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Urgent medical alert – Free Mumia
Mumia’s eyesight endangered
Mumia’s eyesight is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
An independent expert ophthalmologist has confirmed the progression of his eye disease by analyzing Mumia’s most recent eye exams. She reports that he needs surgery and medically necessary treatment “immediately” or faces the possibility of “permanent blindness.”
Mumia’s vision has plummeted from 20/30 with glasses in 2024 (near normal) to 20/200 today—legally blind—because the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) failed to adequately monitor his vision and delayed his urgently necessary medical treatment and surgery. The PA DOC has known since at least March of 2025 that Mumia needed eye surgery. Exams from 2024 – 2025 showed a sharp deterioration, demanding immediate intervention. Despite knowing the urgency, they waited until July to act and then pushed surgery off to an unspecified date in September.
Mumia believes he now suffers from “diabetic retinopathy” stemming from a diabetic coma that he endured after being given an improper and unmonitored dose of steroids for a skin disease in 2015. Mumia asserts that the PA DOC is “slow-walking [him] to blindness” in 2025 – another egregious case of the prison’s medical neglect, medical harm, and inability to treat Mumia’s medical needs.
Court records already document this pattern: (a) negligence in monitoring lab reports that led to the diabetic coma, and (b) deliberate denial and delay of his hepatitis C treatment that left him with cirrhosis.
OUR DEMANDS:
· Release Mumia now – unconditionally – into the care of his own doctors, family, and friends. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has, once again, shown it cannot monitor or provide the timely, corrective care he urgently needs.
· Schedule Mumia’s eye surgery and medically necessary treatment immediately, under the supervision of his independent ophthalmologist, and have it performed by the nearest outside provider approved by that physician.
· Provide Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Mumia’s chosen physician, with all the medical reports from the prison and any other outside examiners who have seen him in 2025.
RELEASE AGING PRISONERS:
The following report by Dr. Ricardo Alvarez details a more complete picture of the history of elder abuse by the Prison Industrial Complex – the New Jim Crow – and with particular regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners:
Parole Elder Abuse article on Mumia Abu-Jamal :
https://paroleelderabuse.org/mumia-institutional-elder-abuse-reports/
What you can do immediately to help:
Call the prison and demand that Mumia immediately receives local expert treatment
Sample script:
“My name is ________and I am calling from ________
I am calling with regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal, also known as Wesley Cook AM8335.
He is suffering from dire vision loss that can be easily treated—or else he will lose his eyesight entirely.
I DEMAND THAT THIS TREATMENT HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY.”
Primary targets:
Bernadette Mason
Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy
Call 570-773-2158
Laurel Hardy
Secretary, PA DOC
Call 717-728-2573
ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov
Central Office, PA DOC
ra-contactdoc@pa.gov
Upcoming Press Conference, Rallies and Marches are being planned so please stay tuned!!
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Mumia Abu-Jamal advocates blame Pa. Dept. of Corrections for his deteriorating eyesight, delaying corrective surgery
Phil Davis, WHYY, August 31, 2025
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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2) 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.
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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3) 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.
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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4) 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
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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5) 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
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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6) 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
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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7) A judge hands Trump a legal rebuke over his troop deployment in L.A.
By Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2025
President Trump mobilized National Guard troops in California in June. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The Trump administration illegally used thousands of military troops in Southern California, a federal judge said on Tuesday, in a ruling that accused the president of effectively turning nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard soldiers into a national police force.
The ruling, by Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, came more than two months into a contentious deployment that was set off by immigration protests in June and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guard soldiers. The judge ordered that the remaining troops should either be released or limited to guarding federal buildings, but he placed his injunction on hold for 10 days.
The judge found that President Trump’s deployment had exceeded the limits of federal laws that generally prohibit the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
The decision was a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible presidential candidate who filed the lawsuit and who has rebuked Mr. Trump for sending the military into Los Angeles. But the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in the lawsuit, is expected to appeal the decision and could receive more favorable consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The ruling was the latest in a series of judicial battles over claims of expansive unilateral powers by the administration. Mr. Trump and administration officials have deported people without due process, imposed widespread and unpopular tariffs and rolled back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers that have been disputed in federal court.
The president also declared crime in Washington, D.C., to be an emergency in order to send federal troops there in August, although crime rates in the nation’s capital have actually been falling and local officials said the deployment was not needed. Since then, Mr. Trump has publicly mused about sending the National Guard into other Democratic-led cities. Federal law gives the White House more latitude to conduct local law enforcement in the District of Columbia than in the states.
The decision on Tuesday arose from the president’s deployment this summer of about 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, where demonstrations had erupted over immigration raids.
In an executive order that was issued on June 7 over the objections of Mr. Newsom, who normally controls the state’s National Guard troops, the president wrote that “violent protests” had grown into “a form of rebellion,” and that the military was needed to “temporarily protect” federal agents and property.
City officials in Los Angeles vehemently disputed the president’s justification, noting that the police had been capably handling the protests, which were mostly confined to a few blocks in downtown Los Angeles near government buildings.
The White House, the officials said, had unnecessarily inflamed local outrage by sending masked and armed immigration agents into workplaces in a liberal city where immigrants make up roughly a third of the population, and then had used the ensuing demonstrations as a pretext to send in the military.
A 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic civilian law enforcement, absent an insurrection. But the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Rather, he argued that an overarching federal law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which lays out the role of the armed forces, allowed him to commandeer National Guard units to execute federal law.
The administration contended that the troops were needed in California for federal agents to do their jobs because protesters were impeding their efforts. California officials quickly challenged the deployment, and Judge Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, temporarily blocked it in June.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ruled that the judge had erred. The protests had been violent enough, they found, that the president could at least make an argument for deployment, and legal precedent required them to give “a great level of deference” to the president in weighing the facts underlying his executive order.
The decision allowed the troops to remain under the president’s control, pending a decision on a secondary request by the state to restrict how the troops could be used. Lawyers for California demanded that the military be limited, at most, to guarding federal buildings, and the appeals court determined that the administration’s use of the troops remained subject to judicial review.
By mid-June, the protests in Los Angeles had largely ended, but instead of releasing the troops, the administration kept them on duty in a sprawling tent city near Long Beach. The administration sent soldiers and Marines out with federal agents executing search and arrest warrants and conducting immigration raids.
Mr. Newsom challenged the administration’s claim that the troops were not conducting law enforcement. During a three-day hearing in August before Judge Breyer’s order, lawyers for California showed numerous photographs of armed National Guard troops engaged in what appeared to be police work — forming security perimeters around cannabis farms and workplaces where raids were being conducted, or wielding batons behind police tape as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuffed people.
In at least two instances, the state’s lawyers noted, members of the deployment briefly detained people. One occasion was early in the deployment in Carpinteria, when National Guard troops prevented a protester from entering an area where a raid was in progress. The other episode occurred later, when Marines held a man for about a half-hour after he tried to enter a Los Angeles federal building.
A field agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles testified that, for at least the first month of the deployment, about 75 percent of ICE operations involved federalized troops.
Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, a 33-year Army veteran who led the task force overseeing the Los Angeles deployment, testified that troops took great care not to cross the line into law enforcement. But the line was fraught.
The general testified at length, for example, about a mission, code-named Operation Excalibur, in which federal immigration agents on foot and on horseback marched through MacArthur Park, a Los Angeles landmark in a neighborhood now largely home to immigrant families with low incomes.
General Sherman said the administration initially wanted to conduct the mission on Father’s Day and to stage troops and military equipment in the middle of the park in a “show of presence,” but he objected. The placement of troops, he said, seemed to inappropriately involve the military in what appeared to be a risky and low-value operation.
Only after federal officials planned to reposition the troops outside the park did he recommend approval. But when he expressed his concerns, he said, Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is overseeing the federal immigration crackdown in Southern California, questioned his loyalty to the country.
The mission, which General Sherman said was ultimately approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was postponed twice before taking place on July 7. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles condemned it as a callous act of political theater that terrified children in the park as well as social workers who were providing services to homeless people.
Scores of National Guard troops drove to the area and stayed for about 20 minutes in case trouble erupted, the general testified, but never left their trucks.
Trump administration lawyers argued that California’s lawsuit was moot because the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute that cannot be enforced with a civil lawsuit.
Moreover, even absent an insurrection, Eric Hamilton of the Justice Department argued, presidents have the inherent power to deploy the military to protect federal property and employees.
The Justice Department lawyers defended how the troops were used during the deployment, saying they violated no law and served a “purely protective function” for federal agents who were facing daily assaults from protesters.
Judge Breyer sharply pushed back, questioning how anyone could limit the power of the White House if the president could legally dispatch the military to enforce any conceivable federal function.
Normally, he noted, local law enforcement officers protect public employees going about their duty. Shouldn’t the president have to prove that a threat exists and rises to a specific threshold in order to summon the military?
“Where are the limits?” Judge Breyer repeatedly asked.
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8) Maduro Tells Trump War With Venezuela Would ‘Stain Your Hands With Blood’
As U.S. warships and troops gather in the Caribbean, Mr. Maduro threatened an “armed fight” in response to any military action. He also appealed for peace.
By Julie Turkewitz and Isayen Herrera, Sept. 2, 2025
Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia and Caracas, Venezuela
President Nicolás Maduro warned on Monday of grave consequences if the United States takes military action against his country. Credit...Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has warned that he would respond to any U.S. military action with an “armed fight” and claimed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was trying draw President Trump into a war in the Caribbean that would mar his reputation.
“Mr. President, Donald Trump,” the Venezuelan leader said on Monday, “watch out, because Mr. Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood.”
The statements, made from Caracas during Mr. Maduro’s first news conference in over a year, come amid rising tensions between Venezuela and the United States. In late August, the United States began moving warships and troops into the Caribbean, near Venezuelan waters — which the Trump administration has said was to combat drug trafficking.
But the size of the military buildup has led to speculation over whether the real goal is to oust Mr. Maduro, through military action or other pressure.
Mr. Rubio said recently that “for the first time in the modern era,” the U.S. government was “truly on the offense” against organized cartels sending drugs to the United States. He and other officials in the Trump administration have called Mr. Maduro an illegitimate leader and his government a “narco-terror cartel.”
Jimmy Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela during Mr. Trump’s first term, said in an interview that using so much military might to take out drug trafficking boats was a bit like “using a blowtorch to cook an egg.”
Mr. Maduro, in his news conference, called the Venezuelan people “warriors” who would respond to any incursion with “maximum rebellion.” But as he seemingly tried to project force, Mr. Maduro also called for peace, an apparent attempt to appeal to Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to end wars — not start them.
He mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize — an apparent allusion to Mr. Trump’s stated interest in receiving it — and said that Mr. Rubio, a longtime proponent of aggressive action that could lead to a change of government in Venezuela, “wants the last name Trump to be stained with blood for centuries.”
The Venezuelan leader also acknowledged that his government in recent months has had two separate channels of dialogue with the Trump administration: One with Richard Grenell, a special envoy, and another with John McNamara, the top U.S. diplomat to Venezuela, who answers to Mr. Rubio.
While the relationship between the two countries was currently in “bad shape,” Mr. Maduro conceded, he said he believed it could be repaired.
Mr. Trump, he said, was “an intelligent, bold man. He’ll known what to do. Hopefully those channels can be recovered.”
Mr. Maduro called the Naval buildup “the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years” in the form of “eight military ships with 1,200 missiles” targeting Venezuela.
The deployment includes several guided-missile destroyers and ships carrying 4,5000 sailors and 2,200 Marines, according to Defense Department officials.
On Friday, Mr. Rubio traveled to Florida to meet with military leaders at U.S. Southern Command to discuss security issues in the region, according to the State Department.
This week he is scheduled to travel to Mexico and Ecuador, trips the Trump administration says are meant to advance the U.S. government’s “unwavering commitment to protect its borders, neutralize narco-terrorist threats to our homeland, and ensure a level playing field for American businesses.”
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9) Belgium to Recognize Palestinian State, Joining Pressure on Israel
The recognition was conditioned on the release of hostages by Hamas. It comes after similar moves by other countries as they try to push Israel to end the war in Gaza.
By Jeanna Smialek, Reporting from Brussels, Sept. 2, 2025
Belgium’s foreign minister, Maxime Prévot, in February. He said his country would recognize a Palestinian state in response to the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. Credit...Virginia Mayo/Associated Press
Belgium will recognize a Palestinian state at this month’s United Nations General Assembly, the country’s foreign minister announced early on Tuesday, joining a number of other states in a push intended to pressure Israel over its war on Gaza.
Palestine will be “clearly a state fully recognized on the international stage by Belgium,” the foreign minister, Maxime Prévot, said on social media, though that recognition would take full effect only if key conditions were met.
The “formalization” of the move will take place “once the last hostage has been released and Hamas no longer has any role in managing Palestine,” Mr. Prévot said. It would come by royal decree, he added.
European leaders have been frustrated that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has not ended the war, which has destroyed large parts of Gaza. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Palestinian health officials, whose tallies do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The territory is gripped by a humanitarian crisis, with food-security experts saying that large parts of Gaza are suffering from famine. Israel rejects that designation.
Against that backdrop, President Emmanuel Macron of France said last month that his government would recognize the state of Palestine as part of “its historical commitment to a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” He added that he would make a formal announcement at the U.N. General Assembly meetings, which will take place from Sept. 9 to 23 in New York.
Britain, Canada and Australia, longstanding allies of Israel, announced that they were prepared to follow, and a number of other major nations have since announced that they will, too. The United States and President Trump have criticized the moves.
Most of the United Nations’ 193 members already recognize a Palestinian state, and several European states, including Spain, Ireland and Norway, moved to do so last year, but the politics of recognition remain fraught.
Israel has consistently opposed recognition of Palestinian statehood, saying it would endanger Israel’s security.
Mr. Prévot referred to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in his announcement. He acknowledged “the trauma caused to the Israeli people” and explained that it was out of respect for that pain that Belgium would formalize its recognition of Palestine only after all hostages still in Gaza had been returned.
Belgium will also enact sanctions against Israel, including a review of public procurement policies with Israeli companies and a ban on importing products from Israeli settlements, Mr. Prévot announced. He said that two unnamed “extremist” Israeli ministers, “several violent settlers” and Hamas leaders would be designated personae non gratae in Belgium.
“This is not about sanctioning the Israeli people but about ensuring that their government respects international and humanitarian law,” Mr. Prévot said.
Mr. Prévot suggested that Belgium would also support action at a European Union level, voicing support for the idea of ending the association agreement with Israel, which enables economic cooperation between the bloc and Israel.
While the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has proposed suspending parts of the agreement — specifically, limiting participation in a research and development program — it has been unable to gain enough support from member states to take action. Germany, which has the bloc’s biggest economy, has not come around to the idea.
“It is frustrating that we cannot do more,” Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said last week, adding, “I feel — all the ministers feel — the pain that we want to do more to help those people.”
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10) Scientists May Have Identified a Culprit Behind Declining Amazon Rains
Deforestation is playing a greater role than researchers expected, according to a new study.
By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Sept. 2, 2025
A deforested area in Acre State, in western Brazil, in April. For the first half of 2025, officials reported a 27 percent increase in tree loss nationwide compared with the same period last year. Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
For decades, the dry season in the Amazon rainforest has been getting drier. A new study, published on Tuesday, found that about 75 percent of the decrease in rainfall is directly linked to deforestation.
The study, in Nature Communications, also found that tree loss was partly responsible for increased heat across the Amazon. Since 1985, the hottest days in the Amazon have warmed by about 2 degrees Celsius. About 16 percent of that increase, the researchers found, was because of deforestation.
Marco Franco, an assistant professor at the University of São Paulo who led the study, said he was surprised by the findings. “We were expecting to see deforestation as a driver, but not this much,” he said. “It tells us a lot about what’s going on in the biome.”
The Amazon rainforest is often called the lungs of the planet because its trees help to regulate the global climate by absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide. But decades of large-scale logging and burning in the forest have recently flipped that script, and parts of the region have become net producers of greenhouse gases.
The Amazon also steers regional weather patterns. Its trees pull water from the soil and, through a process known as transpiration, release that moisture through tiny pores on their leaves. There are hundreds of billions of trees in the Amazon Basin, and the water they collectively release into the air is estimated to contribute more than 40 percent of all the region’s rainfall.
“You can imagine a tree as a big water pump,” said Callum Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds in England who studies tropical deforestation and was not involved in the Nature Communications study. “If you chop down a tree, it reduces the moisture going into the atmosphere.”
In 2023, Dr. Smith led a study that used large satellite data sets to better understand the link between deforestation and decreases in rainfall. He said scientists have long known about this effect, but weather changes don’t always show up in the same place as deforestation, making the relationships tricky to quantify.
The new study, Dr. Smith said, used sophisticated analytical methods and represented a step forward in knowledge.
Luiz Machado, a professor of climate and meteorology at the University of São Paulo and an author of the new study, said “everybody knows” the climate in the Amazon has changed because of climate change and deforestation. But until now, he said, “nobody knew exactly what each of these things contributed.”
The study analyzed 29 sections of the Amazon Basin within the borders of Brazil and used large sets of satellite data to separate out influences like evolving landscapes, changing climate and shifting weather conditions between 1985 and 2020.
While Dr. Franco and Dr. Machado found that deforestation had driven 74.5 percent of the decrease in precipitation across the basin, they emphasized this was just the average. Regions with more deforestation suffered greater rainfall losses, they noted.
In the tropics, the year is split into two seasons: dry and wet. The study found that deforestation was causing rainfall loss in both seasons. But because the effect on the dry season was much more pronounced, the researchers said, they decided to focus on that period. (For the purposes of the study, the definition of dry season varied across areas. Countrywide, it is generally considered to run from June through November.)
Even during the dry season, ecosystems depend on rain. “As a joke, we used to say that the rainy season in the Amazon was when it rained all day, and the dry season in the Amazon rained every day,” Dr. Machado said. “But that’s not true anymore.”
Less rainfall doesn’t just mean less water for plants and animals. As the forest becomes drier, it becomes more prone to wildfires, which, in turn, eliminate more trees. The region has been plagued by slash-and-burn agriculture, in which fires are used to clear big tracts of land for ranching and farming. Sometimes, these fires burn out of control.
In 2024, more than 40 million acres of the Amazon rainforest went up in smoke. And in the first half of 2025, according to observations by Brazil’s space agency, deforestation was already 27 percent higher than in the same period the year before. It’s a feedback loop that threatens to keep rainfall on the decline, the researchers say.
And it’s not just wild ecosystems that suffer. Brazil’s largest farming hubs are directly adjacent to the Amazon. Adequate rainfall for crops in these regions, the researchers said, also requires a healthy forest.
Farmers in states like Mato Grosso, Dr. Franco said, are already losing crops to drought. In 2024, the state went 150 days straight without rain.
“If you don’t have rainfall, then you don’t have rain for farming in Brazil,” he said. “This isn’t something for the future. This is already happening now.”
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11) Scientists Denounce Trump Administration’s Climate Report
Scores of researchers reviewed the Energy Department’s argument about greenhouse gases and found serious deficiencies.
By Lisa Friedman and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Sept. 2, 2025
A heat relief station at the Salvation Army Phoenix Citadel Corps. Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
More than 85 American and international scientists have denounced a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown, saying the analysis is riddled with errors, misrepresentations and cherry-picked data to fit the president’s political agenda.
The scientists submitted their critique as part of a public comment period on the report, which was to close Tuesday night.
The five researchers who wrote the July report were handpicked by Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and they all reject the established scientific consensus that the burning of oil, gas and coal is dangerously heating the planet. The report acknowledged that the Earth is warming but said that climate change is “less damaging economically than commonly believed.”
The administration used the report to justify its recent announcement that it would repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions that stem from burning fossil fuels.
Mr. Wright has accused the report’s critics of avoiding a robust discussion of the science.
“People had been much less willing than I had hoped to engage in a thoughtful dialogue on climate change,” he said in a recent interview. “This is fundamentally a story about something that’s a real physical phenomenon that’s scientifically complicated. It’s a scientific, economic issue and people treat it too often as a religious issue.” The Energy Department declined to comment on the criticisms from scientists about the report. Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for Mr. Wright, said in a statement that the agency sought an “open and transparent dialogue around climate science.” He added, “Following the public comment period, we look forward to reviewing and engaging on substantive comments.”
The Trump administration is pursuing an aggressive agenda to ramp up the production and use of coal, oil and gas, the burning of which is the main driver of climate change.
At the same time, average global temperatures have risen by between 1.25 and 1.41 degrees Celsius (or 2.25 to 2.53 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial times. That may sound small, but the warming has impacted every region of the planet with more frequent and intense heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts and other disasters.
Ross McKitrick, one of the report’s authors, said that their climate work for the Energy Department had been paused because of pending litigation. He defended the report’s lack of peer review, saying that it underwent an initial review within the Energy Department. Critiques submitted during the public comment period will be part of the public record, he said.
Dr. McKitrick said that the report’s authors followed their assignment and focused on themes that do not typically get enough attention.
But the 85 scientists, many of whom produced work that was cited in the Energy Department report, said that the report should be discredited.
In a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal that essentially serves as a peer review, the scientists took apart some of the government’s most eye-popping claims.
“Their goal was to muddy the waters, to put out a plausible-sounding argument that people can use in the public debate to make it sound like we don’t know whether climate change is bad or not,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, who led the rebuttal.
The Energy Department report could have a significant impact on federal policy. Climate denialists have for years acknowledged that they wanted to put the imprimatur of the federal government on research that runs counter to accepted climate science. That could give them more influence with Congress and strengthen their ability to legally challenge climate regulations.
Already the Environmental Protection Agency is using the Energy Department analysis to justify the repeal of the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific declaration that climate change poses a danger to human health and welfare. That finding is the basis for regulations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from such sources as automobiles and power plants.
Dr. Dessler said he was driven to reply to the Trump administration report because he felt it made a mockery out of a fundamental and heavily scrutinized field of science.
By Tuesday morning, more than 2,300 comments had been submitted regarding the report. Among them was a submission from the American Meteorological Society, a premiere climate science organization, which outlined what it called “foundational flaws” in the report and called on the government to correct the findings.
Dr. Dessler’s 439-page report — nearly three times as long as the Energy Department’s — disputes each chapter of the agency’s findings. In many cases, the government’s version deploys a scientific “kernel of truth,” taken out of context, to make its arguments seem credible, he said.
For example, the Energy Department report states that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that helps plants grow, and therefore more gas would improve agricultural yields. The scientific review points out that the Energy Department report sidesteps the negative impacts of global warming on plant life, including extreme heat, drought, wildfires and floods.
In another instance, the Trump administration’s report cited two studies by Antonio Gasparrini, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to support its statement that deaths caused by cold weather exceed those caused by heat.
While that is true, Dr. Gasparrini said, the report ignores the fact that climate change is increasing heat-related deaths, and at a greater rate than it would prevent deaths from cold.
“I found the report very poor from a scientific perspective, with contradictory and unsupported statements,” he said.
Cyrus C. Taylor, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said a chart showing yearly average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations omitted key data and made misleading choices on a graph to make it seem as though levels had risen only slightly.
“It’s a graphical sleight of hand,” Dr. Taylor said.
The scientists found other errors as they reviewed the federal report, including misquoting an international climate report, using incorrect scientific definitions and oversimplifying and mixing up the results of multiple studies.
Pamela D. McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, reviewed a section of the Energy Department report that claimed technological advances and wealth would protect communities from the impacts of climate change. It noted, for example, that improvements to canals, levees and flood gates in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina helped protect against the storm surge from Hurricane Isaac in 2012.
Dr. McElwee, who called the report “absolute sloppiness,” said it failed to consider future scenarios and the cost of climate disasters. The section on risks from climate change cited a 2023 paper that does not exist — and included a link to a different paper that concluded that nations should address climate change because the consequences would be damaging.
The Trump administration’s report also highlighted the work of Kristie Ebi, a global health professor at the University of Washington, as proof that dietary supplements would help combat nutrient loss from plants in a warmer world. But Dr. Ebi said her research did not make that claim.
Jim Rossi, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who specializes in energy law, said the report was significantly flimsier than what would typically be used to support federal policies or reverse them.
“There’s nothing wrong with having dissenting viewpoints that differ from the mainstream involved in reports used for policy assessments,” Mr. Rossi said. But to reverse course on a policy decision, the evidence “ought to be at least as strong as the factual record and science that supported the decision in the first place,” he said.
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12) An Earthquake Killed Hundreds in Afghanistan
Rescue workers struggled to reach isolated areas in eastern Afghanistan after a magnitude 6.0 quake.
By Justin Porter, Sept. 2, 2025
People awaiting evacuation in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, yesterday. Credit...Hedayat Shah/Associated Press
Rescue workers yesterday scrambled to reach isolated, mountainous areas in eastern Afghanistan after a magnitude 6.0 earthquake killed more than 800 people and injured 2,500 others there. Afghan officials warned that the death toll would probably rise.
Recovery efforts were complicated by landslides that stranded villages, and only a handful of countries, including Iran, India, Japan and the E.U., offered relief assistance to the Taliban government.
Most of the destruction took place in the province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan, but hospitals were operational, the acting head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Afghanistan said. Here’s what else to know about the quake.
Humanitarian crises: The quake struck Afghanistan as it grapples with overlapping crises. More than half of the country’s 42 million people are in need of aid, according to the U.N. Aid organizations are bracing for a painful winter amid dwindling funds and the return of more than two million Afghans from neighboring Pakistan and Iran.
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13) Gaza Postwar Plan Envisions ‘Voluntary’ Relocation of Entire Population
Karen DeYoung and Cate Brown/The Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2025
An Israeli tank in Gaza. (photo: Larry Towell/Magnum)
The Trump administration and international partners are discussing proposals to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on the rubble of Gaza. One would establish U.S. control and pay Palestinians to leave.
A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump administration, modeled on President Donald Trump’s vow to “take over” the enclave, would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.
The 38-page prospectus seen by The Washington Post envisions at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls “voluntary” departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.
Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food.
The plan estimates that every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000, compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls “life support” services in the secure zones for those who stay.
Called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, the proposal was developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) now distributing food inside the enclave. Financial planning was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group.
People familiar with the trust planning and with administration deliberations over postwar Gaza spoke about the sensitive subject on the condition of anonymity. The White House referred questions to the State Department, which declined to comment. BCG has said that work on the trust plan was expressly not approved and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently fired.
On Wednesday, Trump held a White House meeting to discuss ideas for how to end the war, now approaching the two-year mark, and what comes next. Participants included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special presidential envoy Steve Witkoff; former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose views on Gaza’s future have been solicited by the administration; and Trump’ son-in-law Jared Kushner, who handled much of the president’s first-term initiatives on the Middle East and has extensive private interests in the region.
No readout of the meeting or policy decisions were announced, although Witkoff said the night before the gathering that the administration had “a very comprehensive plan.”
It’s not clear if the detailed and comprehensive GREAT Trust proposal is what Trump has in mind. But major elements of it, according to two people familiar with the planning, were specifically designed to make real the president’s vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Perhaps most appealing, it purports to require no U.S. government funding and offer significant profit to investors. Unlike the controversial and sometimes cash-strapped GHF, which uses armed private U.S. security contractors to distribute food in four southern Gaza locations, the trust plan “does not rely on donations,” the prospectus says. Instead, it would be financed by public and private-sector investment in what it calls “mega-projects,” from electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high-rise apartments.
Calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years, with ongoing “self-generating” revenue streams. Some elements of the proposal were first reported by the Financial Times.
“I believe [Trump] is going to have a bold decision” when the fighting ends, said one person familiar with internal administration deliberations. “There are multiple different variations where the U.S. government could go, depending … on what happens.”
Competing plans for Gaza
Proposals for the day after the war ends in Gaza have proliferated almost since the day it started on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
As Israel’s military response has systematically reduced the enclave to rubble — displacing hundreds of thousands, leaving more than 60,000 Palestinians dead and nearly half million facing what a global crisis monitor said was catastrophic hunger — think tanks, academics, international organizations, governments and individuals have proposed ways to rehabilitate and govern Gaza.
Early in the war, proposals surfaced in Israel to create Hamas-free zones or “bubbles” under Israeli military protection in Gaza where Palestinians could receive humanitarian aid and gradually govern themselves as the conflict came to an end.
In January, less than a week before Trump took office, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented the Biden administration’s postwar route to statehood. It called for an “interim administration” for Gaza, overseen by the United Nations with security provided by vetted Palestinians and unspecified “partner nations” that would eventually cede power to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have all laid out plans. At a March summit, Arab leaders endorsed the Egyptian proposal that outlines the formation of a government of Gaza technocrats and Palestinian Authority officials with funding from Persian Gulf states. In addition to the possibility of putting Arab peacekeepers on the ground, officials in Cairo have said that members of the largely disbanded Gaza police force are being trained in Egypt to provide security after Hamas is disarmed.
Both Israel and the United States — the only countries that have publicly talked about even temporarily relocating Gazans from Gaza — have rejected the Arab proposal.
American security contractors working for the GHF have also been in discussions with Israel and possible humanitarian partners over a plan in which they would clear Gaza of unexploded ordnance and debris, and secure zones in which Palestinians would live temporarily as part of a reconstruction plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never offered a clear vision for Gaza’s future beyond saying Hamas must be disarmed and all hostages returned. He has said Israel must retain security control of the enclave and rejected any future governance there by the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, as well as the prospect of Palestinian statehood.
Israel, which says its troops now control 75 percent of the enclave, has approved a new offensive to take over the rest.
Far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government have advocated permanent Israeli occupation. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the annexation and Israeli resettlement of Gaza, said at a Thursday news conference that “Israel must completely hold control of the entire Strip, forever. We will annex a security perimeter and open the gates of Gaza for voluntary immigration.”
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has said he intends to take over a Hamas-free Gaza but “we don’t want to keep it.”
Shopping for third-country hosts
Removing Palestinians from Gaza — through persuasion, compensation or force — has been a subject of debate in Israeli politics since Gaza was first wrested from Egyptian control and occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israeli settlers lived alongside Palestinians there until 2005, when a peace agreement mandated their departure. Full Israeli withdrawal led to a power struggle between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas, which successfully wrested control of Gaza after winning a parliamentary majority in a 2006 election — the last election held in the enclave.
That uncomfortable status quo held through numerous brief exchanges of fire between Israel and Hamas until the 2023 attack, when thousands of militants breached the Israeli security barrier that surrounds Gaza on all sides but its narrow southern border with Egypt, overrunning Israel Defense Forces bases and murdering civilians.
Israel, Netanyahu has said, is “talking to several countries” about taking relocated Gazans. Libya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Indonesia and Somaliland have been mentioned as potential options. All except Indonesia — which previously has said it would temporarily admit a few thousand Palestinians seeking work or medical treatment — are in Africa and in the midst of their own conflicts and civilian deprivation.
Libya is ruled by two rival governments that have frequently come to blows, and Ethiopia has seen sporadic civil war and conflict with its neighbors. Israel, which has restricted humanitarian assistance to Gaza, said this month that it would send medical aid and other supplies to South Sudan.
No country has recognized Somaliland, a former British protectorate that unilaterally declared its independence from war-torn Somalia in 1991. After its leaders offered a place for relocated Gazans in exchange for statehood recognition, Trump told reporters earlier this month that “we are looking into that right now.”
Trump outlines his vision
During his 2024 election campaign, Trump said that he would quickly stop the Gaza war. But when he returned to the theme as president, it was mostly to talk about how he would employ his property developer skills once the Gazans were gone.
“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” Trump told reporters while signing a raft of executive orders in the Oval Office two days after his inauguration. “It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way.” Gaza, he said, was “a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”
Two weeks later, at a White House news conference with Netanyahu, Trump said “the United States will take over the Gaza Strip.” Describing a “long-term ownership position,” he added that everyone he had spoken to about it “loves the idea.”
“I’ve studied this very closely over a lot of months, and I’ve seen it from every different angle,” Trump said. “I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so magnificent.”
Netanyahu, smiling at Trump’s side, called it a “bold vision,” and said that Israel and the United States had a “common strategy.”
Asked later that day in an interview with Fox News if Gaza’s Palestinian residents could return after reconstruction, Trump said, “No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing” elsewhere.
Within hours, Rubio and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back those remarks. Part of Trump’s “generous proposal” was that Palestinians would need somewhere to live “in the interim” while reconstruction took place, Rubio said. Leavitt insisted that “the president has made it clear that they need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza.”
Just a week later, Trump returned to the subject at an Oval Office session with a visibly disconcerted King Abdullah II of Jordan. “With the United States being in control of that piece of land,” he said, referring to Gaza, “you’re going to have stability in the Middle East for the first time. And the Palestinians, or the people that live now in Gaza, will be living beautifully in another location.”
Shortly after his February vow to take over Gaza, Trump reposted on his Truth Social account an AI-generated video of his vision. It begins with children picking through the rubble amid gun-toting militants, then quickly shifts to a wonderland of sparkling high-rises, pristine beaches and money falling from the sky. Trump and Netanyahu appear sunbathing on the Gaza shore, and a golden Trump statue lords benevolently over a clean and lively urban scene.
A catchy song provides the soundtrack. “Donald’s coming to set you free/ Bringing delight to all you see. No more tunnels, no more fear/ Trump Gaza is finally here.”
In the wake of Arab outrage and widespread charges that any forced removal would be a violation of international law, both Trump and Netanyahu more recently have stressed that any postwar relocation of Gazans would be voluntary and, if the Palestinians chose, temporary. In the meantime, Israel has moved to corral the Gaza population of about 2 million in a narrow strip of waterfront in the south while it prepares for its northern offensive in Gaza City.
The United Nations estimates that 90 percent of the housing in the enclave has been destroyed. The question of what to do about the population of Gaza while it is made habitable and who will govern it in the future are central, no matter what plan is adopted.
“The scale of destruction is massive and unlike anything we’ve seen before, even within the context of Gaza,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. “The urgency is extreme. The scale of the reconstruction project is extreme. And the political question is as unclear as ever.”
Redeveloping a new ‘Riviera’
Trump’s February vow to own and redevelop Gaza offered both a green light and a road map for the group of Israeli businessman, led by entrepreneurs Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American, and Liran Tancman, a former Israeli military intelligence officer. They had already handed off the GHF project to implementers and moved on to the postwar problem in consultation with international financial and humanitarian experts, and potential government and private investors, as well as some Palestinians, according to people familiar with the planning.
By spring, a Washington-based team from BCG, which had separately been hired to work with the primary U.S. contractor setting up the GHF food distribution program, was working on detailed planning and financial modeling for the GREAT Trust.
Eisenberg and Tancman declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the planning said that the prospectus was completed in April with only minimal change since then, but that there was plenty of room for tweaks.
“It’s not prescriptive, but is exploring what is possible,” the person said. “The people of Gaza need to be enabled to build something new, like the president said, and have a better life.”
Those familiar with the initiative in both Washington and Israel compared it to U.S. trusteeships of Pacific islands after World War II, and the postwar governance and economic roles played by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan and Secretary of State George C. Marshall in Germany.
While the Pacific trust territories were administered by the United States, the arrangement was approved by the United Nations, whose membership is unlikely to agree to a similar relationship with Gaza. But the trust planners maintain that under the customary international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for “as you possess under law”) and limits on Palestinian autonomy under the 1993 Oslo agreements, Israel has administrative control over the occupied territories and the power to give it away.
As outlined in the trust document, Israel would transfer “Administrative Authorities and Responsibilities in Gaza to the GREAT Trust under a U.S.-Israel bilateral agreement” that would “evolve” into a formal trusteeship. The outline foresees eventual investments by “Arab and other countries” that would turn the arrangement into a “multi-lateral institution.” Trump administration officials have dismissed as mere public rhetoric the insistence of Arab governments, particularly in the Persian Gulf, that they will only support a postwar plan leading to Palestinian statehood.
Israel would maintain “overarching rights to meet its security needs” during the first year of the plan, while nearly all internal security would be provided by unspecified “TCN” (third-country nationals) and “Western” private military contractors. Their role would gradually decrease over a decade as trained “local police” take over.
The trust would govern Gaza for a multiyear period it estimates will take 10 years “until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.”
The document makes no reference to eventual Palestinian statehood. The undefined Palestinian governing entity, it says, “will join the Abraham Accords,” Trump’s first-term negotiation that led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states. Trump has said he expects to expand that achievement before leaving office.
The plan talks of Gaza’s location “at the crossroads” of what will become a “pro-American” region, giving the United States access to energy resources and critical minerals, and serving as a logistics hub for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that was first announced during the Biden administration but derailed by the Israel-Gaza war.
Gaza’s reconstruction would start with the removal of massive amounts of debris and unexploded ordnance, along with the rebuilding of utilities and the electrical grid.
Initial costs would be financed using as collateral the 30 percent of Gaza land that planners have said is already “publicly” owned and would immediately belong to the trust. That is “the biggest and easiest. No need to ask anyone,” Tancman noted in the margin of one trust planning document seen by The Post. “I’m afraid to write that,” Eisenberg replied in a note, “because it could look like appropriation of land.”
Investor-financed “mega-projects” include paving a ring road and tram line around Gaza’s perimeter, which the planners flatteringly label the “MBS Highway,” after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose approval of such an initiative would go a long way toward regional acceptance. A modern north-south highway through Gaza’s center is named after United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. A new port and airport would be built in the far south, with direct land connections to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both publicly committed to the Egyptian proposal for Gaza and eventual Palestinian statehood, with no indication that they have agreed to any element of the trust plan.
The GREAT Trust also envisions a water desalination plant and solar array in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula that would provide Gaza with water and electricity. Gaza’s eastern border with Israel would be a “smart” industrial zone, including American electric vehicle companies and regional data centers to serve Israel and the Persian Gulf countries. Gaza’s western waterfront would be reserved for the “Gaza Trump Riviera,” boasting “world-class resorts” with the possibility of artificial islands similar to the palm-shaped ones built off the UAE city of Dubai.
In the center of the enclave, between the waterfront resorts and the industrial zone — which the plan projects would create a million jobs — apartment buildings of up to 20 stories would be constructed in six to eight “dynamic, modern and AI-powered smart planned cities.” The mixed-use areas would include “residences, commerce, light industry and other facilities, including clinics and hospitals, schools and more,” interspersed with “green areas, including agricultural land, parks and golf courses.”
Gazan families who remain, or leave and then return after residential areas are completed to exchange their land tokens, would be offered ownership of new 1,800-square-foot apartments the plan values at $75,000 each.
Adil Haque, a professor and expert on the law of armed conflict at Rutgers University, said that any plan in which Palestinians are prevented from returning to their homes, or inadequately supplied with food, medical care and shelter, would be unlawful — regardless of any cash incentive offered for departures.
Abu Mohamed, a 55-year-old father speaking over WhatsApp from Gaza on Saturday, said that despite the catastrophic situation, he would never leave. “I’m staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now,” he said. “But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland.”
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