “We’ve lost the right to call ourselves Americans.” Mr. Galeano was literate and urbane, but the poorer, mostly rural Mexicans who have crossed our Southern border for more than a century looking for work have had similar complaints. The Mexican norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, sings that the entire New World is “America,” and that “all those born here are Americans.” “We are more American,” goes another of the band’s songs, “than the Anglo-Saxon’s son.” Los Tigres is wildly popular among migrants, who today are stalked by ICE and whose children born on United States soil will, if Mr. Trump gets his way, be denied citizenship.
When the United States broke free of Colonial rule 249 years ago, it helped bring forth, as Adams said on a long-ago Fourth of July, modern principles of equality and justice. But it also conjured a backlash to those principles. Chattel slavery expanded monstrously, while race wars on the frontier nurtured the idea that the United States was not the equal of other nations: It was above, and it was better than the other new republics that made up “America.”
The ideologues at the core of Trumpism continue this tradition, imagining “America” as the heartland of a besieged Anglo-Saxonism. As in the 1840s, their shared fixation is Mexico. Then, the “great Teuton race” was spreading out, as the U.S. envoy to Mexico wrote on the eve of the Mexican American War, and would soon “pervade the continent.” Now it is turned inward, hunkered down behind a wall and urging the White House to crack down harder on migrants.
The fight over the meaning of America reveals MAGA nationalism for what it is: the latest expression of Anglo-Saxon supremacy — a desire to dominate the world, but not be held accountable by the world.
Who gets to call themselves American in Mr. Trump’s America? Ask Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen who was stopped by Border Patrol on June 12. Agents pushed him face first into a black metal fence as they demanded to know which hospital he was born in. “I’m American, bro!” Mr. Gavidia answered. “We are not safe, guys,” he later said, “not safe in America today.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Hamas Has a New Leader in Gaza. His Next Test: Cease-Fire Talks.
The rise of Izz al-Din al-Haddad in the chain of command suggests the group will hold firm to its position demanding a total end to the war before releasing all remaining hostages.
By Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, Published July 3, 2025, Updated July 4, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem, and Ronen Bergman reported from Tel Aviv
The primary obstacle to getting a deal between Hamas and Israel has been the permanence of any cease-fire. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
As the United States presses for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant group’s decision will largely hinge on its new de facto leader in Gaza.
The commander, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, took over the military wing in Gaza after Israeli forces killed Muhammad Sinwar, according to a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official and three Israeli defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to divulge sensitive details. On Thursday, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s spokesman, said that Mr. al-Haddad was Hamas’s new leader.
Mr. al-Haddad, who is in his mid-50s, helped plan the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the officials said.
He is believed to be in firm opposition to Israeli efforts to dislodge Hamas from power, suggesting that he could block any push to release all remaining hostages before a total end to the war in Gaza and a withdrawal of Israeli troops.
“He has the same red lines as the people before him,” said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs.
Mr. al-Haddad is thought to be based in Gaza City, his hometown. He is believed to have said in recent weeks that he will either achieve an “honorable deal” to end the war with Israel or else the war will become “a war of liberation or a war of martyrdom,” the Middle Eastern intelligence official said.
Indirect talks between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly failed to produce a cease-fire, prolonging the suffering of Palestinian civilians and the captivity of hostages.
But over the past week, the Trump administration has been pushing for a cessation in hostilities, helping to shape a new proposal that would begin with a 60-day pause in fighting, during which talks about an end to the war would happen.
As of Thursday, Hamas leaders were deliberating whether to agree to the proposal.
Izzat al-Rishq, a senior Hamas official, did not respond to a request for comment.
The primary obstacle to getting a deal between Hamas and Israel has been the permanence of any cease-fire. Hamas has insisted on a lasting end to the war in Gaza. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that Hamas’s military and governing capabilities must first be dismantled.
Since the Oct. 7 attack, Mr. al-Haddad has been the only senior Hamas commander to give an on-the-record interview, appearing in an Al Jazeera documentary that aired in late January.
“The leadership of the occupation, supported by America and the West, will have to submit to our just demands,” he said with his face concealed by a dark shadow. The demands, he said, include withdrawing from Gaza, stopping the war, releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing the reconstruction of Gaza and lifting restrictions on the entry and the exit of goods.
In the interview, he also spoke about Hamas’s deception of Israel before the October 2023 attack, and he said that the militant group had informed allies about its broad plans for it. But he added that the group had not shared the exact timing, and he did not clarify what details Hamas had provided to its allies.
Mr. al-Haddad, known to his compatriots as Abu Suheib, is one of the few remaining living commanders who served on its high-level military council on Oct. 7. At the time, he was serving as the leader of Hamas’s Gaza City division. Muhammad Deif, the leader of the military wing, and his deputy Marwan Issa were killed in 2024.
Raed Saad, a powerful member of the council and a close ally of Mr. al-Haddad, is still believed to be alive, according to the Middle Eastern intelligence official and one of the Israeli defense officials.
While the Israeli military has failed to kill Mr. al-Haddad, records from the Gaza health ministry say that his eldest son, Suheib, was among the people killed during the war. In April, the Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, announced the killing of Mahmoud Abu Hiseira, who it described as Mr. al-Haddad’s right-hand man.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The Israeli campaign has also reduced cities to rubble and precipitated a humanitarian crisis, in which Palestinians have struggled to find food and shelter.
The October 2023 attack on southern Israel that ignited the war resulted in 1,200 deaths; roughly 250 people were taken hostage.
A Hebrew speaker, Mr. al-Haddad has also spent time with hostages in northern Gaza, according to Israeli officials.
In late May, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said Israel intended to kill Mr. al-Haddad and Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator based in Qatar, who Hamas documents recovered by the Israeli military in Gaza show took part in the planning of the October assault.
Mr. al-Haddad views the history of Chechen resistance against Russian rule in the 1990s as an example that Hamas in Gaza should follow, the Middle Eastern intelligence official added.
For years, Chechen fighters battled with Russian troops in a war that left the region in tatters.
Iyad Abuheweila and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting to this article.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Cruelty and Competition vs. Kindness and Cooperation
By Bonnie Weinstein, July/August 2025
Socialists believe everyone has the right to the basic necessities of life—all the things that are necessary to become a happy, willing, caring and productive member of society.
Economic and social equality, democracy and freedom are essential to this goal. As socialists, we want to disarm the world’s military, we want to end war, we want to share the wealth of the world—wealth that we create by our labor—on the basis of equality and justice for all. That is socialism’s goal. War and capitalism’s competitive private-profit motive of production are the antithesis of this goal.
Competition under capitalism, contrary to uplifting civilization, has brought nothing but cruelty, devastation and war.
In a May 19, 2025, article in the New York Times by Williom J. Broad, titled, “A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret”:
“In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin’s superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.”
The threat of more war and nuclear annihilation was capitalism’s gift to the world by the victors World War II.
And the saber-rattling is ramping up yet again. On June 2, 2025, Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to bring his country to “‘war-fighting readiness,’ by building up to 12 new attack submarines and invest billions of pounds in nuclear and other weaponry as part of a new military strategy for a more dangerous world.”1 On June 13, 2025, the U.S.-backed Israeli Defense Force launched a military attack on Iran.2 And Trump celebrated his birthday, June 14, 2025, by rolling out “28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a robot dog” on the streets of Washington, DC—an astounding display of his brutal ego and the death weapons of capitalism.3 Even Putin managed to resurrect the legacy of Joseph Stalin—the man responsible for the slaughter of tens-of-thousands of the revolutionary workers and leaders of the Russian Revolution, and the resulting demise of the USSR, and its return to a capitalist economy.4
Capitalism’s message is clear; humanity must compete against each other to survive. The one with enough wealth and power to build the biggest bomb wins.
As ordinary working people we must accept as natural the possibility of nuclear annihilation, while competing on an unequal playing field just for the basic necessities of life.
Our children are dependent upon the financial resources of their parents. And as parents, we are solely responsible for their life and wellbeing.
We must work to put food into ours and our children’s mouths. We are either lucky enough to have relatives that can help us with our children, or we must pay others to take care of them or leave them unattended while we work.
It takes a village to raise a child—but not for the poor. There is no village when everyone around you is starving which is the situation with over 2.8 billion of the poorest people the world over.5 You can’t share food if you don’t have any.
Even in the wealthiest countries ordinary working people are struggling to keep up with healthcare, food and housing costs. And so are all their relatives and friends. That’s the point.
The natural order of capitalism is that there must be a vast gap between the wealthy and the poor—between the masses and the elite. It reinforces the capitalist myth that those that have accumulated all the wealth are better, more intelligent—more evolved than the masses. Their wealth is their proof!
This has been pounded into our heads in every way possible. Capitalism teaches the masses to think that those who have more are better and more deserving than those who have less.
Most importantly, capitalism wants us to think that those who are better off financially must guard against the poor—keep them in their place—because if they are allowed to have more, then those who are “better” will have less. Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system destined for annihilation.
The offspring of the capitalist class are set for life the moment they are born. For them, competition is a means to increasing their wealth while risking nothing themselves.
Big businesses compete by reducing labor costs while increasing profits—either by replacing workers with AI and machines, speeding up production—or moving their entire facilities to countries where labor is cheap and labor laws are virtually non-existent. And—as workers—we must compete with each other for the privilege of being exploited and oppressed.
Competition for survival
Applying for a job is competitive. So is renting an apartment, buying a house—even reaching for the last can of beans in the supermarket can be competitive because there is not enough to go around—so the strongest or fastest or the one with the most money gets the beans.
But the capitalists who own the factories that produce those beans will accumulate vast profits for themselves because the cost of labor to produce the beans is a tiny fraction of the money they get from selling them.
That, in a nutshell, is how capitalism works in favor of the bosses at the expense of workers every time.
The capitalist trajectory is toward more cruelty
Capitalist competition, underscored by the threat of nuclear annihilation, is consciously designed to pit us against each other.
Instead of encouraging us to perform to the very best of our ability in cooperation for the benefit of all, capitalist competition rewards cruelty, aggression, deception, bullying and hatefulness.
They portray the rule of the wealthy over the poor as a natural order of human nature that can never be changed. When industries’ profits begin to falter businesses must extract more from their workers.
Pitting workers against each other facilitates their money grab by placing blame for hardship on the poorest and most vulnerable workers.
The current mass scapegoating of immigrants as the cause of all of our economic woes fits right in with their strategy of divide and conquer—to get the working class to blame each other instead of the economic system of capitalism.
Succumbing to the propaganda of divide and conquer among the working class is what keeps the capitalist dictatorship in power.
Cutting Medicaid and demonizing migrants
On May 29, 2025, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!” Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said. The next day she posted an “apology.” In it she exposed her cruelty and proudly expressed her indifference to the suffering of others:
“I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall. I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”
And on May 14, 2025, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who campaigned for “universal healthcare for all” in his bid for Governor, proposed freezing enrollment of undocumented adults in the state’s version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, as soon as January. He also will seek to charge those who remain in the program $100 a month beginning in 2027—a cost they can’t possibly afford.
Further, ICE has removed the children of undocumented migrants from their classrooms—some as young as five or six—deporting them and their parents, ripping them from their communities.
And even though 53 percent of people disapprove of Trumps immigration policies, the deportations continue. As of June 11, 2025, “…the Department of Homeland Security provided TIME with updated figures from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: more than 207,000 deported.”6
Demonizing the most disadvantaged and vulnerable
It’s not only the Republicans who are demonizing migrants, so are the Democrats. In fact, capitalist parties in countries across the globe are reinforcing the demonization of migrants as the cause for the decline in the living standards of their “citizens” while the wealthy get richer.
But “citizens” of the United States have been living on stolen land since the first white man stepped onto this continent.
People in poverty across the world today are being forced to migrate—as they have for millennia. And they are criminalized, murdered and persecuted for it.
Can’t see the forest for the trees
We have been duped for centuries by the elite owners of the means of production and their political mouthpieces who, through the enslavement of the working masses in one form or another, have stolen the wealth our labor created by pitting us against each other instead of against the entire capitalist class who are the real thieves.
We work their land, their factories, their businesses for a pittance, while they wallow in enough wealth to create life ending weapons of mass destruction of astronomical proportions costing trillions of our dollars. Our taxes pay for their weapons—it doesn’t cost the commanders of capitalism a dime.
They make war but they don’t fight in wars—they have us to do that. It’s our blood on the battlefields; it’s our homes that are demolished. And it is we who are sacrificing our lives to enable them.
If we don’t stand united against them, we are succumbing to them
The threat of nuclear annihilation is the ultimate weapon of fascism. It is the threat of annihilation if the power of the ruling capitalist class is challenged. The longer capitalism exists; the calamity of world-ending war becomes inevitable.
Genocide has been a staple of the global expansion of capital throughout history from the ruling monarchs to the corporate executives of the modern-day war industry, and their political representatives among the capitalist ruling class across the globe.
Every war conquest has resulted in mass murder. Both sides of the battle on the ground are annihilated—while the winning commanders—who have not risked their own lives or the lives of their families—claim the wealth and assume the rule over those of us on both sides who managed to survive.
Tricking masses of people into thinking that war and the power of the wealthy elite over the masses, is the natural order of things, is the only way a minority ruling class can endure.
But even trees live in cooperation with each other and their species by separating their canopies to allow light to shine down on saplings.7
A healthy human society can only be built upon cooperation, democracy, social and economic equality. And the only way to achieve that goal is to take the means of production out of the private hands of the wealthy elite and put it into the hands of we who do the work.
We, the masses of humanity working cooperatively together can produce more than enough to fulfill the needs and wants of all while maintaining the highest quality of production methods—production that doesn’t pollute our environment or endanger other species on our planet.
This not only means that environmental protection and the rational use of our resources must become a priority. Producing high quality products must become a priority by ending capitalism’s production of products-designed-to-fail so that they must be replaced over and over. The capitalist production method disregards environmental, and workplace hazards, wastes resources and exploits labor. For the capitalist class, the private accumulation of personal wealth trumps all.
Capitalism is completely irrational and can only lead to the end of life as we know it. That is the destiny of capitalism.
Clearly, the world’s commanders of capital will only get more desperate and violent as their wars against each other for control of natural resources, and the further oppression of the world’s working class escalates.
Only a world socialist revolution can save us
We can end capitalism’s road to global annihilation only if we unite together to disarm the entire capitalist arsenal—both its military and political dictatorship—everywhere.
Cooperating and organizing a unified, democratically structured, force for peace, equality and justice is the only way to transform our world from one of cruelty and brutal competition to one of kindness and cooperation.
Socialism is the only way to rationally and equitably share the wealth produced by the product of our collective labor worldwide without destroying the world in the bargain. It’s our only hope and time is of the essence!
1 “U.K. Faces Most Serious Military Threat Since Cold War, Starmer Says”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/world/europe/uk-defense-review-starmer-nuclear-submarines.html
2 “June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2025_Israeli_strikes_on_Iran
3 “250th BIRTHDAY PARADE—Parade equipment”
https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/06/03/68287c78/equipment-at-army-festival-parade.pdf
4 “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/world/europe/stalin-image-moscow-subway.html
5 “World hunger facts: What you need to know in 2025”
https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts/#:~:text=World%20hunger%20by%20the%20numbers,hunger%2Drelated%20causes%20every%20year.
6 “What the Data Reveals About Trump’s Push to Arrest and Deport More Migrants”
https://time.com/7292939/trump-deportations-ice-arrests/
7 “Crown shyness: are trees social distancing too?
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=tree+canopies+separage+to+allow+more+light+onto+saplings&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Where Do Israel-Hamas Truce Negotiations Stand?
Hamas wants to ensure that the latest cease-fire proposal has sufficient guarantees that negotiations will lead to a permanent end to the Gaza war.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, Published July 3, 2025, Updated July 4, 2025
Displaced Palestinians at a tent camp in Gaza City in June. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Hamas said on Friday that it would inform Arab mediators of its “final decision” on the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza after it consults with Palestinian factions. Hours later, President Trump told reporters that he expected a response from Hamas within 24 hours.
Israelis and Palestinians have been waiting anxiously as Hamas deliberates on whether to accept the proposal for a 60-day cease-fire and the release of hostages.
A critical question is whether Hamas has determined that it has sufficient guarantees that the revised plan will eventually lead to a permanent end to the nearly two-year-old war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and reduced much of the territory to rubble.
Hamas has insisted that any cease-fire plan must pave a path to a complete and lasting cessation of hostilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has insisted on a temporary cease-fire until Hamas’s military wing and government are dismantled.
“Hamas’s focus is on ending the war,” said Hussam Dajani, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza.
Even if Hamas accepts the proposal, both sides would likely still need time to negotiate more details before a cease-fire takes effect.
Here are the main elements of the current proposal, according to an Israeli defense official and a Palestinian close to Hamas who were briefed on its details. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Hostage Releases
The proposal calls for the release of 10 living hostages still held in Gaza and the return of 18 hostages’ bodies, in exchange for the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners.
The exchanges would be staggered over five stages during the 60-day truce.
That differs from what was outlined in a U.S. proposal in May that called for the release of all captives within a week of the cease-fire beginning.
Withdrawal of Israeli Forces From Gaza
Israel would have to pull back troops deployed in Gaza under the proposed deal, according to those briefed on the proposal, who did not provide more details.
It was not immediately clear if that pertained to all forces or just some. During a cease-fire earlier this year, the Israeli military withdrew from parts of Gaza but did not leave the territory altogether.
Assurances on Permanently Ending the War
The proposal states that the United States and the Arab mediators, Qatar and Egypt, will ensure that serious negotiations to end the war will take place during the 60-day cease-fire, and that they will continue beyond that time frame if necessary.
The proposal said Mr. Trump was committed to working toward guaranteeing that negotiations take place in “good faith” until a final deal is achieved.
On Wednesday, however, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that the war was not on the verge of ending. “There won’t be Hamas,” he said. “We will free our hostages, and we will defeat Hamas.”
No More Hostage Handover Ceremonies
Under the proposal, Hamas would refrain from holding televised handover ceremonies like those it staged when releasing hostages during a two-month truce that began in January.
The ceremonies, in which Israeli hostages were often made to give speeches thanking their captors, drew international criticism and infuriated Israelis.
Aaron Boxerman, Ronen Bergman and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) The Cost of Victory: Israel Overpowered Its Foes, but Deepened Its Isolation
It is more secure from threats than at any time since its founding. But the war in Gaza, and attacks on Iran and Lebanon, have undercut Israel’s standing among the world’s democracies.
By Michael D. Shear, Reporting from London, July 5, 2025
It’s Israel’s Middle East now.
After three-quarters of a century fighting hostile neighbors, the tiny Jewish country, about the size of New Jersey, has all but vanquished its enemies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen and now even Iran itself, the one backing them all.
The exercise of raw power has allowed Israel, for the first time since its creation in 1948, a future mostly free from immediate threats. The risk of a nuclear Iran is diminished, or perhaps gone. Israel has stable, if uneasy, relations with Persian Gulf Arab states. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cemented his partnership with President Trump.
The new reality in Israel, said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and former top aide to Mr. Netanyahu, is that places once under constant threat from Lebanon, Syria or Gaza “will be more secure than Manhattan.”
But at what cost?
Mr. Netanyahu’s relentless and unapologetic military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 people and took 250 people hostage has cemented the view of Israel as a pariah, its leadership accused of genocide and war crimes, and disdained by some world leaders. In opinion polls globally, most people have a negative view of Israel.
In Gaza, the war against Hamas has taken a devastating toll, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving more than a million homeless and hungry. Much of the enclave has been reduced to rubble. Poverty and hopelessness are rampant.
Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have also been killed and officials believe about 20 living hostages are still imprisoned in Hamas tunnels after 631 days.
Israel’s actions have shattered a rock-solid, bipartisan consensus in the United States for defending Israel. Now, support for the country has become a fiercely contentious issue in Congress, the subject of angry debates and protests on college campuses and fuel for a surge in antisemitic incidents in the United States and around the world.
The political climate has become deeply polarized. Many supporters of Israel denounce any criticism as antisemitic hate, while those opposed to Israeli policies vow not to be silenced by a label they call unfair.
Inside Israel, the decision to prioritize military victories over the return of the hostages has deeply wounded many people. And the violence has strained the good will of the country’s allies and neighbors.
Yet many Israelis welcome the prospect of a future in which they are no longer surrounded by well-armed enemies determined to do them harm, even if it means being viewed negatively by the rest of the world.
In 1981, Menachem Begin, then the prime minister of Israel, urged Israelis to “never pause to wonder what the world will think or say.” He told a group of American Jews that “the world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him.”
But 20 months of fighting in all directions has had consequences. Another generation of Palestinians living under occupation will see some radicalized to fight against Israel. Israel has created a new wave of global opinion critical of its goals and methods. And many Israelis now feel threatened while abroad, even as they are more secure at home.
Surging Protests
One recent Saturday, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in Russell Square in central London. Their message: “End the Genocide. Stop Arming Israel. Stop Starving Gaza.”
The rally was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which was founded in 1982. Ben Jamal, the director of the group, said Israel’s actions had supercharged its efforts to isolate Israel from the world’s democracies and force a change in its behavior with boycotts and calls for disinvestment.
Before the Oct. 7 attacks, the British group had 65,000 members; now it claims more than 300,000. Two years ago, there were 65 active branches in cities and towns around Britain. Today, there are more than 100.
“People see the scale of the slaughter,” said Mr. Jamal, who is Palestinian. “And then they’re hearing the genocidal rhetoric. They’re hearing Israel’s ministers saying: ‘We’re going to devastate everything. We’re dealing with human animals. Nothing will be left.’ And they’re seeing the result of that.”
Israeli officials strongly deny the accusations of genocide, say they are fighting to eliminate the threat from Hamas and that the military takes precautions to mitigate civilian casualties.
The activist movement to isolate and censure Israel — known as B.D.S., for boycott, divestment and sanctions — has been around for years. There has not been a widespread move by companies to cut ties with Israel, but the wars have given the movement new momentum.
The company that runs the British Co-op chain of groceries, one of the country’s largest, announced last week that it would stop sourcing items from Israel, adding it to a list of rogue countries, including Afghanistan, Russia, Iran and Libya.
In a Pew Research survey of 24 countries around the world published last month, negative opinions about Israel have surged. In 20 countries, more than half of the people said they had an unfavorable view of Israel. In eight countries — Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey — more than 75 percent held that view.
Only two countries, Nigeria and Kenya, reported majorities with favorable views of Israel.
For Israel, the ripple effects have been felt in the Persian Gulf, where before Oct. 7, countries like Saudi Arabia appeared willing to establish diplomatic and economic ties with Israel.
Now, most analysts believe that hopes for normal relations have been drastically set back as the war in Gaza has dragged on, in part because the Gulf nations have tied the idea of diplomatic ties to a resolution of the Palestinian issue — a resolution that seems more distant than ever.
In the occupied West Bank, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has emboldened Israeli settlers encroaching on land seen as integral to a future Palestinian state, and there has been a surge in violence by extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians. The Israeli military has launched the most intense crackdown on West Bank militancy in a generation, carrying out destructive raids, killing hundreds of people and arresting thousands.
But Israel’s diplomatic outlook in the region is not all grim. It is negotiating with Syria’s new government about a potential truce. And once the Gaza war ends, normalization with Saudi Arabia could be back on the table.
Mr. Jamal said Mr. Netanyahu will have to live with the consequence of his military actions.
“On one level, he’s been absolutely successful,” he said. “But has he got the outcome he wanted? I’m not sure.”
‘Paying the Price’
Lior Soharin, 25, grew up fearing missiles in Nahariya, Israel, just south of the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah, once a powerful Iran-backed proxy group, routinely launched crude but dangerous rockets over the border. Israel frequently responded with devastating strikes of its own.
Mr. Soharin is now a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying law and economics. His 280-day service in the Israeli military reserves ended last month, and he said he was pleased that Hezbollah’s military abilities had been so diminished. But he does not feel safer yet.
“Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran — maybe they are not an existential threat right now,” he said. “But after Oct. 7, our feeling of self confidence, the feeling of security in Israel, was shaken very strongly, and it is very hard to build it back.”
Opinion surveys reveal the deep divisions that remain within the Israeli public even as the country’s military strikes in Iran have bolstered Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity. In one poll, two-thirds of Israelis said they wanted to end the war in Gaza with a settlement that could bring the hostages home.
Within Israel, the war has exacerbated tensions between the government and members of Israel’s Arab minority, some of whom have been arrested for social media posts about the war.
Nira Sharabi is the widow of Yossi Sharabi, who was kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, and was killed after 100 days in captivity in Gaza in an Israeli airstrike. While she blames Hamas for her husband’s death, she said she was frustrated by the failure to free the remaining hostages, calling it a cost of Mr. Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
“As it looks now, they are paying the price,” she said of the hostages. “Yes, the government is not dealing with them, but with other things. However we look at it, they are paying the price.”
Mr. Soharin said he, too, wanted the war in Gaza to end so the hostages can come home. He called the damage done to Hamas “very, very good,” but he said the consequences for Israelis around the world had been serious.
“Israelis like to travel a lot to Europe and to other places, and, I think, to speak Hebrew in Europe now is pretty dangerous,” he said. “You might get hurt.”
He is also angry about the accusations of brutality leveled by some against Israel and its citizens.
“We’re not even close to doing the things we’re being accused of. It’s nonsense,” Mr. Soharin said. “Of course, there is civilian death, and I think nobody should be happy. But that’s war. It’s a very, very bad situation. And we didn’t start this war.”
Anger, Activism and Violence
Just 46 percent of Americans in the latest Gallup survey expressed support for Israel, the lowest number since the company began asking the question a quarter-century ago. A third of the respondents in the United States said they sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, up from just 13 percent in 2003.
Around the world, outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza has been expressed largely as peaceful protests demanding an end to the war, but also by praise for the Hamas attacks, and even by some targeted attacks on Jews, killed in the name of opposition to Israel.
In Washington, two employees of the Israeli Embassy were fatally shot in May in an attack officials called a hate crime and terrorism. The authorities said the gunman told them: “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
In Boulder, Colo., a man firebombed marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. One woman later died of her wounds.
There have also been Islamophobic attacks. Days after the Oct. 7 attack, a man in Chicago fatally stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy who lived at his property, an attack prosecutors said was motivated by hatred of Muslims.
Peaceful demonstrations have sometimes turned ugly, triggering clashes with the police on some of America’s most prestigious campuses. More than 100 people were arrested at Columbia University in 2024 after the police were called into break up what organizers had called the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
At Britain’s Glastonbury music festival last weekend, the punk rap duo Bob Vylan chanted “death to the I.D.F.,” a reference to the Israeli military, prompting American officials to deny the band’s visas for a tour set to begin in October.
On Oct. 7, 2024, a year after the attacks by Hamas inside Israel, the pro-Palestine group that had organized student encampments at Columbia University issued a statement calling for “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
The statements were meant to shock and provoke. They were at the extreme end of the spectrum and did not represent the views of most students, experts say.
But they underscore an undeniable shift in opinion about Israel. Many surveys have found that non-Jewish students sympathize with Palestinians, while Jews on many campuses say they feel ostracized and socially isolated.
The Trump administration has seized on the campus divisions to accuse universities of failing to respond to antisemitism. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that Columbia University had acted “with deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students.”
Democratic lawmakers say Mr. Trump is exaggerating the situation for political gain. In April, five Jewish senators wrote in a letter to the president that his stated goal of fighting antisemitism was “simply a means to an end to attack our nation’s universities.”
Diplomatic Scolding
Long before Oct. 7, Israel had been the target of official international condemnation. Over decades, the United Nations has passed dozens of resolutions criticizing Israel.
But the denunciation has intensified, as international organizations and world leaders have repeatedly called on Israel to restrain its military and end the war in Gaza.
In 2024, Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state, a sharp but largely symbolic gesture designed to pressure Israel to cease the fighting. President Emmanuel Macron of France has made it clear he intends to do the same soon.
Mr. Macron’s position and the actions of the other European leaders have enraged members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, who accused the French president of leading “a crusade against the Jewish state.”
But many Israelis, like Mr. Amidror, the retired general, shrug off the criticism.
“The ability of Israel to defend itself and to get rid from its enemies,” he said, “is much, much, much, much more important than the international community’s view about Israel.”
Isabel Kershner and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Israeli Ministers to Meet on Next Steps Toward Gaza Truce
Israel is poised to decide whether to proceed with talks after Hamas said it had responded positively to the latest cease-fire proposal.
By Aaron Boxerman, Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir, July 5, 2025
Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/world/middleeast/israeli-ministers-hamas-gaza-ceasefire.html
A man inspecting damage after an Israeli strike in central Gaza on Friday. The war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced much of the territory to rubble. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli ministers planned to meet on Saturday evening to decide on the next steps in the latest American-backed effort to reach a Gaza cease-fire after Hamas said it was ready for negotiations on the proposal.
Late Friday night, Hamas delivered its formal response to the cease-fire framework, which it said was “characterized as being positive,” and added that it was prepared to start new talks about how to put it into effect.
Israeli officials will have to determine whether to send negotiators to talks with Hamas to flesh out the finer points. The country’s security cabinet — a group of senior ministers — is expected to convene on Saturday night for consultations.
The two sides refuse to meet face to face, so they will most likely travel to an Arab country where Qatari or Egyptian mediators will ferry messages back and forth. No venue has been announced.
Under the latest proposal, the sides would observe a 60-day truce during which hostages would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners and Israeli troops would pull back to agreed lines, according to people familiar with the talks, who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive issues. Mediators would use the pause to negotiate an agreement on permanently ending the war.
Though both Israel and Hamas appear willing to explore the new plan, they still could stall over the most sensitive sticking points, as has happened before.
Hamas has been seeking guarantees that any truce lead to a lasting conclusion to the conflict, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said he does not want to permanently stop the war before ending Hamas’s rule over Gaza.
According to a Hamas official and another person briefed on the negotiations, Hamas has requested changes to the latest proposal on at least three issues. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
One is how aid would enter Gaza during the truce. Another is how far Israeli forces would withdraw from positions in Gaza. And the third is the language around guarantees that the deal would create a path toward ending the war.
Mediators have repeatedly failed to secure a comprehensive cease-fire. But President Trump says he hopes an initial truce could come together as soon as next week.
Mr. Netanyahu is set to meet Mr. Trump in Washington on Monday. Just weeks ago, Mr. Trump fulfilled one of Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding ambitions when the United States joined an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program.
“I’m very optimistic, but look, it changes from day to day,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday, shortly after Hamas replied to the U.S.-backed framework.
Israel’s war with Hamas is the deadliest episode in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, killing more than 57,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry. The ministry’s toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but its lists include thousands of children.
The war was set off by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that the Israeli authorities said killed about 1,200 people and saw about 250 people taken as hostages to Gaza. It was the deadliest single day in Israel’s history.
Israel believes that about 20 hostages are still alive and that the bodies of 30 others are still being held in Gaza.
The war has gone on for more than 20 months, punctuated by two brief cease-fires during which hostages were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. The last truce began in mid-January and lasted for about two months before Israel resumed attacks in Gaza.
The war has been devastating for Gazan civilians, many of whom have spent more than a year displaced, fleeing for their lives across the enclave. Israeli airstrikes have reduced much of the territory to rubble, while restrictions on goods have often made finding enough food and water a daily struggle.
On Saturday, the U.N. World Food Program said a recent assessment had found that “nearly one person in three is not eating for days at a time” in Gaza. Surging malnutrition had left about 90,000 children and women needing urgent treatment, the group said.
“The situation is the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to find words to describe the level of desperation I have witnessed,” said Carl Skau, the agency’s deputy executive director, who recently visited Gaza City. “People are dying just trying to get food.”
Hundreds of Palestinians trying to get food from a newly imposed Israeli-backed system for distributing aid have been killed, Gaza health officials say. Some Palestinian witnesses have said that Israeli soldiers, who guard the outer approaches to the aid hubs, have shot at people as they tried to reach the distribution sites.
The Israeli military has responded to a number of reports of killings near aid sites by saying that its troops had fired “warning shots,” but has largely not taken responsibility for the killings.
Israel says the aid initiative — known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — is intended to prevent Hamas from benefiting from international aid. The United Nations and other aid groups oppose the system, saying Israel is trying to control the flow of food to advance military aims in Gaza.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Virginia Has Become a Hotbed for Immigration Arrests
Lawyers and advocates have theories as to why immigration arrests have accelerated in Virginia at a rate more than that of almost any other state.
By Campbell Robertson, July 5, 2025
Immigration agents take a man from El Salvador into custody in Herndon, Va., in January. Credit...Josh Morgan/Imagn Images
The pace of immigration arrests has shot up across the country under the second Trump term, but few places have seen a spike quite as sharp as in Virginia.
Arrests in the state by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are up more than 350 percent since 2024, one of the steepest increases in the country. This outpaces the growth in ICE arrests in Democratic-run states like California and New York and Republican-controlled states like Florida and Texas. Nearly 3,000 people were arrested by ICE in Virginia in the first five months of 2025, on par with numbers in a much larger state like New York.
It is not entirely clear why Virginia, a politically middle-of-the-road state, has become such a magnet for immigration enforcement.
The state’s immigrant population has increased dramatically in recent decades, and Virginia is now home to more than a million immigrants, most of them citizens or legal residents. But compared to some other states where arrests haven’t risen as much, like neighboring Maryland, people born in foreign countries make up a smaller percentage of the population.
One difference may be that ICE has the unqualified backing of Virginia’s leaders, as well as sheriff departments across the state.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican nearing the end of his term, has been full-throated in his support for President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Sounding a constant refrain about the perils of “dangerous criminal illegal immigrants,” Mr. Youngkin has championed the work of a federal-state task force aimed at combating “transnational organized crime.” He has directed his state’s law enforcement agencies to partner with federal immigration authorities and threatened to withhold funding from local governments that do not fully cooperate with ICE.
“We just passed over 2,500 arrests through our Virginia Homeland Security Task Force, 2,500 violent criminals who are here illegally,” Mr. Youngkin said at a news conference on Wednesday at the Virginia State Police Headquarters. “This is why today, Virginia is safer.”
While some of the thousands of undocumented immigrants arrested in Virginia this year are accused of serious crimes, immigrant advocates say they know plenty who had no such records.
“We see people getting detained at 7-Eleven or coming back from stores where they go to buy clothes or food,” said Marilyn Figueroa, a lead organizer for CASA, an immigrant rights group.
She described an asylum seeker who was married with three children and had his own landscaping company, and then was deported after some 20 years in the United States.
Ms. Figueroa said she was also seeing more people arrested after being stopped by the police for traffic infractions like speeding or missing a taillight.
Sheriffs in 19 Virginia counties have entered into formal partnerships with ICE, and nearly all of these agreements promise the highest level of cooperation, with local law enforcement able to make arrests on the suspicion of immigration violations. While most of these counties are rural, investigative news outlets have reported that some populous Virginia counties also shared data from license plate readers with federal immigration authorities. (A state law that took effect this month now prohibits that.)
The majority of ICE arrests have taken place in the Northern Virginia suburbs or in the Richmond metropolitan area. Roughly twice as many arrests have taken place in Fairfax County — the wealthy, densely populated and strongly Democratic county outside Washington — than in any other county in Virginia.
This is in part because these places have large and active immigrant communities. But several lawyers suggested the nearness to Washington may more than anything explain why Virginia — and Northern Virginia in particular — has become such a hub of ICE activity.
“Virginia often just because of its proximity resonates more with the White House than other states,” said Ava Benach, an immigration lawyer in Washington. The fact that enforcement has been heaviest in Fairfax County is unsurprising, she said, both because the county is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants and in light of Mr. Trump’s explicit pledge to focus enforcement efforts in Democratic jurisdictions.
It is, in other words, a convenient target for both practical and political reasons.
“I don’t think anybody in the White House is afraid of the Fairfax County supervisors,” Ms. Benach said.
In March, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, joined ICE agents for a highly publicized raid in Arlington, Va. “Northern Virginia is safer after a successful operation getting criminal aliens and gang members off our streets,” she said in a post on X.
Later that month, Mr. Youngkin stood alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi for a news conference announcing the arrest of a man in Northern Virginia who prosecutors said was a gang leader. The federal charges against the man were later dropped so he could be handed over to ICE for deportation.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return requests for comment.
In addition to being highly visible, Fairfax County is also the site of Virginia’s main immigration court, which has become a target for ICE enforcement actions. In June, ICE agents arrested people who had come for immigration hearings at the courthouse in Fairfax, as well as at a courthouse in Loudoun County, also in Northern Virginia.
These are part of a pattern of courthouse arrests across the Virginia and nationally, not only at immigration courts but in and around county courthouses as well.
“ICE has been really aggressively going after low-hanging fruit,” said Miriam Airington-Fisher, who runs an immigration law firm in Richmond. “If you go into a traffic docket in a community with a high Latino population or high immigrant population, you know you’re going to be able to scoop a bunch of people up.”
More than a dozen immigrants were recently arrested in and around the courthouse in Chesterfield County in the Richmond suburbs. According to Jessica Schneider, a member of Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors, those detained included a man who had been in the country for decades and had come to court to pay fines for traffic violations.
Many expect arrests like these to ramp up even more as ICE agents try to meet the high expectations set by the White House. And with the passage of Mr. Trump’s sprawling policy bill, which includes tens of billions of dollars in funding for immigration enforcement, the acceleration of ICE arrests in Virginia may quickly be matched all around the country, according to Luis Aguilar, the director of the Virginia office of CASA.
“Virginia is a testing ground,” Mr. Aguilar said. “They’re testing the messaging, the tactics and how they operate.” With ICE getting a huge influx of funding, he said, “they will be able to open up other field offices, contract other ICE agents, and they’re going to be able to replicate what they are doing in Virginia.”
Verónica Zaragovia contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) Under Trump’s Crackdown, a New Crop of Immigrant Rights Groups Rises
The latest networks of volunteers are hyperlocal and focused on responding to federal actions. As the crackdown becomes more intense, so could confrontations.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam Jordan, July 5, 2025
Angy Valencia, at the lectern, and other organizers from Siembra NC spoke to parishioners about their rights at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Greensboro, N.C. Credit...Kate Medley for The New York Times
The call came into the hotline one afternoon in March: A group of officers, masked and in plainclothes, were taking away a young woman in a hijab.
“‘Someone is being kidnapped!’” the caller said to Danny Timpona, the operator who answered the phone. His group, the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts, had been preparing for such a moment.
Within minutes, Mr. Timpona sent out volunteers to verify the report in Somerville, a suburb northwest of Boston. When they arrived to empty streets, they began knocking on doors, looking for anyone who could help them piece together what occurred. One neighbor offered footage from a home security camera.
The video, which has since racked up millions of views, captured agents from the Department of Homeland Security surrounding Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen and doctoral student at Tufts University who spent the next six weeks in detention. It gave the nation one of the earliest scenes of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
A crop of grass-roots immigrant rights networks like Mr. Timpona’s has been rising across the country to try to halt President Trump’s agenda of mass deportation. They aimto quickly corroborate the presence of immigration officers. They document apprehensions that might otherwise go unnoticed. And they spread the word on social media about people being detained.
These groups have recently been most visible in Los Angeles, where an immigration raid at a clothing wholesaler prompted a rapid response from activists who confronted federal agents. Days of protests followed.
This latest iteration of immigrant rights battles could bring more intense confrontations. Trump administration officials have sought to cast many actions of immigrant rights lawyers and activists — from protests to know-your-rights presentations — as enabling illegal immigration and threatening to national security.
In Colorado, Homeland Security officials have said that social media posts from the immigrant rights network in Denver allowed an undocumented man wanted in Italy for child sexual assault to escape. In Maryland, Baltimore police officers have been placed in the middle of tense face-offs, as activists and residents have accused them of actively cooperating with federal immigration officials.
In cities like Boston and Los Angeles, some residents have rushed out of their homes to join activists who film and shout at immigration agents splitting up families, and some are concerned the flare-ups could worsen as tensions rise. The newer activists point to masked agents who are taking away friends and neighbors with more aggressive tactics and not enough due process.
“We are not trying to use violence,” said Ron Gochez, the leader of Unión del Barrio, a group that has been organizing protests in Los Angeles. “We don’t want to use violence, but what is happening to our community is completely violent.”
Evolution of a Movement
In the heated civil rights fights of the 1960s, some of the nation’s oldest immigrant advocacy and Latino civil rights groups drew on tactics from groups like the Black Panthers to monitor police brutality and protect their communities from racial and ethnic profiling. Over the next two decades, a few went on to expand their reach and become established institutions, with influential arms in Washington, as they fought anti-immigrant sentiments that rose with the increased migration from Mexico and Latin America.
The new breed of activism is rooted in those old strategies, some of them later tested and expanded through immigration crackdowns in California, Arizona and across the Sun Belt.
The groups are now sprouting up in places large and small across the country. They tend to be decentralized and more nimble. They communicate through encrypted channels and share strategies through virtual meetings.
In Colorado, newer immigrants rights groups have joined forces with larger and more well-established organizations to form a statewide network. Members of the coalition have trained as many as 4,000 volunteers to confirm or dispel rumors of raids and alert residents of their rights. As in Los Angeles, they have at times arrived to scenes with bullhorns in hand.
Another group south of Portland, Ore., has mobilized hundreds of people to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids solely by sending texts to its volunteers.
In North Hollywood, Calif., Immigo, a tiny group serving the San Fernando Valley, counts four paid staffers who work with Latino students, influencers and online clothing brands to amplify its reach. It now has a roster of 800 volunteers, many of them first-generation Americans, who have said they are willing to rush to verify reported ICE sightings.
“The idea is to get folks to patrol their own neighborhood because it’s more efficient that way,” said Magy Mendez, the group’s founder.
In Arizona, which became a center of pro-immigration protests and counterprotests in 2011, similar rapid response networks are drawing from past experience.
Salvador Reza, a longtime immigrant rights activist in Phoenix, recalls experimenting with different models of organizing when Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, was in power and cracking down on illegal immigration.
Those efforts led to “barrio defense” committees, or neighborhood-based organizations where families helped one another prepare for raids. Residents made plans to help one another maintain access to their bank accounts and or care for children if parents were detained.
The committees waned after Sheriff Arpaio left office, but Mr. Reza and others are now working to revive them through weekly trainings.
“You can break up a nonprofit or an organization, but we organized as families,” Mr. Reza said. “You can’t break apart a family.”
The Next Generation
Federal immigration officials argue the groups are making their jobs harder. Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended the tactics of his agents, including the masks they wear, saying agents and their families have received death threats and been labeled “terrorists.” This week, federal officials rejected legal and administrative challenges filed by civil rights groups, saying they vilified law enforcement.
In interviews, activists said the violent apprehensions of immigrant workers and longtime community members are fueling their growth. Some groups have stepped up as larger nonprofits have come under scrutiny. A Republican House panel last month started an investigation into whether more than 200 nongovernmental organizations, including top immigrant rights groups, enabled illegal activity.
In Georgia, Daniela Rodriguez, 30, created an informal group in 2010 that officially became a nonprofit about a decade later called the Migrant Equity Southeast, or MESE. With the election of Mr. Trump, the organization, which serves the fast-growing Latino population in Savannah, Brunswick and other towns in southern Georgia, shifted to educating undocumented community members about their rights and involving people who support immigrants to assist.
Like other groups, MESE has been recruiting and training Americans to be “ICE trackers,” who rush to places where federal agents have been spotted. They also provide immigrants rides to the grocery store and medical appointments for people who fear being pulled over if they drive themselves.
Eduardo Delgado, 26, who was born to Mexican immigrants in Vidalia, Ga., has hosted clinics to help undocumented parents fill out forms to establish power of attorney, in case they are separated from their U.S.-born children.
“There are thousands of kids like me,” said Mr. Delgado, MESE’s civic and advocacy coordinator. “We’re fighting for our parents to be safe, when they are being indiscriminately targeted.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) China and Russia Keep Their Distance From Iran During Crisis
Some U.S. officials talked about an “axis” of authoritarian nations, but the American and Israeli war with Iran has exposed the limits of that idea.
By Edward Wong, July 6, 2025
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent in Washington and former Beijing bureau chief who has written a new book on China.
An ambulance burned in an Israeli attack in Tehran last month. Despite the appearance of unity, Russia, China and North Korea did not rush to Iran’s aid during its war with Israel or when U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
When Russia enlisted the aid of China, North Korea and Iran in its war against Ukraine, some American and British officials began talking about a new “axis.”
It appeared that the four countries were united by anger, authoritarianism and animus against the United States and its allies.
But Iran’s sales of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia for its war and oil shipped to China did not pay off when it mattered, raising doubts about unity among the nations.
None of the other three states rushed to aid Iran during its war with Israel or when U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites. China and Russia, by far the two most powerful countries among the four, issued pro forma denunciations of the American actions but did not lift a finger to materially help Iran.
“The reality of this conflict turned out to be that Russia and China didn’t run to Iran’s rescue,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “That just exposes the limitations of the whole ‘axis’ idea.”
“Each of them is pretty selfish and doesn’t want to get embroiled in the wars of others,” he added. “These are very different wars and different sets of conflicts. The countries are not necessarily sharing the same structures and values and institutional links the same way the U.S. and its allies do.”
The four nations all have autocratic systems and harbor hostility toward the United States, which traditionally has aimed to weaken them and challenge their legitimacy. The countries also have some strategic ties and have undermined U.S.-led economic sanctions by doing commerce and sharing weapons technology with one another.
“Yes, there is probably a very modest amount of coordination among China, North Korea, Iran and Russia — in the sense that they talk with each other and have some of the same frustrations with the United States or with the West,” said Michael Kimmage, a history professor at Catholic University of America and a former State Department official who has written a book on the war in Ukraine.
“But it’s not particularly meaningful,” he added.
Among the nations, only Russia and North Korea have a mutual defense treaty. Besides providing weapons to Russia, North Korea has sent more than 14,000 troops to fight alongside the Russians against Ukrainian forces.
Their bond is rooted in a shared Communist past and the anti-American war on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, in which Mao’s China also took part.
That history also accounts for the close ties between China and Russia, one of the most consequential bilateral relationships for the U.S. government and much of the world. The leaders of the two nations have forged a personal bond over many years, and their governments announced that they had a “no limits” partnership just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
China still sees value in abiding by some of the international norms promoted by a pre-Trump America and democratic nations, and it has refrained from sending substantial arms aid to Russia during the war. But it has helped to rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base, U.S. officials said, and it continues to be one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil.
Russia and Iran have never had that type of relationship.
One issue is religion. Iran is a theocracy with the type of ruling body that the other three secular, socialist governments regard with suspicion. Both Russia and China view the spread of Islamic fundamentalism with alarm. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has taken extreme measures against even moderate Muslims, suppressing some Islamic practices among ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs in his country’s northwest.
“There are no shared values beyond vague platitudes about the ‘multipolar world order,’ and there are quite a few contradictions,” said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University. “Putin indicated what they are: His relationships with Iran’s neighbors, including Israel and the Arab states, are too important to sacrifice on the altar of Russian-Iranian friendship.”
“He is a cynical manipulator interested only in his strategic interests, and if this means throwing Iran under the bus, then he is prepared to do this,” Mr. Radchenko added. “To be sure, the feeling is fully reciprocated in Tehran.”
Mr. Putin and President Trump spoke about the Israel-Iran war on June 14, and Mr. Putin offered to mediate. Afterward, Mr. Putin said publicly that Russia had helped Iran build a nuclear power plant and was assisting with two more reactors.
While he spoke of Russia’s partnership with Iran, he signaled a reluctance to commit to aiding the country in the war.
“We are not imposing anything on anyone — we are simply talking about how we see a possible way out of the situation,” Mr. Putin said. “But the decision, of course, is up to the political leadership of all these countries, primarily Iran and Israel.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with Mr. Putin in Moscow on June 23, a day after the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, but the Russian summary of the meeting had little beyond the usual expressions of diplomatic support. That day, Iran carried out a symbolic missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar and then agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and the United States.
China also watched from the stands as the crisis unfolded.
Mr. Xi said that all sides “should work to de-escalate the conflict.” And when Mr. Trump ordered the American strikes on Iran, China said it strongly condemned the attacks and accused the United States of violating the United Nations Charter.
But like Russia, China did not send material support to Iran. Although China does sometimes take an official position on conflicts in the region, it also often tries to appear noncommittal in order to balance interests. For years, it has been building up its ties to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two rivals of Iran. Saudi Arabia, like Iran, is a big oil exporter to China.
An extended regional war would jeopardize China’s oil imports from those countries, so it seeks to quell hostilities rather than stoke them.
China’s aim of being a neutral broker in the Middle East became evident in March 2023, when it helped finalize a diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
China also used that opportunity to develop closer ties with Iran’s partner in the region, Syria, ruled then by Bashar al-Assad.
That was a period when China’s influence in the Middle East was at a peak, said Enrico Fardella, a professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” who has taught at Peking University and studies China’s foreign policy. Now, with Iran weakened by the war and Mr. Assad overthrown by rebels, China is treading carefully around the Iran-Israel conflict to see which governments and political groups or militias in the region emerge as the most powerful.
“While Beijing has a vested interest in promoting a cease-fire and post-conflict stabilization, its current low-profile diplomacy suggests limited confidence in its ability to influence events,” Mr. Fardella said in a text message. “As in post-Assad Syria, China may once again adopt a wait-and-see strategy, carefully repositioning itself to salvage influence in a rapidly shifting post-conflict landscape.”
Yun Sun, a scholar of China’s foreign policy at the Stimson Center, a research institute in Washington, argued that the “axis” formulation for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea was still valid. Although the four countries do not have a mutual defense agreement binding all of them, she said, they share an “anti-U.S., anti-West and anti-liberal democracy” outlook.
“An alignment short of mutual defense is an alignment after all,” Ms. Sun added. “The fact they won’t fight for each other in a war does not make their cooperation and collective positioning less of a challenge. China has provided nuclear and missile technologies to Iran. It has bankrolled Russia’s war and kept North Korea on life support.”
But there are limits to China’s support for Iran, Ms. Sun said, adding that Chinese officials lack confidence in Iran’s theocratic leadership, and that they see Iran as having “been too naïve, opportunistic, indecisive and wavering in its external relations.”
Chinese officials are also aware that Iran, like North Korea, is an isolated country and needs China, despite occasional ebbs in the relationship.
On June 26, after Iran agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, Iran’s defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, made his first trip abroad since the war began — to the Chinese city of Qingdao for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security group led by China and Russia.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) With One War Over, Netanyahu Heads to Washington Amid Calls to End Another
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is set to meet with President Trump on Monday as attention has turned from Iran to a cease-fire for Gaza.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 6, 2025
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the meeting with President Trump scheduled for Monday will serve as a kind of victory lap after the joint Israeli-U.S. assault last month on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The White House visit — the prime minister’s third since Mr. Trump returned to office — is likely to add luster to Mr. Netanyahu’s laurels, especially with his voters back home, analysts said, as he soon heads into an election year.
But such trips have yielded surprises in the past.
The last time Mr. Netanyahu was in the Oval Office, in April, he sat somewhat awkwardly at Mr. Trump’s side as the president announced that Washington would be engaging in “direct” talks with Iran in a last-ditch effort to rein in the country’s nuclear program. That month, Mr. Netanyahu tried to convince Mr. Trump that the time was right for a military assault on Iran, but he was swatted down.
This time, Mr. Trump is eager to advance a cease-fire deal for Gaza that would see Hamas release hostages and would ultimately end the long war in the Palestinian enclave that was set off by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. On Sunday, Israel was sending negotiators to Qatar, a mediating country, to try to bridge differences with Hamas.
The United States said it was also brokering talks between Israel and Syria aimed at restoring calm along their frontier.
Then there is the unfinished business with Iran, given the varying assessments of how far Israel’s 12-day assault and the U.S. intervention set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and the possibility of renewed negotiations on a nuclear agreement.
“It’s a victory lap with a caveat,” said Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and Israeli former diplomat who advised several Israeli prime ministers in the past.
“Netanyahu knows the truth — that Iran retains some capabilities,” Mr. Pinkas said. The prime minister needs clarifications from Mr. Trump, he said, about what would happen if Iran was seen to have resumed its nuclear activities, and whether the United States would back Israel if it resumed its attacks on Iran.
In remarks to the Israeli government this month, Mr. Netanyahu said he expected meetings with Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others.
“These come in the wake of the great victory that we achieved,” Mr. Netanyahu said of Israel’s bombing campaign in Iran. “Taking advantage of the success is no less an important part of achieving the success,” he added.
As an added benefit, the trip allows Mr. Netanyahu to postpone his cross-examination in his corruption trial, which Mr. Trump has blatantly called to be canceled. Israeli courts go on summer recess from July 21 until early September.
After securing Mr. Trump’s full backing for the war in Iran, Mr. Netanyahu is now somewhat beholden to his chief ally. The terms of that cease-fire or how it is supposed to be enforced are generally unknown, said Shira Efron, the director of research at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.
Regarding the efforts for a Gaza cease-fire, she said, “We’ve been here before,” but now there were reasons for optimism.
For one thing, Mr. Trump has called for one. “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!,” he wrote on social media a week ago. He says he wants that war to end, too.
Hard-liners in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition oppose an end to the war and want Israel to remain in control of Gaza.
But Mr. Netanyahu could probably sell them an initial, temporary cease-fire, Ms. Efron said, adding, “I think we will see a full cease-fire disguised as a partial agreement.”
In Israel, opposition to the war in Gaza has been growing. Many people are asking what the military is still doing there, with more than 20 soldiers killed in the past month, according to the military. More than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, according to Gaza health officials whose casualty figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. About 1,200 people were killed in the October 2023 attack, and of the 251 people taken hostage, 50 remain in Gaza, about 20 of them alive, according to the Israeli authorities.
The proposed truce calls for a 60-day pause in fighting during which the sides would negotiate terms for a permanent cease-fire. Hamas insists that any deal must lead to a full and lasting cessation of hostilities but has so far rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s terms for ending the war.
Many Israelis, including ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s government, still cling to a brazen vision for Gaza that Mr. Trump floated two Netanyahu visits ago, in February. At the time, the president declared that the United States should seize control of the Palestinian coastal enclave, permanently displace the entire population of two million people and turn the devastated strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Experts said the proposal would be a severe violation of international law.
By the time Mr. Netanyahu came for his next White House visit, in April, Mr. Trump appeared to have moved on.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) ‘Tears My Heart to Pieces’: North Carolina Braces for Medicaid Cuts
President Trump’s domestic policy law jeopardizes plans to reopen one rural county’s hospital — and health coverage for hundreds of thousands of state residents.
By Eduardo Medina, Reporting from Williamston, N.C., July 6, 2025
The only hospital in Martin County, N.C., closed two years ago. Credit...Kate Medley for The New York Times
The only hospital in Martin County, N.C., closed in 2023, but the electricity is still on inside. Air conditioning continues to keep its empty patient rooms cool. And the county still pays the bills for the building’s medical gas system.
That is because the people of Martin County, in rural eastern North Carolina, have been determined to keep the beige brick building from deteriorating — and to somehow reopen their hospital, which had been struggling financially for years.
When North Carolina expanded Medicaid later in 2023, after the hospital shuttered, offering government health insurance to the state’s low-income adults, Martin County saw an opportunity. Plans materialized to partly reopen the hospital, largely because federal dollars were pouring into the state to cover patients’ care under Medicaid.
But those plans are now in jeopardy, as is Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands of North Carolina residents, after Congress passed President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill. To help pay for tax cuts, the bill slashes federal spending on Medicaid, leaving states that expanded the program under Obamacare in a particularly difficult spot.
In interviews last week, local health officials and chief executives of hospital systems across the state said that expanding Medicaid had helped create a lifeline for rural hospitals, allowing some to bounce back from financial deficits. And several North Carolina residents who became eligible for Medicaid through the expansion said they felt worried about the possibility of once again navigating life without health coverage.
“I’m going to have to abandon the diagnostic process for my neurological disorder, and try to function as if it’s not happening,” said Lori Kelley, 58, of Harrisburg, N.C. Over the last 18 months, she said, Medicaid coverage had allowed her to have surgery to save a finger and detect two tumors.
More than 660,000 people have enrolled in Medicaid in North Carolina through the expansion, most of them low-income adults. They include about 14 percent of the adults in Martin County.
The new law will require most adults with Medicaid to periodically prove they work, volunteer or take classes at least 80 hours per month. Most already do, but many could run into hurdles with the verification process and lose coverage.
More concerning to state officials is that the Trump law could trigger the end of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina by lowering a tax the state depends on to cover its share of the cost. The new law may also force the state to end a related program that boosts federal payments for hospitals that treat Medicaid patients. Lawmakers could pass a legislative fix, but they have remained deadlocked over the state budget, and some health experts said they doubted a solution could be reached.
Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled state legislature “must step up to protect our bipartisan Medicaid expansion law,” adding, “This will require taking a hard look at our laws, our state budget and our long-term revenue requirements.”
In his former role as the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, blocked an effort to expand Medicaid in 2013. But like many Republicans who initially opposed expanding the program, his opinion changed after many of his constituents, and hospitals in his state, began benefiting from it. Last weekend, Mr. Tillis announced that he strongly opposed the president’s bill because would “force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands.”
Almost immediately, Mr. Trump attacked him on social media. Mr. Tillis then said that he would not seek re-election; he was one of three Republican senators who voted against the bill last week.
As Martin County pauses efforts to reopen its hospital, rural hospitals elsewhere in the state are worried about their survival. In the two decades preceding Medicaid expansion, about a dozen hospitals closed in North Carolina.
At the last minute, Congress provided $50 billion in funding for rural hospitals in the Trump law. But many hospital executives have said it would not be nearly enough to make up for the cuts to Medicaid and other health programs.
Penney Burlingame Deal, the president and chief executive of Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, N.C., said the law “will create a desperate situation for the people who work here, our patients and the entire community.”
That sense of desperation is acutely felt in Martin County, where roughly 22,000 people, more than a quarter of whom are older than 65, live in a health care desert. Two physicians remain there. The nearest hospital with robust services is 40 minutes away, in Greenville. Some people who cannot afford to drive there take buses on slow routes, residents said.
Verna Marie Perry, 66, who used to work for the county’s adult and aging services department, said she fields calls on a weekly basis from friends in need of emergency medical attention. Neighbors have called her crying moments after someone close to them died while being transported to the nearest hospital.
“To think that if they pass that bill, we can’t get our hospital,” Ms. Perry said through tears last week, “oh God, it tears my heart to pieces.”
Largely thanks to Medicaid expansion and the program that boosted payment rates for hospitals, ECU Health, a system that serves a swath of rural North Carolina, was considering reopening Martin General for emergency care and some diagnostic services.
ECU Health already operates under tight financial margins. Brian Floyd, the hospital network's chief operating officer, said that, as things stand now, the chances of reopening the hospital are low.
“I can only say that if I lose Medicaid expansion, and we don’t have the subsidy payment systems, and we’re operating in the red by a 5 percent margin, that’s money I don’t have to serve Martin County,” Mr. Floyd said.
Cathy Price, 72, used to work as a nurse at Martin General and has lived her entire life in Williamston. Ms. Price, who voted for Mr. Trump last year, said she supports the president’s efforts to rid Medicaid of fraud and waste — the reasons he has given for the cuts. But she worries that the window to reopen the hospital is closing.
“We’re in a life-and-death crisis,” Ms. Price said. “People’s lives are on the line because of the hospital not being here.”
Last August, Jo Ayers, 72, was at home with her 91-year-old father, Bennie A. Moore, who was preparing to mow their farm’s grass. Mr. Moore, a Korean War veteran who owned a septic tank business, had been known as a charitable figure in the community. He would happily overpay for livestock that local children raised and put up for sale.
On Aug. 19, Mr. Moore experienced acute congestive heart failure. Ms. Ayers dialed 911, but was told that it would take emergency workers — whom many residents say are stretched thin — 20 minutes to reach them, and another 20 minutes to transport Mr. Moore to the nearest hospital. She put her father in her own car, speeding toward Bertie Memorial Hospital in Windsor.
Mr. Moore grew paler. As they approached the hospital and reached a final traffic light, he stopped breathing. He was dead by the time they arrived.
As Ms. Ayers recounted the story inside her mobile home, her son, Russ Ayers, 51, shielded his eyes and cried, saying: “A 91-year-old man should not be dependent on his daughter to carry him to the hospital and watch him die.”
Now, as they learn how the federal bill may doom their hometown hospital’s chances of reopening, Ms. Ayers and her son said they were concerned that other families may experience similar crises.
“It’s going to cause a lot of people suffering,” Ms Ayers said.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) Europe’s Dilemma: Build a Military Industry or Keep Relying on the U.S.
Europeans have agreed to pay more for arms and want to spend it at home. But can its manufacturers rush to compete with dominant U.S. firms?
By Steven Erlanger and Jeanna Smialek, July 6, 2025
Steven Erlanger has been covering Europe, NATO and defense for many years and reported from The Hague and Berlin. Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief and reported from there.
A large-scale NATO military exercise involving nine allied nations, earlier this year. Credit...Davide Monteleone for The New York Times
European countries have committed to spending nearly double on military investments over the next decade, with high hopes that it will benefit their defense industries.
But it is not clear that all that money — perhaps as much as 14 trillion euros, or $16 trillion — will fuel a flurry of high-end innovation in Europe. That is because of what one might call the F-35 problem.
Europe lacks quality alternatives to some of the most needed and desired defense equipment that American companies produce. Among them is the F-35, Lockheed Martin’s famed stealth fighter jet, whose advanced abilities are unmatched by European counterparts.
Patriot missile-defense systems are also imported from America, as are rocket launchers, sophisticated drones, long-range artillery guided by satellite, integrated command and control systems, electronic and cyber warfare capabilities — along with most of the software required to run them.
And because many European nations have already invested in American weapons, they want new purchases to remain compatible.
The pledged investments have created a tension. Should European nations build their own military industry? Does the war in Ukraine and the threat of a militarized Russia allow that much lead-time? Or should they continue to invest, at least in part, in America’s already available, cutting-edge technology?
European officials debating how to answer those questions are embracing a middle strategy. Officials have placed limits on how much to spend on American equipment from certain tranches of money, including the flagship E.U. defense funding program — a 150 billion euro, or $173 billion, loan facility to push joint procurement. But individual countries will do most of the purchasing and are free to allocate their resources as they see fit.
The spending debate has become more urgent as the United States shrinks its support for Ukraine. The Trump administration announced in recent days that it was pausing weapons shipments there, leaving European allies to step up.
European countries agreed at last week’s NATO summit to spend 3.5 percent of each country’s annual national income on hard-core military investments, with an additional 1.5 percent on militarily relevant projects. The allies’ pledges met a demand from President Trump to shoulder more responsibility for their defense.
There are essentially two schools of thought as Europe embarks on a military spending binge, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a think tank focused on the European Union. One view, strongly held by French officials and the E.U. institutions, is to restrict the use of Europe’s funds for the longer-term priority of building its defense industry. That is especially important so that Europeans are not overly dependent on an American ally that some feel they can no longer trust.
The other view, shared by the Nordic and Baltic nations and Poland, is that Europe needs capabilities now to help Ukraine and should spend in a less protectionist way. “They believe that we can’t be idealists but need to act now and spend now for Ukraine,” Mr. Grant said.
Officials in Poland argue that the approaches are compatible. Poland is one of Europe’s biggest defense spenders as a share of national income and buys its sophisticated weapons mostly from the United States. Because European nations will spend so much more than they have been, they can buy specialized products from the United States while also investing in local industries, the officials said.
“From our national budgets, most European countries will continue to buy, with the possible exception of France, a huge proportion of their weapons from the United States,” Radoslaw Sikorski, the minister of foreign affairs in Poland, told reporters last month in Warsaw.
But if Europe needs to be able to stand up to Russia on its own, as American officials have pushed, he said, Europe also needs an “enhanced defense industry” with more capacity.
“We cannot import everything from the United States,” Mr. Sikorski said.
A mixed approach means Europe is likely to remain dependent on key American technologies. Some officials worry that Washington may someday withhold critical software updates, a concern amplified by Mr. Trump’s intermittent questioning of NATO commitments and periodically softer tone toward Russia.
Take the F-35. Buying the $80 million jets means committing to a long-term relationship with their manufacturer for updates. Given the recent wobbling of the trans-Atlantic alliance, officials in nations including Portugal, Canada and Denmark have questioned future purchases of the jet.
That’s where European nations run into reality. They have no equivalent alternative to this fifth-generation fighter, which many countries already use, and Washington plans to develop a sixth generation.
That dilemma partly explains the view, led by Nordic and German officials, that Europe must keep good relations with U.S. defense companies even if communication with Mr. Trump is strained, said Claudia Major, a security expert with the German Marshall Fund.
She said such relationships will last and that American companies “fear being excluded from the European defense cake, which is growing.”
“They want to stay in the European game,” she said.
But as the European Union tries to balance two priorities — growing its domestic defense industrial base while retaining important American tech — it is limiting how much it spends on U.S. weapons in a key joint procurement push.
When it was unveiled in March, the €150 billion loan program for military procurement was meant to limit full participation to E.U. nations and close partners, like Norway and Ukraine. Britain, Australia and Canada have been working toward joining as full participants by signing a security and defense partnership with the bloc, a prerequisite for inclusion.
But there will be a cap on how much military equipment can be bought from companies in countries that are not members under the plan, including American firms: just 35 percent.
Some countries wanted to make that even more restrictive, to ensure more investment at home. France wanted to limit any non-E.U. provider or company to providing no more than 15 percent, but that restriction was loosened in negotiations, Mr. Grant said.
Today’s fight is reminiscent of an earlier battle from 2017 to 2021 around a program called Permanent Structured Cooperation. Designed to encourage cooperation among E.U. militaries, the program helps fund nearly 60 projects around cyber, military mobility, logistics hubs, satellite communications and joint training.
That program was also restricted, and it faced criticism. In 2021, the E.U. agreed to allow outside countries to participate on a case-by-case basis, and then only in a limited way, without the power to make decisions. Britain has not yet been granted even limited participation.
For those casting a wary eye toward America, the question is whether such joint initiatives will be enough to push European industry up the technology chain. The risk is that the coming wave of spending will perpetuate the existing system, in which Europe churns out a varied heap of howitzers and ammunition while relying on the United States for advanced capabilities.
Some experts are hopeful. Deep military dependence on American tech is a “worry in these times,” said Guntram Wolff, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank and a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
“In the medium term, it’s really about weaning Europe off the technological dependence on the United States,” he said. While such a transition is not possible overnight, he said, he is confident that European countries will make significant progress over the next five years.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
15) Officials Feared Flood Risk to Youth Camps but Rejected Warning System
Kerr County had discussed buying such things as water gauges and sirens after previous flood disasters. But as with many rural Texas counties, cost was an issue.
By Jesus Jiménez, Margarita Birnbaum, Danny Hakim and Mike Baker, Published July 6, 2025, Updated July 7, 2025
Jesus Jiménez and Margarita Birnbaum reported from Kerrville, Texas, Danny Hakim from New York and Mike Baker from Seattle.
Search-and-rescue efforts after catastrophic flooding on the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas. Credit...Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times
Eight years ago, in the aftermath of yet another river flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials in Kerr County debated whether more needed to be done to build a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River.
A series of summer camps along the river were often packed with children. For years, local officials kept them safe with a word-of-mouth system: When floodwaters started raging, upriver camp leaders warned those downriver of the water surge coming their way.
But was that enough? Officials considered supplementing the system with sirens and river gauges, along with other modern communications tools. “We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don’t get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,” said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.
In the end, little was done. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors. Instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others.
The rural county of a little over 50,000 people, in a part of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley, contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017, but it was rejected as too expensive. The county, which has an annual budget of around $67 million, lost out on a bid at the time to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project, county commission meeting minutes show.
As recently as a May budget meeting, county commissioners were discussing a flood warning system being developed by a regional agency as something that they might be able to make use of.
But in a recent interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said that local residents had been resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” he said, adding that he didn’t know if people might reconsider now.
The idea of a flood warning system was broached in 2015, in the aftermath of a deadly flood in Wimberley, Texas, about 75 miles to the east of Kerrville, the Kerr County seat.
The Guadalupe River Basin is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States when it comes to flash floods. Ordinary floods from heavy rainstorms occur regularly, inundating streets and threatening structures as floodwaters gradually rise. The region is also prone to flash floods, which can occur with little to no notice.
People living near the Guadalupe in Kerr County may have little time to seek higher ground, especially when flash floods come through late at night when people are asleep. In 1987, a rapidly rising Guadalupe River swept away a school bus carrying teens from a church camp, killing 10 of them.
Avantika Gori, a Rice University professor who is leading a federally funded project to improve flood resilience in rural Texas counties, said that flood warning systems are often simple networks of rain gauges or stream gauges that are triggered when rain or floodwaters exceed a certain level.
The gauges can then be used to warn those at risk of flooding, whether by text message, which may not be effective in areas with spotty cellphone service; notifications broadcast on TV and radio; or sometimes through a series of sirens.
More complex systems use forecasts from the National Weather Service to predict rainfall and model what areas might be subject to flooding, Professor Gori said.
After the 2015 floods, an improved monitoring system was installed in the Wimberley area, and cell towers are now used to send out notices to all cellphones in the area.
Mr. Moser, the former commissioner, visited Wimberley after its new system was in place, and then led efforts to have a flood warning system in Kerr County. His proposal would have included additional water detection systems and a system to alert the public, but the project never got off the ground, largely because of budget concerns.
“It sort of evaporated,” Mr. Moser said. “It just didn’t happen.”
One commissioner at the time, H.A. “Buster” Baldwin, voted against a $50,000 engineering study, according to a news account at the time, saying, “I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such.”
Mr. Moser said it was hard to tell if a flood warning system would have prevented further tragedy in Kerr County during the July 4 flood, given the extraordinary circumstance of the flooding, which came suddenly after an intense period of rain. But he said he believed that such a system could have had some benefit.
“I think it could have helped a lot of people,” Mr. Moser said.
The death toll from the flooding, now at 80, includes at least 28 children, with several girls and a counselor from one of the camps along the river still unaccounted for.
According to a transcript from a Kerr County Commissioners’ Court meeting in 2017, officials discussed how even with additional water level sensors along the Guadalupe River, the county would still need a way to alert residents if water levels were rising dangerously fast.
Sirens, which are used across Texas to alert residents about tornadoes, were considered by county officials as a way to alert people who live along the river about any flooding.
“With all the hills and all, cell coverage is not that great in some areas in Hill Country,” Mr. Moser said, adding that a series of sirens might have provided people in vulnerable areas sufficient time to flee.
Mr. Moser retired as a commissioner of Kerr County in 2021. But he said this week’s flooding there should be taken as a warning.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of places in the United States that will look at this event that happened in Kerr County and determine what could be done,” Mr. Moser said. “I think things should come out of this. It should be a lesson learned.”
Current city officials on Sunday did not discuss the earlier deliberations over warning systems. Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, sidestepped a question about the effectiveness of local emergency notifications, telling reporters at a news conference that it was “not the time to speculate.”
“There’s going to be a full review of this, so we can make sure that we focus on future preparedness,” he said.
Professor Gori said that the decision not to install warning systems in the past has for many Texas counties come down to cost.
“If the county had a flood warning system in place, they would have fared much better in terms of preparedness, but most rural counties in Texas simply do not have the funds to implement flood warning systems themselves,” she said in an email.
Some simpler systems, however, like those using stream or rain gauges, may still not have allowed enough time for evacuations, given how fast the water rose in Kerr County, she added.
It is hardly unique in facing challenges.
“Rural counties are extremely data-scarce, which means we are essentially blind when it comes to identifying areas that are prone to flooding,” Ms. Gori said.
Texas has a growing backlog of flood management projects, totaling some $54 billion across the state. The state flood plan of the Texas Water Development Board called on lawmakers to dedicate additional funding to invest in potentially lifesaving infrastructure.
But lawmakers have so far allocated only a fraction of the money needed for flood projects through the state’s Flood Infrastructure Fund, about $669 million so far, even as state lawmakers this year approved $51 billion in property tax cuts.
Kerr County, in its earlier discussions about a warning system, had explored along with other members of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority the possibility of applying for financial support through the infrastructure fund. But the authority dropped the idea after learning that the fund would provide only about 5 percent of the money needed for the project.
During last week’s flooding, despite the text notifications that warned of rapidly rising waters, some residents were unsure how seriously to take the flood warnings because they are not unusual in that part of the state.
Sujey Martin, a resident of Kerrville for the past 15 years, said she was awakened by an emergency alert on her phone at about 2 a.m. on Friday. She said she had glanced at it and went back to sleep.
“It’s never this bad, so I didn’t think much of it,” she said.
It wasn’t until about 5 a.m. that she became alarmed, when she realized that her power was out, and she started reading on Facebook about flooding and evacuations, some of them just a few streets over from her. “It was raining really hard,” she recalled.
Louis Kocurek, 65, who lives in Center Point, about 10 miles southeast of Kerrville, said that he had never received an official government text alert about the flooding. He had signed up for a private emergency alert service known as CodeRED, but by the time that alert came in, his power had gone out. At that time, he said, he had known about the situation for at least three hours, warned by his son-in-law at about 6:30 a.m.
He had checked on the water level of the creek near his home and decided to stay put — even though the water in the creek rose 15 feet in 15 minutes at one point. His house sits at a higher elevation than the homes of some neighbors, and there were 11 people hunkering down at his house.
Mr. Kocurek said the CodeRED alert came in at 10:07 a.m. “At that point, you know, the roads were closed, no way to get out.” His house, ultimately, was not flooded.
Linda Clanton, a retired schoolteacher who lives on the outskirts of Kerrville, said she did not know how bad the flooding had become until her sister called and woke her up with the news at 8:30 a.m. on Friday. The next day, she was among several people taking in the widespread destruction and piles of debris caused by the floodwaters at Louise Hays Park, along the Guadalupe River on the west side of town.
She said she couldn’t be sure that even sirens would have been useful in warning people about the fast-moving water.
“We are all spread out in these hills and the trees,” she said. “If we had a siren here in town, nobody but town people would hear it,” she added. “You’d have to have sirens all over the place, and that’s a lot of money and a lot of things to go wrong.”
And the danger was not over yet.
Around 3 p.m. on Sunday, another emergency alert went out to people along the Guadalupe River, including the hundreds conducting searches, warning of “high confidence of river flooding.” Move to higher ground, the alert urged.
Christopher Flavelle and Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
16) Israel’s Deadly Assault on Iran Prison Incites Fury, Even Among Dissidents
The June 23 airstrikes on Evin prison, including the hospital ward, have turned it from a hated symbol of oppression into a new rallying cry against Israel, even among the Iranian regime’s domestic critics.
By Farnaz Fassihi, Parin Behrooz and Leily Nikounazar, July 6, 2025
Farnaz Fassihi has lived in Iran and has covered the country for three decades and was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Ceilings, walls and wooden cabinets collapsed into heaps of jagged debris in the prison’s visitor center. Scorched papers and brightly colored case files lay scattered amid broken bricks and tangled wires in the administration building. Shattered glass covered patient beds and equipment in the infirmary.
Evin prison in Tehran stands out in Iran as a singular symbol of oppression, its notorious reputation reaching far beyond the country’s borders. For five decades, Iran’s rulers, from the shah to the clerics, have used Evin as the place to punish dissent with detention, interrogation, torture and execution.
When Israel struck the prison with missiles on June 23, the attack generated widespread condemnation and fury in Iran, even among opponents of the authoritarian government.
The strikes were the deadliest of the 12-day Israel-Iran war. Iran has said 79 people were killed and dozens injured in the Evin attack, but casualty numbers are expected to rise.
Among the dead and wounded were visiting family members of prisoners, social workers, a lawyer, physicians and nurses, a 5-year-old child, teenage soldiers guarding the doors as part of mandatory military service, administrative staff and residents of the area, according to Iranian media reports, activists and rights groups.
About 100 transgender inmates are missing after their section of the prison was flattened, and the authorities say they are presumed dead, said Reza Shafakhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, who added that the government often treats being transgender as a crime. The chief prosecutor of the prison, Ali Ghanaatkar, despised by government critics for his handling of political prisoners, and one of his deputies also were killed.
The Israeli military declined to comment about the purpose of the attack on Evin or the casualties. Israeli officials have described the attack on Evin as “symbolic.” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a social media post, suggested that it was both retaliation for Iranian missile strikes on civilian structures, and somehow an act of liberation.
But in Iran, prisoners, families, activists and lawyers said that Israel’s action had shown total disregard for the lives and safety of the prisoners. They said the timing of the attack, at noon during a working day, also meant that the prison had been full of visitors, lawyers, medical and administrative staff.
Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is Iran’s most prominent human rights activist, said in a statement that Israel’s attack “carried out in broad daylight, in front of families and visitors, is clearly a war crime.” Ms. Mohammadi has spent decades in and out of Evin, and is currently out on furlough.
Siamak Namazi, a 53-year-old Iranian American businessman who was detained in Evin for eight years on espionage charges that the United States and rights groups described as bogus, said that prisoners, like many ordinary Iranians, feel trampled by two ruthless powers.
“What I hear from prisoners and my friends there is that they feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom,” he said.
Amnesty International has called on Iran to immediately release political prisoners, and said in its Persian social media account that Israel’s attack on Evin could constitute a war crime. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan called the attack “a grave breach of international humanitarian law.”
This account of what transpired at Evin during and just after Israel’s attack is based on interviews with more than a dozen families of prisoners, lawyers representing them, former prisoners in contact with current ones, written testimonies from current prisoners, photos and videos by independent journalists and Iranian media reports.
The Attack
At around noon on a sweltering summer day, Leila Jaffarzadeh, 35, the mother of a year-old baby girl, arrived at Evin clutching a bag of documents. The authorities had agreed to furlough her husband, Milad Khedmati, jailed on financial charges.
Ms. Jaffarzadeh was on the phone with her husband as she approached the visitor center when the first explosions rocked the prison. She screamed, telling him, “they are bombing, bomb, bomb, bomb,” then the line went dead. Shrapnel had pierced her brain, killing her, said her brother-in-law, Hossein Khedmati, a writer and poet, in an interview from Tehran.
Reaching the scene within an hour, Hossein Khedmati said, he saw smoke, flames and carnage in every direction — broken and dead bodies, shredded clothes and loose shoes scattered in the debris. Emergency responders carried the injured on stretchers to ambulances.
He found his sister-in-law in a body bag. “I can’t fathom that Leila is no longer with us and Nila will grow up without her mother,” he said. “Telling my brother his wife was dead was the hardest thing I have done in my life.”
Zahra Ebadi, a social worker at the prison, could not find child care on thatday, so she took her 5-year-old son, Mehrad, to work. He was playing in the visitor area while his mother finished some paperwork in an office, according to her cousin, Tahereh Pajouhesh, who was interviewed by the Shargh Daily newspaper.
After the first blast, Ms. Ebadi ran to find her son, but another explosion killed her, Ms. Pajouhesh said. A male colleague had grabbed Mehrad to shield him, but debris crushed and killed both of them. Four other female social workers also were killed, according to Iranian media reports.
Mina, 53, said she had been talking by phone with her son who is serving a five-year sentence in Evin for political activism. The call cut off abruptly. She redialed, again and again. When he finally answered he told her the prison had been attacked, she said, and she headed for the prison. Mina asked that her last name and the name of her son not be published out of fear of retribution.
“My legs went numb and my body started shaking. I don’t know how I got myself to Evin despite all the obstacles,” Mina said in a telephone interview. “Security guards wouldn’t let me get through. Other family members were there too. I eventually got myself to the strike site by yelling and screaming.” She said she counted at least 15 dead bodies on the ground.
Iranian news media reported that at least two locations in the prison had been hit directly, the three-story visitor center near the main entrance, which also housed the prosecutor’s office, and the 47-bed hospital clinic inside the compound. Forensic Architecture, a research agency that specializes in visual investigations, said on Friday that its analysis of satellite images showed at least six strikes on Evin, four confirmed by photos taken at the scene, including hits on several of the prison’s dormitories. The library, the grocery shop, the warehouse storing food and the infamous 209 ward controlled by intelligence forces were also destroyed.
Iran’s police force said it had detonated two unexploded missiles in the area of Evin, according to Iranian media reports.
The blasts also extensively damaged surrounding residential and commercial buildings and vehicles, photographs and videos showed.
A photographer who visited the prison on the Sunday after the June 23 attack described a pungent smell from burned and decaying flesh in the rubble. Iranian media reported that the morgue was using DNA tests to identify body parts and corpses burned beyond recognition.
“The prisoners lived in constant fear, believing each moment could be their last,” said Nasrine Setoudeh, a prominent lawyer and former Evin prisoner whose husband and fellow political activist, Reza Khandan, was detained there. “It took an hour for Reza to call and confirm he was safe. That hour felt like an eternity.”
The Aftermath
The families of four political prisoners have released the inmates’ detailed accounts of the strikes and their aftermath, either in statements shared with The New York Times or on social media. They are Abolfazl Ghadyani and Mehdi Mahmoudian, two prominent political dissidents; Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former minister of the interior who is a vocal critic of the government, and Mr. Khandan, Ms. Setoudeh’s husband.
In addition, 13 other prisoners made a joint statement, others have released more general accounts and four female prisoners told BBC Persian of events inside the women’s section.
They all described sudden, all-encompassing chaos: Buildings rocked walls crumbled, windows shattered, doors blew off hinges, smoke and dust clouded the air, and people lay bloodied — shouting for help if they were conscious.
A group of male prisoners ran into the courtyard and found the clinic in flames. The warehouse storing food and personal hygiene supplies was ravaged. Prisoners from the solitary confinement building and their guards wandered outside through blown out doors, dazed.
The four women told the BBC that for more than three hours no outside help arrived and phone lines were cut. They tended to the wounded and cleaned up shards of glass and other debris.
Mr. Tajzadeh told his wife, Fakhri Mohtashamipour, that he had been pacing the hallway on his daily exercise when the first bombs detonated, and would have died if he had been inside his cell, which was flattened. She said in an interview that he managed a quick phone call to her that evening saying the prison had lost power, water and gas, and prisoners were forced to huddle in the dark, in a half-collapsed building.
In the first few hours prisoners helped with recovery efforts. They recounted evacuating survivors from the clinic and digging through rubble with their hands, uncovering about 20 bodies. According to a statement by Mr. Mahmoudian and Mr. Ghadyani, among those severely injured was a female physician, whom they identified only as Dr. Makarem, an infectious disease specialist who lost an arm and leg and who had volunteered at the prison clinic once a week.
In the afternoon, they said, security forces had swarmed the prison, and at gunpoint forced the men helping with rescue operations to go back inside.
Late that night, male prisoners were shackled in pairs at the wrists and ankles, and marched out, again at gunpoint. Those who wrote detailed accounts said each was allowed a plastic bag with whatever remained of their belongings.
They clambered in the dark through the ruins of the prison, over tangled wires, broken bricks and dead bodies. Some people collapsed. Some cried. It took more than an hour to reach the evacuation buses awaiting them through a back opening because the front gate was impassable, a distance that would normally take five minutes.
“We marched in the tunnel of horror, our feet chained, our hands clutching plastic bags with some of our belongings, forming a lone line through the rubble,” said Mr. Ghadyani and Mr. Mahmoudian in their joint statement. “Here, caught between two threats, we are victims and hostages.”
Mr. Khandan, a human-rights activist and graphic designer by trade, said the chains cut into his flesh with every step and he fell several times. He also abandoned the plastic bag containing his belongings, finding it impossible to carry it with chained hands.
As the prisoners reached the buses around 3 a.m., he said, a new round of Israeli attacks erupted, along with the firing of Iranian air defenses. “Fear overcame us. It was impossible to move fast and take shelter because our hands and legs were tied to one another,” Mr. Khandan said.
The convoy of buses, escorted by security vehicles, eventually departed, snaking its way amid airstrikes to Fashafouyeh prison, a facility on the outskirts of Tehran, known for unsanitary, overcrowded conditions. Mr. Khandan said they arrived at 8 a.m., about 20 hours after the attack, not having received food or water since the security forces arrived.
Female prisoners also were evacuated by force, shackled in pairs, and transferred to Gharchak prison, a different overcrowded facility on Tehran’s outskirts the following morning. Fariba Kamalabadi, a Baha’i faith leader serving a 20-year sentence, told her family that conditions for the women had deteriorated so badly, “I wish we had died with the missiles,” her daughter told BBC Persian.
The judiciary says Evin is now empty.
Mr. Shafakhah, the lawyer representing some of the political prisoners, said, “We can assume Evin prison is closed forever, but oppression is not limited to a location, they will continue elsewhere.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
17) You Don’t Have to Be a Doctor to Understand This
By Craig Spencer, July 7, 2025
Dr. Spencer is an emergency medicine physician and an associate professor at Brown and serves on the advisory board for Doctors Without Borders USA.
“Virtually overnight and all around the world, lifesaving care has vanished. H.I.V. medications have become inaccessible for millions, newborn care has halted in many war zones, and communal kitchens feeding Sudanese civilians amid conflict have closed. These weren’t just administrative cuts — they were moral betrayals. The justification was purportedly fiscal responsibility. Yet the entire U.S. foreign aid budget was 1 percent of federal spending, with global health assistance a mere fraction of that. Our global health withdrawal also gave political cover for other countries to follow our lead: Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands announced cuts to foreign aid, in some cases redistributing those funds into military budgets.”
Han Cao
I don’t know exactly when I was infected with Ebola. As a doctor in a treatment center in Guinea in 2014, I faced hundreds of potential exposures during the outbreak there.
If I had to guess, the virus probably breached my protective gear while my colleagues and I cared for a young woman in the final moments of her battle with the disease. Each time she vomited or soiled herself, we changed her linens, gently laying her listless body back onto clean, burgundy floral sheets. I knew this ritual wouldn’t save her life. I also knew it carried substantial personal risk. But I refused to let her die without dignity. I know there are many who would do the same.
You may never find yourself in a treatment center halfway across the world, but when suffering is close enough to touch, most of us feel the same human instinct to offer a helping hand, to not turn away.
America’s leaders are increasingly casting aside empathy and compassionate care as dangerous liabilities. Elon Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” and the Trump administration governs as if that is a guiding principle. The growing philosophical backlash against empathy overlooks a deeper truth: America’s strength has never come from isolation or indifference, but from an instinct to care beyond our borders. If we allow the Trump administration’s assault on empathy to define our global health agenda, or ourselves, we won’t just be turning away from the world — we’ll be turning away from who we are. The belief that we have a responsibility to others isn’t shortsighted sentimentalism; it’s the moral foundation of a meaningful life.
Historically, the United States has strongly supported — strategically, financially and philosophically — the individuals and organizations carrying out this kind of care. I’ve worked alongside health care providers responding to crises abroad because they recognize it’s where their skills are most meaningful and others who do it because of a spiritual duty to serve the suffering and uphold human dignity. Collectively, we were driven by the conviction that it was the morally right thing to do.
The United States government, and perhaps many Americans, no longer view global health in the same way. This is despite the fact that American involvement has helped eradicate smallpox, halved malaria deaths in many countries and prevented an estimated 26 million deaths through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. All told, U.S. global health support saves 3.3 million lives a year — or at least did, before its recent and rapid dismantling.
Virtually overnight and all around the world, lifesaving care has vanished. H.I.V. medications have become inaccessible for millions, newborn care has halted in many war zones, and communal kitchens feeding Sudanese civilians amid conflict have closed. These weren’t just administrative cuts — they were moral betrayals. The justification was purportedly fiscal responsibility. Yet the entire U.S. foreign aid budget was 1 percent of federal spending, with global health assistance a mere fraction of that. Our global health withdrawal also gave political cover for other countries to follow our lead: Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands announced cuts to foreign aid, in some cases redistributing those funds into military budgets.
There are plenty of compelling arguments that this is bad for our health, national security and global stability — and I wholeheartedly agree. But we cannot abandon the moral argument, because it’s one of the strongest we have and it still resonates. Despite deep political divides, eight in 10 Americans still believe the United States “should provide medicine and medical supplies, as well as food” to people in developing countries.
Hyper-individualism may have thrived during the pandemic, but it’s a flimsy foundation for our future. The saying “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will no longer be great” has been heard in campaign speeches for both parties. It endures as a political talking point because Americans expect moral purpose from our political leaders, a purpose that has been long embodied in our global health commitments.
Casting empathy aside won’t just tarnish America’s reputation; it will set global health back decades, costing millions of lives. Empathy is not idealism; it articulates a pragmatic vision of our shared fate. In a world defined by worsening pandemics, climate instability and global interdependence, empathy is a necessity. Politicians may slash budgets and dismantle institutions, but they cannot erase the principle that built them: that caring for others is a moral obligation, not a partisan position. We must not allow that foundational impulse to become collateral damage.
Less than a week after returning from Guinea, I became New York’s first and last Ebola patient. When I was at my sickest, my phone rang. It was an Ebola survivor I had cared for just weeks before. She saw my photo on the news in Guinea and called to thank me — for treating her at her worst, for showing up. Moments later, my nurse came in. Feeling weak, I asked for help getting into a chair. She then quietly and carefully changed my sheets. When she finished, she helped me up from the chair and laid me down gently into the freshly made bed.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
18) Trial Over Free Speech on Campus, and Trump’s Student Crackdown, Begins
The case challenges the Trump administration’s targeting of noncitizen student activists for arrest and deportation on First Amendment grounds.
By Zach Montague, Reporting from Boston, July 7, 2025
Demonstrators outside Columbia University demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia student, in March. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
A federal judge in Boston on Monday will hear opening statements in a trial expected to cut to the heart of several of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics, including President Trump, Israel and free speech on college campuses.
The case, filed by a pair of academic associations in March, has become the foremost challenge to the Trump administration’s aggressive posture toward foreign students who espoused pro-Palestinian views. It contends that the government’s targeting of prominent noncitizen academics who have criticized Israel — such as Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia University and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts — has already partially succeeded in chilling political speech across the country, and should be categorically stopped on First Amendment grounds.
All of those academics, who are either legal permanent residents or in the United States on student visas, have successfully fought for and obtained their release even as their immigration cases continue to wend through the courts.
But lawyers for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who are representing the associations, will argue at trial this week that the arrests were part of an official policy that could just as easily be turned on other groups that clash with the Trump administration.
While the Supreme Court has affirmed in at least one major case that foreign nationals living in the United States are generally entitled to First Amendment rights, constitutional law experts have cautioned that there are few obvious legal parallels in American history.
In its filings, the government has argued that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are an expression of support for Hamas, which the American government considers a terrorist organization. It has relied on Cold War-era precedents in which the Supreme Court upheld the government’s power to deny entry to people over their past membership in the Communist Party.
Deciding whether the Trump administration overstepped will now fall to Judge William G. Young of Federal District Court in Massachusetts. A lifelong believer in the power of trials to clear up thorny legal questions, Judge Young has scheduled a nine-day bench trial — a trial without a jury — to explore whether the arrests and planned deportations fall within the president’s authority or amount to a grave abuse of power.
In June, Judge Young blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel science grants that funded research into diversity-related topics like health disparities in Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities. He rejected the cuts as racial discrimination unlike anything he had seen from the government in his 40 years on the federal bench.
In this case, through witnesses and evidence, lawyers from the Knight Institute will work to establish that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security collaborated to surveil social media and other writings for content that could be used as justification for revoking visas and green cards in order to launch deportations.
“It is totally antithetical to the First Amendment to allow the government to use immigration law as a cudgel in this way,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute who will appear in court on Monday. “If the First Amendment means anything, it means the government can’t lock you up because it doesn’t like what you have to say.”
As much as the issues that will arise at trial seem inextricably linked to the fraught politics of the present, both sides acknowledge that they are deeply rooted in American history.
In trial briefs, lawyers from both the Knight Institute and the government have looked to the height of the Cold War for cues, noting vague similarities to the way the Trump administration has sought to remove people based on a finding that their speech threatened the “national interest.”
The government has denied that any blanket policy toward pro-Palestinian activists exists. But it has raised several Supreme Court decisions focused on people accused of Communist or anarchist sympathies, in which it found First Amendment protections did not apply. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said the government’s goal is to revoke the visas of “Hamas supporters in America.”
“The court has already rejected a First Amendment challenge to a governmental effort to deport Communists for being Communists — i.e., an effort to prioritize immigration enforcement to combat a given political viewpoint,” the Justice Department wrote in one of its filings. “There is no constitutional difference to an effort to expel Hamas supporters.”
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight Institute, said the practices employed by the Trump administration evoked the widespread abuse of screening under the McCarran-Walter Act, long before social media was involved.
He likened the current climate to the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States turned away cultural icons such as Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Doris Lessing, among others, over their association with Communism.
“Now, instead of a handful of people being denied visas because they wrote books that the government misinterprets as sympathetic to Communism,” Mr. Jaffer said, “we have every consular officer turned into a kind of censor, reviewing everybody’s social media posts for any evidence of not just pro-Palestinian sentiment, but hostility to American values — whatever that means.”
Over the course of the trial, the groups suing will call as witnesses a mix of noncitizen students and faculty members and U.S. citizens, including a Columbia University professor who worked alongside Mr. Khalil and Mr. Mahdawi.
Most are members of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, the two organizations behind the lawsuit, and will testify about their experience feeling pressure to censor themselves or witnessing a loss of engagement from their colleagues.
Taken together, their testimony is expected to describe an intellectually impoverished academic environment, in which students and faculty members alike have begun avoiding topics out of step with conservative ideology because of fear of retribution, according to a pretrial brief.
While the lawsuit is national in scope, and was filed before the Supreme Court limited lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, the outcome could still be sweeping.
Even if the judge were to limit his ruling to the groups involved in the lawsuit, both are national faculty-based associations, with tens of thousands of members between them across more than 500 colleges and universities.
Above all, lawyers will work to impress upon the judge this week that any crackdown on speech is a slippery slope, and that the same tactics that unfolded this year could just as soon be applied to deport other groups based on support for other causes.
“The same argument that they’re making could as easily be made with respect to pro-Greenland advocacy or pro-Canada advocacy or pro-Ukraine advocacy,” Mr. Jaffer said.
“Some of the students that they have targeted are green-card holders, and they have also said repeatedly that they intend to go after naturalized citizens next,” he added. “So nobody should feel secure just because they’re targeting foreign students and nobody else.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
