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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) 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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8) The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs. the Cooked
By Jeff Goodell, Visuals by Tova Katzman, Aug. 20, 2025
Mr. Goodell has been reporting on climate impacts for 20 years. His most recent book is “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”
Summer is not what it used to be. On a hot August day, an outdoor concert can feel like a picnic in Death Valley. A trip to Disney World is a roller-coaster ride through unshaded hell. The Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” sounds like a love letter from another planet.
In the hottest regions of the country, such as Texas, where I live, the climate crisis is not only changing our world; it is also dividing it. When the heat spikes during the summer, we morph into a two-party state: the cooled and the cooked. On one side, there is water, shade and air-conditioning. On the other, there is sweat, suffering and even, in the worst cases, death. And it means that no matter where we live, we have to update our conception of heat as a disruptive and punishing force.
The cooled are people like me, who work mostly indoors, bathed in the soothing breeze of manufactured air. We live hidden from the brutality of summer, except when we run out to the mailbox or the grocery store. There we hit a wall of heat that feels like an alien force field and burn our hands on the car’s steering wheel.
We live vampire lives, out early for a walk or to run errands, retreating indoors to our comfy caves during the afternoon, then out again after sundown to hang out with friends and complain about the heat and plot a getaway to the beach or the mountains. For the cooled, heat is an inconvenience, an intrusion into our lifestyles and a reason to finally pull the trigger on a loan to build a backyard swimming pool.
The cooked are people like Matthew Sanchez, the pit manager at Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin. On a busy Saturday, he and his co-workers might grill about 2,000 pounds of brisket in five long steel wood-fired BBQ pits. In the summer, the pit gets so hot it breaks thermometers that hang on the wall. “Sometimes it feels like we are rendering ourselves,” Mr. Sanchez told me.
I also met a delivery driver in Austin who had been hospitalized with heat exhaustion. Though he’s recovered, on hot days the muscles in his back tingle and his kidneys hurt. I met a former emergency medical technician who described the disturbing number of calls she responded to from workers at an Amazon warehouse in Texas, many of them related to heat stress.
I met oil field workers who service rigs in the blazing heat with no shade for miles around. One roofer told me he had twice fainted from heat, once tumbling off the roof and breaking his wrist. A farmworker I talked to in the Rio Grande Valley who had been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (a common consequence of working long hours in the heat) said he kept working because he had no other way to care for his family.
It’s not just that the average daily temperature is getting warmer. It’s that heat waves are changing in ways that make them more dangerous, longer, hotter and more humid. Nights are also growing hotter, which is particularly risky for people who work in the heat, since it limits the time the body has to recover from daytime heat.
The effect is most noticeable in the Southwest, where summer nighttime temperatures have increased by about 4.5 degrees since 1970. All this heat doesn’t just melt glaciers in faraway places. It has a direct human toll: Heat-related deaths in the United States have doubled in recent decades.
The link between more intense heat waves and higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — about 75 percent of which has come from the burning of fossil fuels — is basic physics. What’s new is scientists’ ability to demonstrate how those higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can kill you. A recent study by Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, for example, found that during a 10-day heat wave this summer in Europe, 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths could be linked to human-caused climate change.
And death is only one metric. Prolonged exposure to high temperatures can permanently damage your kidneys. It may speed up your biological clock and age you as much as smoking or drinking.
But the most important thing to know about heat is that it’s a predatory force. It attacks the most vulnerable first: older people, those with weak hearts or lung conditions, pregnant women, young children and people who are on certain drugs (including antidepressants) that can interfere with their body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature. And most of all, workers who spend eight or 10 hours a day working outdoors.
In the United States, that often means people of color and immigrants. Latinos account for one-third of all worker heat fatalities, while farmworkers face the highest rates of death from heat-related injuries and illnesses. All in all, low-paid workers suffer five times as many heat-related injuries as their highest-paid counterparts.
A handful of states, including California and Colorado, have passed laws to protect workers from extreme heat. But not Texas. In 2023, Gov. Greg Abbott gave final approval to a law that, among other things, prohibits cities and counties from requiring water breaks for outdoor workers. (Florida has passed a similar measure.) The cruel but unspoken reasoning of the law: Mandatory shade and water breaks would hurt worker productivity and slow the Texas economy.
The federal government hasn’t been much better. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees worker safety in America, has been working on a heat rule for years that would require a number of protections for workers, including shade and water breaks. But the rule didn’t get finalized during the Biden administration, in part because of heavy lobbying pressure from industry.
OSHA recently held hearings to solicit public comments about the proposed rule, but the Trump administration is more likely to cover the White House lawn with solar panels manufactured in China than finalize the agency’s heat rule. And the Trump administration has gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting. The only thing more deadly than an extreme heat wave is an extreme heat wave that nobody saw coming.
So that mostly leaves it up to employers to take care of their workers. I visited workers in food trucks in Texas that were comfortably air-conditioned — and others that were medieval sweat boxes. Over the past month, I made a habit of asking delivery service drivers I came across in Texas about working conditions in the heat. Most drove trucks without air-conditioning, though most drivers said water and shade breaks were encouraged. Pit workers at Terry Black’s BBQ get free Gatorade, fruit and electrolyte powder. A construction worker told me that he feared that if he asked for too many breaks, he would get fired. Another said his boss tells him every day that the heat makes him “Texas tough.”
But the risks accelerate as the thermometer rises. Without protections, many workers are forced into a kind of extreme heat arbitrage: I need the paycheck, so I will work in the heat and keep my mouth shut and gamble that it won’t kill me. Even workers whose employers try to do the right thing understand it’s a dangerous bargain. “Yes, the heat sucks,” Blake Juranek, a 23-year-old Amazon delivery truck driver, told me. His truck has air-conditioning in the front, but not the back. “But I need to pay the bills.”
That strategy didn’t work out very well for a 38-year-old farmworker named Sebastian Perez, whose family I met with while reporting on the impacts of the brutal 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. Mr. Perez knew very well the risks of extreme heat — his mom even warned him about it the night before he died. But he most likely also knew that if he asked for a break from the heat while he was working, he might get fired.
Mr. Perez apparently thought he was stronger than the heat. But his co-workers found him unconscious in the field, his half-full water jug at his side. He died shortly afterward.
Heat deaths are tragic, not least because they are avoidable. And not every solution requires government intervention. India is experimenting with insurance policies for vulnerable workers — especially women in the informal economy, such as street vendors — that are triggered whenever temperatures reach a certain threshold, which encourages workers to stay home on hot days and pays them for lost income.
In 2024, these policies paid out $600,000 to 50,000 women in three Indian states. There are 225,000 women in this year’s program. U.S.-based nonprofit organizations such as Climate Resilience for All, which helped develop the policies in India, are trying to build support for similar policies for workers in hot cities in America.
The faster our world heats up, the faster the divide between the cooled and the cooked will widen. Ultimately, it is symptomatic of the larger injustice of the climate crisis, which is that the people who have done the least to cause it are the ones who will suffer the most from its impacts.
Fixing that will require more than just better laws and more air-conditioning. It will require acknowledging that in a rapidly warming world, the comforts of some are subsidized by the hardships of others. Until we address that, we’re all cooked.
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9) Preparations for a Move on Gaza City Have Started, Israel’s Military Says
Troops have reached the city’s outskirts, an Israeli official said, adding that more reservists are being asked to report for duty to cover for other soldiers who will be involved in going into Gaza City.
By Lara Jakes, Aug. 20, 2025
Lara Jakes frequently writes about the war in Gaza.
“On Wednesday, a hard-line minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Orit Strock, warned the prime minister in an Israeli radio interview about accepting a deal that does not defeat Hamas and puts ‘the value of returning the hostages above the national interest.’”
An Israeli military vehicle on Israel’s side of the border with Gaza on Tuesday. Amir Cohen/Reuters
Israel’s military is moving forward on plans to take over Gaza City, officials said Wednesday, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weighs a Hamas cease-fire proposal that would anger hard-liners in his government but, potentially, ensure the safe release of some hostages.
Troops had reached the city’s outskirts and tents were being moved into southern Gaza for people who would be displaced from their homes once the operation begins, an Israeli military official who requested anonymity in line with military protocol said at a briefing for journalists.
On Wednesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said separately that he had approved mobilizing more reservists and extending orders for others for the fighting in Gaza. “I instruct you to use all tools and all power to strike the enemy until it is subdued, and to protect I.D.F. soldiers,” Mr. Katz told Israeli troops, referring to the Israel Defense Forces, according to a statement from his ministry.
The new assault aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping and planning future attacks, the Israeli military official said at the briefing. That comes after nearly two years of Israel’s war against Hamas, which has largely leveled the Gaza Strip and brought parts of it to the brink of famine.
The official said that an additional 50,000 reservists — bringing the total to 120,000 — would be told to report for duty in September to backfill other soldiers who would be going into Gaza City. Reservists who are already on duty could see their missions extended, the official said.
The Israeli military said in a later statement that 60,000 new reservists would be called to duty and 20,000 reservists would have their orders extended.
The Israeli official at the briefing described the military operation as “gradual, precise and targeted,” saying it would extend into areas of Gaza City where Israeli soldiers have not previously been during the war. The city and its surrounding neighborhoods remain a main stronghold for Hamas fighters and the militants’ government, the official said.
But a 60-day cease-fire plan, put forward earlier this week and approved by Hamas, could pause the operation.
Mr. Netanyahu is under increasing pressure from his hard-right political allies to reject the proposal, which has been called a “partial deal” because it would neither immediately release all the Israeli hostages nor end the war.
But its terms are similar to those Israel has previously accepted, according to officials briefed on its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
An earlier proposal, which President Trump said in July that Israel had endorsed, called for the release of 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 others during the 60-day period in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Up to 20 hostages are still believed to be living, according to the Israeli authorities. The bodies of 30 others, they say, are also being held in Gaza.
Talks to reach that deal ultimately collapsed, and Mr. Netanyahu has not publicly shared his position on the new cease-fire proposal, which was announced this week by Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
On Wednesday, a hard-line minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Orit Strock, warned the prime minister in an Israeli radio interview about accepting a deal that does not defeat Hamas and puts “the value of returning the hostages above the national interest.”
“This will push the country into a horrible abyss,” Ms. Strock, a member of the far-right Religious Zionism party, told Army Radio. “So it is very possible that we will say we will not be prepared to lend our hand to the government.”
Many Israelis fear that Hamas will kill the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza if the military operation proceeds. The families of the hostages on Wednesday demanded a meeting with Mr. Katz, the defense minister, and the military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir,.
“Approving plans to occupy Gaza, while there is a deal on the table for Netanyahu’s approval, is the essence of torpedoing it, and a stab to the heart of families and the public in Israel,” a group representing the hostages’ relatives, said in a statement.
“Everyone knows that the conditions are ripe for a deal, and it is in your hands,” it said, appealing to Mr. Netanyahu.
The Israeli military official said the new operation also will expand humanitarian aid in southern Gaza where displaced people are being told to move to avoid being caught in crossfire. That will include opening new aid distribution sites and ensuring there is no fighting near them, and opening new routes for trucks to safely bring more supplies.
Gaza’s Civil Defense, the territory’s main emergency service, said at least five people were killed and three wounded in overnight attacks Wednesday at a displacement camp south of Gaza City, near Deir al-Balah. Separately, an Israeli statement said it had launched airstrikes against militants, killing 10, after being attacked in southern Gaza, near the city of Khan Younis.
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel that ignited the war in Gaza, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Aaron Boxerman and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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