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Urgent medical alert – Free Mumia

Mumia’s eyesight endangered

freemumia.com

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

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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky

By Monica Hill

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 Kagarlitsky

We, 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 Kagarlitsky

https://freeboris.info

The 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
Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law. Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141

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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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Articles

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1) There Can’t Be Peace Without Equality

There can’t be equality without socialism

By Bonnie Weinstein, Sept/Oct 2025

https://socialistviewpoint.org

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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2) Artificial Intelligence

Useful tool under socialism, menace under capitalism

By Peter Solenberger, Sept/Oct 2025

https://socialistviewpoint.org/sepoct_25/sepoct_25_18.html

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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3) 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/israel-iran-assassination.html

A huge banner showing the faces of those who were killed in Israeli air strikes.

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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4) 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

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/world/middleeast/houthi-prime-minister-killed-israel.html

Wearing a suit and tie and black and white keffiyeh scarf, Ahmed al-Rahawi sits in front of a row of microphones.

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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5) The Interview

Arundhati Roy on How to Survive in a ‘Culture of Fear’

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Aug. 30, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/magazine/arundhati-roy-modi-trump-interview.html

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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6) 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/world/asia/afghanistan-economy-deportation.html

Two men sit on the edge of a stone wall overlooking a city.

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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7) In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.

By Erica L. Green Aug. 31, 2025

Erica L. Green covers the White House. She reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/us/politics/trump-federal-work-force-black-women.html

Dr. Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, was dismissed after a 36-year career as part of the Trump administration’s plan to drastically reduce the size of the federal work force. Jared Soares for The New York Times

When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation.

She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target.

But her 35-year- career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she had earned the respect of officials from both parties. Surely, she thought, the office tasked with tracking the achievement of the nation’s students could not fall under the president’s definition of “divisive and harmful” or “woke.”

But for the first time in her career, Dr. Carr’s data points didn’t add up.

On a February afternoon, a security guard showed up to her office just as she was preparing to hold a staff meeting. Fifteen minutes later, the staff watched in tears and disbelief as she was escorted out of the building.

“It was like being prosecuted in front of my family — my work family,” Dr. Carr said in an interview. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash, the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

While tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs in Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to shrinking the federal work force, experts say the cuts disproportionately affect Black employees — and Black women in particular. Black women make up 12 percent of the federal work force, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.

For generations, the federal government has served as a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who were shut out of jobs because of discrimination. The federal government has historically offered the population more job stability, pay equity and career advancement than the private sector. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government aggressively enforced affirmative action in hiring and anti-discrimination rules that Mr. Trump has sought to roll back.

The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s overhaul of the federal government as an effort to right-size the work force and to restore a merit-based approach to advancement. In July, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could continue with mass firings across the federal government.

In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Trump was “ushering in an economy that will empower all Americans, just as it did during his first term.” He added that “the obsession with divisive D.E.I. initiatives reverses years of strides toward genuine equality.”

“The policies of the past that artificially bloated the public sector with wasteful jobs are over,” he said. “The Trump administration is committed to advancing policies that improve the lives of all Americans.”

But economists say that Black women are being hit especially hard by Mr. Trump’s policies, which are also rippling through the private sector as corporations have abandoned their diversity, equity and inclusion practices and related jobs, many of which were held by Black women.

The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during this five-month period, according to an analysis by Katica Roy, a gender economist.

Experts attribute those job losses, in large part, to Mr. Trump’s cuts to federal agencies where Black women are highly concentrated.

White women saw a job increase of 142,000, and Hispanic women of 176,000, over the same time period. White men saw the largest increase among groups, 365,000, over the same time period.

Ms. Roy said that with the exception of the pandemic, Black women have never seen such staggering losses in employment. And over the last decade, the experiences of that population have consistently signaled what is to come for others.

“Black women are the canaries in the coal mine, the exclusion happens to them first,” Ms. Roy said. “And if any other cohort thinks it’s not coming for them, they’re wrong. This is a warning, and it’s a stark one.”

‘Wiped Out in One Day’

During the first two weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Education Department began its first wave of firings. It was a preview of what would unfold across the government in the following months.

The department, more than a quarter of whose work force was Black women, suspended dozens of people whose job titles and official duties had no connection to D.E.I. Their only apparent exposure to D.E.I. initiatives came in the form of trainings encouraged by their managers — including Mr. Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Denise Joseph, who worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, was in the first group of people notified on Jan. 29 that they had been placed on administrative leave. She was devastated. “I know my worth is more than D.E.I.,” she said. “I know I’m more than what they’re saying.”

Dr. Joseph had spent a decade at the Education Department, helping to support grantmaking for minority-serving institutions. She worked her way up to a six-figure pay grade and was often the only Black person in leadership meetings.

“My career is an extension of who I am,” she said. “And it was all wiped out in one day.”

Kissy Chapman-Thaw, who also worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, believes she too was caught in the dragnet of employees placed on leave for participating in the department’s “diversity change agent” class years ago.

She has no regrets. She found the class valuable in understanding her colleagues, and the concepts that Mr. Trump has determined were insulting to white people.

“I saw white privilege from my side,” she said. “But I never understood it from their side.”

Ms. Chapman-Thaw, who has multiple sclerosis, joined the department after her 12-year teaching career became untenable because of her health.

During her time at the department, she struggled with mounting medical bills. She struggled to braid her daughter’s hair. But she never struggled to do her job. The fact that the department came to the conclusion that she could not, perhaps because of her race or her disability, has left her bewildered some days.

“The assumption, that’s what hurts,” she said. “I have so many things I can check off, it’s hard for me to know which one they can use against me.”

The Education Department denied that its cuts targeted any particular group.

“The department’s staffing decisions, including its organizational restructuring, were made without regard to employees’ race, gender or political affiliation,” Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, said in a statement. “Suggestions otherwise are unfounded and only serve to sow division.”

As Mr. Trump has tried to eliminate what he sees as a bloated bureaucracy full of deep-state dissidents and “D.E.I. hires,” the Office of Personnel Management has taken steps to erase publicly available demographic data for the federal work force.

In a May memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” the head of O.P.M. told agencies to “cease disseminating information regarding the composition of the agency’s work force based on race, sex, color, religion or national origin.” The office, which is the government’s human resources arm, said it would still collect the data for litigation and other statutorily required reports.

The data, advocates say, has been invaluable to providing insight into whether the work force reflects the country, as well as granular data like pay and promotion disparities for different groups. Without that information, they said, the full impact of Mr. Trump’s work force cuts won’t be known for years.

But a report published by the National Women’s Law Center, which compiled and analyzed the now-deleted O.P.M. data, showed that government agencies that were targeted for the deepest cuts had employed the highest percentages of women and people of color. Both populations also made up large portions of independent agencies, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that Mr. Trump has targeted, the report found.

According to a New York Times tracker of Mr. Trump’s cuts, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the work force, such as the Department of Education and U.S.A.I.D., were targeted for the largest work force reductions or complete elimination. Black women made up nearly a quarter of the work force in agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service that also saw deep reductions, according to a Times analysis.

In his second term, Mr. Trump has been aggressive in removing high-profile leaders of color, in particular, often disparaging them as incompetent, corrupt or D.E.I. hires.

Among the Black female leaders the Trump administration has targeted are Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve; Carla Hayden, the first Black and female librarian of Congress; and Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

“This will be a model for what happens across this nation,” said Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department employees. “If the model employer, the federal government, is unilaterally terminating high-performing Black employees, what hope is there?”

A complaint filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board against Mr. Trump was more pointed. The A.C.L.U. and a group of employment attorneys alleged that among other things, the dismissals “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Kelly Dermody, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said that of the workers who sought legal help to challenge their dismissals, 80 percent were people of color, and the majority were Black women.

“When an organization goes after really, really highly competent, singularly great, Black women — the message it sends, the terror it sends to every other professional woman, person of color, really is so profound,” she said.

She came to a clear conclusion:

“This is an attack on Black women — fully,” she said.

Shock, Followed by Forced Retirement

On a rainy day in April, Dr. Carr was still coming to terms with her forced retirement.

She recalled there was one person who preserved her dignity on the day she was placed on administrative leave. The security guard, a young Black man, was “polite” as he escorted her out, she said. He referred to her as “Dr. Carr,” in a show of respect.

During an interview at her home in Maryland, she pointed out the things that remind her of perseverance. A photo of her ancestors, who dressed up for a photo outside their slave house. Intricate pieces of art by her sister, who helped integrate her town’s school in North Carolina. A prominent photo of her late mother, who protested at lunch counters during the civil rights movement.

“Gaining equality has always driven our family,” she said.

Dr. Carr said she makes no apologies for bringing an equity lens to her work. It helped identify growth among the lowest-performing students, and pinpoint persistent gaps in the “Nation’s Report Card,” considered the “gold standard” of education data. When she delivered the often sobering news about the country’s academic performance to each secretary, they all shared the same concerns.

“What we do is about mission,” Dr. Carr said, “it is not about party.”

The department declined to comment specifically on why Dr. Carr had been relieved of her duties. She was given no reason other than that she served at the pleasure of the president, and it was Mr. Trump’s prerogative to terminate her.

In a statement, the department said that it had conducted a review of contracts and grants in the office, and determined that contractors were being overpaid. Officials said they had reduced the cost of the National Assessment of Educational Progress by more than 25 percent, which it said would save nearly $185 million over five years.

Less than two weeks after she was dismissed, she saw that the department had fired nearly all of her staff at the National Center for Education Statistics. She’s now less concerned about how she lost her job, and more about the nation losing track of how students are faring.

Dr. Carr never dwelled much on being the first Black female commissioner. But she has accepted that she will now add another first to her résumé. Dr. Carr is the first-ever commissioner in the history of the office to be pushed out by a president.

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8) A judge temporarily blocks U.S. efforts to deport Guatemalan children.

By Miriam Jordan and Ali Watkins, August 31, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/31/us/trump-news#trump-deportations-judge-guatemala-children

An airplane with “U.S. AIR FORCE” on the side on a runway. A U.S. Air Force plane that was used to deport migrants in Guatemala City in January. Credit...Daniele Volpe for The New York Times

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting Guatemalan children back to their home country, and scheduled an emergency hearing on Sunday to determine whether the deportations were legal.

Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued the order after the National Immigration Law Center filed an emergency request in federal court to stop the deportations. The lawyers argued that the government had violated the children’s right to due process and had ignored special protections for minors who cross the border alone.

The court forbade the administration from deporting the children, who are between the ages of 10 and 16, for 14 days. An emergency hearing was scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

The order could temporarily hamstring the federal government’s attempts to send back hundreds of other unaccompanied minors whom it said had entered the country illegally from Guatemala.

While the ruling was temporary, it marked the second setback for President Trump’s immigration policies since Friday, when another judge blocked the administration from carrying out rapid deportations far from the border, a cornerstone of the White House’s immigration policy.

The lawsuit was filed after staff members at shelters holding the children were notified by email that they should prepare some children to be sent back to Guatemala. Lawyers representing some of the children received a similar email.

In its 25-page complaint, the National Immigration Law Center said that the children had active cases before immigration courts across the country, and that their repatriation would violate the law and Constitution. It called the government’s actions “unlawful and reckless.”

Some of the children, identified in the lawsuit only by their initials, have expressed a fear of returning to Guatemala to judges in immigration courts where they have pending cases.

The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States has plummeted since Mr. Trump took office for his second term this year. But the migrant children have posed a particular challenge to the Trump administration because they are entitled to special protections.

Hundreds of thousands of children, mainly from Central America, have crossed the southern border into the United States in the last decade, often seeking to join friends or family members. Many of the minors have won the right to remain in the United States permanently by proving that they were abandoned or persecuted in their home countries.

The move to repatriate the Guatemalan children has the backing of the Guatemalan government. On Friday, Guatemala’s minister of foreign affairs, Carlos Ramíro Martínez, said that his country had been coordinating with the United States and expected to receive more than 600 minors, following a plan outlined by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, on a recent visit to Guatemala.

Mr. Martínez stressed that his country hoped that the returns would be carried out “in a gradual and planned manner.”

Most of the children whom the government intends to remove from the United States have been living in government shelters, where they remain until they are released to sponsors or guardians.

Lawyers fighting the removal of unaccompanied minors have cited the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which provides unique protections for unaccompanied minors seeking refuge in the United States, including the opportunity to have their cases adjudicated by a court.

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9) Beaten and Choked at a U.N. Mission, Then Arrested by the N.Y.P.D.

Two brothers went to the Egyptian Mission in Manhattan to protest Egypt’s role in keeping aid from reaching Gaza. Video of the violence, which involved mission security guards, has incited rage.

By Maia Coleman, Aug. 31, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/nyregion/nypd-egyptian-mission-brothers-arrested.html

Yasin El Sammak poses for a photograph wearing a green button-up shirt over a gray shirt. Yasin El Sammak was whipped repeatedly with a chain and strangled with his kaffiyeh during the altercation at the mission, his father said. Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times

All at once, four security guards descend on the two brothers, shoving them through the front doors of the Egyptian Mission to the United Nations.

Through the glass doors, the glint of a metal chain is briefly visible in one of the guard’s hands. He pulls back his arm and swings wildly at the older of the brothers. Then he does it again.

“Bring somebody,” a voice calls out urgently. “They’re beating the kids with the chain.”

The scene, captured in videos recorded by one of the brothers and an activist, unfolded on Aug. 20 at the Egyptian diplomatic outpost on East 44th Street in Manhattan. The brothers, Yasin El Sammak, 22, and Ali Elsamak, 15 — who spell their last names differently — had been on the street outside the building as part of a protest demanding that Egypt do more to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza.

They had come to record the event, according to their father, Akram Elsamak. But he said they were soon confronted by the guards, who dragged them into the front lobby, beating the older brother to the ground and choking and manhandling the teenager.

New York police officers who were called to assist arrested the brothers, charging Mr. El Sammak with assault and Ali with assault and strangulation, even as the snippets of video and two separate accounts of the events do not indicate that either assaulted the guards.

According to the police, the brothers had tried to chain the doors of the mission, sparking the events. Husam Kaid, the activist behind the videos, said in an interview that in fact he had been the one who had tried to chain the doors.

This week, the Police Department said that it was still investigating the incident, adding that officers had made the arrests based on accounts from the mission guards.

Brad Weekes, a department spokesman, said that the brothers were working with the department to file an assault claim and had successfully filed a police report claiming they had been unlawfully imprisoned by the security guards. “This is still under active investigation and no one has been convicted of any crime,” Mr. Weekes said.

The violent confrontation came amid a wave of protests in recent weeks outside Egyptian Embassies in several countries by people demanding that the country do more to open the gates of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, a critical alley for humanitarian aid to the enclave. The Gaza side of the crossing has been closed since Israel invaded Rafah in May 2024 and seized the crossing as part of its war with Hamas, effectively shutting out anything that comes from the Egyptian side.

The video of the incident in New York, which spread rapidly on social media, triggered immediate fury from critics who called it an act of repression by the Egyptian government on American soil.

In a statement on Thursday, Tamim Khallaf, an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman, said the recent protests in New York and elsewhere had “nothing to do with freedom of expression” and were instead a “deliberate attempt” to obstruct diplomatic business.

The episode in New York has also shined a light on several recent cases where other foreign governments have used embassies and diplomatic outposts to crack down on dissent, both among members of their own diasporas and more broadly.

In 2017, supporters and security men for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey attacked protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., sending nine people to the hospital. More recently in New York, the Chinese government, which has a long history of stifling opposition abroad, has been accused of spying on dissidents and, according to reporting by The New York Times, its consulate in Manhattan has enlisted community groups to defeat local politicians who oppose China’s authoritarian government.

“We definitely see a trend of foreign authoritarian governments being emboldened to do things that perhaps they thought they couldn’t get away with before,” said Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School. “There are just a lot more links with the West among a lot of foreign dictatorships, and I think it leads to a lot more of these cases.”

The events that led to the brothers’ arrest remain somewhat murky, with relatives and law enforcement officials offering differing accounts.

According to Mr. Kaid, the activist, he had come to the mission with a plan to chain its door and had asked Yasin El Sammak to record the action. Mr. El Sammak brought his brother along, Mr. Kaid said.

The altercation began when a mission guard approached Mr. El Sammak and began to yell at him, Mr. Kaid said. Soon after, another mission official grabbed Ali, the younger brother, and pinned him in a doorway, Mr. Kaid and Akram Elsamak, the brothers’ father, said.

Mr. El Sammak tried to intervene. Speaking in Arabic, he asked the guards to let his brother go and eventually crossed a barricade to reach him. In a video recording, Mr. Kaid can be heard making what appears to be a 911 call, while a guard in a black dress shirt holds the metal chain in his hand.

Moments later, the guards grabbed the brothers and hustled them 30 feet to the doors of the mission, their father said. Once inside, it was a flash of activity: Mr. El Sammak was whipped repeatedly with the chain and then brought to the floor and strangled with his kaffiyeh, his father said. Ali was in put a chokehold, but tried to wriggle free and get to his brother.

Police officers arrived seconds later and arrested the brothers, bringing them in handcuffs to the 17th Precinct and charging Mr. El Sammak with assault and Ali with assault and strangulation, the police said.

In Mr. Kaid’s video, Mr. El Sammak can be seen on the floor, putting his hands up as an officer sweeps into the building.

According to the police account, the brothers had bypassed the barricades outside the building. The police said the mission’s security personnel had told them that Ali had choked a guard and that Mr. El Sammak had begun fighting one. The guards had then brought the brothers inside and the authorities were called to assist, the police said.

Mr. Kaid, the brothers’ father and a lawyer for Mr. El Sammak all say the brothers are innocent.

“My sons did not raise their hand, did not even push nobody,” Akram Elsamak said during an interview this week. “Those kids they grew up in this country. They have right to speak,” he said. “How they can arrest two American citizens protesting peacefully?”

Mr. Elsamak said his sons were held in custody overnight and that he was prohibited from visiting them at the precinct. He didn’t see either one until after their court appearances the next day.

The arrests, and the violence that preceded it, have raised alarm in New York City. The day after the incident, Within Our Lifetime, a pro-Palestinian group that has been picketing the United Nations’ headquarters daily while officials convene there this month, announced a protest in response. In a release, the group called the situation “an escalation of repression by the Sisi regime.”

But the controversy has also taken hold in Egypt, where anger over the government’s cooperation with Israel has been building. The video from New York spread around social media in Egypt, where the government’s restrictions on political activity make protests or open calls for accountability all but impossible.

Egypt has spent much of the war trying to stomp out accusations that it is complicit in Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has horrified Egyptians and other Arabs and prompted calls from many Egyptians for their own government to do more to confront Israel.

Egypt has been a staging ground for moving aid to Gaza throughout the war. Aid officials have said that Israel’s severe restrictions on supplies, not Egyptian obstacles, have pushed Gaza into famine. But activists have demanded that the Egyptian government do more, launching a highly publicized march on Rafah this year and staging embassy protests in recent weeks.

The activism has evidently rankled Egyptian officials. State news media and prominent pro-government talk show hosts have emphasized Egypt’s role in facilitating aid deliveries and lionized Egyptian officials for trying to mediate a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.

But in a video that circulated on Egyptian social media this month, the foreign minister, Badr Abdellaty, can be heard telling Egypt’s ambassador to the Netherlands that embassy staff members should “drag” protesters inside the embassy and “mess them up” before handing them over to the police. The Times could not independently verify the video.

In a statement, responding to questions about the incident in New York and the video, Mr. Khallaf, the Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman, did not deny the video’s legitimacy, but said the government expected its officials to keep its embassies safe.

“Just as how Egyptian authorities uphold their international legal obligations in affording security and safety to foreign embassies and their staff in Egypt, we expect nothing less for our diplomats and embassy staff abroad,” he said.

In New York, it was not immediately clear whether members of the Egyptian Mission’s security staff could face charges. Under international law, members of foreign diplomatic missions and consular posts receive certain immunities from local prosecution and law enforcement.

During Mr. El Sammak’s arraignment, the most serious charge against him was downgraded from a felony to a lower level misdemeanor, and he was released without having to pay bail, according to his family and court records.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said it was “seeking to review additional video of the incident and speak to additional witnesses.” Mr. El Sammak’s lawyer, Jacqueline Dombroff of the Legal Aid Society, said her office was working to get the charges dismissed entirely.

The case against Ali, which is taking place in family court because he is a minor, is being reviewed, his family said. Mr. Elsamak said he had refused a diversion program for his younger son.

But for Mr. Elsamak’s family, life has “changed completely” since the arrests of his sons.

The incident, he said, had been traumatic, leaving his sons with both physical and psychological scars. Yasin El Sammak, who recently graduated from Brooklyn College and is planning to apply to nursing school, has bruises across his body and has hardly eaten since returning home. Ali has grown quiet and upset, refusing to talk about his experience.

Mr. Elsamak said he worried that the arrests would harm his sons’ futures.

“They’re not criminal. That’s the whole thing,” Mr. Elsamak said.

He added, “They went to stand in front of the embassy to open the Egyptian border, so babies and kids can have a sip of water or a piece of bread before they get killed. That shows what kind of kids I have.”

Vivian Yee and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.

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10) Israel’s Gaza Media Ban Is Indefensible

By The Editorial Board, Aug. 31, 2025

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/opinion/israel-gaza-media-journalists-ban.html

An illustration of a cracked camera lens forming the pupil of an eye drawn in red.

Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

All wars are dangerous to cover, but Gaza holds a place of its own among modern conflicts for the peril faced by journalists. Some 200 journalists have been among the estimated 63,000 people killed since the Gaza war began — an overwhelming majority killed by the Israeli military. Those deaths have helped make the past two years the deadliest period for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit organization, started keeping records in 1992.

The deaths are one more layer of the agonizing human tragedy in Gaza. Families and neighborhoods have been destroyed, and many brave journalists have lost their lives while attempting to help the world understand the war. Nearly all of these journalists have been Palestinian because Israel has barred outside members of the media from entering Gaza.

That ban on outside media is both outrageous and self-defeating. Israel’s leaders and defenders often argue that they are held to a different standard during wartime from other nations, and they are sometimes correct about that. But the refusal to allow international journalists to cover the war on the ground is an example of the Israeli government failing to follow a standard that many other governments, especially democracies, follow. The United States allowed reporters to cover the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ukraine allows journalists in to cover its war with Russia.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government seem to believe that keeping foreign journalists out of Gaza advances their narrative. In Israel it may help serve that purpose by giving some Israelis an excuse to dismiss coverage of Gazan suffering as Palestinian propaganda. Globally, though, the policy has spectacularly failed: Thanks to social media and the work of those brave Palestinian journalists, people can see the mass killing, severe hunger and wholesale destruction in Gaza, and it has prompted an outcry. Keeping out the international media indicates that Israel’s leaders are trying to conceal the war’s full horror. It evokes the failed attempts by American leaders to bury the truth during the Vietnam War.

The ban also seems to be contributing to the Israeli government’s callousness toward the journalists who are covering the war. Often, war-fighting governments take steps to reduce the risks to journalists covering the conflict. Yes, on-the-ground reporting remains dangerous, but military planners nonetheless take account of where journalists are operating and how they might be protected. Israel has failed in this regard. It seems likely that Israel would have tried harder if the journalists in question included more Americans and other nationalities. (The New York Times was among more than 100 news organizations to sign a letter in February 2024 calling on Israel to live up to international law and protect Palestinian journalists who continue to report, “despite grave personal risk.”)

An attack last week offered a terrible and telling example. Israel has sometimes used so-called double-tap strikes in Gaza, in which an initial strike is followed by another, with the purpose of maximizing damage to the enemy. Yet journalists and emergency medical personnel are often first to the scene. On Monday the Israeli military shelled Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, later saying that it had targeted what it thought was a Hamas surveillance camera. Moments after the first attack, a second occurred. In all, at least 20 Palestinians were killed, including five journalists from The Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. Most of the casualties came from the second strike.

Mr. Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap,” said that Israel values journalists and promised a military investigation. But Israel’s use of the double-tap tactic in urban warfare is a sign of its disregard for civilian life and for the people trying to ascertain the truth of the war.

To be clear: Hamas is hardly a model of open information. It has long behaved as a brutal totalitarian government in Gaza that threatens, punishes and sometimes kills people who attempt to speak the truth. Ibrahim Muhareb, a journalist who was beaten unconscious by men who said they were from Gaza’s police investigations department, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that one of them said, “The spy and the journalist are one and the same.” The Gaza of the future deserves a free press wholly different from what Hamas and Israel have permitted.

Israel has responded to criticism of the deaths of Gaza’s journalists by arguing that some of them are Hamas agents. At the very least, some media outlets are affiliated with Hamas or other extremist groups, such as Islamic Jihad. But it is unacceptable for Israel to smear the many courageous journalists doing vital work under almost impossible circumstances — including some for The Times — by suggesting that they are combatants. Israel has offered little, if any, evidence for its claims, while cynically keeping out international journalists.

Two weeks ago, 28 countries, including Britain, France and Germany, called on Israel to give immediate media access to Gaza, saying that journalists “play an essential role in putting the spotlight on the devastating reality of war.” In refusing the independent media’s demands for access, Israel has focused on concern for their safety. That notion is largely an excuse. The world’s journalists stand ready to cover the war. Over 70 international media and civil society organizations, including The Times, declared in another letter that they “fully understand the inherent risks in reporting from war zones.”

Israel’s government has often complained that the world has relied for information on the Gaza Health Ministry and other agencies controlled by Hamas. But what do Mr. Netanyahu and his officials expect to happen when they are banning outside witnesses from Gaza? If the Israeli government wants to let the world judge for itself, it should let in the media.

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11) Mumia Abu-Jamal advocates blame Pa. Dept. of Corrections for his deteriorating eyesight, delaying corrective surgery

Phil Davis, WHYY, August 31, 2025

https://www.phillytrib.com/news/local_news/mumia-abu-jamal-advocates-blame-pa-dept-of-corrections-for-his-deteriorating-eyesight-delaying-corrective/article

Mumia Abu Jamal

In July 1995, Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a policeman, arrived at Philadelphia's City Hall. — AP Photo/Nanine Hartzenbusch

Advocates for Mumia Abu-Jamal say that he is at risk of going blind and blame Pennsylvania corrections officials for delaying surgery to address the issue.

“He fought back against impossible conditions and we have to say the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has entirely abandoned its duties and it has to be held accountable,” said Dr. Johanna Fernandez, at a virtual news conference Friday evening.

Abu-Jamal, an award-winning journalist and co-founder of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of the 1981 murder of white Philadelphia police Officer Daniel Faulkner. The case received international attention and Abu-Jamal maintained his innocence, calling himself a political prisoner. He was highly critical of what he called systemic racism in the city’s police department.

Courts have upheld the convictions through years of appeals. A federal appeals court in 2008 overturned his death penalty sentence, citing improper jury instructions.

According to Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Abu-Jamal’s personal doctor, his eye condition resulted from complications from a 2019 cataract surgery and diabetic retinopathy, caused by overadministered steroids by corrections officials for a skin condition. The overdosing elevated his glucose levels, medical professionals said at Friday’s news conference.

Now, as his eyesight continues to deteriorate, supporters of Abu-Jamal said that prison officials delayed the 71-year-old’s corrective laser surgery by sending him for unnecessary evaluations.

“Despite knowing the urgency, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections waited until this past July … to act and then pushed surgery, the surgery he needed for a cataract complication, to an unspecified date in September,” Fernandez said.

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections said the department cannot comment on medical histories or treatment plans for incarcerated persons.

Speaking in a pre-recorded message, Abu-Jamal said that his vision has deteriorated to the point where he cannot “see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper” and is unable to read or write.

“I kept it quiet simply because I wrongly believed that once I got examined and once it was clear that this was a real visual, contextual problem, that I would get a rather quick response,” Abu-Jamal said. “Boy was I wrong.”

Friday’s news conference was a coordinated effort with the movement behind Abu-Jamal’s freedom to rally supporters to pressure the Department of Corrections and prison authorities to get Abu-Jamal prompt medical intervention.

“The higher-ups in the DOC, the Philly and Pa. criminal justice establishments want Mumia not only imprisoned, they want his voice quashed. They want him dead,” said Mark Taylor, who serves as Abu-Jamal’s coordinator for Educators. “They only do what is right by Mumia when our movement, combined with legal action, make them do so.”

The Pennsylvania prison system has been sued before over its alleged inability to promptly respond to medical conditions. Roughly two decades ago, two prisoners won a $1.2 million judgment after suing the Bucks County Correctional Facility and related officials over a MRSA outbreak at the facility.

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12) U.S. Suspends Visas for Palestinian Passport Holders, Officials Say

The move will stop, at least temporarily, travel for medical treatment, attending university, visiting relatives or conducting business.

By Edward Wong, Adam Rasgon, Natan Odenheimer and Hamed Aleaziz, Aug. 31, 2025

Edward Wong and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer from Tel Aviv.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/world/middleeast/us-palestinian-visa-suspensions.html

A small crowd of people sit and stand on a lawn, some carrying signs or Palestinian flags.

A recent pro-Palestinian demonstration in Dearborn, Mich. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have relatives in the United States. Credit...Jeff Kowalsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Trump administration has enacted a sweeping suspension of approvals of almost all types of visitor visas for Palestinian passport holders, according to American officials.

The new policy goes beyond the restrictions announced by U.S. officials recently on visitor visas for Palestinians from Gaza. Last week, the State Department also said it would not issue visas to Palestinian officials to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York next month.

The more sweeping measures, laid out in an Aug. 18 cable sent by State Department headquarters to all U.S. embassies and consulates, would also prevent many Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in the Palestinian diaspora from entering the United States on various types of nonimmigrant visas, according to four U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

The new measures affect visas for medical treatment, university studies, visits to friends or relatives and business travel, at least temporarily.

It was not clear what prompted the visa curbs, but they follow declarations by a number of U.S. allies that they plan to recognize a Palestinian state in the coming weeks. Some American officials have strongly opposed this push for recognition, which Israel has condemned.

The United States has been Israel’s staunchest supporter throughout its nearly two-year-old war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, even as international criticism has steadily mounted over the conduct of the Israeli military campaign and the humanitarian suffering it has caused.

The new restrictions cover anyone holding only a Palestinian passport, which were first issued in the 1990s when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, or P.L.O., signed agreements establishing a semiautonomous Palestinian government in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. They do not apply to Palestinians with dual nationalities using other passports or those who have already obtained visas.

The State Department confirmed that it had ordered diplomats to enforce the new restrictions. It also said in a statement that the American administration was taking “concrete steps in compliance with U.S. law and our national security in regards to announced visa restrictions” for Palestinians.

To deny the visas, the Trump administration is using a mechanism that is normally applied more narrowly. It is typically used to demand more documentation or information from specific individuals to make decisions on their cases.

In recent days, U.S. consular officers were told to invoke the mechanism — section 221-G of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — to refuse visitor visas to anyone using a Palestinian passport in applications, at least temporarily, the officials said. “Effective immediately, consular officers are instructed to refuse under 221(g) of the Immigration Nationality Act (INA) all otherwise eligible Palestinian Authority passport holders using that passport to apply for a nonimmigrant visa,” the State Department cable said.

That clause means U.S. officials, typically ones in Washington, need to do a further review of the applicant.

Former U.S. officials said the broad use of the measure was tantamount to a blanket rejection of Palestinian visa requests.

“It’s an open-ended refusal,” said Hala Rharrit, who served as an Arabic-language spokeswoman for the State Department until April 2024, when she resigned in protest of U.S. policy on the war in Gaza.

Kerry Doyle, the former lead attorney for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Biden administration, said the administration should be open about its decision making. “If it’s a true ban, then it’s concerning to me in that they should be transparent about it and then make their arguments for the basis of such a ban,” she said.

“Are there true national security concerns?” Ms. Doyle asked. “Or is it politically based to support the position of Israel and/or to avoid uncomfortable issues being raised when folks get here if they speak out about the issues over the war? Why didn’t they just put them on the visa ban list?”

U.S. officials had announced two other narrower measures in recent weeks to limit visas for Palestinians.

On Aug. 16, the State Department said that it had paused approvals of visitor visas for the roughly two million Palestinians from Gaza, a pathway for those seeking medical care in the United States and others. That statement came soon after a right-wing American activist, Laura Loomer, described Palestinians from Gaza being brought to the United States for treatment by Heal Palestine, a humanitarian organization, as “a national security threat.”

HEAL Palestine has said it brought children from Gaza to U.S. hospitals for care, including many who have lost limbs during the war.

Then on Friday, the State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio would not issue visas to Palestinian officials, with the aim of preventing them from attending the General Assembly. The State Department said Mr. Rubio was doing this to hold the Palestinian Authority and the P.L.O. “accountable for not complying with their commitments, and for undermining the prospects for peace.”

The State Department said on Saturday that the ban covers Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the P.L.O., and about 80 other Palestinians. Mr. Abbas’s office expressed “deep regret and astonishment” at Mr. Rubio’s decision and called on the Trump administration to “reconsider and reverse” the move.

The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, has praised the plans by some Western countries to recognize a Palestinian state. On Friday, the State Department said the Palestinian governing body should end its “efforts to secure the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state.”

France and Canada recently announced that they planned to recognize a Palestinian state at the meeting next month, and Britain said it would, too, if certain conditions were met. Those would be the first countries from the Group of 7 allied nations to do so; 147 nations already recognize such a state.

Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, has said that more than 9,000 people with travel documents from the Palestinian Authority entered the United States on visitor visas in the 2024 fiscal year.

Many Palestinians have relatives in the United States, especially in Chicago, Paterson, N.J., and Anaheim, Calif.

Lafi Adeeb, the mayor of Turmus Ayya, a village in the West Bank with many dual Palestinian American citizens, said he was disappointed to learn the State Department was creating obstacles for Palestinian passport holders to obtain visas.

He said thousands of people with roots in his village were in the United States, including many of his children.

“It feels like Palestinians are always treated in an unjust way,” he said.

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13) Man Who’d Served His Time in U.S. Is Deported to an African Prison

The case of Orville Etoria highlights a tension in President Trump’s deportation agenda, in which immigrants can be sent abroad and detained indefinitely.

By John Eligon and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 1, 2025

John Eligon reported from Johannesburg, and Hamed Aleaziz from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/world/africa/trump-deportations-prison-us-eswatini-africa-jamaica.html

A hand holds up a framed photo of a smiling man wearing a cap and gown.

An undated photograph of Orville Etoria on his graduation day. Credit...via Margaret McKen

After fatally shooting a man in the head in Brooklyn in 1996, Orville Etoria was convicted of murder and given a prison sentence of 25 years to life. During his incarceration, Mr. Etoria, a Jamaican citizen with legal residency in the United States, was ordered deported by an immigration judge.

But upon his release in 2021, immigration officials allowed him to stay in America, provided he complete annual check-ins with the authorities.

To those close to Mr. Etoria, 62, it was a reprieve that gave him a second chance at life. He earned a bachelor’s degree while behind bars, successfully completed parole after he got out, got a job at a men’s shelter and started pursuing a master’s degree in divinity.

To those who support President Trump’s stated mission to deport the “worst of the worst” and other immigrants in record numbers, Mr. Etoria is exactly the kind of dangerous felon who should be expelled from the United States.

In July, Mr. Etoria became a target of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. He was among five men with criminal records deported to a prison in the kingdom of Eswatini, a southern African nation where none of the men hold citizenship. A Trump administration official called them “barbaric” and said that the men’s home countries had refused to accept them.

Mr. Etoria’s case represents a tension at the heart of the administration’s deportation agenda. Some legal experts argue that there is little justification for sending immigrants to far-flung countries where they have never been and can be detained indefinitely without charges, as is the case for Mr. Etoria. These critics argue that the administration is unnecessarily putting deportees at risk by sending them to unfamiliar nations where they have few prospects or access to due process, instead of simply sending them home.

In a statement to The New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security countered that Mr. Etoria should have been deported long ago. “Our message is clear: Criminals are not welcome in the United States,” the statement said.

Mr. Etoria has not seen a lawyer since his arrival in Eswatini, his lawyers say, and family members say they have had little contact with him and are worried about his condition.

Mr. Etoria’s aunt Margaret McKen asserted that he should have been deported to Jamaica, where he holds a valid passport.

“It’s inhumane,” she said. “He paid the penalty for what he did. Why is he in prison again?”

Neither Eswatini nor the United States has explained why Mr. Etoria is being held despite completing his sentence in America and not being accused of any new crimes.

Since the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term, his government has brokered deals with countries to accept deportees from other nations. Immigration officials have instituted new rules that allow these third-country deportations from the United States in as little as six hours.

Some experts say the policy is part of an effort to encourage people to leave the United States voluntarily or risk being sent to a distant, unknown land. The administration has already sent foreign nationals to third countries that have concerning human rights records, including El Salvador and South Sudan.

In its statement, D.H.S. warned that immigrants who commit crimes in the United States should expect to “end up in CECOT, Eswatini, South Sudan, or another third country.” (CECOT is a notorious prison in El Salvador.)

The Eswatini government at one point requested a half-billion dollars from the United States in exchange for taking in third-country deportees, according to documents obtained by The Times.

The documents indicate that Eswatini was willing to take more than 150 people from other nations for a cash payout of more than $10 million from the United States.

Eswatini officials also asked whether the United States expected deportees to be put on trial and sentenced by local officials once they arrived.

A spokeswoman for Eswatini’s government declined to comment on the details outlined in the documents, including on the amounts of money involved.

Immigration records show that Mr. Etoria was ordered deported in 2009, while he was still incarcerated. Matthew Hudak, a former senior official with the U.S. Border Patrol, said that if foreign nationals completed their sentences in the United States, immigration officials should work to deport them.

“When someone makes the decision to leave their home country,” he said, “they are agreeing to subject themselves to the laws of the country they are entering.”

Jamaican officials said it was untrue that their country had been unwilling to take Mr. Etoria. “Our position is that we do not refuse any of our nationals, regardless of whatever they have done,” Joan Thomas Edwards, Jamaica’s top diplomat in southern Africa, said in an interview this month.

Representatives of the Jamaican government visited Mr. Etoria in the Eswatini prison on Aug. 21, according to a statement from the island’s foreign minister. The minister, Kamina Johnson Smith, said Mr. Etoria was in good spirits and receiving necessary medical attention. The government was working to get him returned to Jamaica, she said.

Officials with the International Organization for Migration also visited Mr. Etoria and the other deportees last month at the request of Eswatini’s government, offering them humanitarian assistance and support in returning to their home countries if they want to, a spokeswoman for the organization said.

Mr. Etoria came to the United States on a green card in 1976 at age 12. He joined his mother, who had been sponsored by a family she worked for as a nanny, said Ms. McKen, his aunt. He had tough times early in life, she said. He saw his mother flee from his abusive father. In the United States, he struggled to adjust and was bullied in school, she said.

Mr. Etoria has a history of drug abuse, which he has blamed in part on head injuries he suffered as a child. He was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. Doctors noted that he has exhibited violent outbursts, hallucinations and paranoia, according to court records.

He was arrested in 1981 on charges of attempted murder, robbery and kidnapping. During a psychiatric evaluation, he said he could not remember exactly what happened, according to court records. He pleaded guilty and served three years in prison.

More than a decade later, Mr. Etoria walked into a leather goods shop and shot the victim three times in the head, according to Brooklyn court records. The motive was never determined, and there was no indication that he knew the victim or that the crime was gang-related.

During his testimony at a 2003 appeal hearing, Mr. Etoria said he did not remember what happened because he was on drugs at the time and suffered hallucinations in the days leading up to the shooting.

Since leaving prison in 2021, Mr. Etoria, a father of three adult children, has spoken regularly with his aunt, she said. He has discussed his job at the shelter, and how he was learning to use the computer.

“He was finally getting some clarity on his life,” Ms. McKen said. “I would say, finally becoming human again.”

When he went for his annual check-in with immigration officials in June, they took him into custody, said Mia Unger, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in New York, which is handling Mr. Etoria’s case.

Ms. McKen said she tracked her nephew’s movements on the government’s online immigration database after he was detained. She saw that he was moved to a detention facility in upstate New York, then to Louisiana, then to Texas. On June 26, Mr. Etoria called one of his sons and told him that he had been put on a plane to Jamaica, but was removed without explanation before it took off, according to Ms. McKen.

A few weeks later, Ms. McKen said, Mr. Etoria’s name no longer appeared on the database. After a few days, he resurfaced on the administration’s list of men deported to Eswatini.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting from New York. Camille Williams contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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14) He Burned a Flag and Won an American Right. He Worries It’s at Risk.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that burning an American flag is speech protected by the First Amendment. President Trump says it should be punished.

By Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 1, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/us/politics/flag-burning-trump-johnson-supreme-court.html

A man in black clothing, a cap and sunglasses holding a tattered American flag with writing on its stripes.

Gregory Johnson displayed a flag he has used in protests, in Venice, Calif., in 2021. Mr. Johnson won a landmark Supreme Court case in 1989 protecting political expression that is now being challenged by President Trump. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

In the summer of 1984, at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Gregory Johnson burned an American flag to protest the policies of President Ronald Reagan.

“It was a way to speak to the people of the world,” Mr. Johnson said last week, a few days after President Trump issued an executive order that sought to undermine his landmark Supreme Court victory, Texas v. Johnson. By a 5-to-4 vote in 1989, the court said Mr. Johnson’s burning of the flag was political expression protected by the First Amendment.

Mr. Johnson, now 68, said protests like the one in Dallas were even more urgent in the Trump era. “Do you want to live in a country,” he asked, “that’s based on coerced, forced, compulsory patriotism?”

Mr. Trump’s order urged prosecution of flag burnings “to the fullest extent permissible” by invoking laws not aimed at speech, and it instructed officials to pursue deportation of noncitizens who burn American flags. The order only indirectly challenged the 1989 ruling, however, telling the attorney general to “pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions.”

Mr. Johnson said he had not planned to burn a flag in Dallas. But when someone handed him one, he said, it seemed fitting.

“That flag,” he said, “is a symbol of American empire and plunder and murder going back to slavery in this country, and 100 years of Jim Crow segregation and all the lynching and the theft of half of Mexico.”

Mr. Johnson is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, the sort of dissident who was prosecuted for protesting through much of American history. But in the early 20th century, Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis wrote First Amendment dissents that ripened into the United States’ distinctively robust free-speech doctrine in the decades that followed.

Mr. Johnson was charged with desecration of a venerated object, which was a crime in Texas. His trial attracted attention, he said. “It was a hot item in Dallas at the time,” he said. “High school classes came, and so did the Klan.”

He was convicted, and the prosecutor urged the jury to make an example of him. Mr. Johnson said he remembered one turn of phrase in particular.

“I want you to load up on him,” the prosecutor told the jury. “You come to our city and burn the flag, you know you’re going to pay the maximum.”

Mr. Johnson did receive the maximum sentence, a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. But he won an appeal before Texas’ highest court for criminal matters. “Recognizing that the right to differ is the centerpiece of our First Amendment freedoms,” the state court said, “a government cannot mandate by fiat a feeling of unity in its citizens.”

Mr. Johnson thought that had ended the matter. A few months later, though, he came across a newspaper article that said the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the state’s appeal.

He did not like his chances, and he knew he needed help. So he sent a telegram to William Kunstler, the leftist lawyer who had represented members of the Chicago Seven, the activists accused of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Mr. Kunstler took the case. Working with David Cole, who would go on to be the American Civil Liberties Union’s national legal director, he pulled off an improbable victory. The majority included Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Scalia, a giant of the conservative legal movement frequently cited as an exemplary jurist by Mr. Trump, would for the rest of his career point to his vote in Mr. Johnson’s case as a defining one.

“If it was up to me, if I were king,” he said, “I would take scruffy, bearded, sandal-wearing idiots who burn the flag, and I would put them in jail.”

But the First Amendment, he went on, did not allow that. It protected Mr. Johnson’s right to express himself.

Also in the majority was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was serving his first full term on the court. In a concurring opinion, he said his vote was a painful but necessary one.

He took an uncharacteristically personal swipe at Mr. Johnson, saying he was “not a philosopher and perhaps did not even possess the ability to comprehend how repellent his statements must be to the Republic itself.”

I read the passage to Mr. Johnson, who paused before responding.

“I’m glad he voted in my favor,” Mr. Johnson said. But he added that there was “so much concentrated in that contempt, that political prejudice and the superiority complex or whatever, to think that I don’t have political convictions or understanding of philosophy.”

Of the current moment, he said: “What we’re dealing with is fascism. It’s not a curse word. There’s real content to it, and I wish more people would debate and struggle over that.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, a veteran of World War II, dissented from the ruling allowing flag burning. Decades later, he said the decision had a silver lining. Flag burning had all but disappeared, he observed to a Chicago audience in 2006.

“What once was a courageous act of defiant expression is now perfectly lawful,” he noted, “and therefore is not worth the effort.”

Justice Stevens seemed to assume that the closely divided decision had permanently settled the issue, but Mr. Johnson disagreed. “Ever since 1989,” he said, “I never thought, like, well, this is over with.”

To the contrary, he said, “at the time, I thought: Wow, I wonder how long this decision will last?”

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15) Israel’s New Negotiating Stance Is Likely to Prolong Gaza War, Experts Say

A shift toward pressing for a permanent cease-fire deal, alongside plans for a new offensive in Gaza City, means the fighting is unlikely to end soon.

By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 1, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-cease-fire-negotiations.html

A large plume of smoke rises above destroyed buildings on a ridge.

An Israeli military strike in northern Gaza, seen from southern Israel on Sunday. Maya Levin/Associated Press

Over the past year, Israel has doggedly insisted that negotiations for a Gaza cease-fire be focused solely on a phased deal that would begin with a temporary truce and see some hostages released in exchange for some Palestinian prisoners, while deferring agreement on a more permanent pact.

And yet, even as Hamas recently said that it would agree to a phased deal, the Israeli government has switched gears, saying it wanted only a comprehensive deal that would free all the hostages and end the war. It is as unclear as ever how, or when, that might happen.

At the same time, Israel said it would carry out a new, expansive campaign into Gaza City to root out Hamas militants. The military is poised this week to call up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers for its advance.

Both those steps, experts say, would most likely prolong the war, not shorten it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to keep fighting until his country has decisively defeated Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, by stripping it of its military and governing capabilities and forcing it to disarm.

Hamas has so far refused to surrender and largely rejects Israel’s terms for ending the war. Experts are skeptical that Israel could now achieve what it has not managed to achieve in the 22 months since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — whether militarily or by negotiation.

“Netanyahu has defined success as something that is unachievable,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, describing the total elimination of Hamas as an impossible goal. Success, he said, should be defined as what has already been achieved: “that Oct. 7 won’t happen again.”

The Israeli military says it already controls more than 75 percent of Gaza, but many analysts say that chasing down every last Hamas operative and eradicating the movement as an ideology is an unobtainable objective.

Mr. Nides and other experts say that only President Trump has the power to pressure Mr. Netanyahu to end the war. But for now, the Trump administration appears to be backing Mr. Netanyahu’s war plan and appears to have also reversed course on the negotiations.

About a month ago, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a meeting with the families of hostages that Mr. Trump wanted to see all the living hostages released at once. Israel says that about 20 are still alive.

“No piecemeal deals; that doesn’t work,” Mr. Witkoff said, according to an audio recording of part of the meeting published by the Ynet Hebrew news site. He said there was a plan around shifting the negotiation toward an “all or nothing” deal.

He did not offer details and there have been no obvious signs of progress since.

The last cease-fire, reached in January, collapsed in March when Israel went back to fighting in Gaza. In the months since then, Israel and the United States, along with the other mediating countries, Qatar and Egypt, have pressed Hamas to accept a framework for another gradual deal.

That push called for a 60-day cease-fire during which about half the living hostages and the remains of several others would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Under the plan, negotiations would also start immediately for a permanent cessation of hostilities. At the time, Israeli officials described that proposal as the only offer on the table.

By mid-August, when Hamas, under pressure, had broadly accepted a deal along those lines, Israel suddenly moved the goal posts. While Mr. Netanyahu has not yet publicly ruled out a phased deal altogether, his ministers have described that approach as no longer relevant, and the government has not officially engaged with the Hamas response.

“There isn’t an option any longer for a partial deal,” Miki Zohar, a minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, said on Israeli television on Saturday. “The only thing on the agenda is ending the war, along with the return of all the hostages, of course, and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip,” he added.

A comprehensive deal will be much more complicated to achieve, if at all.

According to Shira Efron, an expert in Israel policy at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, “It means more stalling and prolonging” of the war.

The Israeli military has already been in Gaza City, in the early months of Israel’s ground invasion of the enclave that began in 2023.

Ms. Efron said that Mr. Trump might think that this time, the military operation could be “quick and clean.” But, she added, it could also be “dirty and long.”

The question of which kind of deal to aim for — gradual or comprehensive — presents a serious dilemma for Israel’s political and military leaders, and shreds the emotions of the hostages’ relatives and of many citizens.

A partial deal that would see only about half the living hostages released in the first phase would mean choosing who gets released and who gets left behind. There would be no guarantee that negotiations for the next phase would succeed where they failed before.

And many Israelis say they believe that Hamas will never relinquish all of the hostages, an action that would leave the militant group exposed.

“It is not clear that Hamas would want to give up on its insurance policy,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former official with Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security agency.

On the other hand, images released by the captors of weak and emaciated hostages have underlined the urgency of the hostages’ situation, leading many Israelis to ask whether it would be better at least to get 10 out alive sooner rather than to try to negotiate a more complicated comprehensive deal.

“There is no good answer,” Mr. Ben Hanan said.

Israel’s planned takeover of Gaza City poses risks for all sides.

The Gaza Strip is already gripped by a severe humanitarian crisis, and a report by a panel of food security experts has found famine in parts of the territory, a designation that Israel refutes.

The military plan, expected to displace nearly a million residents of Gaza City, would most likely lead to more Palestinian deaths and destruction, and could endanger the lives of hostages held in the area.

Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has already drawn severe international criticism, including from some of its closest allies.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Gaza health officials, whose toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government. About 250 others were taken to Gaza, and 48 remain there, either living or dead.

Some analysts have presented the plans for an assault on Gaza City as a threat intended to pressure Hamas into agreeing to Israel’s conditions for ending the war as much as an operational certainty. If an agreement is reached, so that thinking goes, the plans could be scrapped at any time.

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16) Far-Right, Anti-Immigration Protests Worry Leaders in Australia

The government condemned the demonstrations, which drew tens of thousands of people. Some of the events included speakers tied to neo-Nazi groups.

By Yan Zhuang, Sept. 1, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/world/australia/australia-immigration-protests.html

A large crowd, waving Australian flags, fills half of a multilane road.

Demonstrators at an anti-immigration rally in Sydney on Sunday. Hollie Adams/Reuters

Australia’s leaders on Monday condemned anti-immigration protests over the weekend that saw tens of thousands of people gather in cities across the country, chanting slogans like “send them back” and “stop the invasion.”

The government has described the protests as racist and politicians from both sides of the aisle expressed concerns about the presence of neo-Nazi groups.

Australia is grappling with the growing threat of extremist ideology, amid a rise of far-right nationalism in countries around the world. Australia prides itself on its multiculturalism, but experts say discontent among some groups has been growing because of a lack of affordable housing and soaring living costs.

About 15,000 people gathered for the “March for Australia” anti-immigration rally in Sydney on Sunday, while as many as 3,000 people attended a counterprotest organized by a pro-Palestinian group, the police said. In other parts of Australia, the police said that thousands of people attended rallies, but did not distinguish between protesters and counterprotesters.

Populist politicians made speeches at some rallies, while at others, members of neo-Nazi groups spoke and led chants of “heil Australia,” local media reported. Some clashed with counterprotesters. The police said they made a handful of arrests across the country.

Pauline Hanson, the leader of the far-right anti-immigration One Nation Party, spoke at the protest in Canberra, the nation’s capital.

At a demonstration in Adelaide, a protester held up a sign with the face of Dezi Freeman — whom the authorities have identified as the suspect in a shooting that killed two police officers in Victoria State last week — with the caption “free man.” Mr. Freeman is still on the loose. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged media reports linking the suspect to the radical anti-government “sovereign citizen” movement, although Mr. Albanese added that those were only allegations.

ASIO, Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, warned earlier this year of the growing threat of “nationalist and racist violent extremism” and “issue-motivated extremism, fueled by personal grievance, conspiracy theories and anti-authority ideologies.”

The Australian government condemned the protests as hateful. “This brand of far-right activism grounded in racism and ethnocentrism has no place in modern Australia,” said Anne Aly, the minister for multicultural affairs.

On Monday, representatives of both the center-left Labor government and the conservative opposition voiced concerns about the presence of far-right extremists at the rallies.

Ms. Aly told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that, while the majority of protesters were not neo-Nazis, the rallies were organized by neo-Nazis and were “clearly racist.”

“When we see neo-Nazis address a crowd of people in some of our major cities, that raises material concerns with respect to social cohesion in our country,” said Paul Scarr, the opposition immigration spokesman.

Kaz Ross, a researcher who studies far-right extremism, said that the protests appeared to have been started by a disparate group of online influencers, but that far-right elements were able to shape the protests according to their ideology. Neo-Nazi groups had capitalized on mainstream concerns about the soaring cost of living and housing scarcity to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, she said.

The protests marked a significant moment for the far-right in making inroads into the mainstream, Dr. Ross said. “They’ve successfully — it looks to me — met up in public with thousands of Australians. No one threw them out. No one booed them out of the rally. They had a crossover success moment.”

“It is very very concerning,” Dr. Ross said, “and we don’t know where it’s going to go from here.”

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BAUAW NEWSLETTER

9/01/2025

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, September 1, 2025

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