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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) 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.
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2) 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.
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3) ‘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.
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4) 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.
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5) 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.
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6) 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.”
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7) 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.
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8) 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.”
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9) Federal Agents March Through L.A. Park, Spurring Local Outrage
Federal officials said it was an immigration enforcement operation, though it was unclear if anyone had been arrested. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup,” Mayor Karen Bass said as she condemned the action.
By Jill Cowan and Mimi Dwyer, Reporting from Los Angeles, July 7, 2025
Federal agents ride on horseback at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Credit...Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
It had been a quiet morning in MacArthur Park, a hub in one of Los Angeles’s most immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Children at a summer camp were playing outside, but the park was otherwise largely empty.
Then, dozens of armed federal agents began marching over soccer fields and grass berms, based on footage of the incident. Military-style vehicles blocked the street and a federal helicopter flew overhead.
They wore fatigues, masks and helmets and marched in lines. Some were on horseback. Camera crews followed alongside them.
Los Angeles leaders have grown weary after thousands of National Guard troops and Marines arrived nearly a month ago and immigration raids have become a regular, visible occurrence. But they took particular umbrage at Monday’s extraordinary show of force in MacArthur Park and issued a swift and furious rebuke.
“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a news conference on Monday afternoon, adding that she had traveled regularly into conflict zones as a member of Congress. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”
Dozens of federal agents were observed in the park, many arriving in armored military vehicles. They were joined by 80 California National Guard troops under the command of President Trump, according to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who criticized the effort and has tried to stop the federalization of Guard members through a lawsuit.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to specific questions about the purpose of the operation at MacArthur Park or whether anyone had been detained.
“The operation is ongoing,” she wrote in an email. “So that should be a message in of itself.”
Asked to clarify that message, she responded that it was an immigration enforcement operation and that such efforts “are not in one single location.”
Mr. Trump called up National Guard troops on June 7 to quell protests at federal buildings and at immigration raids. All told, he mobilized about 4,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to the region. It has been more than three weeks since the last major demonstration in downtown Los Angeles.
Mr. Newsom and local leaders had expected the troops to return to their regular duties once the protests had died down. But the president has released only 150 Guard troops for firefighting efforts, and Gregory Bovino, a Customs and Border Protection chief in Southern California, indicated Monday that the Trump administration intended to make itself seen across the city.
“Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon,” Mr. Bovino told a Fox News reporter. “We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
To many local leaders, the Monday march through MacArthur Park seemed designed to intimidate immigrants and residents, rather than to carry out targeted enforcement. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of the Los Angeles City Council, derided the display as a stunt made for TikTok.
“If you want to film in L.A., you should apply for a film permit like everybody else,” he said during an afternoon news conference. “Stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody who lives in this great city and disrupt our economy.”
Ms. Bass had planned to appear with Mr. Newsom on Monday to talk about the region’s recovery six months after the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated the region.
Instead, she told reporters, she heard about the federal action at MacArthur Park and headed there. She met with children who had quickly been ushered inside a recreational facility when the federal personnel arrived. One 8-year-old boy, she said, told her unprompted that he was afraid of immigration agents.
City leaders and community groups have long tried to address homelessness and drug use in the park about 10 blocks west of downtown Los Angeles. Workers with a St. John’s Community Health street medicine clinic that was serving homeless people at the park said that agents had pointed guns at them and instructed them to stop their work and leave on Monday.
Ms. Bass said that once she arrived, she had demanded to speak to the person in charge of the operation at the park. She was handed a phone, through which, she said, Mr. Bovino told her that he would be “getting them out of the park,” apparently referring to federal agents.
The agents left the park a short time later, she said.
Ever since Mr. Trump deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles last month, state and local leaders have engaged in legal and rhetorical battles with the Trump administration.
Federal officials have accused local leaders of fostering lawlessness and allowing criminals to roam free. Mr. Bovino persisted on Monday, saying on X: “We may well go back to MacArthur Park or other places in and around Los Angeles. Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport, now we’ll help things along a bit.”
The post was punctuated with two American flag emojis.
Local officials have accused the federal government of ripping apart families and terrorizing communities by conducting seemingly random workplace and street raids with masked agents in plainclothes, many of whom don’t identify themselves.
The raids have had a chilling effect on the Los Angeles area, where roughly half the population is Latino and an estimated 10 percent is undocumented. Small businesses have struggled as undocumented customers and workers have holed up at home. Public spaces like MacArthur Park have been desolate on days when they would typically be bustling with vendors and celebrating families.
Fernando Rodriguez, who runs a small convenience store on South Alvarado Street near the park, said he had seen about 15 large vehicles pull up on Monday morning, including armored vehicles.
“It was like they were going to war,” he said. He and everyone else on the block rushed to close their stores and went home, returning only once the park had cleared, he said.
Mr. Rodriguez said that everyone in the community was afraid of being picked up by immigration agents, including those who have legal status. He said that agents did not seem to care whether people had immigration papers if they were Latino.
Business at his convenience store has been very slow for about a month, since enforcement raids intensified in the community, he said. He said that he worried about his two children, ages 6 and 7, who were with him in the shop.
“The kids turn on the TV, there’s news about raids,” he said. “That’s already traumatic. Psychologically, they make you sick because all you’re doing is thinking about what time they’ll arrive.”
Monday’s episode felt like an escalation: National Guard soldiers and Marines had mostly been seen guarding federal buildings or accompanying immigration agents on smaller operations. And Ms. Bass said she didn’t know how long to expect the raids to continue.
“Frankly,” she said, “we are managing by rumor.”
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting from Sacramento.
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10) Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country
By Lawrence H. Summers, July 8, 2025
Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former Treasury secretary.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Last week, Robert Rubin and I warned of the many macroeconomic risks created by the domestic policy bill President Trump signed into law on Friday. I stand by our judgment that it will most likely slow growth, risk a financial crisis, exacerbate trade deficits and undermine national security by exhausting the government’s borrowing capacity. This is more than ample reason to regret its passage.
I want to return to the topic after conversations with health professionals, including my daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire. They made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the legislation. I don’t remember on any past Fourth of July being so ashamed of an action my country had just taken.
Over the holiday weekend, while the president was celebrating tax cuts that over 10 years will deliver an average of more than $1 million to families in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, medical professionals were considering questions like these:
· What should they say to seriously disabled patients, who can live at home only because Medicaid pays for rides to their medical appointments, now that those people could lose that coverage?
· What should they recommend to the relatives caring for poor patients at home, who will no longer be able to work when payments for home-health aides are no longer available?
· How should they advise the hospital to handle patients who can’t afford rehab or nursing facilities and can’t live at home, but who currently occupy rooms desperately needed by acutely ill patients?
· Should they still feel proud of and committed to the work of giving comfort to the lonely, poor and elderly, when their country’s leaders have decided that more money for the most fortunate is a higher priority?
· How can they face patients who will be evicted from the hospital with perhaps as little as a cab voucher when their stays end?
After we talked about these questions, it occurred to me to think about precedents in American history — other moments when the social safety net was cut — to see what followed. Did the feared consequences materialize? Were errors corrected?
I am plenty negative about this president and this moment. Even I was unpleasantly surprised by what I learned.
This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The approximately $1 trillion reduction, over 10 years, represents about 0.3 percent of gross domestic product. Previously, the most draconian cuts came with President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax law. But they were far smaller — $12 billion over 10 years and 0.03 percent of G.D.P. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. Other noteworthy reductions to the social safety net, such as the Clinton-era welfare reform, were even smaller.
Because Medicaid is a state-level program and varies widely across the country, economists can evaluate the impact of alternative policies. A number of studies suggest that removing one million people from the rolls for one year could result in about 1,000 additional deaths. It follows that removing more than 11 million people for a decade would likely result in more than 100,000 deaths. Because this figure fails to take account of the degradation of service to those who remain eligible — fewer rides to the hospital, less social support — it could well be an underestimate.
The administration claims its policies, such as adding work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, bear only on the able-bodied. I have supported the general idea of work requirements for cash welfare based on a common-sense idea of fairness. But a careful evaluation of an experiment in Arkansas confirms what common sense also suggests — imposing work requirements on a population in need of health insurance does not increase work and does inhibit necessary care.
The cruelty of these cuts is matched only by their stupidity. Medicaid beneficiaries will lose, but so will the rest of us. The cost of care that is no longer reimbursed by Medicaid will instead be borne by hospitals and passed onto paying patients, only at higher levels, because delayed treatment is more expensive. When rural hospitals close, everyone nearby loses. Hospitals like the one where my daughters practice can no longer accept emergencies by air because those beds are occupied by patients with chronic diseases and no place to go.
Because of the congressional instinct for political survival, the Medicaid cuts are backloaded beyond the 2026 midterms. Cynicism may have a silver lining. As more people realize what is coming, there is time to alter these policies before grave damage is done. TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — is a doctrine that should apply well beyond financial markets.
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11) Trump and Netanyahu Meet Amid Gaza Cease-Fire Negotiations
The two confronted an array of high-stakes Middle East issues. But first they took a victory lap, including the Israeli leader telling President Trump he had nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, Reporting from Washington, Published July 7, 2025, Updated July 8, 2025
During the dinner, the two leaders discussed Gaza and Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu surprised Trump with the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. CreditCredit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confronted several high-stakes issues when they met for dinner on Monday night, including the long-term future of Gaza and the prospect of Israel normalizing relations with its Persian Gulf neighbors.
But first, they indulged in some self-congratulation.
The two celebrated the U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Mr. Netanyahu used the occasion to further ingratiate himself to the American president by telling Mr. Trump he had nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
“He’s forging peace, as we speak, in one country in the region after another,” Mr. Netanyahu said, lavishing praise on Mr. Trump, who has long made known his desire for a Nobel Prize.
Mr. Trump, for his part, compared his decision to authorize airstrikes on Iran to President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan during World War II.
“That stopped a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting,” he said.
The men spoke to reporters while seated at a long table in the Blue Room, surrounded by top White House aides. The Israeli prime minister plans to stay in Washington through Thursday and has meetings planned with Vice President JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary.
He has an array of daunting issues before him during his trip. Mr. Trump has expressed urgency to secure an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage release deal, the subject of talks underway in Qatar.
The discussion agenda also included the recent U.S. airstrikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran, a surgical effort amid a broader Israeli war on the country, as part of a broader conversation about reducing instability in the region, according to two people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private meeting publicly.
Mr. Netanyahu, who arrived in Washington a little after 1 a.m. Monday, met first with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, before having dinner with Mr. Trump.
It is Mr. Netanyahu’s third visit to the White House since Mr. Trump took office for a second time in January, a number that surpasses any other foreign leader. The two men are not personally close — and in fact have long harbored mutual suspicion — but have forged a working relationship out of necessity, allies of both say.
“The utmost priority for the president right now in the Middle East is to end the war in Gaza and to return all of the hostages,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday afternoon. “There was a cease-fire proposal that Israel supports that was sent to Hamas, and we hope that they will agree to this proposal. We want to see all of the hostages released.”
Ms. Leavitt called the cease-fire proposal “agreeable and appropriate.” She added that Mr. Witkoff intended to travel this week to Doha, the capital of Qatar, where he will engage in discussions that include representatives of Qatar and Egypt in trying to negotiate an end to the conflict.
“I think we’re close to a deal on Gaza. Could have it this week,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday, adding, “I think there’s a good chance we have a deal with Hamas during the week.”
Mr. Trump discussed the future of Gaza beyond a short-term cease-fire. In February, during Mr. Netanyahu’s first visit to Washington this year, Mr. Trump made a surprise announcement of his vision that some two million Palestinians be permanently relocated from the Gaza Strip to nearby countries so the United States could take over the territory and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” He later walked back that suggestion.
Arab countries have countered Mr. Trump’s proposal with their own vision, endorsing a plan to keep the population there, rebuild the territory and turn it into part of a future Palestinian state, without Hamas in government.
In response to a question about Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Palestinians be relocated from Gaza, part of a broader proposal that has included essentially razing the territory and turning it into a luxury waterfront development, Mr. Netanyahu of Israel said Mr. Trump had a “brilliant vision.”
The prime minister said Gazans should be able to leave the territory at will. “It’s called free choice,” he said. “You know, if people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s second visit, in early April, came as the prime minister was pressing a case for striking Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Mr. Trump was not interested in having the United States take part as he was trying to negotiate a nuclear containment deal with Iran, but it became clear heading into June that Israel planned to strike with or without U.S. military help.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday that his administration was “working on a lot of things,” including what he called “probably a permanent deal with Iran.”
“They have to give up all of the things that you know so well,” he said, adding that U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities resulted in “complete and total obliteration” — an assessment intelligence reports have contradicted — and that Iran would “have to start all over again at a different location.”
The president and Mr. Netanyahu also discussed Israel’s relationship with Syria. Mr. Trump is hoping to expand the Abraham Accords, an agreement that normalized relations between Israel and other countries in the region that his administration negotiated during his first term.
Mr. Trump has signed an executive order aimed at ending decades of U.S. sanctions on Syria, where the fledgling government of the new president, Ahmed al-Shara, is trying to rebuild the country after a 13-year civil war.
Syria and Israel are engaged in “meaningful” talks through the United States that aim to restore calm along their border, according to the United States.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday before his departure that “the opportunity to expand the circle of peace” was “far beyond what we could have imagined before.”
“I think that everyone understands that the situation has changed,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday. “Before that, Iran was essentially running Syria, directly through Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been brought to its knees. Iran is out of the picture. So I think this presents opportunities for stability, for security and eventually for peace.”
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said more intractable problems lay ahead regarding Gaza and Iran.
“The question really is: How much progress can be made on each of these?” Mr. Abrams said.
“I think there can be a Gaza deal here that begins to free more hostages and includes more food getting in,” he said. “The great complication comes in when you try to extend that and make it a long-term, permanent agreement over the future of the West Bank and Palestinian statehood.”
Rachel Brandenburg, the Washington managing director at the Israel Policy Forum, which works toward a negotiated two-state outcome for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu “probably have different expectations of what should come out of” their meeting.
“President Trump would like to secure the terms of a cease-fire and some amount of agreement that Israel doesn’t strike Iran again,” she said, “but Prime Minister Netanyahu probably just wants to take a victory lap and not have to agree on anything that risks his own political standing.”
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12) Israel Launches New Ground Operations in Lebanon Despite Truce
For months, Israel has conducted near-daily strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets. Hezbollah has not responded militarily since a November truce.
By Euan Ward, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon., July 9, 2025
An Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon last week. Israel has conducted near-daily strikes in southern Lebanon since it agreed to a cease-fire in November. Credit...Rabih Daher/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel’s military launched its first ground incursions in months into parts of southern Lebanon, saying on Wednesday that they were “targeted operations” to dismantle military infrastructure belonging to the militant group Hezbollah.
The military did not say when the operations took place. But the announcement came amid rising tensions over Hezbollah’s disarmament, a core requirement of an increasingly shaky cease-fire agreement signed in November, which ended the deadliest conflict between the two sides in decades.
Under the terms of the truce, Israel was expected to withdraw from southern Lebanon, which it had invaded during the war. But it has held onto five positions along the border, accusing Hezbollah of violating the agreement by maintaining an armed presence in the area.
Israel has also conducted near-daily strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets, intensifying those attacks in recent weeks. Battered by the recent war and struggling to recuperate, Hezbollah has yet to respond militarily to any of the Israeli attacks since the November truce.
The Israeli military statement on Wednesday said it had located and destroyed weapons depots and firing positions, releasing footage showing soldiers conducting nighttime operations inside Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah has said that it withdrew its fighters from southern Lebanon, and Lebanon’s government has since dismantled hundreds of military sites and weapons caches in the area. However, the broader issue of Hezbollah’s full disarmament remains contentious and has raised fears of a renewed war with Israel.
Lebanon’s new government has yet to set a definitive timeline for full disarmament, and Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said in a speech on Sunday that his group’s fighters would not lay down their weapons until Israel stopped its repeated attacks amid the cease-fire.
But those attacks have only intensified in recent weeks, and Israel carried out what it said was a targeted strike on Tuesday against a Hamas official near the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli — an area largely spared during the war — killing three people and wounding more than a dozen, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Roughly 250 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the cease-fire began, according to the health ministry, which does not distinguish between armed combatants and civilians.
The announcement of renewed Israeli ground operations came shortly after a U.S. envoy, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., arrived in Beirut on Monday, where he received Lebanon’s official response to a U.S. road map on Hezbollah’s disarmament.
Speaking to reporters after meeting with Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, Mr. Barrack said that he was “satisfied” with the government’s response, without providing any details on what the seven-page document included.
In an interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Barrack said that the cease-fire had been “a total failure” because Israel was still bombing Lebanon and because Hezbollah was violating the agreement’s terms.
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13) Pregnancy Is Going to Be Even More Dangerous in America
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, July 9, 2025
Eleanor Davis
Dr. Mimi Choate is a family doctor treating pregnant women who struggle with drug addiction. She works at the Oasis Center of the Rogue Valley, a clinic in southwestern Oregon that provides integrated mental health care, social services, addiction counseling and prenatal and postpartum care. I asked her to describe what it looks like when a pregnant woman walks into her clinic for the first time.
“Many of my patients are homeless,” she said. “They may be living on someone’s couch. They may bouncing between motels. Many of them are camping or living outside. So this is a person who doesn’t have an address, often does not have a working cellphone or any cellphone.” They tend to be addicted to either fentanyl or methamphetamine, and they often don’t have insurance, but if they do, it’s Medicaid.
Choate works in a semirural region that’s “among the most reliant on Medicaid” of any U.S. congressional district, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. Oregon also has some of the highest rates of drug addiction and overdoses in the country. Dr. Choate predicts that the Medicaid provisions in the enormous bill that President Trump just signed into law, which cuts more than $1 trillion in health care spending over the next decade, will be devastating for the Oasis Center and its clients.
A lot will depend on how individual states execute the law. Changes to Medicaid financing and programs vary by state and won’t take effect immediately. But considering how drastic the cuts are, it’s possible that even women who have private health insurance will be affected.
Medicaid covers over 40 percent of births in the United States, and an even higher percentage in rural areas. According to an analysis from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy organization, “144 rural hospitals across the country with labor and delivery units are at risk of closure or severe service cutbacks” based on the Medicaid cuts outlined in the bill. That’s in addition to the over 100 rural labor and delivery units that have closed or plan to close since 2020.
For Choate, it is imperative that her patients are seen right away, she told me, because if they aren’t, they might change their minds about getting help. “Even just stepping in the door of a health care facility is a big deal,” she said. “And it’s scary and it feels foreign or it feels like a place where you’ve been judged before or you felt like you didn’t fit in or it wasn’t meant for you.”
If you don’t have a fixed address or a phone, keeping up with paperwork to prove that you are eligible, which the bill requires, is nearly impossible.
The reimbursement rates for providers who accept Medicaid, as Choate does, are already low and are likely to get lower. “Our ability to keep our doors open relies on reasonable reimbursement,” Choate told me, adding, “At least some of our ancillary services are covered by federal grants which have been at risk since Inauguration Day.”
Cuts to Medicaid will have an impact on women across the country regardless of which community they live in. City maternity wards have also been closing, because labor, delivery and infant care are expensive. “Urban hospitals had the highest number of labor and delivery unit closures — 299 — between 2010 and 2022,” my newsroom colleague Sarah Kliff wrote in December.
The United States already has some of the worst health outcomes for mothers and infants in the developed world; it’s only going to get worse as fewer women are able to receive adequate prenatal and postpartum care in a timely fashion.
Sarah Gordon, who is a co-director of the Boston University Medicaid Policy Lab, said that one of her biggest worries is that a lot of lower-income pregnant women will fall through the cracks. “Medicaid programs do not know who is pregnant,” she told me, and often contacting your Medicaid office is “the last thing on most people’s minds.”
If these women are uninsured to begin with, they may not be aware that they’re eligible for Medicaid, and even if they do try to get coverage, “with the punishing amount of administrative burden that’s on state Medicaid agencies, it could take three, four months to sort that out,” Gordon said. With such a short window of time to get prenatal coverage, it could be too late for women to even receive the services they’re entitled to.
Dr. Katharine White, the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston Medical Center, told me she’s also worried that even if her patients remain covered by Medicaid, the increased copays for some of them may keep them from getting that care. “A $35 copay may not sound like a lot to many people, but for the patients I care for, that co-payment could represent half of their utility bill. And a mother is always going to put the needs of their children before their own,” White said.
And these cuts come just as Medicaid was serving more women. Until 2021, Medicaid covered women only until 60 days postpartum. Since then, 48 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted a Medicaid expansion that covers women up until a year after giving birth. According to the Commonwealth Fund, around 30 percent of maternal deaths happen between 43 and 365 days postpartum. If postpartum coverage is dropped — which Gordon thinks is likely — I don’t think it’s a leap to say that more women will die from a lack of preventative care.
Which brings me back to the patients Choate works with. Part of the Trump administration’s health care promise has been that it will “focus on reversing chronic disease.” An executive order issued in February maintains that chronic disease in childhood, specifically, is a “crisis.”
But the planned gutting of Medicaid will imperil the long-term prospects of clinics like the Oasis Center, which offer mental health and substance abuse treatment to pregnant women. This will make babies less healthy from the very beginning. Even some of the people who ended up voting for this bill know how devastating it is going to be. What a preventable tragedy. What a pathetic shame.
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14) Judge Blocks Birthright Citizenship Executive Order Nationwide
By Zach Montague and Pat Grossmith, Zach Montague covers lawsuits against the Trump administration and reported from Washington. Pat Grossmith reported from the courtroom in New Hampshire, July 10, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a contentious executive order ending birthright citizenship, reigniting a legal standoff that has been underway since the beginning of President Trump’s second term.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Joseph N. Laplante of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire also allowed the case to proceed as a class action, applying his order nationwide to babies born to undocumented parents. After a recent Supreme Court decision limiting nationwide injunctions, lawsuits structured as class actions are effectively the only ones that can halt the president’s policies across broad sections of the country.
The Trump administration has fought to end the longstanding custom that people born in the United States are automatically citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Judge Laplante’s order ensures a new round of litigation and appeals.
The judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said he would issue a written order later in the day. He also stayed his order for seven days, allowing time for an appeal.
The lawsuit, brought by the A.C.L.U., was filed just hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling last month, testing what appeared to be the only remaining practical and efficient way for district court judges to freeze the implementation of policies they found unlawful.
The Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship did not address the core dispute surrounding the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s executive action, but it paved the way for a majority of states to begin enforcing it. However, the court’s majority said the executive order could not be carried out for 30 days, allowing time for lawsuits to be filed.
The A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit proposed that all children born in the United States after Feb. 20 and their parents constituted a class. It warned that under the terms of Mr. Trump’s order, people born to parents in the country unlawfully risked being rendered “effectively stateless.”
“For families across America today, birthright citizenship represents the promise that their children can achieve their full potential as Americans,” the lawsuit said. “It means children born here can dream of becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs or even president — dreams that would be foreclosed if their citizenship were stripped away based on their parents’ status.”
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15) How El Salvador Is Reaping Rewards From Trump’s Deportation Agenda
In exchange for jailing more than 200 deportees, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has become a favorite of the Trump administration.
By Annie Correal and Pranav Baskar, July 10, 2025
President Donald Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador holding a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office in April. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
For the U.S. government, sending deportees accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador fits with President Trump’s promise to aggressively deport undocumented migrants and to crack down on crime.
For El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the rewards appear to have included, among other things, a White House visit and stamp of approval, despite widespread concerns over Mr. Bukele’s crackdown on civil liberties.
While the exact terms of the agreement have not been made public, leaders around the world may be watching, experts and immigration lawyers say, especially as the Trump administration searches for countries willing to take expelled migrants of other nationalities.
“Other leaders and countries are trying to emulate the Bukele arrangement,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, a director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based group that has represented immigrants in lawsuits against the Trump administration. Countries are increasingly “raising their hand to volunteer their incarceration facilities and to facilitate the deportation of people,” he added.
A White House spokeswoman has said the administration is “grateful for President Bukele’s partnership” and for the use of his maximum-security prison, adding, “There is no better place for these sick, illegal criminals.”
MS-13 Gang Leaders Returned
An investigation by The New York Times found the U.S. government not only paid Mr. Bukele’s government around $5 million to incarcerate more than 200 Venezuelan deportees, but added a bonus at his request: the return to El Salvador of several top MS-13 leaders in American custody, some thought to have knowledge of Mr. Bukele’s ties to the gang.
American authorities have found substantial evidence of secret negotiations between Mr. Bukele’s government and MS-13 leaders, and some experts say Mr. Bukele may want to bury that evidence. He has denied having any pact with the gang; his administration did not respond to a request for comment.
A Boost for Tourism
In April, the State Department upgraded El Salvador’s travel advisory to its highest rating, citing a “drop in violent crimes and murders.”
While crime has improved, El Salvador jumped to the United States’ safest level, ahead of countries like France or Spain, whose rates of violent crime are the same or lower.
The improved rating reflects a dramatic turnaround for a country that once had a soaring homicide rate and “significant human rights issues,” according to the State Department in 2023.
Since Mr. Bukele ordered mass arrests in 2022, El Salvador has become one of the safest countries in the region, earning him broad support from Salvadorans in a landslide re-election last year.
But the timing of the U.S. upgrade raised questions among critics, as it came soon after El Salvador received deportees, and after Mr. Bukele met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Canada and Britain are among the countries that still warn travelers to exercise increased caution when visiting El Salvador.
Ahilan Arulanantham, of the U.C.L.A. Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said there was “no question” that Mr. Bukele would want the upgrade. Any government, he said, would “prefer a rating saying it’s safe to travel to.”
Mr. Bukele, who hopes tourism will boost the economy, trumpeted the news and promoted a new surfing destination.
“Just got the U.S. State Department’s travel gold star: Level 1: safest it gets,” he said.
Temporary Protected Status
The Trump administration recently ended deportation protections for immigrants from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Honduras and Nicaragua.
But Salvadoran immigrants still have Temporary Protected Status, which shields some 200,000 people from deportation and allows them to legally work in the United States. The privileges last until early September.
Experts say that status earns Mr. Bukele political points at home, where remittances from U.S.-based relatives are vital to the economy.
Muted Criticism
In recent months, Mr. Bukele’s government has cracked down further on civil liberties, targeting civil society groups, arresting critics and pushing some prominent journalists to flee.
And while the European Union condemned a new law giving his government broad powers to silence dissidents, the U.S. government stayed quiet.
Instead, the State Department certified in April that El Salvador was protecting press freedom and strengthening the rule of law.
Attention and Access
After the deportees arrived in El Salvador, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Bukele in the Oval Office, flattering him as “President B.”
Mr. Bukele’s cooperation — and his highly stylized images of shackled deportees entering a prison built for terrorists — also generated buzz, which the Salvadoran president has exploited.
Recently, he sparred online with a fashion designer whose Paris show featured models in outfits resembling those worn by the deportees.
Mr. Bukele has also emerged as an example for other governments, generating at least one agreement, between El Salvador and Costa Rica, to replicate his high-security prison there.
International Scrutiny
The agreement to jail deportees from the United States has invited scrutiny of Mr. Bukele, according to Douglas Farah, an El Salvador expert who advised a Justice Department task force targeting MS-13.
Family members have called for the release of many of the Venezuelan deportees, saying their relatives have no criminal records. Democratic lawmakers have demanded answers about the deal. One returned deportee has said he was mistreated in Salvadoran custody.
Mr. Bukele has denied those allegations. “I don’t care if they call me a dictator,” he said recently. “I would rather be called ‘dictator’ than watch them kill Salvadorans in the streets.”
Mr. Farah said the deal has created tension. “Bukele hadn’t thought about what this would look like to the outside world and to his own people,” he said. For the first time, he added, Mr. Bukele’s image as his nation’s savior is facing “counterpressure.”
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16) L.A. Area Bishop Excuses Faithful From Mass Over Fear of Immigration Raids
San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas lifted the obligation for members of the diocese to celebrate Mass if they had a “genuine fear of immigration enforcement actions.”
By Claire Moses, July 10, 2025
Bishop Alberto Rojas leading mass at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Chino Hills, Calif., in 2023. Federal agents have arrested about 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles area since June 6. Credit...Will Lester/MediaNews Group/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, via Getty
The Diocese of San Bernardino has told its parishioners that they do not have to attend Mass for fear of federal immigration raids.
Bishop Alberto Rojas, the leader of the Roman Catholic community of about 1.6 million worshipers in Southern California, said in a letter on Tuesday that members who face a “genuine fear of immigration enforcement actions” if they attend Mass on Sundays or holidays are “dispensed from this obligation.”
The lifting of the obligation for Catholics is a rare step usually reserved for extenuating circumstances such as the Covid pandemic.
The diocese in San Bernardino, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, is at least the second to excuse its members from Mass as the Trump administration escalates Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids nationwide.
ICE agents, who are often masked, have detained people in shopping center parking lots and at carwashes, bus stops and other public places. In May, armed men in face coverings detained a Latino man outside a church in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, in what pastors believed was an immigration raid.
In May, after immigration raids in Nashville, that city’s diocese said in a statement that “no Catholic is obligated to attend Mass on Sunday if doing so puts their safety at risk.”
Federal agents arrested about 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles area from June 6 through June 30, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The raids have instilled fear and anxiety in Californians, leaving some afraid to go to work. Multiple communities in the state canceled Fourth of July celebrations, citing fears of raids.
Mr. Rojas encouraged members of his diocese who do not attend Mass to “maintain their spiritual communion with Christ and His Church through acts of personal prayer, reading of Sacred Scripture, or participation in devotions such as the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet.”
If possible, people could participate in televised or online Mass, he said.
Last month, he wrote a letter to the diocese in which he expressed worry over the raids and said, without elaborating, that ICE agents had seized several people from a parish property.
“Authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God,” Mr. Rojas wrote in the letter.
The ICE raids have led to protests and tension in California in recent weeks. President Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to the state in early June as demonstrations swelled, a decision that Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has often clashed with the president, called “unlawful.”
In San Francisco this week, tensions over immigration enforcement flared when demonstrators clashed with federal agents who appeared to detain a man outside a courthouse.
In Los Angeles, dozens of armed federal agents marched through a park this week in a neighborhood with a large immigrant population. Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference that the park “looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation.”
Mr. Rojas’s decree will be in effect until further notice, he said. “Please continue to pray for our immigrant brothers and sisters,” the Diocese of San Bernardino said on its Facebook page.
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17) Trump Seeks to Cut Basic Scientific Research by Roughly One-Third, Report Shows
An analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows the impact of the administration’s budget plan on the kind of studies that produce the most breakthroughs.
By William J. Broad, July 10, 2025
The National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. In May, the Trump administration outlined a budget reduction of the foundation, which sponsors basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.
The group says it would fall by more than one-third.
The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.
For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.
The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.
His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”
Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.
In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.
Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.
Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”
The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century.
Federal funding allocated for basic research is often seen as a measure for the likelihood of breakthroughs in esoteric fields like artificial intelligence and quantum computing, areas the Trump administration has prioritized. According to the White House budget office, the administration has maintained funding in these areas “to ensure the United States remains on the cutting edge of these critical technologies’ development and responsible use.”
Each year, the president submits a budget request to Congress in advance of the annual appropriations process. Only Congress has the power to fund federal programs. That budget request thus carries no legal weight, but it does offer an opportunity for an administration to signal its priorities.
In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.
The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.
In April, the science group published figures showing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.
Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.
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18) A Lethal Israeli Airstrike Hits Near a Gaza Aid Clinic
The attack struck near a facility run by an American aid organization as negotiators from Hamas and Israel wrangle over a potential new cease-fire agreement.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 10, 2025
A screen grab from a video shows a wounded child being treated in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on Thursday. Credit...via Reuters
An Israeli airstrike near a health clinic run by an American aid group killed more than a dozen people in Gaza on Thursday, according to the hospital that received many of the dead.
The strike hit near a clinic operated by Project HOPE, an American aid organization, in the central town of Deir al-Balah, according to Natia Deisadze, its regional director. Civilians, including children, were gathering outside the clinic at the time of the attack “to receive essential nutrition support,” she said.
The Israeli military said that it had struck a Hamas fighter who participated in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which ignited the Gaza war. It added that it was still reviewing the strike and regretted any “harm to uninvolved individuals” in the strike in Deir al-Balah.
The Israeli military has said its bombing campaign in Gaza has targeted militants and their weapons infrastructure while seeking to minimize harm to civilians. The military has frequently carried out strikes on densely populated areas, killing many civilians but Israeli officials have accused militant groups of operating in civilian areas.
Intensive Israel-Hamas negotiations this week over a new U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal have raised hopes for a truce soon. But there was no sign that Israel was easing up on its attacks in Gaza that it says are aimed at incapacitating Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that has long ruled the enclave.
More than 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the war, including more than 7,000 in the roughly four months since a cease-fire collapsed in March, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The war has created a dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where hunger is rampant and Palestinians are struggling to find food and shelter.
The bodies of 18 people, including children, were brought to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah after the Israel airstrike, said Dr. Khalil al-Daqran, a hospital spokesman. Dr. al-Daqran is an employee of the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in casualty counts.
A CCTV video from the moment of the strike, verified by The New York Times, shows two men walking down a street with a group of about a dozen women and children sitting on a pavement close by. Suddenly, the two men are hit and a cloud of dust fills the screen.
Videos vetted by The Times from the aftermath of the strike showed at least nine women and children lying injured as onlookers scream. One woman was bleeding from a head wound and the twisted body of a child was nearby.
“There was a loud explosion,” said Doaa al-Harazin, 28, who witnessed the strike. “I saw children torn apart while women nearby screamed in anguish.”
Ameera Harouda, Malachy Browne, Abu Bakr Bashir, Nader Ibrahim and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting to this article.
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19) U.S. Imposes Sanctions on U.N. Expert Who Has Criticized Israel’s War in Gaza
Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced Francesca Albanese, a special rapporteur, for investigating Americans and Israelis over the war in the enclave.
By Francesca Regalado, July 10, 2025
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, in Copenhagen in February. Credit...Ida Marie Odgaard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that the United States would impose sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, for her work with the International Criminal Court to investigate Americans and Israelis.
Ms. Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, has been an outspoken critic of Israeli military actions in Gaza, and the Trump administration has been on a campaign to punish people who criticize Israel’s war in Gaza.
An executive order signed by President Trump in February imposed sanctions that could bar people associated with the International Criminal Court from entering the United States and from purchasing property and assets in the country.
The United States is not a party to a 1998 treaty that established the court to investigate and prosecute people accused of war crimes, genocide and other offenses.
The Trump administration acted last month against four judges on the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and members of his war cabinet. The United States imposed sanctions on the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, in February after he brought a case against Israel over the war.
Last week, in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council Ms. Albanese said that Israel was “responsible for one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio criticized her for recommending that the International Criminal Court investigate and prosecute American companies and executives as part of its investigation of war crimes and human rights violations in Gaza.
“We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty,” he said.
Special rapporteurs are unpaid independent experts who monitor human rights issues.
Mr. Rubio accused Ms. Albanese of bias that he said made her unfit to serve as special rapporteur, a position she has held since 2022. Israel’s government has banned Ms. Albanese from entering the country since December.
Shortly after Mr. Rubio announced the sanctions, Ms. Albanese wrote on social media, “I stand firmly and convincingly on the side of justice, as I have always done.”
Ms. Albanese did not immediately respond to to a request for comment.
Ms. Albanese wrote a report in late June to the U.N. Human Rights Council detailing the profit derived by corporations — including arms manufacturers, banks and large asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard — from a large increase in Israel’s military budget since the start of its campaign in Gaza in October 2023.
The war began in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel that month in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and roughly 250 others were taken hostage. The war has devastated Gaza, and at least 57,000 people have died there, according to the Palestinian health authorities.
In her June report, Ms. Albanese called on U.N. member states to impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel. She also called on countries to suspend trade and investment relations with Israel, and to hold companies involved in violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories accountable.
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20) A British Surgeon on What She Saw in Gaza’s Hospitals
Dr. Victoria Rose spent 21 days in the territory, treating people who were shot trying to get food and children with life-changing injuries from Israeli bombs.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, Published July 9, 2025, Updated July 10, 2025
Dr. Victoria Rose at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza in May, in a picture distributed by Anadolu Agency, a Turkish state news outlet. “I’ve not seen this volume and this intensity before,” she said of the traumatic injuries she treated. Credit...Alaa Y. M. Abumohsen/Anadolu, via Getty Images
On the morning of June 1, Dr. Victoria Rose was nearing the end of her 21-day stint as a volunteer in Gaza when she saw news of a mass shooting of Palestinians near a food distribution point.
A senior plastic surgeon in London, Dr. Rose, 53, had come to the enclave with a small British charity that has sent medical workers to humanitarian crises in countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sri Lanka.
Dr. Rose went straight to the emergency room at Nasser Hospital where she was based, arriving around 8 a.m. It is the last major hospital still functioning in southern Gaza.
“There were ambulances coming in, just bringing dead people, and then there were donkey-drawn carts bringing dead people,” she recalled in an interview in London. “By about 10 o’clock, we had 20 or so dead bodies, and then easily a hundred or so gunshot wounds.”
In her three weeks at Nasser, Dr. Rose said she saw a health system under extreme pressure from an unrelenting stream of people with traumatic injuries. Compared with her previous two trips during the war, she said, many more patients have suffered “unsurvivable” burns or severe blast injuries from Israeli bombs.
“They weren’t shrapnel wounds anymore — bits of them had been blown off,” she said. “Children were coming in with knees missing and feet missing and hands missing.”
For 21 months, Gazan civilians have suffered as Israel has unleashed one of the most intense bombardments in modern warfare in its campaign against Hamas. And since June 1, more than 700 Palestinians have been reported killed, and about 5,000 injured, in almost daily shootings near food distribution sites run under a new aid system backed by Israel and the United States, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The mass casualties have deeply tarnished the aid initiative, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F., which employs mostly American private security contractors, supported by Israeli troops stationed nearby. Dozens of aid groups have called for it to be shut down.
Officials from Israel and G.H.F. have said the casualty figures provided by the health ministry are inaccurate, without providing an alternate toll or addressing other figures. This week, the International Red Cross said its Rafah field hospital had treated over 2,200 weapon-wounded patients, most of them injured in 21 mass casualty events, and had logged 200 deaths since the new aid system began, adding that “the scale and frequency of these incidents are without precedent.”
Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the war began, except on controlled military embeds. As a result, medical workers for charities like Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross and Ideals, which Dr. Rose volunteered for, are among the few international observers who can give firsthand accounts of the aftermath of these shootings and about the condition of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals.
All the patients Dr. Rose treated on June 1 said they had been shot by people guarding the food distribution point. Several people, she said, told her they were shot by “crowd control” while running away, although it is not clear what that phrase referred to. Their accounts were consistent with bullet wounds she treated to the back of people’s legs, she said, as well as to the torso and abdomen.
“We’re in that point where people have been reduced to such a level of deprivation that they’re prepared to die for a bagful of rice and a bit of pasta,” she said.
The Israeli military said on June 3 that its forces had fired near “a few” people who strayed from the designated route to the site and who did not respond to warning shots. Then, on June 27, the military said it was investigating “recent reports of incidents of harm” to civilians approaching aid distribution points, including that on June 1, adding that “any allegation of a deviation from the law or I.D.F. directives will be thoroughly examined.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said in a statement that it disagreed that an incident took place “at or in the immediate vicinity of a G.H.F. distribution site” on June 1. It also denied any injuries or fatalities during its operations since the initiative kicked off on May 26. It added, “Gaza is an active war zone, and G.H.F. doesn’t control the area outside of our distribution sites.”
Dr. Rose usually works as a senior plastic surgeon at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. Her specialty is breast reconstruction for cancer patients, but in her 30-year career she has also treated traumatic injuries from road accidents and shootings. That did not prepare her, she said, for the scale of suffering she encountered on three trips to Gaza in the past 14 months. “I’ve not seen this volume and this intensity before,” she said.
The youngest patient she treated was a 3-month-old baby in May, she said, whose abdomen and leg had been badly burned in a bomb blast.
Dr. Rose posted regular videos on Instagram showing her work in the hospital. While a few are lighter in tone — in one, titled “Breakfast of surgeons,” she drizzles peanut butter onto a cracker — others are graphic and distressing, showing patients with severe wounds. “I just thought people needed to see what I was seeing,” she said. In a post on May 23, she introduces a 3-year-old, Hatem. He is almost entirely wrapped in bandages. “He has a 35 percent burn,” she says in the video. “That’s a massive burn for a little guy.”
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, more than 57,000 people have been killed as a result of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry. That number does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it includes thousands of children.
Israeli officials have blamed Hamas for the deadly toll, arguing that the group deliberately embeds its fighters in areas full of civilians. An investigation by The New York Times last year found that Israel significantly loosened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants during the conflict; on a few occasions, Israeli commanders signed off on attacks they knew would endanger more than 100 civilians.
Dr. Rose first worked in Gaza in 2019. As the lead surgeon for plastic surgery trauma at King’s College Hospital in London, she met Dr. Graeme Groom, a British orthopedic trauma surgeon. He inspired her to volunteer for the charity Ideals, which trains surgeons in the territory. When Israel’s bombing campaign started after the Oct. 7 attacks, she was still in touch with one doctor she helped train, Ahmed El Mokhallalati.
Dr. El Mokhallalati usually texted for advice about cancer patients, she said, but he started sending “picture after picture of children with half their leg missing,” asking whether he should amputate or try to save their limbs.
Dr. Rose recalled saying to her partner, “Look, I think I need to go and give him a hand, because he’s dealing with a lot right now, and he’s only just finished his training.”
She traveled to Gaza in March 2024, again in August and most recently this May. On average, she treated 10 patients a day on her last trip, and she estimated that about 60 percent of those were under the age of 15.
Poor sanitation and widespread malnutrition worsened their survival rates, she said. The United Nations warned of “a growing likelihood of famine” in June, after Israel’s two-month blockade on aid, which ended when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operating. Israeli officials said the blockade was necessary to pressure Hamas to compromise in negotiations.
Malnutrition leaves the body less able to repair wounds and weakens the immune system, Dr. Rose said, adding that antibiotic shortages in Gaza meant that doctors were “unable to prevent infection, and then unable to treat infection.”
She left the enclave on June 3. Asked how it felt to be back in London, she said, “I am a little bit — ” and paused. “Not shellshocked. I’m sort of still in it, though.”
Officials from Israel and Hamas have been holding talks in Doha, Qatar, to end the war but they have been wrangling over the terms of a deal that would see the release of hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
On June 20, Dr. Rose shared a small piece of good news. Hatem, the 3-year-old burn victim, has been evacuated to Abu Dhabi, where his treatment can continue in safety.
But she still thinks about the children she treated who did not survive, she said, and her Palestinian colleagues, who are still in Gaza trying to save lives. “What a Team! … wonderful people who work all the hours to help those in need,” she wrote in one of her last posts from Nasser. “They are the heroes.”
Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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