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) 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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2) 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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3) 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.
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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4) 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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5) Groups calls on Delaware to revoke Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s corporate charter over complicity in genocide
BY MICHAEL ARRIA, AUGUST 15, 2025
Palestinians carry food parcels distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Palestinians in Gaza are being routinely killed while attempting to retrieve aid from GHF-run ‘aid distribution’ sites. (Photo by Omar Ashtawy/APAImages)
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is calling on Delaware’s Attorney General to investigate the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is registered in the state.
This week, CCR sent a letter to Delaware AG Kathy Jennings detailing how the GHF is complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza. According to CCR, Jennings is obligated to sue the organization in order to revoke its corporate charter.
“GHF woefully fails to adhere to fundamental humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence and has proven to be an opportunistic and obsequious entity masquerading as a humanitarian organization,” declares the letter.
Jennings has not publicly acknowledged the demand.
“Attorney General Jennings has the power to significantly change the course of history and save lives by taking action to dissolve GHF,” said CRR attorney Adina Marx-Arpadi in a statement. “We call on her to use her power to stop this dangerous entity that is masquerading as a charitable organization while furthering death and violence in Gaza, and to do so without delay.”
The CCR letter comes just weeks after a similar letter was delivered to Jennings by Delawareans for Palestinian Human Rights (DelPHR).
“The GHF is an agent of the US and Israel and is being used to starve (a war crime), ethnically cleanse (a war crime) and intentionally kill Gazan civilians (a war crime),” it read. “Today, Delawareans have affirmed that we do not want to harbor war criminals in our state, and consequently have asked Attorney General Jennings to begin proceedings to dissolve the GHF based on its violations of international humanitarian and US law.”
The GHF has faced backlash since it effectively took over food distribution duties in Gaza in May 2025. Unlike UNWRA, which is a strictly humanitarian agency and was previously in charge of distributing aid in Gaza, GHF relies on private security forces and logistics companies. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed at the sites since GHF took over. The UN has condemned the current system as “inherently unsafe.”
In June, nearly 200 charities signed onto a joint statement calling for an end to the system.
“Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” read the statement.
A number of Democratic lawmakers have also demanded an end to the distribution structure.
“We urge you to immediately cease all U.S. funding for GHF and resume support for the existing UN-led aid coordination mechanisms with enhanced oversight to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches civilians in need,” demands a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, led Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and signed by 21 Senators.
Last month, former GHF contractor Anthony Aguilar said that he witnessed Israeli soldiers commit war crimes at Gaza aid sites.
“In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population,” said Aguilar.
“I have never witnessed that in all the places that I have been deployed to war, until I was in Gaza — at the hands of IDF and U.S. contractors,” he continued.
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6) U.S. Pauses Visitor Visas for Gazans After Right-Wing Outcry
The move blocked a pathway for those seeking medical care in the United States, including young children, who have arrived in recent weeks with serious conditions.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Ken Bensinger, Aug. 16, 2025
Fadi Alzant, 6, arrived with his mother from Gaza for emergency medical treatment in New York in May. Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times
The Trump administration announced Saturday that it had paused approvals of visitor visas for people from Gaza, a key pathway for those seeking medical care in the United States, including young children who arrived in recent weeks with serious conditions.
The State Department said it would assess the process behind those visas. “All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review,” the department said in a statement on X Saturday morning.
The move came after an intense lobbying campaign by the right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who called the incoming flights a “national security threat” in a flurry of social media posts starting on Friday that targeted a nonprofit aiding in medical evacuations.
Just weeks ago, the nonprofit, HEAL Palestine, an Ohio-based group that helps Palestinian families and children, began orchestrating what it called the “largest single medical evacuation of injured children from Gaza to the U.S.,” bringing injured and ill Gazan children to the United States for care.
To date, the group says it has evacuated 63 injured children for treatment, including 11, from age 6 to 15, who were flown to hospitals in nine U.S. cities this month. Many of the children had lost limbs during the conflict in Gaza. They are expected to travel to Egypt to rejoin their families once their medical care is completed, according to HEAL Palestine.
The group, which was founded last year and also operates food kitchens in Gaza, did not respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this month, Dr. Zeena Salman, a co-founder of HEAL Palestine, said in a statement that the medical evacuation flights were a matter of life or death. “These children could not wait,” Dr. Salman said. “Their lives are at stake, and this mission is about giving them a future.”
Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, said that more than 9,000 people with travel documents from the Palestinian Authority had entered the United States on visitor visas in the 2024 fiscal year.
“This move is consistent with the Trump administration’s overall treatment of immigrants as constituting a threat to U.S. public safety,” Ms. Gelatt said. “But it is extremely hard to imagine how someone coming to the U.S. for lifesaving medical treatment would present a national security risk.”
Ms. Loomer, who wields extraordinary power in shaping Trump administration decisions over personnel and policy despite not having an official role in government, said she first learned of the flights earlier this month.
“I felt like this is something that needs attention,” she said in an interview. “Under the Trump administration, they are actively importing Gazans into the U.S. Clearly this is not what we voted for.”
On social media, Ms. Loomer called attention to a video posted on Aug. 6 by HEAL Palestine, showing Palestinian children arriving at the San Francisco airport.
She subsequently posted about flights to St. Louis, San Antonio and Houston and claimed without providing evidence that the nonprofit was connected to Hamas, tagging state and federal officials in her posts.
Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, responded to her late on Friday on X, saying that he was “deeply concerned about the incoming flights” and was making inquiries.
Ms. Loomer said she spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday night to alert him to the flights and what she called the threat of an Islamic invasion.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Loomer has a long history of anti-Islam activism. In 2017, she wrote a social media post that cheered the drowning deaths of 2,000 refugees who were trying to flee violence in Syria and other countries with large Muslim populations by crossing the Mediterranean.
For years, she has pushed for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Islamist movement, to be designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, lobbying both members of Congress and the administration. Last week, Mr. Rubio said such a designation from the State Department was “in the works.”
Medical flights for children affected by the conflict in Gaza have been occurring for well over a year, organized by a variety of charities.
Dr. Mohammad Subeh, an emergency room physician who volunteers for HEAL Palestine, said that he had previously treated some of the children who recently arrived to the Bay Area during his time in Gaza. He said that the injuries included orthopedic trauma and severe burns and that they were exacerbated by malnutrition.
“I am saddened to see fear and hate permeate within a small yet vocal segment of our society, whereby people have dehumanized children,” he said, by pushing for policies to withhold “life- and limb-saving care.”
Andrew Miller, a former senior State Department official on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in the Biden administration, said that Gazans could only get visas to the U.S. by appearing at an embassy in Jerusalem, Cairo or Amman and undergo security checks.
“What’s more, just to get to a U.S. embassy outside of Gaza, the Israeli military and security services had to clear them and anyone accompanying them,” he said, adding: “From what I saw, any insinuation that we were taking an unusual security risk in these cases is baseless.”
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7) Why Is the U.S. Offering a $5 Million Reward for a Haitian Gang Leader?
A major bounty has been offered for help apprehending Jimmy Cherizier, a gang leader known as “Barbecue.” Experts have doubts about whether it will make any difference.
By Frances Robles, Aug. 16, 2025
This past week, the United States government announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Jimmy Cherizier, a high-profile Haitian gang leader known as “Barbecue.”
The bounty was offered on Tuesday, the same day that a criminal indictment in federal court in Washington accused Mr. Cherizier of conspiring to circumvent U.S. economic sanctions. The sanctions aim to prevent him from receiving money or support from the United States.
The moves were intended as a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crusade against officially designated foreign terrorist organizations, like the one Mr. Cherizier leads. But as killings, poverty and displacement in Haiti rise, will the case against “Barbecue” make any difference?
Who is ‘Barbecue’?
Mr. Cherizier, 48, is the most-wanted man in Haiti. A former police officer, he is the most visible figure of “Viv Ansanm,” a coalition of armed groups wreaking havoc on the nation.
He has told reporters that his nickname was derived not — as urban lore suggests — from roasting his victims, but from the fact that when he was a child, his mother ran a fried chicken kiosk. Long the leader of armed groups operating in the Delmas 6 neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the capital, he emerged to lead an alliance of gangs known as the “G9 Family and Allies” and then “Viv Ansanm,” an umbrella group that formed to attack state institutions.
In November 2018, while serving as an officer in the Haitian National Police, Mr. Cherizier planned and participated in an attack against civilians in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood known as La Saline, according to human rights organizations, the Haitian police and the United Nations.
At least 71 people were killed, over 400 houses destroyed and at least seven women raped by gangs. He was fired after 14 years as a police officer and an arrest warrant was issued, but he has yet to be apprehended — even though he often makes himself available for media interviews.
In the interviews, Mr. Cherizier has denied the allegations and portrayed himself as a revolutionary out to topple corrupt oligarchs. He has acknowledged that gangs have committed atrocities, but he has called for dialogue to end the crisis.
In one interview, he said he had something in common with President Trump.
“During his campaign, he said, ‘We need to drain the swamp,’” Mr. Cherizier told SBS Australia. “That’s the same thing I want to do in Haiti.”
What are the gangs actually doing?
The gangs succeeded in toppling the government last year, after they banded together to attack police stations, hospitals and neighborhoods, but it is unclear what their ultimate goal is.
Gangs set up road blocks and charge tolls, making it difficult for people in Port-au-Prince to travel. They regularly kidnap people for ransom and have burned down countless homes. The main airport has been closed to international flights since November because gangs shot at passing aircraft.
The U.N. estimates that 1.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes, and in the first half of the year more than 3,100 people have been killed.
Will the federal indictment change anything?
“There’s a good reason that there’s a $5 million reward for information leading to Cherizier’s arrest,” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a statement. “He’s a gang leader responsible for heinous human rights abuses, including violence against American citizens in Haiti.”
But most experts who follow Haiti said the U.S. indictment was largely “performative,” given how long he has eluded capture. Large bounties for other gang leaders have yielded no results.
“This is very little, very late,” said Alexandra Filippova, a senior staff attorney with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.
Others noted that the 20-page accusation against Mr. Cherizier documented surprisingly low sums of money being funneled to him.
The indictment accuses a virtually unknown Haitian American trucker in North Carolina, Bazile Richardson, of sending Mr. Cherizier money through third parties. One transfer was for $25 to re-up his phone plan, and another was for $50.
A dozen transfers noted by prosecutors add up to less than $40,000.
The transfers were illegal because in 2020 the U.S. government imposed sanctions on Mr. Cherizier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Mr. Richardson, who was arrested in Texas in July, has pleaded not guilty, court records show. An assistant federal public defender representing him did not respond to a request for comment.
If the United States wants to capture people like Mr. Cherizier, there is much more it could do, said Gédéon Jean, a human-rights activist in Haiti. It could provide material, technical and technological resources to the national police, and join local authorities to mount special operations, he said.
“That way, they could easily capture Barbecue and other gang leaders,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just one more reward.”
In a video released after his indictment, Mr. Cherizier said the charges against his co-defendant were false. “If the F.B.I. wants me, I’m here,” he said. “I am willing to collaborate with them on one condition: There can be no lies told.”
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8) North Carolina Confederate Monument Goes Too Far, Lawsuit Says
A long battle over the pro-slavery words on a Tyrrell County statue intensifies as the Trump administration reclaims Confederate imagery.
By Audra D. S. Burch, Reporting from Columbia, N.C., Aug. 17, 2025
A confederate monument next to the Tyrrell County Courthouse has overlooked Main Street in Columbia, N.C., for 123 years. Credit...Cornell Watson for The New York Times
The first time Sherryreed Robinson remembers noticing the words — “IN APPRECIATION OF OUR FAITHFUL SLAVES” — etched on a Confederate monument in Columbia, N.C., she was a teenager performing with her high school band on the steps of the Tyrrell County courthouse. She remembers approaching the 23-foot Confederate soldier statue and focusing on those six words.
For Ms. Robinson, a high school junior at the time, “faithful” and “slaves” did not feel right together.
About three decades later, with the 123-year-old monument still overlooking the historic town’s Main Street, she joined a federal lawsuit calling for the “faithful slaves” inscription to be removed or covered. It is believed to be the only courthouse monument in the country to “textually express” such a message, according to the lawsuit.
“I just remember thinking that slaves had to be so-called faithful or they would be punished or even worse,” Ms. Robinson, 50, said. “As an adult, the words sitting on the grounds of a courthouse made me question whether Blacks could really receive justice there.”
Earlier this year, a federal judge allowed a portion of the 2024 lawsuit to move forward. County officials have long contended that a state monument protection law restricts them from moving the statue or making changes to it.
The Columbia case is unfolding amid a reverse reckoning of sorts, as the Trump administration reclaims Confederate iconography, part of a sweeping mission to shift or reframe how American history is presented.
In June, President Trump directed the military to restore Confederate names that had been removed from military bases, but drawing from other people with similar names or initials. In early August, the National Park Service announced plans to restore a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and diplomat, and return it to a public square near the Capitol grounds. The 11-foot statue was toppled and set on fire by demonstrators during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Washington. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a Confederate sculpture that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia in 2023 to be reinstalled.
Last year, Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County, a civic group made up of mostly older Black residents, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina against the county.
The suit argued that the “faithful slave” message constitutes racially discriminatory government speech, violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, and called for the county to remove or cover the message.
David Clegg, the county manager and attorney, declined to comment beyond the legal pleadings. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, filed in October 2024, the defendants argued the body has legislative immunity and that they are bound by a 2015 North Carolina monument protection law that limits when an “object of remembrance” on public property can be moved or altered.
“The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled that county commissioners are bound by this statute, and that commissioners who are bound by this statute are not motivated by a discriminatory intent,” it reads. “Tyrrell County should not be subject to liability based on its decision to follow state law.”
With 160 years having passed since the end of the Civil War, Confederate symbols — mounted on courthouse lawns, towering over town squares, affixed to schools and streets and parks — are celebrated, contested and used as a lens on American history and race relations. Critics consider Confederate imagery racist, an offensive tribute to the Lost Cause. Supporters contend that they are a way to honor the sacrifices of soldiers who fought in the war.
Today, the national landscape is still dotted with more than 2,000 Confederate symbols in public spaces, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group.
“This is about history and memory and power,” said Rivka Maizlish, a senior research analyst with the center who focuses on tracking the symbols. “These debates over Confederate memorials are about resisting a propaganda campaign to erase the memory of the true meaning of the Civil War, which was a struggle between slavery and freedom.”
The fight in Tyrrell County mirrors other places, mostly small Southern towns and rural communities, where neighbors sometimes take opposing sides over how slavery and the Civil War should be memorialized. About 30 miles away, the town of Edenton has also been embroiled in a legal battle over moving its Confederate monument from a waterfront location. But the example most similar to the one in Columbia includes the phrase “faithful slaves” and stands in Confederate Park in Fort Mill, S.C.
Along the Main Street in Columbia — a riverfront town about 150 miles east of Raleigh — few people were willing to speak publicly about the monument and the lawsuit.
But a community Facebook page offered a glimpse into how some Tyrrell County residents and others felt. Some were embarrassed by the “faithful slave” language, describing it as a relic of an ugly past. Others felt moving or altering the monument was effectively erasing history. They saw the statue as a way to honor soldiers and said that their Southern pride and heritage were being unfairly attacked.
The statue has stood near the entrance of the courthouse since 1902, part of a wave of Confederate monuments erected during the Jim Crow era, beginning in the late 1800s. It was a gift from the Tyrrell Monument Association, an organization founded by William Fessenden Beasley, a former lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, according to the lawsuit. The monument consists of a Confederate soldier standing atop a base featuring a bust of Gen. Robert E. Lee. One of the statue’s panels includes the “faithful slave” inscription.
Mark Snell Brickhouse’s great-great-grandfather’s name is among those etched on the monument. He returns to Columbia regularly to visit a family cemetery and the monument.
“I love the statue because it honors my family members,” said Mr. Brickhouse, 72. “But I can see how the words are offensive to some people. I think the statue should stay because it reflects our history, but those words should be covered.”
Since the 1990s, Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County has pushed to have the statue moved off the courthouse grounds. Recently, they began to focus on removing the inscription, seeing it as an easier task, but also so the next generation of students doesn’t have to see the words.
Over the years, the group held public marches and demonstrations, spoke at commission meetings and mounted billboards.
“The statue has been here all of my life, but I had no idea the message about faithful slaves was there,” said Joyce Sykes Fitch, a plaintiff in the case who traces her family lineage in the area to before the Civil War. “It was not until I moved back to North Carolina in 2017 after I retired and decided to get involved in the community that I discovered what it said. It’s still hard to believe those words are there.”
The lawsuit describes the plaintiffs as part of a small Black population of less than 1,000 residents in Tyrrell County — about one-third of the total — who are “direct descendants of people whom the county, by way of the ‘faithful slaves’ message, is talking about.”
“This is the only monument of its kind at a courthouse with that language of appreciation, or an endorsement, of slavery on it,” said Ian Mance, a lawyer of Emancipate NC, a racial justice advocacy and litigation organization. “You are talking about families who have been here since before the Civil War. For them, there is this feeling that this monument is offering commentary about their families.”
Mr. Mance said the suit was not seeking damages. “Our contention is that equal protection does not allow the government itself to actually make racially discriminatory statements,” he said. “By the statue being on government property, it represents government speech.”
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9) Trump Wants to Fight Democrats on Crime. They’re Treading Cautiously.
Democrats see the federal takeover of Washington as a way for President Trump to stoke fear for political gain. But they are mindful that issues of public safety continue to resonate with their own supporters.
By Jess Bidgood and Lisa Lerer, Aug. 18, 2025
With his efforts to take control of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., this week, President Trump has pushed the issue of crime back to the foreground of American politics.
In doing so, he’s invited a fight with Democrats, who are treading cautiously as they seek to forcefully oppose the federal incursion into the nation’s capital, something no president has ever attempted, without getting caught up in a debate over public safety on Mr. Trump’s terms.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies wielded the sharp increase in violent crime in urban areas during the pandemic as a campaign cudgel, winning control of the House in the 2022 midterms. Mr. Trump expanded his winning coalition two years later, in part with promises to prevent the rest of America from becoming like the cities he called “unlivable, unsanitary nightmares,” deriding the data that showed improvement across the country.
While his tactics in Washington, D.C., are extraordinary, the effort is an actualization of one of his most tried-and-true political arguments: Democrats — often Black Democrats — have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they were elected to run. At a moment when Mr. Trump’s approval ratings even among his supporters are declining, he appears to be laying the groundwork for Republicans to once again weaponize the issue in the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump has sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets, turned federal law enforcement officers into beat cops and sought to put the local police department fully under his administration’s control. And the president has suggested he wants to bring his brand of law and order to Chicago; Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; and New York, all liberal cities in blue states, while avoiding any mention of high-crime cities in red states, like Memphis or St. Louis.
Among Democrats, there is widespread agreement that Mr. Trump is stoking fear for political gain and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.
But there is also recognition that the party must acknowledge that concerns about public safety continue to resonate not just with Mr. Trump’s supporters, but with their own.
“We as Democrats should be careful not to cede the issue of public safety to Donald Trump and Republicans,” Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, said in an interview. “We should own the issue of public safety, because it matters to voters.”
For his part, Mr. Trump made clear this week he sees his moves as a political slam-dunk.
“I think crime is maybe 100 to nothing, so I think we may get very well some Democratic support,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday.
Trump made inroads across blue states like New York, New Jersey and California in 2024, alarming Democrats who worried that his messages about crime, immigration and quality of life had appealed to their voters, too. That year, a survey by Pew Research Center found that nearly six in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, wanted the reduction of crime to be a top priority for American leaders — a figure that had grown since 2021.
The differing approaches the party has taken to Mr. Trump so far over his crackdown in Washington were on display in neighboring Maryland, where a group of lawmakers, including five members of Congress, raised grave concerns for democracy. They framed the president’s assertion of federal oversight of the Metropolitan Police Department and his use of the National Guard to patrol the streets as a “soft launch of authoritarianism.”
By contrast, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, called the takeover a distraction, echoing party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“I see this as performative and nothing more,” Mr. Moore said in an interview, “because if he wanted to have a serious conversation about violent crime, he should have to pay attention to the work we’re doing in the state of Maryland to be able to address the issue.”
Mr. Moore accused Mr. Trump of ignoring the fact that the homicide rate in Baltimore is the lowest it has been in 50 years. “That doesn’t fit his narrative,” Mr. Moore said. “This is just a series of ignorant tropes that he continues to lay out.”
Some Democrats, though, warn that reality is not as important as perception — something that Mr. Trump has long been adept at shaping with his will and his echo chamber.
They recall Democrats’ ineffective efforts during last year’s presidential election to promote statistics showing that the economy was improving — while Mr. Trump and his allies hammered away at the pain people felt over persistently high prices. He won the support of voters with deep economic concerns.
“D.C. presents the easiest opportunity for him to make crime an issue when it’s not, and politics is perception,” said Mike Morey, a Democratic strategist who advised former Representative Sean Patrick Maloney in the 2022 race he lost to Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican, largely over the issue of crime.
That contest was waged in New York City suburbs where crime was relatively low, but Mr. Lawler and his allies repeatedly attacked Mr. Maloney using headlines from the city’s pandemic crime spike. Public safety is already an issue in this fall’s contest for mayor of New York City, while Republicans are signaling their intent to raise the matter during next year’s race for governor of New York.
“We have to be careful not to lean too heavily on statistics, because people form their judgments about public safety based on their own lived experience,” Mr. Torres said.
Stoking fears of crime, and braiding them with race, has been central to Mr. Trump’s public and political persona since the 1980s, when he took out ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino men who were accused of raping and beating a woman in Central Park. The men were later exonerated.
In 2016, Mr. Trump proclaimed himself the “law and order” candidate as he accepted his party’s nomination for president and took office by describing gangs, drugs and inner-city blight as “American carnage.” Four years later, as Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated across the country, Mr. Trump once again ran against crime in urban centers, describing living in cities like Baltimore, Oakland and Detroit as “like living in hell.” He seized on the small number of Democrats who supported calls to “defund the police” amid a broader reckoning over the treatment of people of color, particularly Black people, by law enforcement officers.
There are signs that the party is better prepared to ward off Mr. Trump’s attacks on crime than it was in 2020 and 2022.
“What Democrats need to do is keep calling out the lack of reason to do this other than to distract and to assert more power,” said Representative Dan Goldman of New York, who called Mr. Trump’s actions “authoritarian fascism.”
Some Democrats have seized the opportunity to talk about their own credentials on public safety in places where violent crime has fallen on their watch, while being careful to acknowledge that a falling crime rate doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.
“No mayor in the country, myself included, is saying that we solved this issue of violent crime,” said Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, adding that “we have to keep going until we make our cities even safer.”
In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, appears well aware that Washington’s historically low rate of violent crime hasn’t prompted a significant change in people’s perception of the issue. (A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Washingtonians rated crime as an “extremely serious” or a “very serious” problem in the District, up from 56 percent in 2023, when the crime rate was actually higher.)
She initially responded to Mr. Trump’s takeover this week with a cautious and conciliatory tone. Even as she called it “unsettling and unprecedented,” she acknowledged that some residents wanted to see more done to reduce crime.
Her tone grew more defiant after the Trump administration sought to tighten its grip over the city police.
Some of the cities Republicans long regarded as crime-ridden punching bags seem to have fallen off Mr. Trump’s radar entirely. Take San Francisco, where, in 2022, voters ousted Chesa Boudin, a progressive district attorney, after a wave of car break-ins and burglaries had spurred a pervasive sense that San Francisco was unsafe, even as some metrics showed that violent crimes like homicides were declining.
Last year, San Francisco residents denied Mayor London Breed another term in office and elevated Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and wealthy nonprofit leader who made cracking down on crime and improving homelessness central tenets of his campaign. So far, he has refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump by name.
“The best argument against this notion that Democrats ruin cities is to run the city effectively,” said Steven Bacio, the co-founder of GrowSF, a moderate political advocacy group.
It does not hurt, perhaps, that Mr. Lurie, a white man and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, replaced Ms. Breed, a Black woman who was willing to occasionally spar with Mr. Trump.
That’s not lost on Mayor Scott of Baltimore, who described Mr. Trump’s complaints about crime as a thinly veiled attack on Black leadership.
“My city and all the others called out by the president on Sunday, led by Black mayors, are all making historic progress on crime,” Mr. Scott said. “But they’re the ones getting called out, and it tells you everything that you need to know.”
Kellen Browning and Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting from San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
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10) For D.C.’s Homeless, Strained Lives Become More Unstable
Some on the street have been forced to move, while others are fearful they could be next. Many face an even more uncertain future.
By Anushka Patil and Aishvarya Kavi, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 18, 2025
David Brown said that his tent and many of his belongings were thrown in the trash when he was forced to move out of an encampment on Friday. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
For some 15 years, David Brown had made a home in Washington Circle, living in a tent with a handful of others in an encampment. On Friday, that home was destroyed — his tent, clothing and other possessions were tossed into a dumpster by police officers carrying out President Trump’s crackdown on some of the city’s most powerless residents.
Left with a fraction of his things, Mr. Brown and his 6-month-old puppy, Molly, moved a block away and slept outside the Foggy Bottom subway station. Sitting in a wheelchair outside the station on Saturday, he was still baffled at what was happening. “Why is he doing this, for no reason?” he asked of Mr. Trump.
The clearing of homeless people off the streets of Washington, part of the president’s marshaling of federal forces on the nation’s capital, has been more scattered than sweeping, and it is unclear how many of the estimated 900 people who sleep on the city’s streets have been affected.
But what emerged over the weekend were more stories like Mr. Brown’s. Many people are on the move, seeing their lives uprooted and their futures become even more precarious, whether as a result of force or out of fear.
Some have moved into shelters. Others have secured temporary hotel rooms with the help of nonprofit groups. Some have taken buses to surrounding areas, or are using donated metro cards to ride the subways back and forth at night. Still others have simply moved to another spot on the streets.
David Beatty, who was removed from an encampment between the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace, said he spent the first night after being cleared out behind bushes near the Foggy Bottom subway station. But without his tent or foam mat, he was getting little sleep. His other belongings had been put into storage, thanks to the Georgetown Ministry Center — but he kept his broom and dustpan, which he carried with him as he walked around the city during the day, sweeping up cigarette butts and litter.
Making the city safe and beautiful includes “removing mentally disturbed individuals and homeless encampments,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference last week. The White House also said that scores of homeless encampments have been cleared since the president issued an executive order in March that included creating a program to beautify the district. His supporters, including Scott Turner, the housing secretary, say the president’s measures have been needed to rid the city of blight.
Mr. Trump has claimed on social media that authorities would give homeless people somewhere to stay far from the capital, and Ms. Leavitt said they would be offered shelters or addiction and mental health services.
But advocates for homeless people say no federal aid to get them help has materialized.
“Precisely zero resources — no money, no vacant federal buildings, no housing — have come from the federal government to support moving people inside,” Amber W. Harding, the executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said in a statement.
Organizations that provide support in the region estimate that several hundreds of people in Washington remain without a place to sleep. They also said that news of the clearings had driven fear through homeless communities even though the moves may not have displaced huge numbers of people. The district does not have large encampments similar to ones in other big cities.
Homelessness was a vexing problem for the district well before Mr. Trump’s crackdown. Mayor Muriel Bowser made the issue a focus of her administration when she took office in 2015, vowing to end long-term homelessness in the district and make it a “rare, brief and nonrecurring experience” by 2020.
Advocates say those goals are far from being met and that the district’s latest budget for 2026 will undermine the social safety net for the neediest. While city data shows that the number of homeless people in the city dropped by 9 percent over the past year, it had been rising for two years before that.
The city acknowledges that more work needs to be done but points to the decrease over the past year as evidence of progress. It says it has expanded its shelter system and that one of its programs has diverted nearly 400 people from entering homelessness.
Still, the sudden disruption of the past week has left city workers and volunteers scrambling to assemble a patchwork safety net.
Claire Wilson, the executive director of Georgetown Ministry Center, said that close to a dozen of the more than 60 individuals her organization sees on a regular basis were displaced on Friday. It was done without warning, she said, which was out of the norm.
Ms. Wilson added that on Saturday morning, more than 50 people came to the center for shelter — a much larger crowd than what the ministry typically sees on a Saturday.
“Yesterday was frantic — and traumatic,” said Ms. Wilson, talking about Friday. She added that it was unlike any other crisis she had seen homeless individuals face in about a decade of working on housing issues.
On Friday night, as federal and local law enforcement patrolled the streets of Washington, advocates for the homeless were roaming transit hubs in Montgomery County, Md., wealthy suburbs that border of Washington, searching for unhoused people who had left the city.
John Mendez, Bethesda Cares’s executive director, and Renee Siepierski, the group’s street outreach program director, drove to Chevy Chase, a wealthy enclave on the northwest border of Washington. They pulled on bright orange wind breakers and walked the hollow concrete transit hubs in the area, tucked away behind luxury retail stores and bars.
Mr. Mendez anticipated that some of Washington’s homeless would seek refuge by blending in at libraries and coffee shops during the day and on public transit at night. But they were unlikely to permanently leave the city they called home, Mr. Mendez said.
He counted four people who appeared to be homeless, which he said was a higher than usual number. They were laden with bags of belongings. Some of them took a pair of new socks he offered them. They all climbed onto a bus back to Washington that pulled away just before midnight.
In Bethesda, Md., Erica Jones got off a bus from the city. She said she did not have a place to live but relied on the generosity of friends and family. On Friday night, she was heading to her mother’s apartment in Silver Spring, Md.
Ms. Jones said her friends and acquaintances, who are homeless, were intimidated by the number of law enforcement in the streets. And she was alarmed by the way people are being treated.
“These are people like me and people like you,” she said, adding later, “That’s just where they sleep.”
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11) America Is Abandoning One of the Greatest Medical Breakthroughs
By Rick Bright, Aug. 18, 2025
Dr. Bright is a virologist and a former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
Gabriel Gabriel Garble
In early 2020, when the first genetic sequence of the new coronavirus was posted online, scientists were ready. Within hours, they began designing a vaccine. Within weeks, clinical trials were underway. That unprecedented speed, which saved millions of lives, was possible only because years earlier, the United States had invested in a vaccine technology called mRNA. Today, that work is being sidelined, and with it, our best chance to quickly respond when the next threat emerges.
The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced it would wind down 22 mRNA vaccine development projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, halting nearly $500 million in investments. This decision undercuts one of the most significant medical advances in decades, technology that could protect millions more from the threats ahead.
I know the stakes because I was BARDA’s director when the United States made the decision to invest heavily in mRNA. That investment did not begin with Covid-19. It began in 2016, when we faced the Zika virus outbreak. We needed a way to design a vaccine in days, not years, to protect pregnant women and their babies from devastating birth defects. Older vaccine approaches were too slow. The solution was mRNA: a flexible, rapid-response technology that could be reprogrammed for any pathogen once its genetic sequence was known. That early investment laid the groundwork for the lightning-fast Covid-19 response four years later.
BARDA wasn’t the only government agency making early investments in mRNA research. The Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had already recognized mRNA’s potential for swift action against emerging biological threats, including those that might be weaponized. Globally, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed substantial resources to advance the technology for viruses with pandemic potential. These combined efforts created a scientific and manufacturing foundation that allowed the world to move at warp speed when Covid-19 emerged.
During the pandemic, mRNA vaccines went from the genetic sequence of the virus to human trials in under 70 days. They were evaluated in large, rigorous trials, meeting the same safety and effectiveness standards as other vaccines. By the end of 2021, they had saved an estimated 20 million lives globally, including more than one million in the United States. They reduced hospitalization and death rates, lowered the risk of long Covid and helped economies and communities reopen sooner.
The mRNA technology is not a single vaccine. It is what scientists describe as a platform, which can be adapted quickly for new or mutating viruses, combined to target multiple variants and manufactured through a streamlined process that reduces reliance on fragile global supply chains. It is now being tested for personalized cancer vaccines, autoimmune therapies and treatments for rare diseases. It is under study to protect against pathogens like Nipah, Lassa fever and Chikungunya, threats that could cause the next global emergency.
Like every technology, mRNA has limitations. Vaccines meant to protect against respiratory infections, whether mRNA or older technologies, are generally better at preventing severe disease than preventing you from getting infected. It is a scientific challenge we can address with next-generation vaccines. The answer to limitations is improvement, not abandonment.
Political narratives about mRNA have fueled confusion, which leads to mistrust, yet the scientific evidence consistently shows that this technology is safe and effective, and holds enormous potential for future vaccines and treatments. Some have claimed mRNA encourages viral mutations or prolongs pandemics. Research says otherwise. Mutations arise when viruses replicate. Vaccination can help reduce the chances of virus replication, which would reduce opportunities for mutation. Other critics point to safety concerns. With more than 13 billion Covid‑19 vaccine doses administered globally, including hundreds of millions of mRNA doses, the evidence shows that serious complications are very rare and occur at rates comparable with those of other vaccines. Most side effects are mild and short‑lived.
If the United States abandons mRNA, it will not simply be forfeiting a public health advantage. It will be ceding a strategic asset. In national security terms, mRNA is the equivalent of a missile defense system for biology. The ability to rapidly design, produce and deploy medical countermeasures is as vital to our defense as any military capability. Adversaries who invest in this technology will be able to respond faster to outbreaks, protecting their populations sooner than we can. Right now, the United States has a decisive advantage in mRNA science, manufacturing capacity and regulatory expertise. But in an era where biological threats can be engineered, losing this competitive edge would leave the United States vulnerable and dependent on others for lifesaving tools.
The consequences of canceling mRNA contracts will affect more nations than just the United States. Many countries have been building regional mRNA manufacturing capacity. For a leader like the United States to pull back now undermines that effort and weakens our collective ability to respond to the next outbreak. It means choosing to face the next biological threat with fewer defenses and slower tools while others build speed and strength.
There is a better path forward. The department of Health and Human Services can work with scientists, public health experts and security leaders to refine and improve mRNA technology while preserving critical programs and production capacity. By recalibrating rather than severing support, we can keep this powerful tool ready for the time it is needed most. The next crisis will not wait for us to rebuild what we have thrown away.
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12) Protests Highlight Growing Discontent With Netanyahu and the Gaza War
Many Israelis feel that freeing the hostages cannot happen if the government refuses to come to terms with Hamas and pursues its policy of trying to eliminate the group militarily.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 18, 2025
The Israeli campaign against Hamas has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 18,000 children and minors, according to Gazan health officials. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Protests that culminated in a mass rally in Tel Aviv attended by hundreds of thousands of people over the weekend have exposed a yawning chasm between many Israelis and the unpopular hard-line government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Demonstrations called for Sunday had been billed as a day of Israeli solidarity with the families of the hostages held in Gaza and a call to stop the war and bring the captives home. Many businesses observed a popular strike and groups of activists and sympathizers blocked major highways as protests went on into the night. Dozens were arrested.
The scale of the turnout in Tel Aviv indicated that pressure is intensifying on Mr. Netanyahu, who has been almost impervious to public sentiment two years into Israel’s increasingly contentious and expanding offensive in Gaza, set off by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The Israeli public is particularly divided over Mr. Netanyahu’s government’s stated goals in Gaza: eliminating Hamas as a military and ruling force and releasing the remaining 50 hostages, about 20 of whom Israel believes to be alive.
Many experts say these two goals are incompatible and unachievable as a joint strategy, since the only practical way to free the hostages is to negotiate a cease-fire and their release with Hamas, while the group has essentially conditioned their release on its own survival.
Complicating matters for Mr. Netanyahu is that the more unpopular he becomes, the more support he needs to stay in power from the hard-line members of his government, who have adamantly opposed ending the war, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Jerusalem.
For Mr. Netanyahu, whose coalition would not get re-elected today according to numerous Israeli polls, “the protests matter less, and intra-coalition politics carry more weight.” Mr. Plesner said.
The main demand of the protesters on Sunday was for the government to prioritize bringing the hostages home. That comes as the government and military move ahead with a plan to take over Gaza City, and possibly the rest of the enclave, in the face of international censure, a dire humanitarian crisis and concerns that the lives of the captives would be endangered.
“Trying to achieve both goals in tandem is no longer valid when you are approaching two years since the October attack,” Mr. Plesner said.
“While defeating Hamas may take many more months and years, bringing back the hostages doesn’t have the same time frame,” he said. Recent videos of two of the hostages, filmed by their captors, showed them in an emaciated state, alarming Israelis and raising questions about how long they could stay alive.
President Trump appeared to back Mr. Netanyahu’s position on Monday, writing in a social media post: “We will only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed!!! The sooner this takes place, the better the chances of success will be.”
The October attack led by Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel — mostly civilians — with an additional 250 taken hostage. The subsequent Israeli campaign against Hamas has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 18,000 children and minors, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
While Israel says its military takes precautions to protect civilians in Gaza and accuses Hamas of using them as human shields, there has been little apparent introspection among the high command over the death toll.
Aharon Haliva, Israel’s former military intelligence chief who resigned over his part in the failure to foresee and prevent the October 2023 attack, was heard in leaked, undated recordings aired on Friday by Channel 12 News saying that 50,000 dead in Gaza was “necessary and required for future generations,” and that “For every person who was killed on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.”
Channel 12 included a statement from Mr. Haliva acknowledging making the comments, but saying that he regretted they had been made public.
In the recording, Mr. Haliva also excoriated political leaders who he said bore responsibility for the failure, including Mr. Netanyahu, for refusing to resign.
The organizers of the protest Sunday — relatives of hostages and people killed in the October 2023 attack — insisted that it was not meant to be political.
Some members of the government nevertheless went on the attack.
Mr. Netanyahu criticized the protesters on Sunday, saying, “Those who are calling for an end to the war today, without defeating Hamas, are not only hardening Hamas’s stance and pushing off the release of our hostages, they are also ensuring that the horrors of Oct. 7 will recur again and again.”
When a bereaved mother tried on Sunday to address a vigil outside the home of the education minister, Yoav Kisch, from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, her words were drowned out by loud music coming out of the house. Another Likud lawmaker, Hanoch Milwidsky, said the protests were “riots in support of Hamas.”
The prime minister insists on the decisive defeat and disarming of Hamas — a position that many Israelis also subscribe to.
But many who want to see the hostages released quickly say that a cease-fire must be achieved first and that Hamas will always give Israel an excuse to resume fighting later.
And while Mr. Netanyahu says Hamas was responsible for the impasse in negotiations, the group blames Israel.
Few Israelis had any illusion that the demonstration Sunday would have any immediate impact on the government after nearly two years of weekly protests. Many of those who attend those protests say they do so not out of any expectation of forcing a change, but to let the families of the hostages know they are not alone.
Prof. Tamar Hermann, an Israeli public opinion expert, said the movement to free the hostages had become “colored by politics” as the weekly protests pressuring the government to reach a deal with Hamas had mixed with anti-government demonstrations that began well before the war.
“The vast majority of the participants are people that wouldn’t vote for the coalition’s parties even if you pulled out their fingernails,” Professor Hermann said. “And so from the government’s perspective, they have no reason to change their policy,” she said.
Nili Bresler, 73, who was protesting in Tel Aviv on Sunday, said, “People have normalized the situation, there are hostages in Gaza and a lot of the young generation seem to be able to live with that.”
She added that Israeli soldiers were being sent off to fight in “a useless war that cannot be won.”
Organizers of the protest said more than 400,000 people turned out in Tel Aviv on Sunday night. The police did not provide any official estimate, but the crowds packed a large plaza that has been renamed Hostages Square and the surrounding streets and the protest was considered the largest of its kind in almost a year.
The number 400,000 holds a symbolism for many older Israelis. In the early 1980s, an estimated 400,000 people rallied in Tel Aviv against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in what was described as the largest protest in the history of the country, whose population was then half what it is now.
But those were very different times. Mr. Plesner noted that the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, who founded the Likud party, “First of all respected the protesters and took them into account.” Ultimately, Mr. Begin resigned.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.
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13) Paris Braces for a Future of Possibly Paralyzing Heat
City planners say the day when temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius, could stall the French capital is not far off. They are already starting to prepare.
By Catherine Porter, Reporting from Paris, Aug. 18, 2025
Trying to cool off this month. France has recently been experiencing its second heat wave of the summer. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Imagine Paris at 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius.
The asphalt streets would melt in spots, making it virtually impossible for ambulances and buses to pass. The lights and fans could cut out in neighborhoods if underground cables burned or junction boxes shifted. Cellphone service might go down as antennas on boiling rooftops stopped working. Trains would halt as outdoor rails swelled, keeping nurses, firefighters and electricity engineers from reaching their jobs when they were most needed.
Those are situations city officials are already planning for.
“A heat wave at 50 degrees is not a scenario of science fiction,” said Pénélope Komitès, a deputy mayor who oversaw a crisis simulation two years ago based on those presumptions. “It’s a possibility we need to prepare for.”
France has recently experienced its second heat wave of the summer, with temperatures reaching record highs last week in the southwest and heat alerts covering three-quarters of the country. In Paris, this has become the new normal. Eight of the 10 hottest summers recorded in the city since 1900 occurred since 2015.
In 2019, temperatures in Paris hit a record, nearing 109 degrees. Scientists say it will get worse, particularly since climate change is warming Europe at more than twice the global average.
In 2022, city officials asked climate scientists if Paris might experience heat waves that reach 50 degrees in the near future.
Their answer was yes, possibly, by the end of the century, or as soon as around 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions increase exponentially. But the scientists’ modeling showed that scenario was unlikely if global pledges from the Paris climate accord were met and the rise in warming was kept below 2 degrees Celsius.
“I don’t think we should bet on that as a society,” said Alexandre Florentin, a green city councilor and environmental engineer who spent more than a decade working at Carbone 4, a leading French climate change mitigation and adaptation firm.
He led a committee of city lawmakers, from all political parties, to examine the capital’s vulnerabilities to extreme heat waves. They published their report, Paris at 50°C, in 2023, separately from the crisis simulation.
They found that there were temperature thresholds that could cause widespread breakdowns, leading to a cascade of crippling domino effects.
During an interview with a hospital director, for example, Mr. Florentin learned that the medical center’s air-conditioning system was designed to work only when the outside temperature was about 109 degrees or lower.
Any higher and it would break down and the hospital would be forced to close its operating rooms and send urgent cases to other hospitals. “What would happen if they have the same problem?” Mr. Florentin said. “He didn’t have an answer.”
He added, “As long as that threshold is passed, we face domino effects.”
Another important finding was the vulnerability of schools, should a heat wave hit during the school year — like in late June.
“The classes will close, and that will have rippling consequences all through society,” Mr. Florentin said. “If their parents work at a hospital or the electricity facility, there will be bigger problems” — meaning understaffing at crucial times.
His strongest recommendation was for the city to invest more in green and shaded yards and to transform schools into “passive” cooling centers with designs that allow for more air circulation or geothermal cooling systems, not electricity.
Paris is particularly ill-adapted to heat waves. A 2023 study published in the London-based medical journal The Lancet deemed it the European capital whose residents were most exposed to heat-related deaths.
The city has the highest population density in Europe, and those people are packed into buildings without insulation and with zinc roofs built for the city’s historically moderate winters and summers, explained Franck Lirzin, author of the 2022 book “Paris in the Face of Climate Change.”
Many of its main squares are paved in stone and ringed with asphalt roads, transforming them into radiators that help increase the city’s temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Celsius compared with the countryside nearby.
Just under 15,000 people died from heat-related causes in 2003 during a heat wave that hit France that August. Many were older adults living in apartments that had zinc roofs with no insulation or air-conditioning, according to reports by national lawmakers and the national public health agency.
In response, the country drafted its first national heat wave plan and introduced a system of registering isolated older or disabled people, so that they could be checked on during heat waves.
Given the surprising speed of climate change, the lessons of 2003 already seem outdated. “The climatologists tell us the 2003 heat wave will be considered a cool summer soon,” Mr. Florentin said. “We must prepare for much worse.”
The city’s emergency simulation presumed a two-week heat wave, with temperatures surging to near 115 degrees and forecasts for 122.
City workers focused on two Parisian neighborhoods, shuttling elementary- and middle-school children to climate shelters set up in an abandoned train tunnel and an underground parking lot.
That drill was followed by a tabletop exercise to see how firefighters, police officers, hospital staff members, the Red Cross and others would interact and respond.
The big lesson from the exercise was that “Parisians are not ready,” Ms. Komitès said.
Some are trying to change that.
A nonprofit group focused on sustainable food has organized “Eating at 50 degrees” events around France, with chefs working on menus sourced locally that require no ovens or stovetops, which exacerbate the heat.
Another group, Health in 2050, has been bringing doctors, pharmacists and medical scientists together to discuss how they can prepare for the health crises and new diseases a hotter climate will bring to France.
The Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe is organizing an event in September in Paris to discuss how theaters and museums can adapt for climate crises.
In May, Prime Minister François Bayrou passed a decree requiring all workplaces to create an extreme heat plan.
The city government has doubled down on its own adaptation plans — pulling up asphalt parking places and the center of roads to plant trees — 15,000 last winter alone, said Dan Lert, deputy mayor in charge of the city’s ecological transition and its climate plan.
“Our first line of defense is massively plant,” Mr. Lert said in an interview. “The best natural air-conditioners in Paris are trees.”
Where the city cannot plant trees, officials are putting up more shade structures and water misters to offer solace during hot days. They opened three bathing sites in the Seine river this summer, so people have places to safely cool down during heat waves.
Another key part of the defense plan is insulating the city’s buildings, so they can better resist heat waves. Since 2023, the number of private housing units being fitted with insulation increased to 7,000 annually from 1,500 annually, with an aim to reach 40,000 by 2030, Mr. Lert said.
But the challenge is daunting. There are one million private apartments in Paris, few with insulation, he said.
“It’s a race against time,” Mr. Florentin said. “There is going to be a lot of change. The question is what percentage of change we want and prepare for, and what percentage we just suffer through.”
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14) A New Way to Reduce Children’s Deaths: Cash
Simply giving money to poor families at certain times reduced deaths among young children by nearly half, a new study found.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, Aug. 18, 2025
“Of every 1,000 children born in Kenya, 32 don’t make it to their first birthdays. Study after study has explored how to improve those staggering numbers, in Kenya and elsewhere. On Monday, a decade-long study on alleviating poverty stumbled onto a straightforward solution. Giving $1,000 to poor families lowered infant mortality rates by nearly half, and deaths in children under 5 by 45 percent. … The outcomes suggest that delivering even smaller amounts of money to families — especially those that live near a hospital — immediately before or after the birth of a child might allow women to seek medical care and drastically improve their children’s chances of survival.”
A home in Siaya County, Kenya, in 2018. Between 2014 and 2017, some families there received $1,000 in three tranches. Credit...Gioia Forster/picture alliance, via Getty Images
Of every 1,000 children born in Kenya, 32 don’t make it to their first birthdays. Study after study has explored how to improve those staggering numbers, in Kenya and elsewhere.
On Monday, a decade-long study on alleviating poverty stumbled onto a straightforward solution. Giving $1,000 to poor families lowered infant mortality rates by nearly half, and deaths in children under 5 by 45 percent.
Those are much bigger drops than have been credited to routine immunizations, for example, or bed nets to prevent malaria.
“This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I’ve seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty,” said Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work.
The decline in infant mortality is a “showstopping result,” he said.
The outcomes suggest that delivering even smaller amounts of money to families — especially those that live near a hospital — immediately before or after the birth of a child might allow women to seek medical care and drastically improve their children’s chances of survival. The study was published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
More than 100 low- and middle-income countries have explored so-called cash transfers, especially after the pandemic began. Generally the experiments have found that giving money to poor families improves school attendance, nutrition and use of health services.
Misuse of the funds — spending them on alcohol, gambling or otherwise wasting them — has proved to be a minor concern, said Edward Miguel, a development economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader of the new study.
But most cash transfer programs were not large enough, involved too little money or did not track the recipients for long enough to home in on details, he said.
In this case, the nonprofit group GiveDirectly — which, as its name suggests, helps individual donors send money directly to people living in poverty — provided the cash transfers.
Between 2014 and 2017, GiveDirectly provided $1,000 in three installments over eight months to more than 10,500 poor households in Siaya County, Kenya. The amount covered roughly 75 percent of the recipients’ average expenses for a year.
The donation was unconditional; families were selected at random to receive money and were given no suggestions on how to spend it.
An independent team of researchers, including Dr. Miguel and his colleagues at U.C. Berkeley and Oxford University in Britain, then examined the effects. Over a decade, the researchers conducted four census surveys, collecting data on births, deaths, employment and other factors in more than 650 villages. They compared data from households that received the funds with those that did not.
In a subset of more than 10,000 families — only some of which had received the cash — the researchers went even deeper, asking about details of health behaviors such as seeking prenatal care.
Consistent with other programs, the team saw an effect on poverty. Every dollar transferred generated $2.50 in business activity, observable more than a mile away. The families that received cash did better even during the Covid-19 pandemic and a drought.
But the biggest gains were in child mortality, which the researchers had not expected. And the improvements became obvious immediately.
“When you come across an intervention that reduces child mortality by almost a half, you cannot understate the impact,” said Dr. Miriam Laker-Oketta, a physician at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and a senior research adviser at GiveDirectly.
When the women in the villages didn’t have money, they were more likely to skip meals and prenatal appointments, perform hard labor long after it had become unsafe and give birth at home rather than at a hospital. The infusion of cash helped pregnant women rest and deliver safely, the researchers said.
The findings are particularly relevant as the United States and other countries have slashed foreign aid, putting children’s lives at risk, Dr. Miguel said. The results show that even individual donors “can do something very meaningful with a limited amount of money,” he said.
The size of the study allowed the researchers to dig deeper into the reasons for the improvements. They collected geolocation data on clinics, dispensaries and hospitals in and near the study area, and recorded how long it took people to get to hospitals.
The money made the biggest difference when given to pregnant women who lived close to hospitals with a physician. And funds had the biggest effect when given right before or after the birth of the child.
“Ultimately, this study really shows that the best way to save the life of a child is to give a mother money at the time when they need it the most,” Dr. Laker-Oketta said.
There were other findings. Children in families who received the cash were 44 percent less likely to go to bed hungry. And pregnant women given funds worked half as much in their third trimester and in the months after birth, compared with other women.
“I’m quite confident each of the things we emphasize is playing a role,” Dr. Miguel said. “But it’s hard to quantify exactly how much.”
One shortcoming of giving the money in a big chunk is that as the cash dwindles, so do the benefits. Regular installments of smaller amounts may better sustain the benefits, said Dr. Thirumurthy, the University of Pennsylvania economist.
“Having that kind of steady infusion of cash would give you more steady results,” he said. “Maybe not as dramatic, but more reliable.”
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15) Mississippi and Louisiana will send National Guard troops to D.C.
By Eduardo Medina, Aug. 18, 2025
The governors of Mississippi and Louisiana said on Monday that they would deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington, joining three other Republican-led states that have recently heeded President Trump’s request to fill the nation’s capital with troops.
Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican, echoed Mr. Trump’s exaggerated portrayal of Washington as lawless, saying in a statement that he would send 200 troops because “Americans deserve a safe capital city that we can all be proud of.”
Violent crime has fallen rapidly in Washington in recent years, reaching a 30-year low. Mr. Trump claims, without evidence, that the city is fabricating crime statistics to hide its descent into a dystopian hellscape and has fudged statistics himself to justify his takeover. District leaders say the Trump administration has made combating crime harder through budget cuts and inaction.
The Louisiana National Guard said in a statement that “as directed by the president of the United States,” it was sending 135 members to Washington to “protect federal buildings, national monuments and other federal properties.”
“I am proud to support this mission to return safety and sanity to Washington,” Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana wrote on social media.
The governors of Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina have also deployed National Guard troops to Washington as part of Mr. Trump’s crackdown on the city, which has also included deploying hundreds of federal agents and commandeering the Washington police force.
The five states are collectively sending about 1,000 troops to Washington, where there are already 800 deployed troops from the D.C. National Guard, which the president can call out directly. Governors typically control the National Guard in their states, though Mr. Trump circumvented this limitation when he deployed troops to Los Angeles this summer, a matter still under litigation in federal court.
It is unclear exactly where in Washington the Guard troops will be located, what their responsibilities are and who is directing them. Questions sent to each of the states’ National Guard headquarters were not answered on Monday. Governors’ offices either did not comment or referred questions to the Guard.
Many residents in the heavily Democratic city say they are angered by the prospect of more troops, though there was also a measure of resignation.
Patrick O’Rourke, who has seen Washington’s crime rate fluctuate over the 25 years he’s lived there, said the additional troops seemed like “a joke.” Other residents like Stanley Watters, a retired real estate agent, said Mr. Trump’s deployment of troops was just a hollow show of force.
“He’s just trying to show off that he’s got this power and is willing to use it in an authoritarian way,” Mr. Watters said.
But some residents said the situation reflected a failure of the city’s leadership, including that of Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat.
“I think it falls back on the mayor,” Lamont Johnson said, adding that if local government did its job, federal forces would not be needed.
Campbell Robertson, Anushka Patil and Mark Walker contributed reporting.
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16) Netanyahu Faces Pressure From Far Right Over New Cease-Fire Proposal
Some members of Israel’s coalition have ruled out a proposed hostage deal with Hamas, but the prime minister has yet to state his position.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Aug. 19, 2025
Far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition denounced a proposed cease-fire deal with Hamas that would see the release of some of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas said on Monday it had agreed to the terms of a deal presented by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. But a flurry of statements from hard-liners in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition illustrated the pressure he was under over the latest proposal, which would force him to forgo his stated plan to send the Israeli military into Gaza City, at least in the near term.
“Going for a partial deal is a moral folly and a difficult strategic error,” Moshe Saadeh, a lawmaker in Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, told Israel’s Channel 14 on Tuesday. “In the end, it will strengthen Hamas,” he added.
Both Israelis and Palestinians have referred to the latest proposal as a “partial deal” because it postpones addressing key disputes between Israel and Hamas. It neither ensures the release of all the hostages nor the end of the war, though theoretically it could tackle them in a second stage.
Hamas has said it is willing to release all the hostages on the condition that Israel ends the war. But Hamas has not publicly accepted Mr. Netanyahu’s conditions for doing so, which include the group’s disarmament.
The gulf between Hamas and Israel’s position, analysts say, suggests that a partial deal is more realistic than a comprehensive one.
The terms approved by Hamas were similar to those Israel has previously accepted and include both a temporary cease-fire and a path to an agreement to end the war, according to officials briefed on its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. Mr. Netanyahu has not publicly shared his position on the new cease-fire proposal.
In July, President Trump said Israel had agreed to “the necessary conditions” to finalize a 60-day cease-fire, during which the United States would “work with all parties to end the war.” At the time, the agreement on the table called for the release of 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 others during the 60-day period in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Talks to reach that deal ultimately collapsed.
In six weeks, the war will enter its third year. Some 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted in the Hamas-led attack that ignited the war on Oct. 7, 2023, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, said the Gaza health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in casualty counts.
Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, said on Monday that Mr. Netanyahu does not have a “mandate to go to a partial deal.”
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, rejected what he called “stopping in the middle with a partial deal that abandons half of the hostages and that could lead to the suspension of the war in defeat.”
“It is forbidden to surrender and give a lifeline to the enemy,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu relies on the support of Mr. Ben Gvir’s and Mr. Smotrich’s parties to maintain the stability of his government.
Last week, Mr. Netanyahu suggested Israel was no longer interested in a deal that would involve the release of only some hostages.
“I think that is behind us,” he told the Hebrew-language channel of i24 News.
But on Tuesday, Gila Gamliel, a minister in Israel’s security cabinet and an ally of Mr. Netanyahu, did not rule out the latest offer.
“There’s a proposal,” she told Channel 14. “We know what it says.”
“We will examine what we will say about that,” she added.
In early August, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy for peace missions, told families of Israeli hostages at a meeting that Mr. Trump now wanted to see all the living hostages released at once.
“No piecemeal deals, that doesn’t work,” Mr. Witkoff said, according to an audio recording of part of the meeting published by the Ynet Hebrew news site. “Now we think that we have to shift this negotiation to ‘all or nothing’ — everybody comes home,” he said.
“We have a plan around it,” he added, without elaborating. A participant in the meeting confirmed that Mr. Witkoff made such remarks.
The shift in focus from “all or nothing” to a partial deal came after Mr. Netanyahu advanced his plan for the military to occupy Gaza City.
Egypt and Qatar, both strongly opposed to the prime minister’s plan, helped craft the new terms for a cease-fire. While the countries have been calling for an end to the war, their proposal likely focused on starting with a partial deal because they were aware of the irreconcilable positions Israel and Hamas have staked out on ending the conflict.
“They’re trying to force Israel not to invade Gaza City,” said Tamer Qarmout, a professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. “That’s the basic goal.”
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17) Vietnamese Are Helping Cuba With 38-Cent Donations. A Lot of Them.
Cuba sent doctors and food to Vietnam during the war. Now ordinary Vietnamese are sending cash to struggling Cubans.
By Damien Cave, Aug. 19, 2025
Damien Cave is based in Vietnam and has written about Cuba for more than two decades.
Cuban soldiers during a visit last year by Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam. Credit...Pool photo by Adalberto Roque
Dinh Hien Mo was skimming social media on Sunday at her home in Central Vietnam when she stumbled on a post calling for aid to Cuba, where hunger has been spreading as inflation soars.
She watched videos and read about how Cuba supported Vietnam during the wars of the 1960s and ‘70s, building hospitals and sending doctors, sugar and cattle. Inspired, she donated 500,000 Vietnamese dong, about $19, from the modest income she earns at her family’s grocery store.
“I feel bad that people in Cuba are suffering from economic hardship,” she said. “They’re isolated by sanctions and their economy is cut off from the world — Vietnam used to be like that, but we opened up, and life here is much better.”
Her donation joined a chain-reaction of generosity. A new crowdfunding campaign for Cuba led by the Central Committee of the Vietnam Red Cross Society has raised more than $13 million in the first week — far more than organizers had expected for the entire two-month effort.
And with that unexpected surge has come a complex reckoning. For many in Cuba and Vietnam, the charitable transfers bring up memories of past solidarity, when both nations shared dreams of Communist independence won through revolution. But there’s also the awkward realization that their roles have reversed because of choices made as the Cold War ended.
Vietnam, when faced with shortages and starvation, pivoted quickly toward free enterprise in the mid-80s, leading to restored relations with the United States in 1995, and a manufacturing and agricultural boom that has nearly erased extreme poverty.
Cuba stuck with ideology and one-man rule. The island nation, which had an unequal but developed economy roughly on par with Argentina’s in the 1950s, remained in the intransigent grip of Fidel Castro until his death in 2016. Even after President Barack Obama visited Cuba, seeking to end decades of hostility, Mr. Castro, his brother Raúl, and their handpicked successors maintained strict state control of the economy.
A U.S. trade embargo had been limiting Cuba’s options since 1962. Compounding that challenge, Cuba’s leaders failed to empower the country’s well-educated population. In the years when I covered the island’s flirtations with openness, from 1999 to 2016, the best that most Cubans could do was start small restaurants or other home-based businesses that the government harassed with high taxes and hefty regulations.
Vietnamese economists — the architects of the country’s success story — frequently traveled to Havana throughout this period, offering guidance and lectures. They said that many of their presentations drawing on what worked well in Vietnam, like letting people start small businesses without permits, were kept secret by Cuban officials.
“They didn’t want to implement the freedom to do business,” said Le Dang Doanh, the former head of Vietnam’s Central Institute for Economic Management.
Today, Cuba is on its knees. Tourism never recovered from the pandemic. Facing tougher enforcement of the embargo from Washington, everything seems to be breaking down at once.
Blackouts have spread because of a decaying power grid and a lack of fuel. Consumer prices have risen fourfold over the past five years, according to experts, spurring migration and putting already-scarce food and medicine beyond the reach of many workers.
Even the infant mortality rate, which Cuba’s leaders had proudly brought to levels lower than the United States, has been rising.
“Cuba is in very bad shape,” said Carlos Alzugaray, an analyst and former Cuban diplomat in Havana. “And those who are in power don’t seem to know what to do either because they are ignorant, or inept, or corrupt, or don’t care or because they are terrified about losing control if they go too far in opening up.”
Vietnam, while supporting Cuba’s call for the United States to drop its embargo, has become even more determined to help. Most of the rice that Cubans receive through government rations are donations from Vietnam. Last year, To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, visited the island and promised closer ties.
The crowdfunding campaign, which aims to celebrate the 65th year of diplomatic relations between the two countries, represents a more emotional step of people-to-people connection. It has attracted more than 1.7 million donations, mostly from 38 cents (or 10,000 dong) to $38.
Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, the president of Cuba, posted a public thank you note on X over the weekend, expressing gratitude for “an act of love” that comes from “a hardworking and heroic people who were able to rise up after several wars and today dazzle the world with their sustained progress.”
He did not say how Vietnam’s money would be used.
Some Vietnamese critics online said it made no sense to support leaders who have made the Cuban people poor. Donors said they just hoped the cash transfers would get to the people in need.
“I know the support from Vietnam won’t be enough to solve everything, but I hope it helps in some way,” said Ms. Mo, 33. “And I hope their economy will get better so people there can have better lives.”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi.
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