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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10) Deportations Reach New High After Summer Surge in Immigration Arrests
By Albert Sun, Aug. 21, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/21/us/trump-deportations-summer-data-immigration-arrests.html
Federal agents at an ICE facility, Delaney Hall, in Newark in July, 2025. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
President Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations may be coming closer to reality. Until June, deportations had lagged behind immigration arrests and detentions. By the first week of August, deportations reached nearly 1,500 people per day, according to the latest data, a pace not seen since the Obama administration.
With an infusion of cash from Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill signed in July — an extra $76 billion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can spend over a little more than four years — the agency appears poised to scale its operations even further.
At least 180,000 people have been deported by ICE under Mr. Trump so far. At the current higher pace, the agency is on track to deport more than 400,000 people in his first year in office, well more than the 271,000 people ICE removed in the year ending last September but still short of the administration’s stated goal of one million deportations a year.
(The Department of Homeland Security says the total number of deportations so far under Mr. Trump is much higher — at 332,000. That figure includes people who are turned around or quickly deported at U.S. borders by Customs and Border Protection.)
ICE now uses about a dozen charter planes every day to conduct deportations and move detainees around the country, almost twice as many as in January, according to data collected by Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights. In May, ICE modified its contract with CSI Aviation, its primary air charter company, to increase the number of flights per week. It has also resumed using a limited number of military planes.
ICE’s expanded operations have drawn nationwide protests, fierce backlash and an endless series of legal challenges. But officials have pressed forward with aggressive tactics anyway.
Not just criminals
Mr. Trump may be catching up to President Barack Obama, whom immigrant advocates called the “deporter in chief,” but the nature of his immigration enforcement has been very different. The hundreds of thousands of people removed under Mr. Obama were mostly recent border-crossers, and ICE focused its arrests in the interior of the country on criminals.
In late May, Stephen Miller, a White House immigration policy adviser, ordered ICE leaders to escalate arrests across the board, even if it meant broadening its focus beyond immigrants with a criminal record.
Since then, almost all of the increase in arrests has been of people without any prior criminal convictions. Immigration arrests of people with a past violent criminal conviction increased to about 1,900 in June from about 1,100 in December. At the same time, arrests overall tripled to more than 28,000 and arrests of people with no past conviction or charges increased by almost 20 times.
But the summer surge experienced in much of the country did not last. Arrests peaked at an average of almost 1,200 per day in early June, but the pace has since fallen back to levels seen in April.
It’s unclear why arrests dropped, but in Los Angeles, high-profile street arrests and raids triggered a backlash that led to protests and the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines.
In response to a lawsuit accusing ICE of illegal racial profiling, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from arresting someone based on their race or ethnicity and presence at a certain location. The Trump administration has appealed the order.
Between the start of the surge and the court order, ICE arrested more than 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles area who had no criminal records. A majority were from Mexico or Guatemala.
New York City also saw a spike in arrests of non-criminals this summer, many at immigration court and ICE check-ins, tactics which prompted their own backlash and lawsuit.
New detention centers
With 60,000 people now in custody, the Trump administration has stretched the capacity of the immigrant detention system, arresting more people and releasing far fewer on bond, parole or supervised release.
That’s a deliberate tactic to boost deportations, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, because people held in detention are more likely to have their cases end with a removal order and are also more likely to abandon their cases and agree to be deported.
The Laken Riley Act also expanded the types of unauthorized immigrants whom ICE is required to keep in detention to include many who have been accused of low-level crimes, like shoplifting.
To hold them all, ICE has had to seek more and more detention space. In addition to holding more people at existing facilities, ICE has added at least 50 new detention centers since Mr. Trump took office. At the end of July, these facilities held more than 6,000 people.
Among the detention centers are Delaney Hall, a private facility run by the Geo Group in Newark; a tent facility in El Paso that was formerly used by the U.S. Border Patrol; the Guantanamo Bay naval base; a reopened family detention center in Dilley, Texas; federal prisons in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Miami, and Philadelphia, and a large number of state and local jails and prisons.
More money for enforcement
Because deporting people who are in the country unlawfully is logistically challenging, to reach its goal of speeding deportations, ICE will likely need to hire more agents not only to arrest people but also to ensure due process, said Blas Nuñez-Neto, who was a homeland security adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The agency will also need to procure more detention space to hold people for several weeks while their removal is arranged, he said, and contract for more aircraft for removal flights.
Flush with new money on top of its 2025 budget of $10 billion, ICE is preparing to spend to address each of those chokepoints. Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said the new funding would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE agents and adding 80,000 new detention beds. Some $45 billion is designated for expanding detention, and $14 billion is set aside for transporting people out of the country.
ICE also intends to expand detention partnerships with state and local governments, like the one for the facility Florida has named “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
More money for enforcement
Because deporting people who are in the country unlawfully is logistically challenging, to reach its goal of speeding deportations, ICE will likely need to hire more agents not only to arrest people but also to ensure due process, said Blas Nuñez-Neto, who was a homeland security adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The agency will also need to procure more detention space to hold people for several weeks while their removal is arranged, he said, and contract for more aircraft for removal flights.
Flush with new money on top of its 2025 budget of $10 billion, ICE is preparing to spend to address each of those chokepoints. Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said the new funding would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE agents and adding 80,000 new detention beds. Some $45 billion is designated for expanding detention, and $14 billion is set aside for transporting people out of the country.
ICE also intends to expand detention partnerships with state and local governments, like the one for the facility Florida has named “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
About the data
Data comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports and data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of immigration enforcement data at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Arrests shown in charts are administrative arrests — arrests in which ICE is seeking to deport rather than criminally prosecute the arrestees — that were conducted by the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division and that led to a book-in to detention. The charts do not include criminal arrests, arrests by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division or arrests by Customs and Border Protection.
Deportations are removals and enforcement returns conducted by ICE.
For the chart of arrests by field office, the Los Angeles field office covers Los Angeles County and surrounding counties from San Luis Obispo to Riverside Counties. The New York City field office covers the five boroughs, Long Island and the Hudson Valley. The Boston field office covers all six New England states. The Miami field office covers Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Chicago field office covers Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas and Wisconsin. The San Antonio field office covers Central Texas spanning from near Del Rio to Austin.
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11) Federal Agents Detain Dozens of Workers in Raid at New Jersey Warehouse
It appeared to be among the largest federal raids in the state since President Trump took office.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Mark Bonamo, Publishe, Aug. 20, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
Federal officers detained dozens of immigrant workers at a warehouse in Edison, N.J., on Wednesday in what appeared to be among the largest federal raids in the state since President Trump took office.
The hourslong operation was conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, whose officers arrived at the warehouse along a busy stretch of shipping facilities west of New York City about 9 a.m.
The federal officers arrested 29 people, according to the Edison mayor’s office, which said that the township’s Police Department had been notified that the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the customs agency, would be in the area on Wednesday.
The purpose of the operation remained unclear on Wednesday night, and it was unclear if other federal agencies had been involved. The Department of Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Protection agency did not reply to requests for comment.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told Univision that the agency had carried out “a surprise inspection” of the warehouse. The agency also told Univision that the operation was part of routine customs enforcement efforts, not specifically immigration-related, but that officers had checked the immigration status of workers.
The warehouse — where packages were stacked high in a space about the size of a professional football field — handles shipping for major online retailers, distributing packages across the Northeast, three workers told The New York Times.
The facility is a bonded warehouse, a facility where importers can store foreign goods still in transit without immediately paying import duties and that is under the supervision of the Customs and Border Protection agency, one worker said. The agency has said that it is authorized to conduct unannounced inspections at bonded warehouses to ensure that facilities are adhering to “protocols for the importation of cargo entering the United States.”
Workplace immigration raids have been uncommon in the New York City area, where most arrests have unfolded inside immigration offices and courthouses. Wednesday’s warehouse raid appeared to be at least the second this summer in Edison, a township and commercial hub of about 100,000 people that is about a one-hour drive from New York City.
On July 8, the immigration authorities raided a wine and liquor warehouse in Edison during a “worksite compliance inspection,” arresting 20 workers, mostly from South and Central America, who officials said were undocumented.
Many of the workers detained on Wednesday hailed from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, workers and activists said.
Workers who were interviewed Wednesday night described a chaotic scene of fear and confusion that began when about 20 federal agents stormed through the front door, while another group emerged from vehicles outside, blocking potential points of escape.
Inside, workers ran, yelling, “La migra,” which is Spanish shorthand for the federal immigration authorities, according to the workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and activists who were outside and spoke with some employees as they were released. Some workers were injured during the scramble, workers and activists said, and a video showed at least one ambulance arriving on the scene.
Some workers hid from the officers in the warehouse’s towering rafters, remaining there for hours even after officers flew a drone inside the warehouse to try to find them, the people said in interviews. Some texted relatives from their hiding spots.
The agents did not state the purpose of their visit, according to some workers, and told those present to gather in a corner where workers were taken into a meeting room to be interrogated one by one.
Officers spent hours checking the workers’ immigration status, placing yellow wristbands on those whom they determined to have legal status and leading others away in zip ties, employees said. Agents searched the warehouse and trucks to make sure no workers were hiding.
Amanda Dominguez, a community organizer at New Labor, an advocacy group that represents low-wage immigrant workers, said that the warehouse workers had been hired by a staffing agency, calling the raid “an attack on working-class people.”
Outside, activists and relatives of the workers gathered throughout the day, searching for answers and waiting anxiously to see if their relatives had been detained or let go.
“People were very upset and crying and angry, completely understandably,” said Ellen Whitt, who works at DIRE, a New Jersey hotline that responds to calls about raids and from relatives of immigrants who have been detained. “One girl’s father was taken. She was very, very upset.”
The facility was largely desolate on Wednesday evening, its forklifts mainly quiet as supervisors called temporary employment agencies to help replace the detained workers.
Tracey Tully contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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12) He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated Him.
By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 21, 2025
Anas al-Sharif reporting in Gaza City last year. Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Eleven days ago, Israel assassinated a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, a young man who had suddenly become the face and voice of the desperate people of his homeland, Gaza.
In gripping dispatches on Al Jazeera and his social media feeds, Anas al-Sharif documented the relentless Israeli assault on civilians, breaking down on camera as he reported on the gathering famine. He was 28 years old, a husband and the father of two young children. He, four of his colleagues from Al Jazeera and at least one freelance journalist were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a press tent outside a hospital in Gaza City.
The Israeli military made no attempt to obscure this brazen strike on civilians, which is a war crime. Instead, it argued that al-Sharif was not a civilian at all. It claimed with no credible evidence that he was the commander of a Hamas cell and that his journalism was merely a cover for that clandestine role. Those killed alongside him — Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi — were presumably acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of this target.
Since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has waged a pitiless war in Gaza. More than 62,000 people have been killed, including some 18,500 children, according to local health authorities in what is considered by many experts to be an undercount. Most of the tiny enclave is now rubble; almost all of Gaza’s two million people have been forced to flee their homes, many repeatedly. Since Israel ended the latest cease-fire in March, it has sharply curtailed the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. Most of its population, according to the United Nations, is experiencing or staring down starvation.
Amid so much suffering, the targeting of a single journalist may seem like an individual tragedy. But coming as Israel begins an all-out assault to capture Gaza City and as Benjamin Netanyahu has said he intends to occupy all of Gaza in the face of growing global condemnation, the killing of al-Sharif, like the killing in March of his fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat, marks an ominous new phase in the war.
To justify its pitiless pulverizing of Gaza, Israel has endlessly invoked the threat of Hamas, supposedly lurking in schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. Now it has begun not only accusing individual journalists of being Hamas fighters but also openly admitting to killing them in targeted attacks, based on purported evidence that is all but impossible to verify.
With Gaza closed to international journalists, this new campaign has created a pretext to eliminate the remaining journalists with the platform to bear witness and terrify anyone brave enough to attempt to take the place of the fallen. It has also exposed the cruel logic at the heart of Israel’s prosecution of the war: If Hamas is everywhere, then every Gazan is Hamas. This is truly a war with no limits, and soon there may be no journalists left to document its horror.
I have long been awed by the work of journalists who find their own homeland under attack. I spent years in war zones as a foreign correspondent, working alongside some of the bravest and finest journalists I’ve ever encountered. We were engaged in the same work, fundamentally: trying to help the world understand seemingly incomprehensible suffering. As an American employed by an American news organization, I stood on the same front lines in Congo, in Darfur, in Kashmir and elsewhere. But I would fly home to safety, while they would remain, struggling along with everyone else to survive.
We differed in another important way as well. I chose and pursued a career in journalism. For many reporters from war zones, the profession chose them. This was the story of Mohammed Mhawish, a young man from Gaza City. When Hamas attacked Israel, he was dreaming of a career in the arts. He had graduated from the Islamic University in Gaza, where he studied English and creative writing, and hoped to write literature and poetry. Instead, he found himself working as a journalist for Al Jazeera’s English-language service.
“It was a feeling of obligation to my people and a responsibility to my hometown that was being destroyed in real time,” he told me. “I never imagined myself being given the responsibility or assigned the responsibility to be writing through destruction and death and loss and tragedy.” Gaza City is a small place, so he got to know al-Sharif as they both struggled to cover the catastrophe unfolding around them.
“He was this really brave young person,” Mhawish told me. Before the war, his work had focused on culture and ordinary life. “He reported on families having hope, families getting married, people celebrating life accomplishments, people just enjoying life on a daily basis. He never wanted or aspired to be a correspondent carrying a responsibility for his entire people.”
The work took a toll on al-Sharif. “I remember many times where he was in public and sometimes personally with other colleagues of his in Gaza, just saying how hungry he was,” Mhawish said. “How tired, how exhausted, how terrified and how scared — he was really scared all the time. He was feeling that he was being watched and he’s being hunted and he’s being targeted.”
Under international law, journalists are considered civilians. But since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 192 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (I’m on the organization’s board). “At some point, I had to abandon my press vest because it no longer provided me with the protection that I was seeking,” Mhawish told me. “In fact, it functioned as a target on my back.”
Mhawish left Gaza last year. Al-Sharif’s death, coming after so many threats from Israeli military officials, was an especially devastating blow. “At the end of the day, he chose to give the sacrifice of his life,” Mhawish said. “I am really, really tired of grieving my friends and colleagues.”
When the Saudi government murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident columnist who wrote for The Washington Post, inside its consulate in Turkey, it created a global outcry. Russia’s detention and killing of journalists have likewise provoked outpourings of support. If the governments bother to concoct accusations — of espionage and other crimes — to justify these heinous acts against working journalists, they are usually dismissed out of hand as the ravings of autocratic regimes bent on destroying free speech.
The response to al-Sharif’s killing, like that of scores of other Palestinian journalists, has been different — more muted, more likely to give equal weight to Israeli accusations despite the lack of verifiable evidence. Mhawish told me he was dismayed to see so many news organizations around the world parrot Israeli claims that his friend was killed because he was a Hamas militant. “What’s heartbreaking about this is that it tells me that there are journalists in the world who are justifying the killing of other journalists,” he said.
This is another respect in which I, as a foreign journalist, was always perceived differently from the local journalists who worked alongside me in war zones. They knew far more than I did about events unfolding in their homeland. They understood how to move safely through dangerous territory and possessed essential contacts and expertise that helped enrich my coverage.
Ideally, this leads to mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships between local journalists and their international counterparts, who often hire locals to improve their coverage. But in some places, what might be seen as expertise comes to be viewed as something darker. As a foreigner, I tend to be seen as a neutral outside observer. A local reporter, embedded in her community and enduring the same hardships as her fellow citizens, comes under more scrutiny. She cannot help being blinkered, the thinking goes, by her own suffering and root for one side in the conflict she is covering. She is, surely, a partisan.
In the remarkable new documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” a pair of Ukrainian journalists accompany a group of Ukrainian soldiers through a narrow band of forest as they seek to recapture a village from Russian forces. It is a claustrophobic, harrowing film, unfolding in bunkers and foxholes. At one point the film’s director, the Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, notes the parallel between himself, the journalist, and the young officer he is interviewing.
The soldier, Chernov says, picked up a rifle, while he picked up a camera. Through different means, each man sought to stand up for the dignity and sovereignty of Ukraine’s people. Were Chernov, who works for The Associated Press, to be targeted or smeared by the Russian state, journalists the world over would not hesitate to rally to his side and dismiss any allegations against him as propaganda. I would be among the first to join any crusade on his behalf.
It is in this context that we must consider Israel’s contention that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant. The evidence offered to the public is weak, consisting of screenshots of spreadsheets, purported service numbers and old payments that have not been independently verified.
“The Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists,” said Irene Khan, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, when a different Israeli airstrike killed another Al Jazeera journalist and his cameraman last year. Al-Sharif reported on their deaths.
In interviews before his own death, al-Sharif pleaded for help and safety. “All of this is happening because my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They accuse me of being a terrorist because the occupation wants to assassinate me morally.”
Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value — which I absolutely do not, given Israel’s track record — and entertain the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas at that time had been the governing authority of his homeland since 2006. It ran the entire state apparatus of a tiny enclave. “It is a movement with a vast social infrastructure,” Tareq Baconi, the author of a book about Hamas, has written, “connected to many Palestinians who are unaffiliated with either the movement’s political or military platforms.”
Take it further and contemplate, based on Israel’s supposed evidence, that al-Sharif had played some military role before becoming a journalist. The history of war correspondence is replete with examples of fighters turned reporters — indeed perhaps the most famous among them, George Orwell, recorded soldiers’ lives while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and became a war correspondent.
These days, having served in the military is widely seen as an asset among American war reporters. Far from seeing those who served as hopelessly biased, editors rightly value the expertise and perspective these reporters bring from their experiences and trust them to prioritize their new role as journalistic observers. In Israel most young people are required to serve in the military, so military experience is common among journalists.
Many will protest that Hamas is different from the military of a state. This is true. Long before its gruesome attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it engaged in horrifying terror tactics like suicide bombings that targeted civilians. Many countries, including the United States, consider it a terrorist organization. But it was the accepted authority in Gaza.
Indeed, the uncomfortable truth is that Hamas owes much of its strength to Netanyahu’s cynical policies, which, as The Times reported in 2023, included tacit support designed to prop up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. As late as September of that year, the month before Hamas attacked Israel, his government welcomed the flow of millions of dollars to Hamas via Qatar.
“Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued,” my newsroom colleagues wrote. “For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.”
Freud theorized that hysterics were an extreme version of ordinary people experiencing outsize distress in exceptional circumstances. In this way, journalists are an extreme version of the curious person who lingers and tries to figure out what’s going on when everyone else, sensing danger, has packed up their curiosity and gone home.
What are journalists but unusual people who decide on society’s behalf to witness the unbearable? They set aside their personal safety, and perhaps find strange thrills in the horrors of the work they do and the things that they witness. There can be a kind of moral deformity in this, to be sure, but it’s an important and socially recognized role. Someone’s got to send word back into history.
In this regard, journalists are actually not that different from soldiers. Soldiers, after all, are ordinary people given minimal training, mostly how to use their equipment and the tactical ways that one does the job. And then they set off to do a monstrous task on behalf of the rest of us, something most of us cannot possibly imagine doing.
This strange and seldom acknowledged kinship is what permits a pall of suspicion to fall over the work of journalists in war zones, especially local ones, who cannot help being caught up in the events unfolding around them. Using their chosen instruments and medium, they are engaged in a struggle to protect their home and their people. It is easy to see how the other side will seek to cast them as combatants, even if they carry no weapons. But that does not mean we should believe them.
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13) Israel’s Operation to Take Control of Gaza City Looms. Where Does It Stand?
The Israeli government is expanding its operation in Gaza, despite its generals’ advice and as it deliberates on a new cease-fire proposal.
Published Aug. 8, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
An Israeli armored fighting vehicle near the border with Gaza earlier this month .Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Southern Gaza, as seen from a Jordanian Air Force plane delivering humanitarian aid in July. Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The Israeli military is widening its offensive in the Gaza Strip, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weighs a new cease-fire proposal that would bring it to a halt.
Israeli officials say that ground forces are already operating in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in the southern part of the city. The possibility of Israeli soldiers moving into other neighborhoods in Gaza City has raised alarm among Palestinians who have been repeatedly displaced since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war.
Some people have said they would follow Israeli evacuation orders, while others have said they will remain in their homes, even if doing so would risk their lives. On Thursday, scores of Palestinians participated in a protest in Gaza City, demanding an end to the war.
The decision to move forward with the operation was approved by Mr. Netanyahu’s government in early August against the advice of the military’s high command, which has expressed concern about the exhaustion of reservist soldiers and the possibility of endangering hostages still held in Gaza.
Why does Israel want to control Gaza City?
Mr. Netanyahu said in interviews earlier this month that an expanded operation would ensure Israel’s security, drive Hamas from power and enable the return of hostages.
His office said that the security cabinet had adopted “five principles for concluding the war,” including disarming Hamas, bringing back the hostages, demilitarizing Gaza, establishing Israeli security control over the enclave and setting up “an alternative civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.”
The announcement by his office seemed to stop short of saying Israel would take full control of the Gaza Strip, which Mr. Netanyahu earlier said was his plan, at least temporarily.
Where is Israel’s military now?
After nearly two years of war, the Israeli military says it controls about 75 percent of Gaza.
The main part outside its control is a coastal strip stretching from Gaza City in the north to Khan Younis in the south. Many of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have squeezed into tents, makeshift shelters and apartments in that stretch of land.
In recent days, Israeli troops began operating in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, while other forces were active on the outskirts of the city, according to the Israeli military.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office has said the military would prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the fighting zones.
What would it mean for civilians?
For civilians in Gaza, the possibility of an escalated operation has raised fears that many more of them could be killed and that living conditionscould get even worse.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is devastating, with many people struggling to find food, clean water, and electricity. Many Gazans have been displaced more than once since the war began, and more than 60,000 have been killed, according to the local health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Some Palestinians in Gaza City have said they refuse to be displaced again.
“We’ve had enough, we’re not going anywhere,” said Hassan Shehada, a 62-year-old textile factory owner. “We’re so tired and we can’t take it anymore.”
How long would it take?
Even though Israeli troops are already operating in Zeitoun, it could be weeks before the military launches a broader assault.
To take over Gaza City, the military needs more soldiers. On Wednesday, it called up 60,000 reservists and announced plans to extend the duty of 20,000 others.
Yet the additional reservists were set to report for duty only in September, according to two Israeli military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational plans. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister had ordered the military to shorten its timeline.
The military believes it could seize the remaining parts of Gaza within months.
Who would govern?
Mr. Netanyahu said earlier this month that Israel did not want permanent authority over Gaza. “We don’t want to keep it,” he said. “We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces.”
Arab states could agree to participate in an international force, possibly handling security and administration, perhaps with foreign peacekeepers or contractors. But they would most likely want approval from, and a role for, the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers part of the West Bank and governed in parts of Gaza before Hamas came to power in 2007.
Israel’s security cabinet has insisted that the Palestinian Authority be excluded from any civilian government.
What will Hamas do?
After Israel announced its decision to take over Gaza City earlier this month, Hamas said that occupying the city and evacuating its residents would constitute “a new war crime.”
The militant group did not say in detail how it would respond. But Hamas has resisted calls to surrender throughout the war, and despite heavy losses among its leadership, it has continued to recruit new fighters.
Who has objected?
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, is among those who have pushed back against Mr. Netanyahu’s plan, according to Israeli security officials. He expressed concern that expanded operations would further endanger the remaining hostages in Gaza, about 20 of whom are believed to still be alive, that it would put more strain on already-exhausted resources and troops, and make the armed forces responsible for governing two million Palestinians, the officials said.
At a U.N. Security Council meeting earlier this month, Miroslav Jenca, the U.N.’s assistant secretary-general for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, said expanded military operations “would risk catastrophic consequences for millions of Palestinians and could further endanger the lives of the remaining hostages.”
Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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14) ‘We Can’t Take It Anymore’: Gazans Fear Looming Israeli Operation
Israel’s plan to invade Gaza City, the most populous city in the northern Gaza Strip, has forced many families to consider uprooting themselves.
By Adam Rasgon and Iyad Abuheweila
Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv and Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul, Published Aug. 20, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
An Israeli strike hits a building on Wednesday in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Israel announced its plan to invade Gaza City in early August, Hassan Shehada scrambled to find an apartment in towns south of the city.
For a week, Mr. Shehada, a 62-year-old textile factory owner, made calls to friends and colleagues in Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat and al-Zawayda, asking for help in securing a place for him and his family. Since the start of the war, he had been displaced six times, and each time he had managed to find an apartment to house his family. This time, however, his efforts failed.
“We’ve had enough, we’re not going anywhere,” Mr. Shehada said. “We’re so tired and we can’t take it anymore.”
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it is moving ahead with its preparations to invade Gaza City, calling up an additional 60,000 reservists and announcing plans to extend the duty of 20,000 others. Troops will conduct a “gradual, precise and targeted” operation in and around the city, an Israeli military official said, requesting anonymity to comply with military protocol.
The offensive, the official said, is intended to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping and planning future attacks, and it would extend into parts of Gaza City that Israeli soldiers have not previously attacked or held during the war. In early phases of the war, Israeli soldiers have carried out operations in Gaza City, including at Al-Shifa Hospital, before withdrawing.
Israel’s plan to invade Gaza City, the most populous city in northern Gaza, has forced hundreds of thousands of residents like Mr. Shehada to consider uprooting themselves to the central and southern parts of the territory, away from the planned operation.
While some people in Gaza City have said they will abide by Israel’s evacuation orders, others have said they will remain at home, even if it means risking their lives.
The war in Gaza was ignited when Hamas led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Since then, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Eli Cohen, a minister in Israel’s high-level security cabinet, has said the operation should transform Gaza City into a wasteland. “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins,” he told Channel 14, a right-wing television station, on Saturday.
On Monday, Hamas agreed to a new proposal for a cease-fire with Israel, which would enable the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has not said whether it would accept the cease-fire proposal. Mr. Netanyahu has come under pressure from some far-right members of his coalition to press ahead with military operations against Hamas.
The Israeli official said the military was already operating in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Residents there say people were being ordered to evacuate.
Hamdi Sweisi, 38, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, said he relocated last week to another part of the city with his wife and three children, and on Tuesday he learned that his family’s multistory building in Zeitoun had been blown up.
“The building was standing for 50 years,” he said. “Everything we owned was wiped out in a second.”
Mr. Sweisi said he had no idea what his family would do if Israel invades the entire city.
Asked about the bombing of the building in Zeitoun, the Israeli military requested more information but did not provide an immediate comment. The military has said that its strikes in Gaza target militants and their weapons caches and has stressed that Hamas fighters have embedded themselves in civilian spaces.
Khalil el-Halabi, 71, a former U.N. official from Gaza City, said he would move to central or southern Gaza if he was left with no other choice, but he dreaded the prospect of living in a tent again. He and his family lived in a tent for more than a year in 2023 and 2024. They returned to Gaza City during the cease-fire between January and March.
Mr. el-Halabi said that he and his wife and children would struggle on foot to carry their belongings, which include blankets, clothing and an oxygen cylinder.
“Why should we be displaced again?” he said. “We’re totally against what happened on October 7. We had nothing to do with it.”
Despite the Israeli military’s preparations, Mr. el-Halabi remained optimistic that Israel and Hamas could reach a cease-fire, preventing Israeli soldiers from taking over the city.
“I’m hopeful there will be a truce,” he said. “We need one more than anything else.”
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting to this article.
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15) Brazil Wanted America’s Help Mining Rare Earths. Then Came Tariffs.
Tensions between President Trump and Brazil’s leader could derail a promising alliance to unlock the world’s second largest reserve of the minerals.
By Ana Ionova, Aug. 21, 2025
Ana Ionova spoke to mining experts, companies, diplomats and officials in Brazil, the United States and Australia. She reported from Brasília and Rio de Janeiro.
A mine in Minaçu, Goias state, Brazil, that produces rare earth elements, including neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium. Eraldo Peres/Associated Press
Tucked under layers of clay and rock, Brazil has a bounty that much of the world covets: millions of tons of rare earth minerals needed to build drones and robots, electric cars and guided missiles.
For years Brazil and the United States have quietly discussed how American investment and assistance could help the South American country unlock these vast reserves of rare earths, the world’s second largest.
But now, the diplomatic crisis between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest nations risks derailing years of U.S. efforts to secure access to Brazilian rare earths.
By loosening China’s grip on strategic minerals crucial to the economies and battlefields of the future, both nations stood to gain from such an alliance, according to current Brazilian and former U.S. officials.
American support could help Brazil become a global powerhouse in the extraction and processing of rare earths. And Brazilian rare earths could reduce American dependence on China, which controls about 90 percent of world supplies — and has shown itself willing to withhold them.
The talks about this alliance, which have not been previously reported, were at an early stage. Then, Brazil’s rare earths were suddenly thrust into the bitter trade dispute between the two countries that erupted last month.
Ties between Brazil and the United States frayed when President Trump targeted the country with 50 percent tariffs to help his political ally, Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, who is facing criminal charges for plotting a coup.
Just before tariffs were imposed on Brazil, the United States signaled that access to Brazil’s strategic minerals should be part of trade talks. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva snapped back, accusing the United States of threatening his nation’s sovereignty.
“No one lays a hand,” Mr. Lula said last month, referring to Brazil’s critical minerals. “This country belongs to the Brazilian people.” Brazilian officials also made clear that they will now seek to explore tapping its rare earth deposits with other allies, like India.
“With Brazil, we were pushing an open door,” said José Fernandez, a former top official at the State Department. “I don’t know if this will backfire, but it certainly will not help.”
Brazil is believed to hold between 19 and 23 percent of global reserves of rare earths, a group of 17 elements needed to make powerful magnets used in a range of products, from electric cars and wind turbines to missiles and fighter jets.
For decades, China, home to 40 percent of rare earth deposits, has dominated global supply chains of the minerals, which are plentiful in the earth’s crust but difficult to extract and separate. The West has mostly left to China the hard work of mining, processing and refining rare earths into magnets imported by the United States and other countries. For some rare earths, China is virtually the only country able to separate and process them.
But other countries have grown wary of China’s chokehold. Beijing cut off supplies to Japan in 2010 and is now withholding some critical minerals and magnets from the United States in response to tariffs. To reduce its reliance on China, the Pentagon has poured millions into a Las Vegas-based mining company, MP Materials, becoming its largest shareholder.
Brazil has emerged as perhaps the most promising challenger to China’s monopoly. It has reserves of about 21 million tons, though it may be years away from producing significant amounts of the minerals.
“There is still a lot to be explored, to be studied,” said Inácio Melo, director-president of the Brazilian Geological Survey. “Brazil has enormous potential.”
For now, just one Brazilian mine, partially backed by American investors, is churning out small quantities of minerals, which still have to be shipped to China for processing. But Brazil has ambitious plans to build a domestic supply chain spanning mines, processing plants and magnet factories.
Our economics reporters — based in New York, London, Brussels, Berlin, Hong Kong and Seoul — are digging into every aspect of the tariffs causing global turmoil. They are joined by dozens of reporters writing about the effects on everyday people.
Until recently, the United States had been helping Brazil inch closer to its goals. Biden administration officials made at least five visits to the country between 2022 and 2024, according to Mr. Fernandez, who participated in some of the meetings.
Brazil’s main focus in these discussions was securing technical assistance and American investment, Mr. Fernandez said. “Brazil was a very willing partner,” he added.
During a State Department visit last year, U.S. officials appeared interested in Brazil’s first laboratory where rare earths will be made into magnets and its capacity to eventually supply the Pentagon, according to Eduardo Neves, a researcher at the facility who participated in the meeting.
“They wanted information from us about whether we are already selling magnets, how long it will take to produce,” he said. “They seemed very interested.”
Last year, American and British investors poured $150 million into Brazil’s first rare earths mine, Serra Verde, as part of an initiative backed by the U.S. government.
In the months after Mr. Trump took office, the top U.S. diplomat in Brazil, chargé d’affaires Gabriel Escobar, met with Brazil’s mining association to discuss a possible partnership on rare earth minerals, according to Raul Jungmann, the group's president.
Then, in July, two weeks after Mr. Trump threatened Brazil with high tariffs, Mr. Escobar requested another meeting, according to Mr. Jungmann.
“The first time, he was more concerned with partnerships,” Mr. Jungmann said. The second time, the tone was more insistent, he added. “He made the United States’ interest in strategic critical minerals very clear, very explicit.”
In Brazil, a country sensitive to foreign involvement in its resources, after decades of booms and busts in commodities like rubber and sugar, U.S. interest in rare earths made headlines and triggered anger and suspicion.
Then, after the tariffs took effect and negotiations over a trade deal hit a stalemate, some Brazilian officials struck a more conciliatory tone, signaling they were open to putting rare earths on the negotiating table.
Trade talks between Brazil and the United States have since stalled, with Brazil accusing Mr. Trump of ignoring its attempts to negotiate and Mr. Trump insisting the country drop its case against Mr. Bolsonaro, which many in Brazil see as central to safeguarding the nation’s democracy.
Last week, tensions escalated when Mr. Trump accused Brazil of being a “horrible trading partner.” Mr. Lula shot back, pointing out that his nation runs a trade deficit with the United States. “We’re still willing to negotiate, but Brazil won’t kneel before the United States.”
Brazil now appears to be forging ahead largely without the United States. It is studying its deposits with the help of a Spanish mapping firm and working toward improving its processing abilities through a public-private partnership backed by more than two dozen companies and research groups from around the world.
“Establishing a supply chain outside of China is quite important for most Western nations right now,” said John Prineas, executive chairman of Australia-based St. George Mining, which is developing a rare earths project in Brazil’s Araxá region. “Brazil has a potentially big role to play there. And we’re happy to be a part of it.”
The tariffs on Brazil were softened by hundreds of exceptions, but rare earths were notably absent from the list.
That would make American firms reluctant to invest in the country’s rare earths, according to Sergio Fontanez, a former national security adviser to the chair of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a government export credit agency.
“There’s an opportunity there for us,” Mr. Fontanez said. “But what you’re essentially creating now,” he added, “is an embargo for U.S. companies.”
Janaína Camelo and Lis Moriconi contributed research.
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