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Urgent medical alert – Free Mumia
Mumia’s eyesight endangered
Mumia’s eyesight is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
An independent expert ophthalmologist has confirmed the progression of his eye disease by analyzing Mumia’s most recent eye exams. She reports that he needs surgery and medically necessary treatment “immediately” or faces the possibility of “permanent blindness.”
Mumia’s vision has plummeted from 20/30 with glasses in 2024 (near normal) to 20/200 today—legally blind—because the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) failed to adequately monitor his vision and delayed his urgently necessary medical treatment and surgery. The PA DOC has known since at least March of 2025 that Mumia needed eye surgery. Exams from 2024 – 2025 showed a sharp deterioration, demanding immediate intervention. Despite knowing the urgency, they waited until July to act and then pushed surgery off to an unspecified date in September.
Mumia believes he now suffers from “diabetic retinopathy” stemming from a diabetic coma that he endured after being given an improper and unmonitored dose of steroids for a skin disease in 2015. Mumia asserts that the PA DOC is “slow-walking [him] to blindness” in 2025 – another egregious case of the prison’s medical neglect, medical harm, and inability to treat Mumia’s medical needs.
Court records already document this pattern: (a) negligence in monitoring lab reports that led to the diabetic coma, and (b) deliberate denial and delay of his hepatitis C treatment that left him with cirrhosis.
OUR DEMANDS:
· Release Mumia now – unconditionally – into the care of his own doctors, family, and friends. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has, once again, shown it cannot monitor or provide the timely, corrective care he urgently needs.
· Schedule Mumia’s eye surgery and medically necessary treatment immediately, under the supervision of his independent ophthalmologist, and have it performed by the nearest outside provider approved by that physician.
· Provide Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Mumia’s chosen physician, with all the medical reports from the prison and any other outside examiners who have seen him in 2025.
RELEASE AGING PRISONERS:
The following report by Dr. Ricardo Alvarez details a more complete picture of the history of elder abuse by the Prison Industrial Complex – the New Jim Crow – and with particular regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners:
Parole Elder Abuse article on Mumia Abu-Jamal :
https://paroleelderabuse.org/mumia-institutional-elder-abuse-reports/
What you can do immediately to help:
Call the prison and demand that Mumia immediately receives local expert treatment
Sample script:
“My name is ________and I am calling from ________
I am calling with regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal, also known as Wesley Cook AM8335.
He is suffering from dire vision loss that can be easily treated—or else he will lose his eyesight entirely.
I DEMAND THAT THIS TREATMENT HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY.”
Primary targets:
Bernadette Mason
Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy
Call 570-773-2158
Laurel Hardy
Secretary, PA DOC
Call 717-728-2573
ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov
Central Office, PA DOC
ra-contactdoc@pa.gov
Upcoming Press Conference, Rallies and Marches are being planned so please stay tuned!!
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  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) Immigration Officials Conduct Operation at Wildfire Site in Washington State
Local firefighting officials provided few details about the incident at Olympic National Forest. Federal officials rarely enforce immigration laws at the site of an emergency.
By Mike Ives, Aug. 28, 2025
A view of the Bear Gulch wildfire on July 21. It started in early July and is still burning. Credit...U.S. Forest Service
Immigration officials conducted an operation at the site of the largest wildfire in Washington State, fire officials said on Wednesday. The incident appeared to be a rare case of federal officials enforcing immigration laws at the site of an emergency.
Officials in charge of fighting the Bear Gulch fire in the Olympic National Forest, west of Seattle, said in a brief statement on Wednesday night that they were “aware of a Border Patrol operation” at the site of the fire.
“The Border Patrol operation is not interfering with firefighting activity and Bear Gulch firefighters continue to make progress on the fire,” the officials said in their statement.
Hours earlier, The Seattle Times reported that two people fighting the blaze had been arrested earlier in the day. It cited interviews with firefighters, whom it did not name, and what it described as video of a confrontation between the firefighters and law enforcement agents.
The fire officials did not say whom the operation had targeted. They referred questions about the operation to a Border Patrol office in Port Angeles, Wash. Federal and state officials did not immediately respond to inquiries about the fire.
The blaze in the forest, west of Seattle, was the largest in the state as of Thursday morning, having consumed nearly 9,000 acres.
The Seattle Times report said that the federal agents had made the arrests after showing up on Wednesday morning at a site near Lake Cushman where two crews of private contractors had been assigned to cut wood for a local community. The Bear Gulch fire is burning next to the lake.
Border enforcement operations do not normally occur at active firefighting sites. During the 2021 wildfire season, the Department of Homeland Security said that immigration enforcement would not be conducted in places where disaster and emergency response and relief was being provided, “absent exigent circumstances.”
In some cases, federal immigration agents have assisted firefighters by helping with evacuation efforts.
The Bear Gulch fire was 13 percent contained of as Wednesday evening, officials said in an update. Officials have said that the fire, which started in early July, was caused by human activity. The exact cause is under investigation.
Parts of Washington State were under a red flag warning early Thursday. Many roads, trails and campfires inside Olympic National Forest were closed.
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2) Judge Orders New Federal Trial in Tyre Nichols Case
The ruling cited concerns about the appearance of bias, pointing to comments that the judge who presided over the trial of three former police officers reportedly made afterward.
By Emily Cochrane, Aug. 28, 2025
Emily Cochrane has covered the legal proceedings in connection with Tyre Nichols’s death since 2023.
A community rally in honor of Tyre Nichols after three former Memphis officers were acquitted in the fatal beating that lead to his death in Memphis in May. Brad J. Vest for The New York Times
A federal judge on Thursday ordered a new trial for three former Memphis police officers found guilty of charges related to the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker, in 2023. She cited concerns about the appearance of bias, pointing to comments that the judge who presided over the trial reportedly made afterward, suggesting that one of the defendants was a gang member.
Last fall, a federal jury acquitted the former officers of the most serious charge, that they had violated Mr. Nichols’s civil rights by causing his death. The jury found them guilty on federal witness tampering charges.
But just days before the three men were to be sentenced, Judge Mark Norris abruptly recused himself from the case.
Court documents unsealed on Thursday, as well as the judicial order, show that the defendants requested a new trial after the U.S. attorney’s office disclosed conversations that took place after the verdict. One of Judge Norris’s law clerks had been shot during an apparent carjacking in October, days after the verdict, and the judge repeatedly expressed frustration with the police investigation and lack of federal charges in that case to federal prosecutors, according to the documents.
Then, in a May meeting with the prosecutors, Judge Norris suggested that one of the defendants in the Nichols case was a member of a gang, according to the documents. He went on to say that the gang might have been responsible for the shooting of his law clerk, because the law clerk had been staying at the home of another clerk who had worked on the case.
Those comments prompted a federal prosecutor to recall a conversation she’d had with Judge Norris months earlier, during which the judge told her that the Memphis Police Department was “infiltrated to the top with gang members,” according to the documents.
In court filings unsealed on Thursday, the Justice Department said there was no evidence that any of the officers charged in the Nichols case, or any Memphis police officials, were in a gang.
The three officers asked for a new trial in June, arguing that the judge’s reported comments showed he was biased against not only them, but also the Memphis Police Department.
Chief Judge Sheryl H. Lipman, who was assigned the case after Judge Norris’s recusal, granted the request for a new trial on Thursday, saying that it “would serve the interest of justice.”
In her order, she said that had the request been based only on Judge Norris’s conduct during the trial, “then a new trial would be unnecessary.”
But, she concluded, “the risk of bias here is too high to be constitutionally tolerable.”
Judge Norris, who was nominated by President Trump in 2018, has given no reason for his recusal. Judge Lipman’s order notes that her decision was based on the “unrebutted description of the conversations as presented.”
An assistant who answered the phone in Judge Norris’s chambers on Thursday said the judge could not publicly comment given the ongoing case. The U.S. attorney’s office in Memphis, which had argued against a new trial, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The three former officers — Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith — had been scheduled for sentencing December. Two other former officers charged in the Nichols case — Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr. — pleaded guilty and testified against their former colleagues.
“Judge Lipman did the morally and ethically correct thing,” said Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Mr. Smith.
Lawyers for Mr. Haley and Mr. Bean did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Nichols was driving home from work on Jan. 7, 2023, when he was stopped by some of the officers for speeding up to beat a red light. Surveillance and body camera footage showed that he was aggressively yanked out of the car. After he broke free and ran away, officers caught up to Mr. Nichols, punching and kicking him while he cried for his mother.
Mr. Nichols died three days later.
All of the officers are Black, as was Mr. Nichols, and the case was seen by many in Memphis as another example of brutal treatment of Black people by the police.
The officers were fired shortly after, as the brutal footage horrified many in Memphis and across the country. But the case has produced mixed verdicts over the course of two trials, one in state court and one in federal. All three men have maintained their innocence, arguing that the use of force was in line with their training.
An out-of-town jury acquitted the officers in May of state charges that included second-degree murder. But in a separate federal case last fall, a jury found Mr. Haley, Mr. Bean and Mr. Smith guilty on a charge of witness tampering. Mr. Haley was also found guilty of violating Mr. Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury.
At least some of the federal charges will be revisited in a new trial. Judge Lipman, an Obama nominee who has sat on the court since 2014, gave the parties until Sept. 15 to say what charges should go to trial.
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3) Los Angeles Is Contaminated Now
By David L. Ulin, Aug. 29, 2025
Mr. Ulin is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles.” He wrote from Los Angeles.
Maria Chimishkyan
Southern California was made to burn. The earliest wildfire recorded there was in 1889 and scorched 300,000 acres.
Given such a history, it might be tempting to see the calamitous Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires in Los Angeles County in January as part of a continuum. That would be a mistake. Rather, these fires show we need a new way of thinking about fire: as not only natural disaster, but also environmental threat with a high risk of long-term harms to health.
In part, this has to do with more frequent fires in the wildlife urban interface, where the city meets the wilderness. Both the Eaton and Palisades fires affected this type of terrain, which the historian and social critic Carey McWilliams (among others) once characterized as “rurban,” which is to say, untamed and densely populated at once.
Blazes in these areas consume, in addition to brush and undergrowth, all sorts of manufactured materials: lead paint and piping, lithium batteries and computers, cleaning solutions and artificial fibers, automobiles and electric wires. Soil samples collected from the Palisades and Altadena have revealed the presence of heavy metals and other toxic elements, including arsenic, lead and mercury. If not properly remediated, such contamination can linger, with potential effects including not only cancer but also damage to the brain and nervous system, especially in children under 3. That makes every fire in the wildlife urban interface a potential public health emergency.
Normally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would take the lead on testing the soil and other sites for contamination after such an event. In February, however, the Corps announced it would not order sampling to see if properties had been properly decontaminated, citing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s refusal to authorize remediation efforts of that scope. Such a pullback is hardly exclusive to Southern California; in recent months, FEMA has denied disaster aid to West Virginia and Washington. This means that survivors in Los Angeles, as well as elsewhere, are on their own more than ever.
Some residents of Altadena and the Palisades have paid for their own remediation, then waited, in some cases for months, to be reimbursed by insurance companies. Many homes that escaped fire damage were inundated with debris, some of it toxic. The administration has said it wants states and municipalities to take a larger role in mitigation and recovery, but the truth is they are already strapped. California is no exception.
In June, the state announced a mortgage relief program for those whose homes have been destroyed or irreparably damaged, but these grants top out at $20,000. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County has allocated up to $3 million for soil testing for residents affected by the Eaton fire, but this, like many private programs, relies on residents gathering and transporting their own samples.
The ramifications of toxic contamination in large areas of Los Angeles for public safety and health are likely to be significant. Consider the spike in both heart and lung disease reported after the 2023 Lahaina fire on Maui. And then there are the psychological risks. In the immediate wake of Lahaina, suicides and overdoses rose precipitously across Hawaii — a staggering 97 percent on Maui alone in the month of the fire, according to a recent paper.
Among the problems with fire is how its effects linger. It may take years for the full consequences to be known. Equally troubling is that contamination doesn’t stay contained. For all the visible damage to Altadena and the Palisades, in other words, there is a more insidious set of dangers, both in the homes and structures left undamaged and throughout the broader region. Even as the January fires had stopped burning, wind had distributed toxic smoke and ash across much of Los Angeles County, before blowing them out to the Pacific by way of Long Beach.
The slow recovery in Los Angeles is the result, in part, of complex and contradictory insurance practices — according to one report, as many as 70 percent of survivors in Altadena and the Palisades have reported delays, denials or underpayment — intensified by the shifts in federal policy. According to Department of Angels, one of several community-based groups that have emerged to work for those left behind by government and insurers, a large number of affected residents are still unable to return to their properties.
Without federal resources for recovery efforts, survivors can end up in an ongoing state of triage, in which the best that can be hoped for is short-term remediation, amid the certainty that fire will come again.
Because fires and other climate disasters are no longer discrete episodes, but instead a constant barrage. They represent a new normal in a nation where more than 60,000 communities are within a wildlife urban interface, a number that, as weather patterns continue to turn increasingly severe, will only grow. We know what to do: plant fire-resistant vegetation; create defensible space cleared of flammable objects; build with fire-resistant materials. Such strategies, however, require time and money. They require patience and grit. Eight months later, with recovery moving slowly, those things are in short supply.
Meanwhile, climate change isn’t waiting. Every day, it seems, we face another catastrophe. July marked the onset of fire season in California, and conditions that helped precipitate the January conflagrations — drought and a preponderance of dry brush — remain a substantial risk. This month alone, the Gifford fire in San Luis Obispo County has burned more than 130,000 acres, making it the state’s largest fire by area in 2025.
And yet California has learned from, and adapted to, climate challenges since before the phrase was in use. I recall the Field Act, which mandated earthquake-resistant building codes for schools after more than 200 were destroyed or damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. I recall Bob and Jackie Genofile, the couple featured in John McPhee’s essay “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” their Glendale home demolished by debris flow only to be rebuilt and reinforced.
Each, in its own way, represents a gesture of community. Each represents an act of will. As the wildlife urban interface expands and fires become more toxic, Californians have become, perhaps, the canaries in the coal mine, in a world where environmental devastation provoked by climate change is now a commonplace.
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4) Israel Resumes Daytime Operations in Gaza City, Signaling Buildup to Assault
The Israeli military ended a policy of pausing operations during the day that was intended to allow more aid in, calling Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone.”
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Aug. 29, 2025
Displaced Palestinians leaving Gaza City toward the southern areas of the Gaza Strip on Thursday. The Israeli military has not yet issued a blanket evacuation order for the city. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military on Friday ended its policy of pausing daytime operations in Gaza City, intended to ease aid delivery, in the latest indication that the military was moving toward a full-scale invasion of the area.
In a statement, the military said the “local tactical pause in military activity” would not apply to the city as of 10 a.m. on Friday, describing the area as a “dangerous combat zone.”
The Israeli military said in late July that it started instituting pauses of operations between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. in several parts of the Gaza Strip. It made the move after international outrage over the dire humanitarian situation. Last week, a panel of global food experts said Gaza City and its surrounding areas were suffering from famine.
Earlier this month, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Israeli military would expand its nearly two-year war in the territory by taking control of Gaza City. Last week, the military said it had called up an additional 60,000 reservists and announced plans to extend the duty of 20,000 others. It was unclear how long it would take for the additional reservists to be mobilized.
In recent weeks, the military has made a series of moves signaling that it wants Palestinians in Gaza City to move southward, though it has not yet issued a broad evacuation order.
The move on Friday could complicate an already challenging aid situation in Gaza, in which humanitarian groups have struggled to overcome bottlenecks to deliver food and other supplies to the most vulnerable people.
Aid workers have said many trucks were being intercepted by hungry Palestinians and gunmen before reaching their destinations, even as Israeli authorities have reported a greater number of trucks entering Gaza daily. Aid workers have also said that there are limited routes into Gaza and long waits at Israeli checkpoints.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or O.C.H.A., has acknowledged that the pauses have enabled some improvements to the delivery of aid. But two U.N. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said that bombings had taken place during the daytime in spite of the pauses. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, O.C.H.A. said it was assessing the “potential impact” of the Israeli military’s announcement on civilians and humanitarian operations.
“We remain deeply concerned by the intensified offensive in Gaza city, which will drive further mass displacement,” the agency said in response to an inquiry.
Indications that the Israeli military was building up to its invasion of Gaza City have been mounting in recent weeks.
In early August, an Israeli military official contacted Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, telling him to prepare a plan for transferring medical equipment to towns south of the city.
On Wednesday, Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the military, issued a statement claiming there were vast open spaces in central and southern Gaza where people in Gaza City could relocate. But Palestinians in central and southern Gaza have said there are few apartments for rent in those areas and expressed disbelief there was enough open space for hundreds of thousands of people to settle in tents.
The military has already carried out widespread destruction of a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City, Zeitoun, turning a large part of it into a barren wasteland, according to satellite images reviewed by The New York Times.
A satellite image from Aug. 8 showed scores of buildings intact and what appeared to be several tent encampments. A separate image of the same area from Aug. 25 showed many, if not most, of the buildings reduced to piles of rubble and the apparent encampments gone.
The Israeli military has said that its strikes in Gaza target militants and their weapon caches, and it has stressed that Hamas fighters have embedded themselves in civilian spaces.
The intensification of the war comes as talks have faltered for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and the release of hostages.
Hamas has said it has accepted a new framework put forth by Arab mediators, which would begin with a temporary cease-fire and the exchange of some Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. But Mr. Netanyahu has not supported that proposal, calling for negotiations for the release of all hostages and the end of the war “on conditions that are acceptable for Israel.”
Hamas has said it is willing to release all remaining 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.
On Friday, Mr. Netanyahu said the body of an Israeli man who was killed during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, had been returned to Israeli territory. He said the body of the man, Ilan Weiss, had been moved to Gaza after he was killed while he was going out to defend Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel.
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5) Israel Recovers Body of Oct. 7 Victim From Gaza, Netanyahu’s Office Says
Ilan Weiss, who was killed in the Hamas-led attack, and the remains of another person, who was not identified, were found as the government looks set to expand a military offensive.
By Johnatan Reiss, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Aug. 29, 2025
Demonstrators hold posters with photographs of Ilan Weiss at a rally in Tel Aviv last year. Credit...Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Israeli security forces have recovered the body of Ilan Weiss, who was killed during the Hamas-led attack on the country on Oct. 7, 2023, from Gaza, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday.
The remains of “another deceased hostage” were also recovered, the prime minister’s office added, but their identity was not released.
Mr. Weiss was killed in his home village of Be’eri, in southern Israel, when hundreds of militants raided the community as part of a wider attack that killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Some 250 more people were abducted and taken to Gaza as hostages.
The remains of Mr. Weiss and the unidentified person were recovered in a “complex rescue operation” carried out by forces from the Israeli military and Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, the military said in a statement. Israeli officials did not specify where or when the operation took place.
Mr. Weiss, who led the village’s civilian emergency response team, disappeared after he had gone to the community armory when the attack began, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing many families of the hostages, said in a statement. His death on Oct. 7, 2023, was confirmed in absentia in January 2024, the Forum added.
Mr. Weiss’s wife, Shiri, and teenage daughter, Noga, were kidnapped in the attack. They were released during a brief cease-fire along with dozens of other Israeli hostages in November 2023.
The recovery of the bodies comes as Israeli leaders face mounting pressure at home and abroad to reach an agreement with Hamas that would secure the release of the remaining hostages and end the war in Gaza. Israeli officials believe that 20 hostages are still alive and Hamas is holding the bodies of about 30 more captives.
The Israeli security cabinet, a group that includes senior ministers and is chaired by Mr. Netanyahu, recently decided to intensify military operations in Gaza, including taking over Gaza City, the enclave’s main urban center where thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge.
“We will not rest until everyone returns home — this is the objective of the upcoming maneuver,” the office of Israel Katz, the country’s defense minister, said in a statement on Friday referring to the plan to widen the military offensive.
But Israel’s plan to expand operations has been condemned by many world leaders. “Israel’s initial steps to militarily take over Gaza City signal a new and dangerous phase,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said on Thursday.
In Israel, hundreds of thousands joined nationwide demonstrations on Tuesday, calling on the government to accept a cease-fire proposal that Hamas agreed to earlier this month.
It is unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu will accept the proposal. A spokesman for the Israeli government, David Mencer, stopped short of saying that Israel would reject the proposal but told journalists this week that Israel was “going for a full agreement, and no longer a piecemeal agreement.”
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6) Britain Bars Israeli Government From a Leading Arms Trade Fair
The British government said it was acting in response to Israel’s escalating military operation in Gaza. Israel condemned the decision.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, Aug. 29, 2025
The Defense and Security Equipment International fair in London in 2023. Credit...Leon Neal/Getty Images
Britain has barred the Israeli government from sending officials to its flagship military weapons trade fair in London next month, in another sign of Israel’s deepening isolation as it expands the war in Gaza.
The British defense ministry confirmed in a statement on Friday that it had told Israel that its officials would not be welcome at the Defense and Security Equipment International exhibition, because “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its military operation in Gaza is wrong.”
Israel condemned the decision, calling it a “deliberate and regrettable act of discrimination against Israel’s representatives.” The Israeli defense ministry said in a statement that it “plays into the hands of extremists, grants legitimacy to terrorists and introduces political considerations wholly inappropriate for a professional defense industry exhibition.”
Britain’s ban does not extend to Israeli arms suppliers, several of which plan to have displays at the fair, which runs from Sept. 9 to 12. The British statement said the police would put “robust security measures in place” at the sprawling event, which attracts companies from about 60 countries and has drawn protests by human rights groups in previous years for the lethality of the weapons on display.
The British government has steadily ratcheted up pressure on Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza, announcing last month that it would recognize an independent Palestinian state next month unless Israel agrees to a cease-fire with Hamas. Last September, it imposed a partial suspension of weapons sales to Israel.
Britain’s move to recognize a Palestinian state followed on the heels of France, which also acted to constrain Israel’s ability to sell weapons in its country. At the Paris Air Show in June, organizers erected walls around some stands, after the Israelis objected to a French demand that they take down the displays on the grounds that they were promoting offensive, rather than defensive, weapons.
At the time, the Israeli defense ministry’s director general, Maj. Gen. Amir Baram, called France’s action “absolutely, bluntly antisemitic.” His criticism was echoed by two Republican governors from the United States who attended the show, Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.
Britain said in its statement that it would reconsider its ban if Israel complied with international humanitarian law in Gaza and the West Bank, adding, “There must be a diplomatic solution to end this war now, with an immediate cease-fire, the return of the hostages and a surge in humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.”
Under the ban, Israel’s defense ministry cannot set up a national pavilion at the fair, where arms producers are typically grouped together by country. Individual Israeli suppliers can still sell their weapons — a list that includes Israel Aerospace Industry and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, which are owned by the government. Both said Friday that they planned to attend the exhibition.
Britain’s handling of the war in Gaza has become an increasingly fraught issue for Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He is facing rising calls from members of his Labour Party to take harsher measures against Israel, with some criticizing him for making his pledge to recognize a Palestinian state conditional, unlike France.
Others faulted the government for not imposing a total ban on weapons sales to Israel. The government noted that Britain’s arms sales constitute less than 1 percent of Israel’s imports. But they include British-made components for the F-35 fighter jet, which the Israeli air force has used in strikes on Gaza.
Critics say Britain has adopted a series of half-measures against Israel, and then only after other countries, like France, acted first.
“They’re not leading, they’re following,” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, an institute in London and New York. “Left to their own devices, they would be as undisruptive as possible to the bilateral relationship. They put their finger in the air and say, ‘We need to move a bit.’”
Mr. Levy said the decision to bar Israeli officials, but not companies, could be calculated to defuse demonstrations. Britain recently banned a pro-Palestinian protest group, Palestine Action, and declared it a terrorist organization.
On Wednesday, Tony Blair, a former Labour prime minister who informally advises Mr. Starmer, took part in a White House meeting about the postwar future of Gaza. Mr. Blair served for eight years as the envoy for the Quartet, a coalition of Western countries that has tried fruitlessly to broker a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. He declined to discuss his role in the meeting.
Though Mr. Starmer has mostly stayed in lock step with President Trump on the war in Ukraine, there is growing daylight between them on Israel and Gaza. During a visit to Britain earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration had no plans to follow Britain in recognizing a Palestinian state.
“I don’t know what it would really mean to recognize a Palestinian state, given the lack of a functional government there,” Mr. Vance said, adding that he expected “some disagreements” about how to end the suffering in Gaza, where observers warn of spreading famine.
Lara Jakes contributed reporting from Rome.
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7) There Can’t Be Peace Without Equality
There can’t be equality without socialism
By Bonnie Weinstein, Sept/Oct 2025
While capitalist world leaders are ramping up their military arsenals for a major battle to the death over natural resources and cheap labor worldwide, the overwhelming majority of humanity—we who do the work that creates profits for the rich—are struggling to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.
The staggering wealth disparity between the rich and the poor has hit new heights. The wealthy rule, not just to maintain their wealth, but to steadily increase their rate of private profit. War and genocide are how capitalists maintain their power and wealth. Capitalist oppression is happening worldwide, not just with bombs, but also with bigotry and mass starvation the world over.
World wealth
Out of a world population of more than 8.62 billion people1, the number of billionaires is a tiny minority of 3,028 and, as of 2025, they are richer than ever—worth $16.1 trillion in total—up nearly $2 trillion over 2024.
The U.S. has a record 902 billionaires, followed by China (516, including Hong Kong) and India (205). The top three wealthiest are Elon Musk with $342 billion, Mark Zuckerberg with $216 billion, and Jeff Bezos worth $215 billion.2
What does a billion look like? To spend a billion dollars in a year, you would need to spend approximately $2,739,726 per day.3 What does a trillion dollars look like? To spend one trillion dollars in a year, you would need to spend approximately $2.74 billion per day.4
World poverty
In 2025, an estimated 696 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty, which is defined as surviving on less than $2.15 a day. Approximately 9.9 percent of the world’s population, or roughly one-in-ten people, live in extreme poverty.
When considering a higher poverty line of $8.30 a day, the number of poor people remains over 3.7 billion, which is comparable to the number in 1990—things are not getting better!
Poverty is not evenly distributed. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of extreme poverty, with 30 percent of its population living below the $2.15 threshold, according to the World Bank.5
Workers in the U.S. are relatively wealthy. In 2025, the federal poverty guideline for a single person is $15,650 annually or having a job that pays about $7.52 an hour, while for a family of four, it’s $32,150 annually or having a job that pays about $16.20 per hour. No wonder so many people want to live in the U.S.!
But even in the U.S., “…the national average annual income needed to be in the top one percent of earners is approximately $731,492.00.”6
Class consciousness
These wealth figures actually show how much power workers really have because it is we, the working class, that creates this wealth that the capitalist class claims as their own.
We could, on our own, just as easily distribute this wealth equally and democratically—on the basis of the needs and wants of all—and not on enormous private profits for the tiny few.
Class consciousness comes when workers realize that all this wealth is created by their labor—and their labor alone. And we, along with our allies among the masses, have the power to take that wealth into our own hands through unity and solidarity against capitalism worldwide. We, the 8.62 billion people in the world, have the power to end capitalism and build a society of economic and social equality and justice for all—a world socialist society.
Economic injustice is, and has always been, the foundation of capitalism
I was enamored with the TV series from Toronto, Canada called, “The Murdoch Mysteries” which takes place in the mid-to-late 1800s. It’s a very left-leaning series that takes up many social issues such as the Suffragette movement, racism and slavery, and labor struggles of the time.
After watching the TV series, I was inspired to start reading the novels that the series was based upon by author, Marureen Jennings.
In her novel, “Night’s Child” there is a character named Reardon, who was horribly disfigured with severe burns all over his body, and who’s a possible witness to a crime under investigation by the then, Acting Inspector Murdoch. (He was an Acting Inspector because he’s Catholic, and there was a lot of prejudice against Catholics at that time. He finally makes it to full Inspector later on in the series.)
As it turns out, throughout most of the 1800s labor unions were outlawed in Canada. Well, this character in the novel, Reardon, is explaining to Murdoch how, exactly, he got his burns.
He tells Murdoch that he’s a member of a secret labor organization, The Knights of Labor, which actually was a secret mutual support group of workers at the time unions were outlawed.
Reardon was working at a lumber mill when all the workers walked off the job for better pay and safety conditions—workers were losing fingers and limbs and their lives—as well as starving to death.
The company sent in scabs, not only to take the jobs of the workers on strike, but more sinisterly, to act as agent provocateurs attempting to superficially attack the homes of the bosses and blame it on the striking workers in order to break their strike. So, The Knights of Labor decided to thwart their plans by defending the bosses’ houses against the scabs with their own armed guards while maintaining their walk out.
Reardon described the indignation he felt while protecting the bosses who were starving himself and his fellow workers by explaining to Murdoch, “...there we were, standing outside the bosses house trying to protect them, while the bosses were stuffing their faces with the fine food we gave them!”
That night Reardon and his comrade standing guard were captured by the scabs and tarred and feathered.
Class consciousness was literally burnt into them.
Class consciousness is the enemy of the wealthy
Such vast wealth concentrated in the hands of such a tiny minority allows them to control not just the military and the police, but the mass media and the internet—and the thoughts and consciousness of the masses everywhere.
They must maintain full control over the economy, the military, the police and the media in order to control us. Their modus operandi is divide-and-conquer because they know, that united together in our own defense, they are utterly powerless. Without the misguided cooperation of workers, war would not be an option for the capitalist class.
Racism and bigotry are capitalism’s tools used to divide us for centuries
In a July 4, 2025, New York Times guest essay by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale, titled, “Trump Is Waging War on His Own Citizens,” Grandin draws parallels between the current racist expansion of ICE, and the racist U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846:
“Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill. Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said—not debt, not Medicaid cuts—compared to securing ‘ICE money.’ Now, the agency—which already acts like secret police—will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations. …The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and then, the following year, invaded Mexico. By 1848, the U.S. Army had won the war, and though there were many excitable expansionists in favor of seizing ‘all Mexico,’ the opposing opinion of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina won the day. Calhoun warned that incorporating the ‘mixed races’ of Mexico into the United States would undermine ‘Caucasian’ rule. The United States couldn’t take them in as citizens. ‘Ours is the government of the white man,’ Calhoun said. And there were too many Mexicans to make slaves. Congress limited itself to taking just Mexico’s less densely populated northern half.”
Gaza genocide—capitalism’s example and warning to all of us
The horrendous suffering, devastation and starvation ofthe Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank has been designed by the U.S. and Israel to set an example to anyone who would challenge U.S. hegemony in the world and its self-proclaimed right to control, by lethal force, if necessary, any territory or resource it wants—even if it has to destroy everything in its path.
There are approximately 5.6 million Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank and another 2.1 million living in Israel. There are about 7.7 million non-Arab Israelis in Israel. That’s about 7.7 Palestinians all together, and 7.7 non-Arab Israelis—an equal population living under severely unequal, racist laws that give the non-Arab Israelis privileged status over all Palestinians—including Arab Israelis:
“The Israeli government directly controls 93 percent of the land in Israel and systematically discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel in its allocation through official agencies like the Israel Land Authority and quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund. Combined with the discriminatory Admissions Committee Law, approximately 80 percent of state lands are off-limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who face significant legal obstacles in gaining access to this land for residential, agricultural, or commercial development.”7
There is talk of recognizing a “separate state” for Palestine supposedly encompassing the territory of the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank is where Israeli settlers are illegally stealing Palestinian homes and farms, bulldozing streets and forcibly settling on the land they have stolen.
Gaza has been demolished almost entirely—there are no more farms, stores, hospitals, homes, businesses, electricity, gas, clean water—nowhere to forage for food. The U.S./Israeli assault on Gaza has turned it into a wasteland that will take trillions of dollars to restore—money the capitalists have, for sure—while the Palestinians have nothing left at all and not a dime to spend.
Exactly where is this “separate state” supposed to be established and just who will rule it? That decision has been left to the U.S. and Israel.
The vast U.S. military budget
And how much does the U.S. spend on the military industrial complex that it shares with Israel and its diminishing allies?
“From 2020–2024, the latest five-year period for which data is available, the average was 54 percent— $2.4 trillion in contracts, $4.4 trillion in spending. …Approximately $993 billion of the $1.06 trillion in military spending authorized for 2025 is for the Pentagon (as noted above, the $1.06 trillion total also includes spending on nuclear weapons programs and other expenses outside the Pentagon.) If the share of the department’s spending on contracts this year reflects the decade’s average (54 percent), these figures suggest a more than half-trillion-dollar transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to private [military related] contractors.”8
Please take note that we workers pay the overwhelming majority of the taxes. The capitalists use our tax money to protect their obscene wealth—by the use force and violence anywhere and anytime they are threatened.
Capitalism is mad, irrational, and the most unbalanced it has ever been between the wealthy and the poor. It must be ended and only we, the overwhelming masses of humanity, have the power to end it.
The road ahead
In the UK, there’s a new challenge to the Labour Party which has been moving further and further to the right including sending arms to Israel against the will of the majority in the UK as well as criminalizing immigrants in the UK.
Jeremy Corbyn, current Member of Parliament and former leading figure in the Labour Party and Zarah Sultana, who has served as a Member of Parliament, have launched a new leftwing party in the UK that is independent and in opposition to the Labour Party. They collected over 600,000 membership signatures in just three days. The Labour Party currently has around 309,000 members.9
In their statement about the formation of this new party in opposition to the Labour Party they said they are calling it “Your party” temporarily until the organization can meet in a founding convention sometime this fall and democratically decide on the final name. Here’s what they say their party is about:
“On Gaza, the statement said the new party would demand an end to arms sales to Israel and ‘defend the right to protest against genocide.’ ‘The great dividers want you to think that the problems in our society are caused by migrants or refugees,’ it said. ‘They’re not. They are caused by an economic system that protects the interests of corporations and billionaires. It’s time for a new kind of political party. One that is rooted in our communities, trade unions and social movements. One that builds power in all regions and nations. One that belongs to you.’”10
We need similar discussions among the left—including the labor movement in the U.S. and everywhere—about the formation of an international, independent, democratically organized workers’ party in opposition to capitalism and the capitalist class as a whole. We can use our power on the internet, in the media and in the streets if our voice is loud enough—and that will happen when we are very well organized in unity and solidarity with each other and in our own defense.
We urgently need to form workers’ independent parties that will unite the entire working class and all of our allies to demand an end to war and inequality—parties who, united together, will have the power to end capitalism and establish a new, socialist society devoted to equality, freedom and justice for all—and finally bring to an end the rotting capitalist dictatorship of the tiny few over us all.
1 https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
2 https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
3 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=How+much+money+a+day+would+you+need+to+spend+to+spend+one+billion+dollars&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#cobssid=s
4 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=how+much+money+would+you+have+to+spend+per+day+to+spend+one+trillion+dollars&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
5 https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/june-2025-global-poverty-update-from-the-world-bank--2021-ppps-a
6 https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-income-puts-you-top-1-5-10/#:~:text=The%20amount%20varies%20by%20location%20and%20local,while%20in%20others%2C%20the%20threshold%20is%20lower.
7 “Fact Sheet: Palestinian Citizens of Israel”
https://imeu.org/article/fact-sheet-palestinian-citizens-of-israel#:~:text=The%20Israeli%20government%20directly%20controls%2093%25%20of,Land%20Authority%20and%20quasi%2Dgovernmental%20Jewish%20National%20Fund.
8 “Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024”
https://quincyinst.org/research/profits-of-war-top-beneficiaries-of-pentagon-spending-2020-2024/#summary
9 “Membership down 11 percent since election as Labour loses a member every 10 minutes”
https://labourlist.org/2025/02/labour-party-membership-drop-since-general-election/
10 The Guardian, July 24, 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/24/jeremy-corbyn-and-zarah-sultana-agree-to-launch-leftwing-party
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8) Artificial Intelligence
Useful tool under socialism, menace under capitalism
By Peter Solenberger, Sept/Oct 2025
Hal, from Stanley Kubrikz's "2001 A Space Oddesy"
Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa some 300,000 years ago. From our genus Homo ancestors, we inherited upright posture, opposable thumbs, binocular vision, high intelligence, group living, language, use of fire, and toolmaking. Humans have built on that foundation, again and again transforming technology, reorganizing production, and reordering society.
In the past 50 years, computers and the internet have changed how hundreds-of-millions of people work and live. Artificial Intelligence—a much-hyped misnomer—continues that trend.
As this article will develop, AI technology is potentially beneficial. Under socialism, it could relieve people of many mind-numbing tasks, free them for creative and self-fulfilling activity, and make possible scientific, economic, environmental, and other advances currently beyond us.
Under capitalism, however, it could destroy jobs and livelihoods, intensify exploitation, increase the levels of surveillance and repression, further destroy the environment, and make war more likely and more lethal.
Demystifying AI
Artificial intelligence is neither “artificial” nor “intelligent.” It is the application of clever but not very sophisticated computing techniques to massive amounts of digital data to find patterns of association—for example, between X-rays and cancerous tumors, or text in Spanish and translations into English.
Traditional scientific analysis observes reality, develops hypotheses, and tests these hypotheses through observation and intervention. Traditional data analysis collects and analyzes data through statistical methods, attempting to identify patterns in the structures and processes described by the data. Like other scientific analysis, its goal is both to understand and to predict.
AI dispenses with the goal of understanding and goes just for prediction. Hence the name of the current favored technique: generative pre-trained transformer (GPT). Incomprehensible models are built through pre-training on massive amounts of data, to apply to new data to generate diagnoses, translations, and other predictions.
Precursors to AI were developed in the early 20th century and used as probabilistic text generators, but they were mainly proof of concept and not very useful practically. Data and computing power were lacking.
By the 1990s, the digitization of images, sounds and text had produced the data, and propagation through the internet had made it available. Computing power lagged. The computers of the day relied on powerful central processing units (CPUs), caching data in fast memory, and limited parallel processing, in which several CPUs worked on different parts of a problem. Software engineers had to design algorithms1 for programmers to code and computers to run.
The situation was like the early days of the industrial revolution, when machines were built by artisan methods. Scaling up production required the breakthrough of machines to build machines.
The breakthrough occurred in what seemed a peripheral area of computing. Editing images and videos and also gaming required very fast rendering of graphics on screens, as images were manipulated, videos showed motion, or games were played. Bits in memory had to be mapped quickly to pixels on screens. Relatively simple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), separate from the CPU and working in parallel, were developed for this task.
Computer engineers and programmers quickly realized that GPUs could be used for other mapping problems, including mapping the vast quantities of digital data now available to produce models that could be applied to new data for searches, translations, transcriptions, analyzing CT scans, facial recognition, and on and on. AI was born.
Garbage in, garbage out
AI models are trained on pairings of raw data and human-validated results, and they depend completely on the accuracy of both. If either data or results are partial or skewed, the models will be too. Garbage in, garbage out, as the Information Technology (IT) saying goes.
The garbage out can be obviously weird “hallucinations,” or can be more insidious. The patterns of association may be based on opinions presented as facts, oversimplifications, prejudices or lies. Racial profiling that would be unacceptable coming from a human being can be hidden in the black box of AI.
A revealing and increasingly likely illustration of garbage in, garbage out is AI trained on its own product. A New York Times article, “When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself” by Aatish Bhatia explores the problem of “model collapse.” Images are reduced to blurs, colors are muddied, faces look weirdly alike. “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.” (August 26, 2024)
AI is in a sense a step backward from analytic techniques that seek to understand data. Small datasets and limited computing power forced analysts to choose techniques appropriate for the data—for example, linear regression for continuous variables like height and gross domestic product (GDP), or logistic regression for categorical variables like race and gender. AI leaves the modeling to the computational process.
Data analysis could be compared to climbing a mountain. The goal is to get to the top. With data analysis, that means maximizing a likelihood function—the likelihood that a model applied to the actual data gets the actual results.
One approach to mountaineering would be to have a very skilled team painstakingly climb the mountain. Another would be to have many competent but less-skilled teams swarm up the mountain, making many mistakes but still arriving at the top by trial and error. Traditional statistical analysis is like the former. AI is like the latter.
The trial-and-error method is very expensive in terms of computers and energy to run them. As a New York Times article, “What will power the A.I. revolution?” by David Gelles notes:
“In the next three years alone, data centers are expected to as much as triple their energy use, according to a new report supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Under that forecast, data centers could account for as much as 12 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption by 2028.” (January 7, 2025)
Bigger isn’t necessarily better. In January 2025, the Chinese company DeepSeek published a paper describing a novel AI modeling technique. A New York Times article “Why DeepSeek Could Change What Silicon Valley Believes About A.I.” by Kevin Roose explains the significance of the technique. (January 28, 2025)
Basically, by combining thinking ahead and swarming, DeepSeek was able to use less sophisticated computer chips, much less computing time, less energy, and smaller datasets to train its model.
These reservations aren’t to say that AI is useless. Machine translation of languages has become dramatically better as techniques advanced from rules-based machine translation to statistical machine translation to AI machine translation.
But good AI translators are trained on good human translations, and really good translations still require correction by human translators who know the source language, the target language, and the subject. On the other hand, searching is getting worse as the “correct” results are increasingly what advertisers pay for, rather than what users want.
Origin of AI
In the 1990s, Google servers began trawling the web, storing and indexing the content of websites, and returning search results. An important Google insight was that the number of links to a page was a useful measure of its importance. Another was that users are not just consumers but also data providers, through their searches and clicks. Another was that search data could be integrated with many other kinds of data.
Google came to dominate searching through a positive feedback loop: Its search engine was better, partly because of its clever algorithm but mostly because it was based on more data, so people used it, providing yet more data, and round and round.
Google at first struggled with how to make money from its searches. Its solution was advertising and other marketing. It could charge for clicks on links to business websites in its search results, charge for highlighting a business in its searches, and produce lists of customers interested or likely to be interested in buying products.
Google realized that data was potentially valuable, even if its use wasn’t yet clear. Free searches, maps, email addresses and operating systems produced data. The data could be mined to know who asked what, who communicated with whom, what they communicated about, and often the content of their communication. Street views produced data, not just the views but also the content of unencrypted wireless networks in the houses being photographed.
The FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), state and local police agencies, and the police and security services of Russia, China, Britain and many other countries realized they could obtain and store metadata (the who, where, when, how long, how much) and data (the what) from electronic communications.
In the United States and some other countries, accessing content requires a court order, but the procedures are often lax. Data encryption is an obstacle, but people often fail to encrypt, and much can be inferred from the metadata alone.
Until the last few years, the capacity of corporations and governments to collect data far exceeded their capacity to analyze it. With AI, data analysis began to catch up.
Uses of AI…
Human history has seen many technological advances that both raised labor productivity and were exploited by the rulers of the day to augment their power and wealth.
Energy, transportation, communication, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, distribution, medicine, education, entertainment, personal relationships, religion, policing and warfare—all have been transformed by technology. The general pattern is mechanization, substituting machines for people, and automation, as machines run themselves, maintained and supervised by people.
Technological advances can be abused, as shown throughout history. The United States was built on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the theft of half of Mexico, the ruination of farmers, exploitation of workers, abuse of immigrants, racism, oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people, and destruction of the environment—all enabled by technology.
But class and social struggle has forced the use of technology in beneficial ways: to replace humans with machines for many dangerous and debilitating tasks, to reduce the hours of work, and to raise living standards. People live longer, are healthy longer, and have many more opportunities than they would otherwise have had.
There is every reason to think that AI will continue this pattern. AI should make it possible to automate many tasks that now require labor that could be spent thinking, creating, playing, loving or daydreaming.
Language translation is an example of what AI can already do. Anyone with access to a computer, the internet, and AI translation software can read material written in many languages. Human translators are needed to provide the material to train the AI, to correct inaccuracies in the AI translations, and to make really good translations. But accessibility is useful, even if the translation is rice and beans, rather than fine dining.
Computer programming is another area where AI could help by relieving programmers of tedious work. Programming has changed vastly since the 1950s, when computers had to be rewired for different tasks and bugs were literally that.
By the 1970s, most programming was done in higher-level languages like Fortran, Cobol, or C, with mathematical and other libraries for common tasks. AI could take this a step further by allowing software engineers to describe what they want and have the machine write the program. Human programmers would still be needed to provide the material to train the AI, to correct the deficiencies in the AI programs, and to innovate.
… And abuses of AI
AI today is based on theft. AI companies gather much of their data from their users and from the internet. They don’t acknowledge their sources or pay royalties for the data. Their models aren’t regulated, and they modify the information enough so that copyright infringement is difficult to prove.
The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for stealing its content without permission or payment. Musicians, artists, and writers find themselves competing with AI rip-offs.
AI under capitalism will be used to displace workers. Robots are already used extensively in manufacturing, since assembly lines lend themselves to replacing human with mechanical motion.
AI allows robots to respond more flexibly and to be used for more tasks, such as retrieving items in warehouses and at some point, delivering them, although the problem of sharing the road with humans is far from solved.
Under socialism, this could lead to a welcome reduction in working hours. Under capitalism, it will lead to layoffs.
Use of AI further lowers the quality of services. Brick-and-mortar stores have closed, replaced by Amazon and other online retailers. In many of the stores that remain, knowledgeable salespeople have been replaced by scanners. Customer representatives have been replaced by web pages and automated telephone navigation of frequently asked questions. AI could be used to further reduce the possibility of speaking with a knowledgeable human being.
AI will tend to reduce human interaction generally, as for many purposes the only interaction available is with a computer. School closings and online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic set back education so much that many students haven’t recovered five years later.
The isolation of the pandemic led to more abuse of alcohol and drugs, domestic violence, and a sense of hopelessness that contributed to the high death rate among the elderly. Parents and researchers worry about children’s screen time. AI will tend to draw people further into their screens.
AI will subject people to more insidious advertising, marketing and other targeting, as tech companies accumulate more data about us and use it for more purposes. Not just sales and solicitations, but employment screening, doxing and worse.
AI has already increased the level of surveillance. Facial recognition permits the identification and tracking of people. License-plate readers aid the tracking of vehicles.
Analysis of communication metadata allows identification of groupings from friendship circles to fan clubs to activist organizations. AI transcription and translation make it possible to mine data that would have gone unnoticed in past years.
Repression can follow surveillance. The Trump administration has tried to ban “woke” words and information about diversity, climate change and social justice from federal websites. AI would allow surveillance of that kind to be extended to all electronic communication and, via listening devices, to much non-electronic communication too.
And it’s not just Trump. Palestine activists rightly fear surveillance and repression by liberal university administrations.
As mentioned above, AI requires immense computing power and immense quantities of energy, which increasingly contribute to the release of carbon dioxide and climate change. AI could contribute to environmental destruction indirectly, as agents of corporations and governments skew the data used in AI models to remove references to climate change, pollution and other factors they don’t want considered. “AI says…” could disguise their interests and ideologies via AI’s black box.
Warfare could become more common and more deadly, as AI-controlled drones remove the danger and moral responsibility of combat. The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb satirically depicts where this could lead.
In the film, the Soviet Union has created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent but has not announced it. General Jack D. Ripper, mistakenly thinking the U.S. is under attack, orders a nuclear strike, and Major T. J. “King” Kong contrives to deliver a bomb that sets off the doomsday machine. Fiction, but consistent with the logic of leaving decision-making to machines.
A working-class response
Socialists and other working-class activists should say clearly that AI, like many other technologies, is too useful and too dangerous to leave in the hands of capitalists.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Elon Musk’s X companies and all the other purveyors of AI should be expropriated and taken over by society.
Since the capitalist government can’t be trusted, workers’ control and a workers’ government are needed to ensure that AI serves human needs.
Socialists and other working-class activists should join campaigns against today’s abuses of AI. Musicians, artists, writers and other content producers should have control over what they produce.
AI methods and models should be open source. AI companies should be required to reveal the data on which they train their models, to receive permission to use it, and to pay royalties to the human beings who create it.
People should have the right to data privacy and the right to opt out of data collection. For this to be effective, the default should be to opt out. Contracts requiring data sharing should be banned. “Free” should not mean free in exchange for consenting to surveillance.
Workers whose jobs are threatened by automation, including AI, should have a say in any transition. Displaced workers should be guaranteed comparable jobs, education/training for jobs that interest them, or retirement at full pay. As the level of labor productivity rises, the workweek should be reduced at no loss in pay, and work should be divided equitably among those who work.
Corporate surveillance should be banned, and government collection of data should be limited to what’s needed for public health, safety and welfare. Legislatures and courts should oversee data collection, and reports of data collection should be public. The use of AI to target repression should be banned. Too much can be hidden in its black box.
Socialists and other working-class activists should oppose war generally and particularly oppose the incorporation of AI into the war machine. A war crime is a war crime, even if pulling the trigger is delegated to AI.
The purveyors of AI and their corporate and government clients will fight such limitations. As in other areas of class contention, their sabotage will show that more drastic action is needed.
—Against the Current, July/August 2025
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc237/ai-useful-tool-under-socialism-menace-under-capitalism/
1 In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations and data processing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
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9) Targeting Iran’s Leaders, Israel Found a Weak Link: Their Bodyguards
Israel was able to track the movements of key Iranian figures and assassinate them during the 12-day war this spring by following the cellphones carried by members of their security forces.
By Farnaz Fassihi, Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, Aug. 30, 2025
Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergmen have led coverage on the shadow war between Iran and Israel and investigated assassinations and covert operations on sea, land, air and in cyberspace. Mark Mazzetti has covered security topics for more than two decades.
A banner in Tehran showing pictures of Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists killed by Israeli strikes. Israel used its technological and intelligence capabilities to track and target key figures in Iran during the 12-day war in June. Majid Asgaripour/Wana News Agency, via Reuters
The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.
The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.
Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.
The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.
Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli air force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.
“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones, they did not take precautions seriously and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.
The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.
The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.
Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.
“Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision making,” Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.
Earlier this month, Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guards said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.
Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel’s success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October, but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.
From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a “decapitation team” reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.
At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called “Operation Red Wedding,” a play on a bloody “Game of Thrones” episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.
Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.
In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.
“The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data,” General Vahidi said. “They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations.”
From the Israeli side, Iran’s growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.
Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.
“Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that,” one Israeli defense official said.
Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.
Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.
The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guards called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guards.
General Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.
The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel’s wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.
But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with General Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.
Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Israel’s technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions — including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.
“We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole,” Mr. Safavi said in a telephone interview.
Iran’s minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations ahead of the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)
The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.
Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.
Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.
Israel has made killing Iran’s top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation’s nuclear program, even poisoning two young upcoming scientists.
As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.
In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called “the weapon group” — a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and American intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)
It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war’s early days this spring.
By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Mr. Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.
But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches present at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.
General Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where General Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.
Mr. Hajizadeh’s son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that “when my father wanted to discuss something important he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away.”
The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Mr. Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.
The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Mr. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.
Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Mr. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.
“There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won’t suffocate. Life hinges on one second,” Mr. Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials it would have created chaos in the country.
“People,” he said, “would have lost hope.”
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10) Houthis Say Prime Minister Is Killed in Israeli Attack
Ahmed al-Rahawi had led the Houthi cabinet in Yemen since 2024. His killing is unlikely to halt the Iranian-backed group’s missile attacks on Israel.
By Aaron Boxerman and Ismaeel Naar, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 30, 2025
Ahmed al-Rahawi was the prime minister of the Houthi-controlled government in Yemen. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Thursday in the capital, Sana. Credit...Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel killed the prime minister of the Houthi-controlled government in Yemen, Ahmed al-Rahawi, in an attack this past week that hit the capital, Sana, a Houthi spokesman said on Saturday. He was the most senior official in the Iranian-backed militant group to be killed in the conflict so far.
In a statement, the Houthi government said that a number of Mr. al-Rahawi’s colleagues were also killed and wounded, without naming them. It said Israel had attacked while they had gathered in Sana for a government workshop on Thursday afternoon.
The killing of Mr. al-Rahawi was unlikely to cripple the Houthis, given that his role in the group was largely symbolic and power is concentrated in the hands of its leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi. Yet it marked an escalation in Israel’s efforts to stop Houthi missile attacks.
Soon after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza, the Houthis began firing missiles and drones at Israeli cities. The group, which has ruled much of northwestern Yemen since a civil war a decade ago, says its attacks are in solidarity with Hamas and their Palestinian allies.
Houthi fighters have also fired on ships passing by in the Red Sea in what they call an effort to enforce a blockade on Israel, even though many of the boats targeted had no clear ties to the country. The attacks have disrupted global trade, often forcing ships to reroute.
Israel has responded by sending fighter jets hundreds of miles to Yemen to bombard power stations and ports in Houthi-controlled areas. But the sorties failed to quell the Houthis’ attacks, which the group says will continue until Israel ends its military campaign in Gaza.
Like Hamas, the Houthis are backed by Iran, Israel’s regional archnemesis. During the war in Gaza, Israel has fought several Iranian-supported armed groups around the Middle East, and engaged in 12 days of direct fighting with Iran in June.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, had threatened to assassinate senior Houthi officials before — including its leader Mr. al-Houthi — should they continue firing at Israel. But they had yet to successfully carry that out until this past week.
The Houthi government confirmed Mr. al-Rahawi’s death in a statement circulated on its official channels on Saturday. The statement vowed that the militant group would continue “our noble stance of supporting and aiding the people of Gaza.”
A longtime Houthi official, Mr. al-Rahawi had several roles in local government before being named to the powerful Supreme Political Council in 2019.
Under the Biden administration, a U.S.-led multinational coalition began its own campaign against the Houthis in Yemen in an effort to clamp down on their attacks on international shipping. President Trump escalated that campaign in mid-March, pledging that the Houthis would be “completely annihilated.”
But in May, Mr. Trump announced the end of U.S. bombings, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.”
Yemen, located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, has endured a bloody civil war since 2014 that led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Analysts say that Yemeni civilians have often paid the price for Israeli attacks, which have driven up the price of fuel and basic goods in the beleaguered country.
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11) The Interview
Arundhati Roy on How to Survive in a ‘Culture of Fear’
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Aug. 30, 2025
Nishanth Radhakrishnan and Zishaan A Latif for The New York Times
As we get older, we often struggle to understand the impact our parents have had on our lives. For the author Arundhati Roy, that process happened after her mother’s death in 2022 and resulted in her new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” which will be published on Sept. 2. “I couldn’t write anything else until I wrote this,” she told me. “I was shocked by the quality of my grief.”
The book is partly a chronicle of Roy’s complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. Mary’s bouts of “clawing lashing fury,” as Roy describes them, scarred both her and her brother. But there was another side to Mary: her work fighting for education and women’s rights in India, which Roy greatly admired. The book, though, is not just about Roy’s mother. It is also a search for the roots of Roy’s own evolution into a writer determined to expose the pain and suffering of the world.
Roy has spent her career writing about the rich lives and deep struggles of marginalized and oppressed people in India. Her Booker Prize-winning first novel, “The God of Small Things,” made her an international literary star when it came out in 1997 — a celebrity that made her very uncomfortable, she told me. While she did publish a second novel in 2017, Roy spent most of the years after the Booker Prize writing articles about a range of injustices, from India’s caste system to the treatment of Muslims, especially in the India-administered portion of Kashmir. Because of that work and her political activism, Roy has been targeted repeatedly by India’s government under the populist leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
When we spoke twice earlier this month, we started by talking about her mother and her memoir but ended up discussing the cost of speaking out and the parallels she sees between India under Modi and America under President Trump.
Your mother was a very complicated and difficult person, as you describe her. While I was reading your book, it reminded me of a quote by the writer Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Did you struggle with how much to reveal about your mother and your family? When you write something like this, you choose what you write and what you won’t write. But I know that this doesn’t work as literature if you’re trying to present some acceptable version of yourself or of her. Then you might as well not do it. But it wasn’t so much of a struggle because what was incredible about her was that there was a part of her that hammered me but then it also created me. There was this public part of her, which was so extraordinary, so I could never settle on what I really thought or felt. The entire range was a challenge to me as a writer: Can I put down this unresolvable character?
Let’s talk about that public part of her before we get to her as your mother. Tell me about who she was outside of your relationship. She belonged to the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, which is a tiny but privileged community that’s insulated from the wildness and the poverty of the rest of India. But she married outside the community and then got divorced, which was absolute taboo. She started a small school initially in the rented premises of the Rotary Club. I used to think of it as a sliding, folding school because we had to sweep up all the stubs and the coffee cups of the men and put out our furniture, and they would come the next day and mess it up again. Then ultimately she built this beautiful school, which still runs. I studied there too in the early years.
But what she’s equally well known for is that when she left her husband, my father, we lived in this tiny little cottage [in Tamil Nadu] that used to belong to her very cruel father, who was dead by then. Her mother and her older brother came there, and they asked us to leave the house and said that, according to the Travancore Christian Succession Act, a daughter can inherit a quarter of her father’s property or 5,000 rupees, whichever is less. So we were literally going to be turfed out onto this road in the middle of the night by my grandmother and my uncle. We ran to the lawyer, and he told us that law applies in Kerala but not in Tamil Nadu. So we weren’t kicked out, but she nurtured this humiliation and kept it to herself for a long time. When she could afford to, she filed an appeal to the Supreme Court challenging this law, calling it unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court actually struck it down with retrospective effect and made it equal inheritance for everybody.
So there’s that side of your mother. You start the book, though, discussing how you were raised by her. Your early life was one of hardship, poverty, instability and abuse, both verbal and physical. I should ask before we continue, is “abusive” the word that feels right to you in describing your relationship to her? I flinch. I didn’t use any of these words in the book. If it was a single thing that one was dealing with — if it was just abuse or just violence or just one thing that you could settle on and decide how to feel about it, that’s one thing. But I had a schism in me very early. Even as a young child, I could see that her anger against me and my brother was somehow connected to what she herself was going through. So one half of me was taking the hits and the other half was taking notes. That, in a sense, made me a writer very early, where you’re trying to understand, Why is she doing this to me?
Some of the moments that were hardest to read about were when she would berate you, belittle you. You tell a story about being on a plane for the first time when you were about 6 years old. Can you recount that story?My mother had an older sister who was very different from the rest of the family. She was married to a pilot who worked in Indian Airlines, and she had a proper house and a proper husband and proper children. Because this uncle of mine was a pilot, we had free tickets to get on a plane, which we had never been on. And on the plane, I asked my mother how come her sister was so much thinner than her. My mother was a very severe asthmatic, and at the time she was on steroids and had become very overweight. She just turned on me in a fury and mimicked me. She had this way of mimicking my baby way of speaking, and that used to just rip through me. And then she said, By the time you’re my age, you’ll be three times my size. And, of course, very quickly, she said, I’m your mother and your father and I love you double. So you forgive her, and yet you’re shredded. That was the constant thing that you had to manage, that something would tear you up and then stitch you back together, then tear you up, then stitch you back together.
You write that her mimicking you and calling you names made you feel that “I swirled like water down a sink and disappeared.” I think that anyone who has had a difficult parent, which I have, can identify with that line. Did you think that you had to disappear when she was attacking you? Yeah. She was the only parent and also the only person in a society and in a family that makes it clear that you’re not part of it. So she’s all you have. I mean, there are no relatives. There are no neighbors. There’s just nobody. So I welded myself to her when I was very young. And then exploded apart when I was older.
She had these terrible attacks of asthma, and she used to keep telling me, I’m going to die, and you better figure out what you’re going to do. Who’s going to look after you? And so I became like her lung. I used to breathe for her. My body was an extension of her body. And then when I was 16 and I went to architecture school and I walked into those lawns and watched all the students, I knew that I would be fine. I would be able to work. I would be able to survive. I wouldn’t die if she died. I didn’t have to breathe for her. And she sensed that the valiant organ child of hers, the lung, suddenly was breathing for itself. That generated a whole lot of hostility. But I don’t want this to end up like some litany of horrors about her because as I keep saying in the book, I had huge admiration for her too.
You talk about the battles that she was fighting even within the school, how she taught women and men to look at gender dynamics in a completely different way. You tell a story about her making the boys parade around in bras because one of them had disrespected one of the girls. Not parade around, but she learned that they were making fun of the girls because they’d started wearing bras. So she said, Go to my cupboard and get my bra. And then she showed them. She said, This is a bra, this is what it’s for, and if it excites you so much, you can keep mine. It changes the pH balance of what goes on between boys and girls when the girls know that there’s someone who’s got their back.
In the book you describe India as the land of son worshipers. You also describe how harsh your mother was with your brother in particular. She would call him a male chauvinist pig when he was only a child. When he was a teenager, she said to him, “You’re ugly and stupid, you should kill yourself.” You write that the way she treated him was like she was punishing him for the sins of the world, and that complicated your own views of feminism. How did that play out for you? My brother is one of the most amazing people that I know. My brother’s the one that asked me, “I don’t understand how you can be so upset about her death after everything that she did to us.” And I understand that it’s very puzzling for him and perhaps even hurtful that I don’t hate her. I think it’s because I see that her public battles were making space for women in ways that included making space for me. But at the same time, just because you’re a feminist doesn’t make you a great person. Feminism doesn’t have only to do with women’s rights. It has to do with a way of looking at the world in which men and women are equal and men and women are respectful of each other. It doesn’t mean disrespecting a lovely man, which is what I saw happening with my brother. It affected me deeply.
What have the conversations around this book been like? Has he read it? He has read it, and it was hard initially for him to read, because maybe he thought he had put it behind him. But then he wrote to me saying, I’m laughing and crying and I can’t breathe and if I die, it’ll be your fault. He did say, I don’t understand why you feel so much about her. I said I can’t hate her because there is so much of her in me, I’d have to hate myself.
There is this other moment that really struck me. You and your brother are being sent to boarding school. And you write that your brother got a report from school that said “average student,” and your mother beat him with a ruler until it broke. And in the morning, she turned to you and gave you a hug because your report card had been good and said that you were brilliant. And you wrote, “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.” That stopped me in my tracks. I think the sentence after that is, “If you stop to think about it, it’s true, someone is.” When you get applauded and rewarded and everybody claps and you know that somebody you love and somebody quiet has been beaten — to me that expands far beyond my brother and me. It expands into the country that I live in now or the world. I might be a writer with whatever is conventionally known as success. But the things I write about and the people that I write about are being beaten, even as we speak today. They are being starved in Gaza, they are being broken, they’re being occupied. And so what does it mean when you are applauded, when your heart belongs in the whole world?
When you wrote that section and were thinking about that incident and how it applies to your life, was it a sense of discovery? No, I don’t think that the process of writing this made me understand it deeper. I wrote it because I understood it. In order to survive or to make sense of my life, I’ve had to think and think and think about all these things. When I won the Booker Prize, there was more than one half of me that was thinking, What does it mean to be this best-selling novelist in this country where people can’t read, in this country hurtling toward what we have now? So there was hardly a moment for me to feel great about myself before things started to unravel quickly. Even the celebration of me had this whole nationalistic fervor, which I despised at that time, in ’97. So I was very quickly kicked off that pedestal, and I kicked myself off it too. I always have this feeling that those of us who’ve been very unsafe as children, we seek out the unsafe. We seek out the lack of security, and if you have security, you blow it up.
You’ve risked your security many times in your career. You are under legal threat in India for your writing and things that you’ve said. What do you think the role of writers and creators is at a moment when there is censorship and people are trying to shut you down? Whether it’s in the Soviet Union or whether it is in East Germany or in the darkest places and times, writers have managed to survive. Their work has survived. For me it’s very important to understand that I just can’t keep striking the same note again and again. You have to change it up, you have to experiment, you have to insist that your work is not just a reaction to what’s happening to you. Your work is a thing in and of itself, a way of positing another vision of the world. And that’s a challenge because you can’t do it as a manifesto, hitting everybody on the head with some ideological hammer. You’ve got to do it beautifully. Somebody told me the other day, “Oh, the reason I like your writing is because you write as though they’ve already killed you. [Laughs.] You don’t hold back.”
Just in the past few days, the Indian regional government of Kashmir has banned one of your books. The book is “Azadi,” which was published in 2020. It’s about the fight in India-controlled Kashmir and the concepts behind freedom and authoritarianism more broadly. The directive said that your book and others — yours wasn’t the only one that was targeted — would “deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism.” Why do you think your book was included in that list, and what’s your response to that more broadly? My response is to not respond, because I don’t know. It sounds like some list they got out of ChatGPT. You never know why these things happen when they happen. When they target me now, I just don’t say anything, because you never know whether they really mean it or it’s just some side game to distract from something. I have no idea, so I’m not really going to say much about it.
You are currently under threat of arrest in India for comments you made about Kashmir in 2010. Do you feel comfortable explaining your position? And can you tell me a little bit about the status of that legal case? I really don’t want to talk about it, actually, because it just increases the risk of something being taken out of context and something blowing up. It’s dormant right now, so I just let it be.
Even the manner in which you’re responding, which is that you do not want to address this because of the fear of legal repercussions, what does that say? Well, I think in America you’re beginning to head in that direction. Ours started a long time ago, and one has to learn how to navigate it. And the reason that I don’t talk about it is because I would much rather write what I want to write than have some controversy about something you say off the cuff. It’s like they’re always trying to trip people up and trying to prevent you from thinking clearly. This culture of fear is everywhere here. People are arrested for things they say on Facebook, on Twitter, or what they don’t say. In the U.S., it seems new to you, but we have been living with this, and it’s increasingly becoming normalized. It’s a very disturbing situation, especially for Muslims, where it doesn’t stop with just court cases and jail. It goes on to lynching and murder and social boycotts and economic boycotts and homes being bulldozed. You meet people who have stories that you can’t look away from.
You touched on this a little, and so I would love to hear your thoughts on how you view parallels between the Hindu-nationalist movement in India and the MAGA movement here in the United States. There are a lot of parallels. One of the first things that happened when Modi came to power was demonetization — this direct hit on the economy, where he said 500-rupee notes were illegal, like, overnight. If you look at the attack on citizenship, the attack on universities, the attack on students, the attack on Rohingyas, the continuous uncertainty, the fact that you might be ambushed by anything at any time — it’s so similar that you wonder, is there a playbook or is it just osmotic authoritarian behavior? The ruling party is confused with the government and all of it is confused with one man. So you’re seeing that in the U.S., and I look at it in shock. You thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place. But clearly there isn’t a way of handling someone who’s completely out of control. The way statisticians are being fired for giving out figures that the authoritarian doesn’t agree with — same thing here, you can’t believe any of the government figures on economics because everything that doesn’t suit the ruling establishment is dismissed, it’s thrown away, and a new picture is put in its place.
The one big difference is that in India, the mainstream media has completely compromised. It’s not just rolled over, it is actually an organ of the authoritarian state. It’s actually calling for people’s arrest or making up lies. And of course America is sitting on top of a crumbling world. Whatever Trump does affects the whole world, whereas here, it just affects this country.
Why do you think authoritarian leaders go after people like you, people who deal in ideas? When you said there’s a playbook, we’ve seen that in places all around the world. From time immemorial.
But as someone who’s the subject of that kind of censure, I’m wondering why you think it happens. They are terrified of people who they feel can communicate, not just cerebrally, but emotionally. However small they are, and even however little access they have to the mainstream or to the thundering, pulpit-thumping television anchors, they know there are some people who people eventually do listen to. They know who is read. They know who is loved. They also know who is not invested in the things that everyone else is invested in — fame and money and awards. There are a lot of people like that who they know will not bow down. We are just people who look at things and say it how it is.
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12) An ‘Economic Storm’ of Crises Is Battering Afghanistan
Afghanistan was on a timid recovery path. But four years after the Taliban retook power, it has been badly hit by aid cuts and an inflow of two million Afghans forced out of Iran and Pakistan.
By Elian Peltier, Yaqoob Akbary and Safiullah Padshah, Aug. 30, 2025
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Herat Province, at the border with Iran.
In Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Ghullam Ali Hussaini used to make $6 a day as an Afghan construction worker in southern Iran, enough to rent a small house and provide for his mother and sick brother who lived with him.
But the job, the house and the certainty of three meals a day are all gone.
Mr. Hussaini and his family were deported back to Afghanistan last month, among the two million Afghans who have been expelled from neighboring countries and whose return is pushing Afghanistan’s teetering economy to the brink.
“I’m not at peace because I couldn’t find a house for myself,” Mr. Hussaini said as he sipped on green tea at a relative’s home, where his family had taken temporary refuge after a nearly 1,500 mile journey from Iran.
Four years into Taliban rule, Afghanistan is being hit head-on by two major crises, sending the people of one of the world’s poorest countries further into a seemingly endless cycle of misery, hunger and displacements.
The first crisis is the mass return of Afghans, most of whom had been living in Iran or Pakistan. A tidal wave of xenophobia and political pressure in those countries has led to a campaign of deportations and forced returns. Millions of Afghan citizens are returning without jobs — many do not have homes, either — to a country where more than half of its 42 million people are already in need of humanitarian assistance.
The second is a sudden drop in foreign aid, primarily since the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development this year, that has already forced the closure of more than 400 health care facilities and left hundreds of thousands of Afghans without consistent access to food.
Rising unemployment is adding to the burden and hitting even those who once had secure jobs. Running short on cash and deprived of foreign aid, the Taliban have been laying off thousands of their own government employees and defense personnel in recent months.
“These crises have a cascading impact on an economy that was already reeling from pretty bad years,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, an Afghanistan analyst with the International Crisis Group.
Peter Chaudhry, a Kabul-based policy specialist at the United Nations Development Program, described it as “a perfect economic storm in many ways.”
The crises are hitting Afghanistan just as its economy was slowly bouncing back.
It had contracted by a quarter after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, but it grew by 2.5 percent last year.
Tax revenues and mining royalties have been on the rise. Foreign tourists are trickling back to visit the remains of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan or snap pictures on the hills overlooking Kabul. The capital looks like a gigantic construction site, with buildings mushrooming and new roads being built.
Some foreign countries and companies have also committed to helping Afghanistan’s fledgling economy. In recent weeks, the Taliban signed a $10 billion plan with an Emirati-based energy company to produce electricity in the country. This year, China vowed to increase imports of pine nuts, pomegranates, precious stones and minerals from Afghanistan, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China visited Kabul this month.
Russia’s recent recognition of the Taliban has brought hope among Afghan officials that more countries might follow and bring badly needed financial support to their government.
But the recent growth has been too modest to translate into improved living standards for most Afghans, the World Bank has said. And while Afghanistan received on average more than $4 billion annually in aid and development assistance from 2001 to 2021, today’s gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2011.
Three-quarters of Afghan households lack secure access to basic needs like food, sanitation, water, health care or decent housing, according to the United Nations Development Program. Some 3.5 million children under 5 are malnourished, according to UNICEF, and this year had the sharpest surge in child malnutrition ever recorded in the country.
Severe work restrictions in Afghanistan are compounding the emergency. Afghans had faced limited access to the job markets in Iran and Pakistan, but both men and women were allowed to work — as hairdressers, gardeners, herders or construction workers, among other jobs.
By contrast, drastic restrictions on female employment in Afghanistan have deprived half of the country’s work force of most job opportunities.
Elaha, 19, worked in a beauty salon in Iran, but she has been sitting at home since she was deported back to Afghanistan with her family in June. Her brother and father, both construction workers in Iran, have yet to find jobs. “We’re just waiting,” she said.
Elaha and some other Afghans spoke on the condition of anonymity or asked that only their first names be used, out of fear of retribution.
The return of many who had been living abroad also cut off vital remittances. Many in the Afghan diaspora had been supporting their families back home.
One morning this spring, Naqibullah Ebrahimi trudged across the border between Iran and Afghanistan with a suitcase full of clothes. In Isfahan, a city in central Iran, he was earning $300 a month at a factory making chemicals for air-conditioners and fire hoses. It was tough work, and he was inhaling chemicals even through a mask. But he was fed and lodged for free and could send almost all of his earnings to his mother in Afghanistan, he said.
That assistance has now vanished.
Mr. Ebrahimi was deported back to Afghanistan after Iranian police officers raided the factory in May and arrested all the Afghan workers. More than a dozen returning Afghans said that they had been unable to withdraw the cash they had in Iranian banks or to collect their deposits from landlords.
The humanitarian response to the forced exodus is a trickle of what it should be, aid workers say, and they fear it will get worse when winter comes. This month, Pakistan’s government said it would seek to expel an additional 1.3 million Afghan refugees.
The Afghan authorities have vowed to build dozens of townships across the country, but none of them have been completed yet. In overcrowded Kabul, landlords are expelling their tenants to make space for their own relatives returning from Iran.
Abdul Rahman Habib, a spokesman for the Taliban-run Ministry of Economy, called the inflow of returnees “a serious issue” but said they could help rebuild the country. He urged foreign companies to invest in Afghanistan.
The country’s destitute government has been cutting salaries and has announced plans to cut 90,000 positions in the civilian and defense sectors.
An employee in a provincial finance department said he could only afford a third of what he previously spent on food, following a salary cut. A recently laid off commander in the armed forces, now working as a taxi driver, said he had reduced the number of daily meals for his family to two.
Thousands of additional troops and security personnel have been put on “active reserve,” meaning that they are no longer being paid. “Even though they told us that they will recruit us in the future, I don’t see any hope,” Mohammad, a former technician in the military, said about the Taliban.
Upon their return to Kabul from Iran, Mr. Hussaini, the former construction worker, and his family were transferred to a transit camp in a nearby province. But they were asked to leave after a week to make space for new returnees.
All three went back to Kabul and moved into a tiny room in a relative’s house. Weeks later, they moved again, this time to a 190-square-foot room that they are sharing with a neighbor.
But that arrangement may not last, either, Mr. Hussaini said. The room belongs to another Afghan who is living in Iran. He has told Mr. Hussaini that if he were to be deported, he would need it back.
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