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Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  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 KagarlitskyWe, 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 Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe 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) How the Military Became Another Instrument of Trump’s Power
By Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, Aug. 13, 2025
Mr. Simon held senior positions in the State Department and at the National Security Council. Mr. Stevenson served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration.
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts.
Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term.
But today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order.
It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities. Recent changes to the terms of the military’s employment by the Pentagon and its members’ incentives to career advancement will ultimately overcome any constitutional and moral qualms about their conduct.
Democratic civilian control and the apolitical professionalism of military officers have long been bulwarks against authoritarianism. This framework proved stable through the 20th century, even when tested by the Vietnam War, in significant part because American presidents and their civilian advisers could be trusted not to imperil the political integrity of the Republic.
Mr. Trump, however, has challenged this civil-military calculus. Since the military resisted his efforts to use active-duty personnel against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, liberals have put their faith in the military as a last line of defense against a rogue executive branch.
But Mr. Trump and his allies have incentivized loyalty over legality and professional competence in administering military promotions. Mr. Trump has dismissed top military personnel without cause and promoted supporters (like former National Guard three-star Gen. Dan Caine) to leadership positions. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the military’s top Judge Advocates General, even though Pentagon lawyers see their job as facilitating policy objectives, not impeding them.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump has insidiously militarized domestic law enforcement by bureaucratic means. In July, the Pentagon re-designated a change of duty status of military personnel from Title 10 to Title 32 to facilitate their “direct interaction with individuals in ICE custody.” And ICE may now utilize the National Guard in 20 states for “alien processing.”
There are structural as well as ad hoc components to Mr. Trump’s mobilization. He is effectively fusing Northern Command, or Northcom, and the Department of Homeland Security into a cooperative internal security body. Both were established after the Sept. 11 attacks to secure U.S. territory against external terrorist threats.
Broader military culture favors the administration’s position. History shows that reinforced by the principle of civilian control, military officers will generally adapt to new missions even if they depart from tried-and-true practices. From World War II to the war on terror, new missions have required pragmatic go-getters, and the system has ensured their promotion over peers who remain dedicated to outdated ways. A truly disturbing precedent was the Army’s internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, carried out by officers of the Western Defense Command, a wartime precursor of the now peacetime Northcom. These officers were well aware that there was no serious security rationale to justify corralling these Americans into camps.
If the highest-ranked officers taking their cue from the White House decide that military operations on American soil are necessary, career officers will get the message. Some may entertain and even express reservations about employing American forces for domestic law enforcement, but few would act on them.
This is what we are seeing now. Top officers have registered no public objection to the dismissals of certain officers or the elevation of others whose main qualification appears to be loyalty to the president. Nor have they appeared to meaningfully question the dispatch of the Marines to California, Florida and elsewhere or of the National Guard to Washington.
In the 1950s, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed that American military officers had evolved into a disciplined, technically competent, conservative group removed from the maelstrom of American politics.
But in the context of domestic theaters, the military cannot be a politically neutral tool. The Marines in Los Angeles and National Guard troops in Washington will not be wearing blue helmets and thinking of themselves as a United Nations peacekeeping force. The Trump administration has cast immigration and political forces “from within” as threats.
Northern Command is fundamentally no different than Central Command. Its commander’s job is to use U.S. air, ground and naval forces in combined operations to defeat enemies within their area of responsibility — even if those “enemies” are U.S. citizens.
Extending military operations piecemeal to internal law enforcement stealthily routinizes the fusion of executive and military power. Huge new funding for ICE under Mr. Trump’s big tax and spending law will substantially increase the scope and pace of the agency’s efforts nationwide and is likely to prompt commensurately greater military support. The fact that some California National Guard troops are reportedly disaffected with the ICE support mission they were given may well persuade the Trump administration to move more regular, active-duty troops into American cities.
The danger of escalation is real. Soldiers and Marines are trained for combat, not constabulary duty and riot control. Expecting military personnel to shift seamlessly from destroying an enemy on the battlefield to law enforcement is asking for trouble. And the deployment of troops to urban areas may provoke clashes with citizens who may be motivated to pick up a gun. Once shots are fired at military personnel, no matter where the shots come from, the administration will have the pretext it requires to tighten its grip using instruments of state control. This might sound far-fetched, but it can spin out of control.
It may be left to the Supreme Court to enforce constitutional discipline on the U.S. armed forces. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California’s lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops is working its way through the federal judicial system. The District Court initially ruled in California’s favor, but the Court of Appeals quickly ruled for the federal government.
But the Supreme Court, which has shown scant enthusiasm for curbing presidential power, could just as easily rule for the Trump administration. The military would be unlikely to challenge the president, and his power would become that much more entrenched. The last best hope may be a broadly applicable unanimous decision upholding the District Court’s ruling that even Mr. Trump would feel compelled to respect.
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2) If Haiti Has Become More Violent, Why End Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status in the US?
By Nathalye Cotrino, Senior Researcher, Americas Division, August 5, 2025
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced last month that temporary protected status for about 500,000 Haitians would end Sept. 2, five months earlier than planned. The Trump administration has cited flawed and contradictory assessments of conditions in Haiti — which, make no mistake, remains unsafe.
Although a US district court halted the action — at least temporarily — and reinstated the original termination date of Feb. 3, the administration is likely to challenge the ruling. The outcome of such a challenge could hinge on whether the courts receive and believe an accurate representation of current events in Haiti.
The administration asserts that “overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But few outsiders are entering and leaving the country lately, so the truth can be hard to ascertain.
In late April and early May, as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, I traveled to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. For the first time in the several years I have been working in Haiti, violence kept me from reaching the capital, Port-au-Prince, where the airport remains under a Federal Aviation Administration ban since November when gangs shot Spirit, JetBlue and American Airlines passenger jets in flight.
In Cap-Haïtien, I spoke with dozens of people who fled the capital and other towns in recent months. Many shared accounts of killings, injuries from stray bullets and gang rapes by criminal group members.
“We were walking toward school when we saw the bandits shooting at houses, at people, at everything that moved,” a 27-year-old woman, a student from Port-au-Prince, told me. “We started to run back, but that’s when [my sister] Guerline fell face down. She was shot in the back of the head, then I saw [my cousin] Alice shot in the chest.” The student crawled under a car, where she hid for hours. She fled the capital in early January.
This rampant violence is precisely the sort of conditions Congress had in mind when it passed the temporary protected status law in 1990. It recognized a gap in protection for situations in which a person might not be able to establish that they have been targeted for persecution on the basis of their beliefs or identity — the standard for permanent asylum claims — but rather when a person’s life is at real risk because of high levels of generalized violence that make it too dangerous for anyone to be returned to the place.
When an administration grants this designation, it does so for a defined period, which can be extended based on conditions in the recipients’ home country. For instance, protected status for people from Somalia was first designated in 1991 and has been extended repeatedly, most recently through March 17, 2026.
Almost 1.3 million people are internally displaced in Haiti. They flee increasing violence by criminal groups that killed more than 5,600 people in 2024 — 23% more than in 2023. Some analysts say the country has the highest homicide rate in the world. Criminal groups control nearly 90% of the capital and have expanded into other places.
Perversely, the Department of Homeland Security publicly concedes this reality, citing in a Federal Register notification “widespread gang violence” as a reason for terminating temporary protected status. The government argues that a “breakdown in governance” makes Haiti unable to control migration, and so a continued designation to protect people from there would not be in the “national interests” of the United States.
Even judging on that criterion alone, revoking the legal status of Haitians in the US is a bad idea. Sending half a million people into Haiti would be highly destabilizing and counter to US interests — not to mention that their lives would be at risk.
The Trump administration has taken no meaningful action to improve Haiti’s situation. The Kenya-led multinational security support mission, authorized by the UN Security Council and initially backed by the United States, has been on the ground for a year. Yet because of severe shortages of personnel, resources and funding, it has failed to provide the support the Haitian police desperately need. In late February, UN Secretary-General António Guterres recommended steps to strengthen the mission, but the Security Council has yet to act.
The humanitarian situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate. An estimated 6 million people need humanitarian assistance. Nearly 5.7 million face acute hunger.
On June 26, just one day before Homeland Security’s attempt to end Haitians’ protected status prematurely, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau described the ongoing crisis in Haiti as “disheartening.” He said that “public order has all but collapsed” as “Haiti descends into chaos.” Two days earlier, the US Embassy in Haiti issued a security alert urging US citizens in the country to “depart as soon as possible.” These are not indications that “country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety,” as Homeland Security claimed on June 27.
The decision to prematurely end temporary protected status is utterly disconnected from reality. The Trump administration itself has warned that Haiti remains dangerous — and if anything has become more so in recent months. The US government should continue to protect Haitians now living in the United States from being thrown into the brutal violence unfolding in their home country.
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3) With Arson and Land Grabs, Israeli Settler Attacks in West Bank Hit Record High
Extremists are carrying out one of the most violent campaigns against Palestinian villages since the U.N. began keeping records.
By Patrick Kingsley, Fatima AbdulKarim and Natan Odenheimer, Aug. 14, 2025
The journalists reported from several villages in the central valleys of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including Burqa, Beitin and Taybeh.
Burned out cars in Burqa, in the West Bank, last month. Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
It was well past midnight when the masked arsonists sneaked into the hilltop Palestinian village of Burqa. Arriving from the direction of a nearby Israeli settlement, they crept inside a junkyard on the edge of the village.
They sprayed liquid on several cars, security footage showed, and set the vehicles alight. One sprayed graffiti on a barn wall, tagging the name of a nearby settlement, as well as the Hebrew word for “Revenge.”
It was the third attack that July night in this central pocket of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the seventh attack on this particular junkyard since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, according to its owner.
“Before the war they harassed us, but not like this,” said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner. “Now, they’re trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.”
Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank. With the world’s attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Settlers carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians and their property during the first half of this year, an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That is the highest monthly average since the U.N. started compiling such records in 2006.
The Israeli military has recorded a similar surge in settler violence, though it has documented only 440 attacks in the same period, according to unpublished internal records reviewed by The New York Times. The military, which is the sovereign power in the occupied territory, says it tries to prevent the attacks, but a Times investigation last year found that the Israeli authorities have for decades failed to impose meaningful restraints on criminal settlers. While Israel usually prosecutes Palestinians under military law, settlers are typically charged under civil law, if they are prosecuted at all.
For this article, reporters for The Times visited five villages recently attacked by settlers, reviewed security footage of several episodes and cellphone footage of others, and spoke with residents of the afflicted villages, as well as Israeli military officers and settler leaders.
Our reporting found that masked settlers typically sneak into Palestinian villages in the dead of night, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. In some cases, they enter during the daylight hours, leading to confrontations with residents. Sometimes the clashes have involved the Israel military, leading to the killings of several Palestinians, including a Palestinian American. In one daytime attack, settlers threw a firebomb into a child’s bedroom, the child’s family said.
The vast majority of the 700,000 Jewish Israelis who have settled since 1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — in settlements considered illegal by most of the international community — are not involved in such violence. Mainstream settler leaders say they have a right to the land but oppose attacking Palestinians.
Hard-line settler leaders acknowledge that their aim is to intimidate Palestinians into leaving strategic tracts of territory that many Palestinians hope may one day form the spine of a state.
“It’s not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,” Ariel Danino, a prominent settler activist, said in an interview with The Times in 2023. “But we’re talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.” In a recent call, Mr. Danino said he stood by the comments but declined a second interview.
For several years, the settlers had focused their intimidation on tiny, seminomadic herding communities along a remote chain of hilltops northeast of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank. That campaign has largely succeeded, forcing at least 38 communities to leave their hamlets and encampments since 2023, according to records compiled by B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group.
That has eroded the Palestinian presence there and ceded the surrounding slopes to settlers who have seized the chance to build more small settlement outposts, or encampments.
After members of one Palestinian community fled en masse in May, a settler leader, Elisha Yered, wrote on social media that their departure was “thanks to the campaign waged against it by the Jewish settlement outposts in the area.”
“With God’s help, one day we will expel you to your natural place in Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” added Mr. Yered.
Since the start of 2023, settlers have built more than 130 outposts, mostly in rural areas of the West Bank, that are technically unauthorized but often tolerated by the Israeli government. That is more than they had built in the previous two decades combined, according to research by Peace Now, an Israeli group that backs the creation of a Palestinian state.
Now, settlers have expanded their scope. They are increasingly targeting a cluster of wealthier, larger and better connected Palestinian villages closer to Ramallah — villages like Burqa and its neighbor, Beitin.
Before the junkyard attack in Burqa, masked settlers had, in fact, begun to rampage in Beitin. Just after 1 a.m., Abdallah Abbas, a retired teacher in that village, woke to find his sedan on fire and a Star of David sprayed on the wall of his garden.
Roughly an hour later, security footage showed, two masked arsonists stole into the yard of Leila Jaraba’s house, a few hundred yards away on the edge of the village. One sprayed the hood of Ms. Jaraba’s car with something flammable, and his accomplice set the car on fire.
“We knew our turn would come,” said Ms. Jaraba, 28, who was cowering inside with her husband and two sons, ages 2 and 4 months. “They want to take this land; they want to kick us out.”
About an hour later, masked settlers entered Burqa and attacked Mr. Sabr Asalaya’s junkyard. Villagers said in interviews that they suspected the same group of settlers might have moved from place to place, wreaking havoc. This sequence of attacks was just a snapshot of a broader pattern of violence in the area.
In the first half of 2025, there were an average of 17 attacks a month in this approximately 40- square-mile area, according to the U.N. That was nearly twice the monthly rate in 2024, and roughly five times as many as in 2022.
The attacks have occurred against the backdrop of intensifying efforts by the Israeli government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, to entrench its grip on the West Bank.
Since entering office in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have authorized more than 30 settlements, some of which were previously built without government permission and have been granted retroactive authorization. It is the largest wave of government-led settlement activity since before the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
Simultaneously, the Israeli military has captured and demolished key urban neighborhoods in the northern West Bank that are technically administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous institution that oversees civil governance in Palestinian cities. The military has also installed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints across the territory.
The Israeli military defends its actions as a means of containing Palestinian militant groups that launch terrorist attacks on Israelis. But it has further complicated the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, stifled the economy, left tens of thousands of people homeless and made it even harder for most Palestinians to journey to nearby cities.
In villages like Burqa, settlers’ attacks make life especially untenable. Repeated arson attacks have damaged scores of used cars that Mr. Sabr Asalaya, the junkyard owner, said he had bought from dealers in Israel. He planned to retool their engines and spare parts and sell them for a profit. The attacks have lost him stock worth tens of thousands of dollars, making his business — and his ability to survive in this village — much less viable, he said.
Life is “not slowly turning untenable — it is already untenable,” Mr. Sabr Asalaya said. “We are encircled. We can’t even herd our cattle. We’re locked in.”
The problem has been made worse by the Israeli military’s failure to prevent either the attacks or the settlers’ construction of unauthorized encampments across the territory. A Times investigation last year found that the Israeli authorities had for decades shown substantial leniency to Jews involved in terrorist attacks against Arabs, a dynamic that has only worsened since October 2023. In one emblematic case, a settler was filmed shooting a Palestinian in the presence of an Israeli soldier, yet the shooter was questioned for only 20 minutes and never arrested.
A senior Israeli military commander in the central West Bank, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol, said his soldiers tried to protect both settlers and Palestinians in accordance with Israeli law. He noted that settlers had sometimes clashed with Israeli soldiers this summer.
We spoke to the commander eight hours before the attacks on Mr. Sabr Asalaya’s property and Ms. Jaraba’s car.
Soldiers arrived long after the fires had been extinguished, villagers said. While the Israeli police said they had opened investigations into each episode, no one was prosecuted.
“In some cases, suspects were arrested,” the police said in a statement, “though later released due to a lack of evidence.”
Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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4) Big Tech’s A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
Electricity rates for individuals and small businesses could rise sharply as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies build data centers and expand into the energy business.
By Ivan Penn and Karen Weise, Aug. 14, 2025
Ivan Penn reported from Anaheim, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and Los Angeles. Karen Weise reported from Seattle.
“States allow utilities to charge customers enough to recoup their costs and make money for shareholders based on how much they invest. New data centers require utilities to spend billions of dollars on power lines and plants, which should lead to bigger profits for the utilities over time.”
A transmission line running near data centers in Ashburn, Va. As the electricity demands of the structures rapidly escalate, tech companies are becoming some of the most dominant players in energy. Nathan Howard for The New York Times
The annual meeting of state utility regulators is typically a humdrum affair of dry speeches and panel discussions. But in November, the scene at the Marriott in Anaheim, Calif., had a bit more flash.
The conference’s top sponsors included the nation’s biggest tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Their executives sat on panels, and the companies’ branding was plastered on product booths and at networking events. Even the lanyards around attendees’ necks were stamped with Google’s colorful logo.
Just a few years ago, tech companies were minor players in energy, making investments in solar and wind farms to rein in their growing carbon footprints and placate customers concerned about climate change. But now, they are changing the face of the U.S. power industry and blurring the line between energy consumer and energy producer. They have morphed into some of energy’s most dominant players.
They have set up subsidiaries that invest in power generation and sell electricity. Much of the energy they produce is bought by utilities and then delivered to homes and businesses, including the tech companies themselves. Their operations and investments dwarf those of many traditional utilities.
But the tech industry’s all-out artificial intelligence push is fueling soaring demand for electricity to run data centers that dot the landscape in Virginia, Ohio and other states. Large, rectangular buildings packed with servers consumed more than 4 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2023, and government analysts estimate that will increase to as much as 12 percent in just three years. That’s partly because computers training and running A.I. systems consume far more energy than machines that stream Netflix or TikTok.
Electricity is essential to their success. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, recently told investors that the company could have had higher sales if it had more data centers. “The single biggest constraint,” he said, “is power.”
The rush to build power plants and transmission lines comes as big tech companies are richer than ever because of their pivot to A.I.; after announcing blowout financial results in late July, Microsoft became the second public company to surpass $4 trillion in value.
Even as some corporate customers have been underwhelmed by A.I.’s usefulness so far, tech companies plan to invest hundreds of billions of dollars on it.
At the same time, the boom threatens to drive up power bills for residents and small businesses. Nationally, the average electricity rate for residents has risen more than 30 percent since 2020, after years of relatively modest increases. Much of that increase has been driven by utilities’ catching up on deferred maintenance and hardening grids for extreme weather.
In the coming years, A.I. could turbocharge those increases.
It is difficult to predict what that will mean for consumers’ power bills. But recent reports expect data centers will require expensive upgrades to the electric grid, a cost that will be shared with residents and smaller businesses through higher rates unless state regulators and lawmakers force tech companies to cover those expenses.
A June analysis, from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University, found that electricity bills are on track to rise an average of 8 percent nationwide by 2030 and as much as 25 percent in places like Virginia because of data centers.
In some places, it is happening already. Starting in June, the electricity bill for a typical household in Ohio increased at least $15 a month because of data centers, according to data from a major local utility and an independent monitor of the electric grid that stretches across 13 states and the District of Columbia.
Tech companies insist they are not trying to fob energy costs onto residents and small businesses, saying they are willing to pay for the power they use and for much of the equipment needed to make it available.
“We don’t want to see other customers bearing the cost of us trying to grow,” said Bobby Hollis, who leads Microsoft’s energy procurement.
But even with their expressed good will, getting the companies to make consumers whole will not be easy because determining how much large users like data centers should pay is not straightforward.
The business of keeping America’s lights on is mostly about two things: supplying reliable electricity and figuring out what to charge to deliver it. In recent years, big tech companies have inserted themselves into debates over both. They lobby lawmakers and regulators, and they are pitching their own pricing schemes to challenge those of utilities — something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
That has led to growing tensions.
The utilities pay for grid projects over decades, typically by raising prices for everyone connected to the grid. But suddenly, technology companies want to build so many data centers that utilities are being asked to spend a lot more money a lot faster. Lawmakers, regulators and consumer groups fear that households and smaller companies could be stuck footing these mounting bills.
For utilities, working with technology companies can be difficult but also lucrative.
States allow utilities to charge customers enough to recoup their costs and make money for shareholders based on how much they invest. New data centers require utilities to spend billions of dollars on power lines and plants, which should lead to bigger profits for the utilities over time.
“My No. 1 priority in all of this is to keep the lights on,” said Calvin Butler, the chief executive of Exelon, a large utility company, and the chairman of Edison Electric Institute, an industry association. “I think the tech companies’ being engaged in our industry makes this a very exciting time. Just pay your fair share of the grid.”
Ultimately, the technology companies may have an upper hand. In many states bursting with data centers, utilities cannot own power plants because of policies intended to encourage competition. But the tech giants do not have the same restrictions, and many have invested in power plants and secured control of electricity produced by others, making them both big users and suppliers of power.
The tech companies use the electricity produced at these facilities to help power their data centers or sell it to retail utilities on the wholesale market — a small but growing source of revenue. Over the past five years, electricity sales from tech companies’ energy subsidiaries totaled $2.2 billion, with much of that generated since 2022.
Tech Companies’ Electricity Sales Have Surged
Subsidiaries of major tech companies such as Amazon and Google have sold more than $2.7 billion on the wholesale electricity market in the past decade.
Quarterly electricity sales, 2015 through June 2025
“Unless people lean on the public utilities commissions, the ratepayers will take it on the chin,” said Mark Cooper, an economic analyst at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
‘Extremely New Territory’
In the debate over who will foot the bill, the industry’s eyes have been fixed on Ohio.
On a snowy day in December, a first-of-its-kind showdown played out in a small hearing room in Columbus. Lawyers for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies faced off against representatives of an electric utility.
The tech companies had plans for dozens of new data centers, so much that the local utility, American Electric Power, projected it would need six times the electricity central Ohio produced.
The utility had spent months meeting with the state’s consumer representative, tech companies and related industries, and the staff of the regulator, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, to hammer out a deal.
But in October, before the negotiations were done, the tech companies gave the utility a few days’ notice that they were submitting their own proposal. Industry experts said they had never seen that kind of front-running before. Under the companies’ plan, they would pay less upfront than the utility had wanted.
Days later, the Ohio utility, the consumer representative and the regulator’s staff countered with a plan that would create a class of customer for data centers and would require them to pay more. This category would be in addition to the four main types of electricity customers — homes, businesses, factories and public rail systems — that pay different rates in Ohio and other states.
The hearing in Columbus, before an administrative law judge, was about power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense.
American Electric Power, which has 5.6 million customers in 11 states, warned the judge that if the state did not adopt its proposal, residents and smaller businesses would bear much of the costs for tech companies’ power demands.
Despite tech companies’ professed desire not to burden others, they often push regulators to impose some of the upgrade costs on everybody. They contend that data centers bring jobs to the area, and that grid upgrades will ultimately help local businesses and residents.
At one point, a lawyer representing Amazon sought to get an executive from the Ohio utility to admit that he had once welcomed data centers to the state.
“You said something to the effect of ‘Data centers are great for the economy,’” David Proaño, a partner at the law firm BakerHostetler, prodded. “Do you remember saying something like that?”
The executive, Kamran Ali, deadpanned that he had “said a lot of things.” Mr. Ali testified that he worried about how the voracious power demands would tax the electric grid and hurt other consumers.
Scores of residential and business customers raised similar concerns in comments to Ohio regulators.
“To even consider foisting more fees on Ohio’s private citizens is a travesty,” Benjamin Yoder, who lives in Blacklick, east of Columbus, wrote in a comment for a public hearing in January.
An anonymous customer from Upper Sandusky wrote: “Our wallets cannot be strained anymore. Make them pay their own bills like we do!”
The utility in Ohio has already committed to supplying electricity for 30 data centers in the region by 2030, reaching power consumption levels in the Columbus area as high as Manhattan’s. But the tech industry is making additional requests to power 90 more data centers, which could make consumption comparable to the entire state of New York during a peak summer day.
“We’re used to a couple megawatts added to our system,” Marc Reitter, president and chief operating officer at the utility, said in an interview. “Massive amounts of power is extremely new territory.”
The utility’s proposal for a new category of customer will require data centers to make years of payments for the energy they need — something other customers are not required to do.
It wanted data centers and cryptocurrency miners to pay at least 85 percent of the electricity they request, even if they did not use it.
But Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies said they should pay less than what the utility wanted. The settlement the companies filed had committed to 75 percent of the electricity they requested, depending on the length of the contract. That would leave other utility customers to shoulder more of the cost of new grid equipment.
In addition, the tech industry wanted all large customers, including factories, to be treated the same. And it proposed a higher threshold for determining if data centers should be considered large users than in the utility-led proposal.
Kevin Miller, who was until recently a vice president at Amazon, said the Ohio utility’s plan could result in tech companies’ overpaying because data centers ramp up operations in phases. And data centers could be required to pay for power even if the utility failed to deliver all the energy it had committed to supplying, he said.
“We just don’t think that it has the right kind of flexibility to really match the profile over time that the data center brings,” Mr. Miller said in an interview before he left Amazon in July.
Last month, after spending months weighing the proposals, the commission ruled 5 to 0 against the tech companies.
“Today’s order represents a well-balanced package that safeguards non-data-center customers,” Jenifer French, the chair of the commission, said in a statement after the ruling.
Last Friday, the tech companies asked the commission to reconsider the case, calling the ruling “unlawful and unreasonable.”
Another Risk: Growth Could Falter
The Ohio ruling hinged on a big concern for utilities and lawmakers: that the tech companies may be asking for a lot more power than they will ultimately use. The worry is that executives could overestimate demand for A.I. or underestimate the energy efficiency of future computer chips. Residents and smaller businesses would then be stuck covering much of the cost because utilities largely recoup the cost of improvements over time as customers use power rather than through upfront payments.
These are not idle fears. Tech companies have announced plans for data centers that are never built or delayed for years.
The utility’s executives said their proposal sought to protect all customers if tech companies abandoned or delayed projects. They pointed to a case in Virginia, where regular customers had to cover initial costs of grid upgrades for a data center that started operating years later than planned.
In that case, a developer of data centers, Unicorn Interests, told Dominion Energy, a large utility, in 2010 that it would build a data center next to the regional airport in Manassas, near Washington, that would need electricity by July 2013.
Virginia regulators approved Dominion’s $42 million plan to build a substation and a transmission line to serve the campus, which was run by an investment trust founded by the real estate developers Hossein Fateh and Lammot J. du Pont, a descendant of the du Pont dynasty. By late spring 2013, Dominion had procured most of the materials it needed for the project and done some site work, but Unicorn was behind schedule.
Ultimately, the data center did not sign a customer until summer 2017. During the four-year delay, ratepayers in and around Manassas paid millions of dollars for upgrades that were not being used. Because Unicorn was not drawing electricity from the new equipment, it paid Dominion nothing or very little in those years.
In an interview, Mr. Fateh acknowledged the delays but said Unicorn had helped usher in a data center boom in the area.
He also said he supported the utility industry’s efforts to have data centers make upfront payments for grid upgrades to weed out projects that might not be completed.
“Most utilities really, really like our business because we are using a consistent amount of power, day or night,” he said. That means once they are up and running, data centers buy power all the time, unlike homes, which primarily use electricity in the morning and evening.
A spokesman for Dominion Energy, Aaron Ruby, said another data center project had replaced Unicorn and covered some of the costs, so “any impacts to residential customers would have been temporary and minimal, if anything at all.”
Data centers are contractually required, Mr. Ruby said, to pay for the full cost of new distribution infrastructure — including substations and the poles and wires that connect the data center to the substation — within the first four years of their service.
But that requirement does not apply to all upgrade costs. To serve large energy users, utilities also have to upgrade transmission lines that take electricity from power plants to the substation. The cost of upgrading those lines is generally borne by everyone.
Data centers have flocked to Northern Virginia because it is home to critical internet cabling and government agencies. The tech buildings now account for more than a quarter of the region’s energy use.
A Virginia agency concluded in a report in December that data centers had generally been paying their fair share of grid upgrade expenses, but that costs to residents could rise $276 a year by 2030 because of data centers. That number could be substantially higher if construction plans for data centers are delayed, or if they are never built or use less electricity than planned.
The report recommended that the state create a rate class for data centers — similar to the proposal that regulators approved in Ohio and other states are contemplating. At a hearing in Richmond, Va., in December, the tech companies pushed back against that idea.
“We do see an industry-specific rate class as discriminatory,” Brian George, a Google executive, said at the hearing. “Once we start going down that road, it does become a very slippery slope for how we can stop. If we assign it to one particular industry, how do we not assign it to another?”
But James Wilson, an energy economist who has consulted for consumer and environmental groups, noted that data centers accounted for almost all the electricity demand growth expected over the coming years in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“Discrimination, yes; undue, not really,” he testified at the same hearing.
The technology companies say they are open to compromises. In an interview, Amanda Peterson Corio, a Google executive responsible for data center energy, pointed to a deal with American Electric Power’s subsidiary in Indiana and consumer groups in that state, where tech companies agreed to pay some grid upgrade costs upfront to allay concerns about canceled or delayed projects.
But under that deal, data centers are not put into a new rate class. “You start to isolate different classes and start to allocate who we’re going to give power to and who we’re not,” Ms. Corio said. “That goes against every construct of how our electricity system was designed, which is to be open access.”
Tech companies say they plan to keep building data centers, but where those sites will be is uncertain. That puts utilities at risk of building more than their area needs.
Microsoft, for example, announced plans in October to build three data center campuses that would require power from the Ohio utility. “The Columbus region’s skilled work force, strong infrastructure and strategic location make it ideal for this project,” the company said then.
But six months later — before regulators ruled against the tech industry — Microsoft changed its data center strategy and said it was putting the Ohio projects on ice. For the foreseeable future, those sites would remain farmland.
Jeremy Singer-Vine contributed reporting.
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5) Behind Wall Street’s Abrupt Flip on Crypto
The reversal risks declawing a century of consumer financial protections and replacing the backbone of bank accounts.
By Rob Copeland, Aug. 13, 2025
Rob Copeland has been covering Wall Street’s posture on cryptocurrency for more than a decade.
“Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy. ‘The genie is out of the bottle,’ said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. ‘You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,’ Mr. Cagney said. Not everyone agrees that the result will be cataclysmic. ‘The consumer checking account is probably safe,’ said Tim Spence, the chief executive of Fifth Third, a Cincinnati bank with $210 billion in assets that traces its roots back to 1858. It plans to accept stablecoins issued by a large group of banks. Privately, however, many lending veterans are vexed at how rapidly changes are coming. ‘If the banking industry was being totally frank,’ one prominent banking attorney said, ‘they would say they wish stablecoins had never been invented.’”
Ari Liloan
Not long ago, bank executives would compete with one another to be the loudest critic of cryptocurrencies.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, once compared Bitcoin to a pet rock and said the whole crypto industry should be banned. Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan described the space as an “untraceable tool for money laundering,” while HSBC’s chief executive proclaimed bluntly: “We are not into Bitcoin.”
Now big banks can’t stop talking about crypto.
In investor calls, public presentations and meetings with Washington regulators, financial executives are tripping over one another to unveil new plans — including the development of fresh cryptocurrencies under bank umbrellas and loans tied to digital assets.
There’s no small mix of political opportunism at play, given that President Trump and his family are vociferous crypto boosters and investors. And of course there is a degree of old-fashioned jealousy among the traditional finance set at the riches earned by onetime fringe companies and investors as Bitcoin more than doubled over the past year to blow past $100,000.
But behind the scenes at major financial institutions — and in stark contrast to the public showboating among chief executives — fear is also rising that the rush into crypto may risk the safety of personal bank accounts in ways that Wall Street and Washington are just beginning to understand.
The worries, described by nine Wall Street executives briefed on their organizations’ crypto initiatives but not authorized to speak publicly for their employers, center on the creation of a new interbank checking account and payments system built on crypto and blockchain technology. That system would come with few consumer protections and nascent regulatory oversight.
The system, being sketched out by top executives and lawyers at huge banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi, involves a complicated corner of the crypto ecosystem called a stablecoin.
Stablecoins could upend the old financial order.
Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.
Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.
The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.
That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.
Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.
Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.
One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.
Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said.
Not everyone agrees that the result will be cataclysmic.
“The consumer checking account is probably safe,” said Tim Spence, the chief executive of Fifth Third, a Cincinnati bank with $210 billion in assets that traces its roots back to 1858. It plans to accept stablecoins issued by a large group of banks.
Privately, however, many lending veterans are vexed at how rapidly changes are coming.
“If the banking industry was being totally frank,” one prominent banking attorney said, “they would say they wish stablecoins had never been invented.”
Wildcat banks offer a warning.
Wall Street has been nibbling around the edges of crypto for years.
Investment banks have already been advising crypto companies with public listings and bond offerings (collecting fees in the process). Goldman Sachs has offered wealthy clients loans based on their crypto holdings since 2022.
The big banks’ brokerage units help major clients buy investment funds with exposure to cryptocurrency, and in some instances they help the clients directly hold crypto coins themselves.
The first Trump administration and Biden years were a step back, however, as banks cut off crypto companies and investors from their networks amid pressure from skeptical regulators.
Eventually JPMorgan, despite Mr. Dimon’s public crypto antipathy, built a team of several hundred employees to study how to make money from crypto and began testing a niche digital asset, JPM Coin, to experiment with digital payments for commercial clients. It didn’t take off.
JPMorgan in recent months has assigned a team of internal researchers to unearth legal documents related to the era of so-called wildcat banking from two centuries ago. In that era, hundreds of state-chartered banks issued their own currencies. JPMorgan’s researchers were looking into whether some of those dormant laws applied to the bank’s plan to create its own stablecoin today.
They uncovered something else, though. In the wildcat era, fraud and bank failures ruled. That tumult was fixed only by the creation of the first U.S. National Bank note, a predecessor to the modern U.S. dollar. It was issued only by official national chartered banks — one of which was the precursor to JPMorgan Chase.
The GENIUS Act codified an untested future.
Mr. Trump, who, like the nation’s biggest bankers, used to be a crypto skeptic, has worked during his second term to bring crypto into the mainstream.
This summer, Mr. Trump signed into law the GENIUS Act, passed by Congress during what Republicans called “cryptocurrency week.”
The law created a pathway for banks to operate in stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar, long considered the steadiest global currency because of the reliability of the American economy.
It requires stablecoin issuers to maintain “reserves” of U.S. Treasury bonds or dollars equal to the total value of the coins they have distributed.
The GENIUS Act enjoyed a measure of bipartisan backing. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said it unlocked “the next generation of financial innovation.”
Critics of the law pointed out that Mr. Trump’s sons run a crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, that issues its own stablecoin and stands to benefit handsomely if the digital currency takes off.
Bank lobbyists didn’t just support the legislation, but took an active role in shaping it.
Bankers who participated in the lobbying said they felt somewhat forced by circumstance. Stablecoins, they said, were coming fast — both from new upstarts like Circle and big retailers like Walmart and Amazon, which are said to be studying creating coins of their own.
If such competitors become popular, they will act as a runaround of banks large and small, by allowing consumers to buy goods and pay for services without needing an account at an existing lender.
Thus banks have been discussing with one another how to create one big stablecoin of their own. (The name, the bankers briefed on it said, is to be determined.) They are also hedging their bets, developing individual ones if needed. Some plan to operate rewards programs, similar to existing credit card promotions, to woo customers to their own coins.
None of the coins are expected to be in use before the end of the year.
Mr. Moynihan of Bank of America confirmed during a quarterly earnings call last month that his lender was brushing up on stablecoins, saying that “both the industry and ourselves will have responses.”
He said he had no clue how popular they would become, or whether the bank would go it alone or in concert with other lenders.
“It will be a complex array,” Mr. Moynihan said.
“Hopefully not complex to the consumer, frankly,” he added.
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6) Sudan, Battered by War, Is Hit by Its ‘Worst Cholera Outbreak’ in Years
International charities warned that, left unchecked, the disease’s spread might exacerbate similar outbreaks across the African region for weeks or months to come.
By Eve Sampson, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, Aug. 14, 2025
Patients received treatment in the cholera ward of a refugee camp in the town of Tawila in the western Darfur region of Sudan on Tuesday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The cholera ward in Tawila, Sudan, was overflowing the first week of August, a grim sign of what the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said in a release on Thursday was “the worst cholera outbreak the country has seen in years.”
International charities have warned that the spread of the disease, no longer contained within Sudan’s borders, might exacerbate similar outbreaks across the region.
“People cross borders,” Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “This epidemic has already crossed into South Sudan, and it’s crossing into Chad. Unless we’re able to address this crisis, we risk it rippling across borders for weeks and months to come.”
Sudan has had nearly 100,000 suspected cases of cholera and has reported more than 2,400 cholera-related deaths since the country’s Health Ministry declared an outbreak a year ago, Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said in its statement. The group said it had documented 40 deaths over the span of one week in the western Darfur region of Sudan alone.
The town of Tawila, in the state of North Darfur, has become a hotbed for disease. The town is about 44 miles from the city of El Fasher, the Sudanese Army’s last holdout in the Darfur region that has been under siege for over a year. The local population has ballooned to include hundreds of thousands of people fleeing nearby violence.
They had sought refuge from the bloodshed in cramped encampments with little infrastructure. But there is little water, health services or hygiene infrastructure to support the new arrivals.
“In displacement and refugee camps, families often have no choice but to drink from contaminated sources, and many contract cholera,” Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in Tawila, said in the group’s statement.
“Just two weeks ago, a body was found in a well inside one of the camps. It was removed, but within two days, people were forced to drink from that same water again.”
Cholera is caused by ingesting contaminated food or water, and infections can run rampant in areas where people live in crowded conditions with substandard sanitation. Cholera kills by dehydrating victims, often through vomiting and the onset of diarrhea, and its lethality increases when coupled with other factors like inadequate nutrition.
For just pennies, the disease can be easily treated with medication, but only if that medication is accessible.
Sudan, in northern Africa, has been engulfed in deadly violence since the civil war broke out between rival generals in April 2023. The Darfur region, which is primarily controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, a militant group that opposes the Sudanese Army, has been hit particularly hard by the war. Its population has suffered mass displacement and disease on top of the bloodshed.
This month, UNICEF reported a surge in cholera cases in Tawila and said that fighting in North Darfur had put over 640,000 children under the age of 5 at risk of hunger, violence and disease.
Mr. Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan, said that the group was trying to mitigate the suffering but that the problem would persist unless the root causes — including war and displacement — were addressed.
“As populations move, so does the disease,” he said, adding, “When we think we have it under control in one place, it pops up somewhere else.”
In 2024, the United States gave $830 million in emergency aid to Sudan, more assistance than any other country provided, the United Nations estimated. The Trump administration’s slashing of U.S. aid this year has wreaked havoc in parts of the country where people used to depend on American-funded food kitchens for sustenance.
Mr. Yett said aid cuts were amplifying the cholera crisis as well, and he emphasized that, left unchecked, the outbreak risked escalating in other regions where the disease is already tearing through vulnerable communities.
A cholera outbreak has already struck a refugee settlement in Chad that hosts people from Darfur and countries that are contending with their own surges in disease.
South Sudan is experiencing “its worst and longest” cholera outbreak, according to the United Nations, with more than 80,000 cases and 1,400 deaths recorded since the outbreak was declared in October 2024.
Similarly, the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an outbreak this May, reporting 29,392 suspected cases of cholera and 620 related deaths from Jan. 1 to June 8.
This year, neighboring Angola experienced “the worst cholera outbreak in the country in almost two decades,” the World Health Organization said in a June report, citing more than 26,000 cases and nearly 750 deaths in just over five months.
Mr. Yett, speaking from Port Sudan, noted the weather and spoke grimly of what may come. The rainy season, which can lead to flooding and the mix of sewage with drinking water, has not yet concluded in Sudan.
“Already we’ve got a massive outbreak,” he said, “and the rains are still in front of us.”
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7) Ice Deports Boy with Cancer to Honduras
By Edward Helmore
—The Guardian, August 14, 2025
People protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York on 8 August. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images
The lawsuit, which names the attorney general, Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and various Ice officials as defendants, alleges Ice violated its own policies, and multiple federal laws, when officers secretly detained the families, denied access to counsel and swiftly deported them to Honduras, ignoring legal filings.
The claim, JLV v Acuna, filed by the National Immigration Project, says that three of the children – a four-year-old boy with stage 4 kidney cancer, his seven-year-old sister and a two-year-old girl – were included in the deportation sweep despite being American citizens.
The parents “were never given a choice as to whether their children should be deported with them and were prohibited from contacting their counsel or having meaningful contact with their families to arrange for the care of their children”, the lawsuit claims.
The mothers, pseudonymously named as Rosario and Julia, allege they wanted their children to remain in the US but the families were “illegally deported without even a semblance of due process”.
One of the children, named as five-year-old Romeo, was diagnosed with a “rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer” at age two and had been receiving treatment in the US.
“The failure to allow his mother to arrange for his care, in violation of Ice’s own directive, and his unlawful deportation to Honduras interfered with his needed medical treatment,” the suit, filed in the US district court for the middle district of Louisiana on 31 July, states.
Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, said in a statement that “Ice’s actions in this case are not only unlawful, they are cruel and show a complete disregard for family values and the wellbeing of children”.
“No government agency should have the power to disappear families, ignore medical needs, and disregard its own policies and constitutional rights simply in order to achieve a goal of unfettered enforcement,” Shebaya added.
The Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to NBC News that US children were not being “deported” and denied that the parents were not given a choice regarding the care of their children before being sent to Honduras.
“Rather than separate their families, ICE asked the mothers if they wanted to be removed with their children or if they wanted ICE to place the children with someone safe the parent designates. The parents in this instance made the determination to take their children with them back to Honduras,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin added that when there is a health issue, “ICE makes sure that treatment is available in the country to which the illegal alien is being removed. The implication that ICE would deny a child the medical care they need is flatly FALSE, and it is an insult to the men and women of federal law enforcement.”
The lawsuit comes amid claims and counterclaims about the number of people being swept up in the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, and the legality of those efforts under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
There have been more than 1,000 deportation flights to 62 countries since Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, according to the immigrant advocacy group Witness at the Border.
But that number of flights is becoming more difficult to track, the group warns, after air charter companies began requesting that their tail numbers be removed from public flight-tracking websites.
Rosario, one of the mothers named in the lawsuit, told the legal group that the deportation experience had been “scary and overwhelming”.
“After so many years in the United States, it has been devastating to be sent to Honduras,” she said. “Life in Honduras is incredibly hard. I don’t have the resources to care for my children the way they need.”
The other, Julia, said: “This whole situation has been incredibly stressful.” She had arrived in the US in 2019 after fleeing Honduras and applied for asylum, but was forced to wait in Mexico under Trump’s first-term “remain in Mexico” policy. She returned to the US in 2021.
The lawsuit states that she was told to check in with Ice, bringing both of her daughters to her regular Ice check-ins in February 2021. But in April she went to an appointment and was soon told she would be deported along with her children.
“I was lied to,” she said. “I never imagined they would send me and my children to Honduras. Returning to Honduras has meant leaving my husband behind, and that’s been very hard. My daughters have also suffered a lot. We were deprived of the opportunity to be and make decisions as a family.”
Her attorney claims that an Ice officer told her to write on a piece of paper that her daughter would be going with her to Honduras. When she objected, an Ice officer allegedly told her that if she refused, her daughter would be sent to a foster home.
The Department of Homeland Security said in its statement to NBC News that it “takes its responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected”.
In a statement, Erin Hebert of Ware Immigration said Ice officials had “betrayed their most basic duty: to safeguard the wellbeing of US citizens. These children and their families deserve justice and accountability for the flagrant and unapologetic violations of their rights.”
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8) The District of Columbia sues the Trump administration over its policing takeover.
By Campbell Robertson, August 15, 2025
The District of Columbia government filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s “brazen usurpation” of the city’s authority by trying to take control of the D.C. Police Department, in a marked escalation of tensions between local and federal authorities in the nation’s capital.
The suit argues that both President Trump’s executive order on Monday federalizing the Police Department and a follow-up order by the U.S. attorney general “far exceed” the president’s authority under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which granted D.C. its limited degree of self-government.
Such an attempt to “upend the command structure of the Police Department” risks “endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike,” the suit says, using the Trump administration’s argument for public safety against it.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court by the D.C. attorney general, Brian Schwalb, comes after the Trump administration moved on Thursday to expand its control of the city’s Police Department by installing an “emergency commissioner” and revoking policies that limited officers’ cooperation with immigration enforcement.
Mr. Schwalb, a Democrat who was elected in 2022, has been outspoken from the outset in criticizing the federal takeover of the D.C. police and the deployment of the National Guard, calling the moves “unnecessary and unlawful.”
In a statement on Friday morning, Mr. Schwalb said that the administration was “abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act, infringing on the district’s right to self-governance and putting the safety of D.C. residents and visitors at risk.”
“This is the gravest threat to Home Rule that the district has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mayor Muriel Bowser had been, for the most part, diplomatic in her comments this week. But that tone changed late Thursday after Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general,issued an order rescinding the city’s policing policies governing immigration enforcement. That order also declared that Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was now the “emergency police commissioner,” with “all the powers and duties” invested in the city’s police chief, Pamela A. Smith.
Mr. Schwalb issued a legal opinion saying that Ms. Bondi’s order was “unlawful,” and that the mayor was “not legally obligated to follow it.” Ms. Bowser posted the letter on social media, saying that the city had followed the law but that “there is no statute that conveys the district’s personnel authority to a federal official.” The lawsuit, which lists Mr. Trump, Ms. Bondi and Mr. Cole as defendants, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice and the D.E.A., expands upon that opinion.
Mr. Trump’s executive order was based on a section of the Home Rule Act that explicitly gives presidents temporary authority to “direct the mayor to provide him” such services of deemed “necessary and appropriate” to address “special conditions of an emergency nature.”
That order declared a “crime emergency” in the city, and in announcing the order, Mr. Trump said that he was “placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police under direct federal control.” While Ms. Bowser later that day acknowledged that the president had the authority to order the services of the Metropolitan Police, she said that Chief Smith was still in command.
But on Thursday, Ms. Bondi issued her order installing Mr. Cole in command of the police.
The city’s lawsuit argues that this order was a violation of the Home Rule Act, which does not grant presidents “operational control” over the police. It also says that the law limits presidents to using the police for “federal purposes,” not the managing enforcement of local laws.
The president’s executive order on Monday said that crime in D.C. had “a dire impact on the federal government’s ability to operate efficiently to address the nation’s broader interests.”
The suit is the latest attempt by local jurisdictions to push back legally at the administration’s broad assertion of federal power.
The state of California sued the Trump administration after the president deployed thousands of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles this summer, after protests broke out against aggressive immigration enforcement. A federal judge ruled that the deployment was unconstitutional, but an appeals court disagreed, arguing that the president had acted within his authority. While most of the soldiers have returned home, that litigation is ongoing.
Washington is in a different position, given the many limitations on its autonomy under federal law.
The section of the Home Rule Act giving the president some authority over the local police says that this authority terminates after the end of the declared emergency, an act of Congress or a period of 30 days, whichever comes first. President Trump has said he will seek from Congress “long-term extensions” of his control over the D.C. police.
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9) Trump’s D.C. surge turns federal agents into beat cops.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Reporting from Washington, August 15, 2025
When a police dispatcher relayed that a man had walked into Howard University Hospital in Washington with a gunshot wound one night this week, it was not just the local police who showed up to investigate. A group of U.S. Border Patrol and other federal agents descended on the brown-brick hospital two miles from the White House, parking their S.U.V.s in front of the main entrance.
A few blocks away, a team of F.B.I. agents was helping to conduct a traffic stop on a Mercedes on the side of a busy street; a few hours later, agents who ordinarily investigate federal weapons violations stood watch as local police officers tried to subdue a disturbed man at a bus stop.
President Trump’s announcement on Monday that the federal government was assuming law enforcement responsibility in the nation’s capital has begun to quietly transform the day-to-day business of policing. Routine calls that might have been handled solely by the Metropolitan Police Department now attract an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as the F.B.I.
In a city where federal law enforcement officials regularly go to work in offices, they are suddenly out on the street, visible almost everywhere — except for those hidden behind the tinted glass of unmarked cars.
Each evening this week, federal agents have rolled out of a vast federal Park Police station south of the Anacostia River to ride through the District until the early morning hours.
Agents have appeared at a range of locations, strolling by bars and restaurants in the trendy U Street Corridor, patrolling a near-empty National Mall after dark and winding through apartment complexes.
Robyn Swirling, who lives in Northwest D.C., said that she returned to her home in Manor Park one night this week and soon saw dozens of federal agents on the other side of the quiet residential street. They told her when she asked that they had a warrant, and she watched as they took a man from her neighbor’s home into a police car.
Early in the week, a group of F.B.I. agents stood in the bleachers of a high school athletic field in the Petworth neighborhood, looking on as adult recreation league soccer games were played. It did not appear that any crimes were taking place, and afterward, the soccer league emailed its members a link to an American Civil Liberties Union website about the public’s rights when stopped by the F.B.I.
“Everyone was just uneasy about it,” said Elena Lensink, who was among those playing that evening. “All that was happening at the field was, like, three soccer games.”
The week’s work has included a range of law enforcement activities that ordinarily would have been handled by local police officers, who have continued to do their work, but now federal agents were often collaborating or looking on. Federal agents have hunted for guns and stolen vehicles, conducted drug busts and chased down members of the public who ran when approached. Some agents could be seen pulling over cars for minor infractions, or reminding people at a sobriety checkpoint to wear their seatbelts.
A typical action played out early on Friday morning, when a D.C. police officer pulled over a Toyota in the Carver Langston neighborhood in the city’s Northeast quadrant. The traffic stop was initiated in front of a discount clothing store, where a brigade of federal agents was sitting in the parking lot in about a dozen unmarked cars.
As soon as the car was pulled over, the federal officers — from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and several other agencies — gathered around it, blocking off two lanes of traffic and a streetcar track for about 10 minutes before telling the driver that he was free to leave.
In another part of town, earlier in the week, F.B.I. officers descended when other officers conducting a traffic stop in the Brentwood neighborhood reported that the man driving had an open warrant and a gun. Residents who were outside enjoying the summer night eyed the scene warily as the man was arrested and the agents returned to their cars.
The deployment of federal law enforcement has galvanized the city’s liberal activists, some of whom gathered around a sobriety checkpoint operated in part by federal officers and jeered until the officers left.
Late Thursday night, F.B.I. agents retreated from an effort to take down a handful of tents housing homeless people at Washington Circle when a woman who lived in one, accompanied by members of a homeless advocacy group, showed them a notice the city had given her allowing her to stay a few more days.
Federal officials have said they have made more than 150 arrests and seized 27 guns since the operation began, but have offered few details about the specific police work being done or the charges being brought.
The White House and the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., did not provide the names of those arrested but did highlight charges filed against a man who was accused of throwing a sandwich at a Border Patrol officer after condemning the presence of federal agents on the streets.
Yet simply being present appears to be one of the goals.
A video taken in the Bellevue neighborhood this week showed a phalanx of federal agents, including the A.T.F. and Homeland Security, walking between brick apartment buildings and stopping to speak with a few people on a stoop.
“You got your I.D. on you, champ?” a U.S. Park Police officer asked the man taking the video, initially thinking he was holding a joint before realizing it was a cigarette. The man who recorded the encounter said later that he had been disturbed to see so many federal officers arrive at his house, but said he did not want to discuss it further to avoid drawing more attention.
Mr. Trump’s approach has been applauded by some residents who view Washington as increasingly unsafe (the city recorded its highest murder rate in 20 years in 2023 but has since seen a significant reduction). But some also said they worried that Mr. Trump, who has frequently spoken of “unleashing” the police, has given law enforcement a green light to return to harsh tactics that in the past have disrupted poorer neighborhoods and led to injustices, particularly for Black and Hispanic residents.
Nathan Salminen, a cybersecurity lawyer, said he was alarmed when he drove through the city on a recent night and saw traffic stop after traffic stop in poorer areas, reminding him of what policing was like in the 1990s.
“Since then, a string of good police chiefs and a lot of community outreach has made the relationship between the M.P.D. and the community dramatically better,” he said, referring to the city police. “But the last few nights, I’ve seen a return to the sorts of tactics that I’ve seen in the 1990s in those same neighborhoods.”
As Kyvin Battle waited for a bus in Anacostia earlier this week, he said he feared that Black men like him would be unfairly targeted.
“A lot of us who are innocent are going to get caught in the middle of all this,” said Mr. Battle, 57, a military veteran.
As he spoke, a group of federal officers — several in unmarked cars — made a U-turn and rushed down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
“I’ve been here six years,” he said. “I’ve never seen that.”
Darren Sands contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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10) SpaceX Gets Billions From the Government. It Gives Little to Nothing Back in Taxes.
Elon Musk’s rocket company relies on federal contracts, but years of losses have most likely let it avoid paying federal income taxes, according to internal company documents.
By Susanne Craig and Kirsten Grind, Aug. 15, 2025
(Susanne Craig and Kirsten Grind can be sent tips at nytimes.com/tips.)
“SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite internet company, has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence. But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times. The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by The Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income. President Trump made a change in 2017, during his first term, that eliminated the tax benefit’s expiration date for all companies. For SpaceX, that means that nearly $3 billion of its losses can be indefinitely applied against future taxable income.”
Illustration by Joan Wong, Photographs by Meridith Kohut for The New York Times, Carly Zavala for The New York Times
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite internet company, has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence.
But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by The Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income. President Trump made a change in 2017, during his first term, that eliminated the tax benefit’s expiration date for all companies. For SpaceX, that means that nearly $3 billion of its losses can be indefinitely applied against future taxable income.
Tax experts consulted by The Times said that not having to pay $5 billion in federal income taxes was substantial and notable for a company that has relied on contracts with the U.S. government to an unusual degree. SpaceX works closely with the Pentagon, NASA and other agencies, giving it a vital role in national security. In 2020, federal contracts generated almost 84 percent of the rocket maker’s revenue, according to the documents, a figure that had not been previously reported.
Larger tech companies — including some that have taken advantage of the tax benefit — often pay billions in federal income taxes. Microsoft, for one, said it expected to pay $14.1 billion in federal income taxes in its last fiscal year.
SpaceX can use the tax benefit even if its business thrives. By one measure of corporate profitability, the company had roughly $5 billion in earnings from its core operations last year, up from $2.6 billion in 2023, according to what the company has privately told some stakeholders.
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a group that investigates corruption and waste in the government, said the tax benefit had historically been aimed at encouraging companies to stay in business during difficult times.
It was “quaint” that SpaceX was using it, she said, as it “was clearly not intended for a company doing so well.”
Mr. Musk has built SpaceX into one of the world’s most influential companies, which dominates the space industry through its rockets and its Starlink satellite internet service. It has been a jewel in the crown of his business empire and an essential source of his wealth and power, along with his electric vehicle company, Tesla. It has also given Mr. Musk a perch on the world stage, allowing him to weigh in on geopolitics.
Like many tech start-ups, SpaceX lost money as it plowed billions of dollars into building its business. Uber, Amazon, Tesla and other tech firms were also not profitable for years. As SpaceX has grown, the firm has been valued at more than $350 billion, crowning it one of the world’s most valuable private companies, according to the start-up tracker PitchBook.
Several news organizations have reported on aspects of SpaceX’s finances, which the company discloses to its investors and other stakeholders. But the documents reviewed by The Times — including income statements and balance sheets covering 23 years — offered new insight into SpaceX’s revenue sources, investors and taxes.
SpaceX appears to have paid some income taxes over the years, though likely not to the federal government, according to the documents. In one document, the company said it expected to pay $483,000 in income tax to foreign governments and $78,000 in state income tax in 2021. Separately, it reported paying $6,000 for income taxes in 2020 and 2021, but did not disclose if the payments were for federal, state or local governments.
SpaceX and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk has often trumpeted SpaceX’s role in carrying out missions for NASA and other agencies. In June, he proudly posted on social media that the company had reached a milestone, as its “commercial revenue from space will exceed the entire budget of @NASA next year.”
Mr. Musk, who left his role as a close adviser to Mr. Trump in late May, founded SpaceX with the goal of shuttling humans to Mars and colonizing the Red Planet. He owned 44 percent of the company as of 2022, according to the documents.
Getting to Mars is an expensive endeavor, and SpaceX’s losses piled up from the start. In its first year of operation in 2002, the company lost about $4 million, the documents show. The next year, it lost $14.5 million. Those losses ballooned in subsequent years, reaching $341 million in 2020. In 2021, it lost $968 million.
All the while, Mr. Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, pushed the company to grow. It began developing and testing Starship, a reusable rocket that Mr. Musk hopes will one day reach Mars.
By the end of 2021, SpaceX had accumulated almost $5.4 billion in tax losses, according to the most recent figure in the documents. Those losses generated the tax benefit, known as a net operating loss carryforward. It enables SpaceX to avoid federal income taxes on an equivalent amount of future taxable income. The benefit is available to all companies, including start-ups that lose money for years before turning a profit.
In one document, SpaceX told investors that it was “more likely than not that some portion or all of the deferred tax assets will not be realized,” meaning it might never pay taxes. The company cited, among other things, its past losses. Such language can be common for companies with a history of losses, and this outlook can be revised if their finances improve, said Robert Willens, an accounting analyst who runs his own firm.
SpaceX also benefited from a sweeping package of tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed in 2017. One change was eliminating a 20-year limit on the use of tax-loss carryforwards, meaning that losses generated after 2017 no longer expired. That change allows SpaceX to apply nearly $3 billion in carryforwards indefinitely.
In addition, the company had $227 million in carryforwards that could offset state income taxes, the documents show. It had more than $1.1 billion in other federal and state tax credits.
“Given the size of its net operating loss, the company almost surely didn’t pay any federal tax for years,” said Gregg Polsky, who teaches tax law at New York University School of Law. “And it’s so large, it’s unlikely it has paid taxes even if it has had positive taxable income in recent years.”
The tax benefits may have come in handy in recent years as SpaceX’s finances have improved, at least by one measure. The company has privately said its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization nearly doubled to roughly $5 billion last year from 2023. That figure, known as EBITDA, is one way of measuring corporate profits but is not the same as the bottom line and does not mean that SpaceX is paying taxes.
Starting in the mid-2000s, SpaceX began landing hundreds of federal contracts, including one with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and another with a U.S. intelligence agency for $1.8 billion to provide spy satellites. Some contracts are expected to generate substantial revenue for years, according to the documents.
The documents, reviewed by The Times, provide the first insights into how heavily SpaceX depends on federal contracts. In 2020, they generated about $1.4 billion, or 83.8 percent, of the company’s total revenue that year. The next year, federal contracts brought in about $1.7 billion, or 76 percent, of the total revenue, the documents show.
Mr. Musk said in June that he expected SpaceX’s revenue to reach $15.5 billion this year. That is up from about $7.4 billion in 2023, the documents show. (Revenue includes sales of the company’s products.)
A big part of that growth stems from Starlink, which has six million subscribers, according to the company. The documents showed that SpaceX told investors that Starlink had 2.5 million users in 2023 and generated roughly $8 billion in revenue last year, more than double the previous year’s revenue and outpacing SpaceX’s rocket division in both years.
The documents do not include SpaceX’s net profits or losses for the past two years. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023. Companies can simultaneously report profits to shareholders and tax losses to the I.R.S. in any given year because of the differences in how certain items are treated.
To fund SpaceX, Mr. Musk has relied on longtime investors like Fidelity and Google and friends like Antonio Gracias, who is also a SpaceX board member. The documents reviewed by The Times identified others who had not been publicly associated with the company.
A company called AI RT SPX Holdings is listed as an investor on a 2020 document. It appears to be affiliated with Access Industries, an investment firm founded by Len Blavatnik, the billionaire investor who was born in Ukraine and raised in Moscow and made his fortune in the privatization era in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Now a British and American citizen, he has become a prolific philanthropist and investor in American and European companies.
The document was signed by two Access executives, including Mr. Blavatnik’s brother Alex Blavatnik. It is unclear whether Access Industries remains a SpaceX investor. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Blavatnik declined to comment.
Chris Anderson, the entrepreneur who is the head of the organization behind TED Talks, appears to have invested in SpaceX through a company called Excalbians. He did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk has delivered several TED Talks in the past.
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11) Draft of White House Report Suggests Kennedy Won’t Push Strict Pesticide Regulations
The report is not final, but indicates good news for the food and agriculture industries.
By Dani Blum, Benjamin Mueller and Alice Callahan, Published Aug. 14, 2025, Updated Aug. 15, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., second from right, the health secretary, during a news conference at the Health and Human Services Department in Washington in April. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
A highly anticipated White House report on the health of American children would stop short of proposing direct restrictions on ultraprocessed foods and pesticides that the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has called major threats, according to a draft of the document that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The report, if adopted, would be good news for the food and agriculture industries, which feared far more restrictive proposals than the ones outlined in the draft. Through his “Make America Healthy Again” movement, Mr. Kennedy has sought to overhaul the nation’s diet by pushing those industries to make major changes.
The draft includes an array of policy proposals calling for research into topics as distinct as electromagnetic radiation and children’s oral health.
It also recommends action on health initiatives, like efforts to increase breastfeeding rates, address infertility and educate the public on the dangers of vaping.
Questions about a possible push for new pesticide regulations were raised in May when the White House released an initial report, from a presidential commission chaired by Mr. Kennedy, that raised strong concerns about possible links between pesticides and childhood diseases. It also linked the dominance of ultraprocessed foods in children’s diets to a range of chronic diseases.
Those findings touched off tensions between Mr. Kennedy’s movement and Republican lawmakers who have traditionally drawn support from powerful agriculture, food and drug lobbyists.
The Times obtained the draft of the new report from a former federal official. An industry official confirmed that it was nearly identical to a copy the administration had recently shown the official at the White House.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, on Thursday would not verify the draft. At this stage, any draft would go through a number of revisions before it is finalized. The document The Times reviewed was labeled “pre-decisional” and dated Aug. 6.
Called the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” the report comes from the commission led by Mr. Kennedy, which includes cabinet secretaries and agency heads from across the government.
The White House has not said when the report will be made public, though it was to have been presented to President Trump on Tuesday, the deadline set by Mr. Trump’s executive order establishing the “MAHA Commission.” The final report is expected to be released in the coming weeks.
The draft report says that environmental regulators will work with “food and agricultural stakeholders” to ensure that the public is aware of and confident in existing pesticide review procedures. It described those procedures as “robust” and did not propose new restrictions.
It also says the Trump administration will back research on technologies to try to help farmers reduce pesticide use and on the health effects of Americans’ cumulative exposure to chemicals.
After the first report was published in May, agriculture groups, including the American Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association, urged the Trump administration to listen to farmers as the commission prepared its follow-up report outlining a strategy.
The draft reviewed by The Times does not mention how the proposed research and the new policy initiatives would be funded or how much money might be allocated to them.
But it says that the Department of Health and Human Services will form a working group to evaluate “overprescription trends” involving mental health medications, such as S.S.R.I.s and stimulants, for children. It reiterates Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to study the “root causes” of autism.
Mr. Kennedy has spent much of his tenure as health secretary characterizing modern American childhood as a state of stress and sickness, with children mainly eating ultraprocessed food, which he has called “poison,” tethered to screens and reliant on pills and shots.
And he has railed against the pharmaceutical industry, which he says exerts undue influence over scientific research, all while the Trump administration has decimated funding for many academic research programs. Mr. Kennedy has also condemned scientific experts. In June, he fired all the members of an influential vaccine advisory panel.
The first report, from May, reflected many of Mr. Kennedy’s key talking points. It was heavily scrutinized. While some scientists applauded its focus on flaws within the American food system, many noted it misrepresented the scientific consensus on issues like vaccines. The report also cited studies that did not exist.
In recent weeks, Mr. Kennedy’s aides and allies have publicized what they described as the administration’s most significant steps to improve American health. These include persuading some food makers to phase out petroleum-based food dyes, working with several states to remove soda and candy from their food stamp programs and trying to tighten oversight of food additives. The draft reiterates that the administration will continue these efforts.
Some researchers have cautioned that such steps may not do much to improve the overall healthfulness of the American food supply.
Ultraprocessed foods, which make up about 62 percent of the calories consumed by U.S. children, are explicitly mentioned in the draft of the second report only once, in a line about the administration’s effort to define them. The near-omission of ultraprocessed foods from the draft report raises questions about the administration’s appetite for regulation, which the food industry is likely to vehemently oppose.
The draft does describe prioritizing “whole, healthy” foods in federal programs like those providing meals in schools. It suggests offering these foods in “MAHA boxes” for food stamp recipients.
The draft touches on a number of other topics, including vaccines, a focus of Mr. Kennedy’s. It says the health department will develop a framework for “Ensuring America has the Best Childhood Vaccine Schedule.”
Mr. Kennedy, one of the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, recently pledged to overhaul the nation’s system to compensate people harmed by vaccines. Earlier this month, he canceled nearly $500 million in contracts for mRNA vaccines.
The draft report also suggests that the government will consider developing guidelines that would limit marketing of unhealthy foods directly to children and will more vigorously enforce restrictions around direct-to-consumer drug advertising. It says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will update its recommendations on fluoride in water.
On Tuesday, Calley Means, a senior adviser to Mr. Kennedy, spoke at a Heritage Foundation event on the role of agriculture in public health, presenting farmers as key players in American health care. “We are not going to win if the soybean farmers and the corn growers are our enemy,” he said.
There are signs that the report, as drafted, could land with a thud among Mr. Kennedy’s followers. In July, 500 people, including leaders of advocacy groups aligned with Mr. Kennedy’s movement, sent a letter to Mr. Kennedy and other members of the White House commission urging them to ban pesticides like glyphosate.
Hundreds of people tied to the MAHA movement, including Vani Hari, a prominent food activist and MAHA influencer, also sent a letter addressed to Mr. Trump on Monday urging him to take action against protections for pesticide manufacturers.
Over the first six months of his presidency, Mr. Trump has largely supported Mr. Kennedy’s decisions, after urging him during the campaign to “go wild” on health. This month, though, after Mr. Kennedy canceled the contracts for mRNA vaccines, Mr. Trump told reporters that the mRNA coronavirus vaccine development initiative from his first term, Project Warp Speed, was “one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.” He said he had scheduled a meeting with Mr. Kennedy to discuss the cancellations.
While Mr. Trump convened the commission, and put Mr. Kennedy at the helm, he does not have to follow its guidance.
“Unlike other administrations, we will not be silenced or intimidated by the corporate lobbyists or special interests,” Mr. Trump said in May during an event celebrating the release of the commission’s first report. “I want this group to do what they have to do.”
“In some cases, it won’t be nice, or it won’t be pretty,” he added, “but we have to do it.”
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12) The Trauma of Childhood in Gaza
Over the past two years, tens of thousands of children in the territory have been killed, wounded or orphaned. Childhood as they once knew it has ceased to exist.
By Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, Aug. 15, 2025
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, and Bilal Shbair from Khan Younis, Al-Mawasi and Deir al Balah in the Gaza Strip.
A camp for the displaced on a beach in Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Wounded Palestinian children after a school sheltering displaced people was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City in April. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
To numb the traumas of wartime Gaza, Rahma Abu Abed, 12, plays a game with her friends. They ask one another: What did you eat before the war? What did your home look like before the war? What would you wear if you had new clothes?
For Rahma, who recounted these details in an interview alongside her mother, Heba, the answers are often less soothing than tragic. She hasn’t eaten meat in months, her parents said. Her home in southern Gaza has been flattened, satellite imagery shows. Her clothes are mostly under the rubble. The beach, where her parents occasionally took her as a treat before the war, has become her full-time home.
Rahma now lives in a storehouse for fishing equipment with her parents and four siblings, who share the space with several displaced families. She usually eats one meal a day, often lentils or pasta, her parents said. Trying to remember what good food looked like, Rahma plays with the wet sand, shaping it into imaginary meals.
“If someone gave me a choice between crayons and bread,” Rahma said, “I would choose the bread.”
After 22 months of war, childhood in Gaza hardly exists.
There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, and nearly all require mental health or psychosocial support, according to research by the United Nations. Most of them have been out of school for nearly two years. After Israel’s 11-week blockade on food this year, all children younger than 5 are at risk of acute malnutrition, the U.N. said.
Israel’s military operation, which began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has killed more than 18,000 Palestinians under the age of 18, according to the Gazan health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. About two-thirds of them did not reach their teenage years. A New York Times investigation last year found that since the start of the war, the Israeli military has significantly loosened safeguards meant to protect civilians, including children.
“Normal markers of childhood are gone, replaced by hunger, fear and all-consuming trauma,” said James Elder, a spokesman for UNICEF who has regularly visited Gaza throughout the war. “This war is being waged as if childhood itself has no place in Gaza.”
The Israeli military has said that it tries to minimize harm to all civilians, including children, and blamed Hamas militants for hiding among them, sometimes alongside their own families. Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces have reported seeing children used as lookouts by Palestinian militant groups, which also kidnapped and killed children on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Intentional harm to civilians, and especially to children, is strictly prohibited and completely contrary to both international law and the binding orders of the I.D.F.,” the military said in a statement.
A Life of Hunger
As Rahma flicked recently through prewar photos on a cellphone, she stopped at an image of herself at an ice-cream parlor.
“I just stared at it,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t recognize those days.”
Life for Rahma, like that of many children in Gaza, has become one of hunger. Israel has limited food supplies to the enclave since the earliest days of the war, and the situation has worsened since March, when Israel began its blockade. In late May, Israel allowed some food back into the territory, using private contractors to distribute the food from a few sites.
But for families like Rahma’s, that did not solve the problem. Reaching the sites is dangerous and exhausting in part because they were built behind Israeli military lines, far from where most people live. Hundreds have been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as they try to reach the sites, and those who get there unscathed often find the food has already been taken. Israel says its soldiers have fired “warning shots” at people who have strayed from designated access routes toward Israeli military lines.
Reaching the sites is a process that favors the fittest. Rahma’s father, Nidal Abu Abed, 42, has often been knocked over during the rush toward the sites, and he was once nearly shot, according to Rahma’s mother, Heba Abu Abed, 32. Because he rarely manages to secure a box of food, Ms. Abu Abed added, her husband is regularly forced to gather lentil grains or bits of broken pasta that have spilled onto the ground.
“He picks them up, I clean them, and I rinse them again and again to remove the sand or dust,” Ms. Abu Abed said. “Then I cook them for the children. That’s our meal, once a day, if we’re lucky.”
Rahma’s younger sister, Rital, 2, is just learning to talk. The process of seeking aid looms so large in Rital’s life that it even dominates her limited vocabulary.
“Where’s your dad?” Rital was asked on a recent afternoon.
“Baba aid!” she replied.
While some food is available in the markets, it has often been unaffordable for families like Rahma’s; her parents, like the vast majority of Gazans, have no work. Though food prices have dropped in recent days after a rise in deliveries, they are still astronomically high. On Aug. 13, according to the Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry, flour cost more than 10 times its prewar price.
Rahma helps her family survive by fetching water. She stands in line every day with several empty plastic containers, waiting for a water truck sent by an aid group. The process lasts for hours in the hot sun, often until the afternoon. People often push past her, knowing she can do little to stop them.
To alleviate the food crisis, which drew global condemnation, Israel recently loosened restrictions on U.N. food convoys and permitted foreign air forces to airdrop aid packages over Gaza.
When Rahma gazes up at those planes, she said, she wishes one would fly her family to a safer place.
“I imagine riding on it like a hot-air balloon, going to a country with no war — just food, school and toys,” she said.
A World Without School
Hala Abu Hilal, 10, pretends to be a teacher to keep her four younger sisters entertained. She stands up in their tent and recites things she remembers from school — sometimes simple math equations, sometimes the alphabet.
“Two plus four equals?” she calls.
“Six!” they reply.
In today’s Gaza, this game of make-believe is as close as most children get to school. Some 95 percent of schools have been damaged in the fighting, leaving most children without education for nearly two academic years, according to U.N. data. Many schools have been turned into displacement camps. Israel has regularly struck them, saying that Hamas leaders have used them as cover.
Hala’s school, like her home, is inaccessible. She is from Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has largely been flattened. She and her family fled their home last year and now live in a displacement camp close to a beach miles to the north.
In this camp, there is currently no school, according to Hala’s mother, Sanaa Abu Hilal. For a few months, volunteers in the camp ran a makeshift classroom, teaching ad hoc classes in a tent, but that system ended when the last truce collapsed in March, Ms. Abu Hilal said.
The U.N. tries to provide basic teaching via an online portal; some teachers also send educational material to parents via WhatsApp. But for families like Hala’s, the internet is often inaccessible. It’s hard to connect for prolonged periods to the phone network, and phone batteries run out quickly. Ms. Abu Hilal has a phone with a broken screen that barely responds to her touch.
Instead, Ms. Abu Hilal tries to teach the children herself — recently, she did Arabic grammar with Hala, simple geometry with Bisan, 6, and the alphabet with Deema, 5. But the sisters have lost four semesters of learning, while Bisan, who should have started school this year, has never received formal education.
Their sister, Tala, 8, seems most affected by the lack of classes. With no school to attend, Tala whiles away the day inventing games, some of which are disturbingly warped by the violence that surrounds her. Once, her mother recalled, Tala picked up a stone and said to her sisters: “I’ll throw this stone. Pretend it’s an F-16 missile.”
Then she hurled it at a tent.
Before the war, Ms. Abu Hilal said, Tala was the star of her class and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to cram for tests. “I wanted to be a doctor,” Tala said in an interview alongside her mother. “I wanted my daddy to build a hospital for me. I wanted to treat everyone for free. My daddy is in heaven now.”
Their father, Ashraf Abu Hilal, a former janitor, tried to return to their home last August, seeking to retrieve some goods that he could sell for food, according to Ms. Abu Hilal. He never returned.
A day later, his brother spotted him lying dead in a nearby street, Ms. Abu Hilal said. Nearby gunfire prevented the brother from reaching Ashraf’s body or discerning how he had died, Ms. Abu Hilal added. By the time they could reach the street safely, months later, little was left of the body, she said. (The Israeli military said it was unaware of the episode.)
“I hear how other kids call their dads — and their dad’s reply,” Ms. Abu Hilal recalled Hala telling her. “I wish baba could answer me, too.”
A Childhood Without Parents
On one page in his notebook, Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, has drawn a picture of his mother and father at their old home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. On another page, there’s a drawing of his mother taking him to a vegetable stand.
This is the closest Sajed can get to a hug from his parents. His father, Muhammad, and mother, Shireen, were killed in a strike that also destroyed their home in the third week of the war in 2023. The Israeli military said the house had been used for “terror purposes” and declined to comment on whether Mr. al-Ghalban was the target. One of Sajed’s surviving aunts, Amany Abu Salah, said Sajed’s father had no links to militant groups. It was not possible to verify either assertion.
Sajed survived the attack unscathed, but his sister Alma, now 12, and brother Abdallah, now 8, suffered head injuries, according to video of the aftermath and their surviving relatives. Alma was later evacuated to Turkey for treatment, relatives told The Times.
For nearly two years, Sajed and Abdallah were cared for by another aunt. Then, in July, that aunt was killed in a strike on a nearby tent that also wounded the boys, according to Ms. Abu Salah, the surviving aunt. Now, they live in another tent with Ms. Abu Salah and her three children.
The boys’ skin is still scarred by the shrapnel from the second strike — Abdallah has scars on his stomach and shoulder; Sajed on his foot and back. The Israeli military confirmed the attack, saying it was aimed at Hamas militants.
The brothers are among at least 40,000 children who have lost at least one parent since the start of the war, according to statistics published by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which employs thousands of officials in Gaza.
The children live in an encampment that local volunteers have created mainly to care for those orphaned in the war; in this camp alone, there are roughly 1,200 orphans, according to the camp administrators.
With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Sajed is suspended between childhood and premature adulthood. Sometimes he draws childish pictures in his notebook. Or he plays marbles and hide-and-seek with other children in the camp. But he is also increasingly trying to support his aunt in keeping their makeshift household together, according to Ms. Abu Salah.
He sweeps the tent each morning. He lines up for hours in the heat to fetch water. He fixes the tent poles when they collapse. He makes kites from scrap material and sells them for pocket change that he saves to buy food for himself and Abdallah.
“I’m the man now,” Sajed told his aunt, she said. “I’ll go buy what we need.”
Recently, Sajed, remembering how his father kept a rifle at home, said he wanted to help guard the aid convoys that bring food into Gaza. He also offered to make the perilous journey to the aid distribution sites, despite the risk of getting shot by soldiers or crushed by the crowds.
“How would you do that?” Ms. Abu Salah remembered asking him.
“I’ll do it just like the men do,” Sajed replied, she said.
Yet, sometimes Sajed just wants to be a child. He misses the sweets he ate before the war, he said. He misses being with his mother in their kitchen. He misses going to the park with his father.
“Why do all kids now have to wait in line for water?” Sajed asked.
“I just want to go home, to go to school,” he said.
“I just want the war to stop.”
Johnatan Reiss and Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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13) Man Fleeing an Immigration Raid Dies After Running Onto an L.A. Freeway
The man was hit by a vehicle. It happened about a month after an immigrant fell from a greenhouse and later died following a raid in Ventura County.
By Jesus Jiménez, Reporting from Los Angeles, Aug. 14, 2025
An immigration raid at a Home Depot in Monrovia, Calif., on Thursday caused a man to flee onto a freeway. He was struck by a vehicle and died, officials said. Credit...Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
A man died on Thursday after he was struck by vehicle on a freeway in Monrovia, Calif., as he was trying to flee an immigration raid at a Home Depot, officials said.
Federal immigration agents were seen conducting an operation near a Home Depot on Thursday morning in Monrovia, a city about 20 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, according to Dylan Feik, the city manager.
As the operation was unfolding, a man ran off, crossing a street and then entering the eastbound lanes of Interstate 210, a freeway. The man, who was not identified, was taken to a hospital, where he died, Mr. Feik said in a statement.
Details about the immigration operation were unclear.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the person was “not being pursued by any D.H.S. law enforcement.”
The agency added: “We do not know their legal status. We were not aware of this incident or notified by California Highway Patrol until hours after operations in the area had concluded.”
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
A portion of Interstate 210 was briefly closed. The California Highway Patrol was investigating the episode.
“While we understand community members want to know more about the incident, the information provided in this update is all the city has to provide at this time,” Mr. Feik said. “We extend our condolences for the individual and his family.”
Palmira Figueroa, a spokeswoman with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that organizers were working to learn more about the crash and the man’s identity.
Ms. Figueroa said that 10 to 12 day laborers were believed to have been detained during the immigration operation. She described the operation as “pretty aggressive” and said that agents had pursued day laborers in their vehicles.
Judy Chu, a Democratic member of Congress whose district includes a portion of Monrovia, said on social media that the man’s death was “a result of the Trump administration’s strategy of sowing intimidation and fear throughout Los Angeles.”
The fatal crash on Thursday came about a month after a similar episode in July at a cannabis farm in Ventura County.
During an immigration raid there last month, a Mexican farmworker died from injuries after falling several stories from a greenhouse as he was trying to flee immigration agents. The man, who was later identified as Jaime Alanís, fell more than 30 feet and suffered injuries to his spine and his skull, according to the United Farm Workers union.
Monrovia is one of dozens of cities across Southern California that have been targets of federal immigration operations this summer as the Trump administration has sought to increase the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants.
Home Depot stores across the region have regularly been targeted by federal immigration agents. Day laborers often gather outside the stores looking for work. Last week, federal immigration agents conducted a raid, named Operation Trojan Horse, outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles. In that operation, agents jumped out of a Penske rental truck and ran onto the streets. The raid led to the arrests of 16 undocumented immigrants.
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