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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”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Who Are Chicago’s Immigrants?
Almost 40 percent of immigrants living in Chicago are from Mexico. More than 800,000 of the city’s 2.7 million residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
By Julie Bosman, Reporting from Chicago, Sept. 9, 2025
The “Wings of Mexico” art installation at the Plaza of the Americas in downtown Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Immigration has always shaped Chicago’s neighborhoods, its expansion and its culture.
Immigrants have stabilized the city’s population, allowing it to maintain slow growth in recent years. Foreign-born workers are integral to the local economy, particularly in the construction, manufacturing and service industries.
Chicago politicians brag about their immigrant backgrounds, as in the Irish American Daleys, and it is not uncommon to see signs in English, Spanish and Polish on downtown buildings.
“Chicago has been very chill about immigration,” said Rob Paral, a demographer at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s not a radioactive issue here.”
As the Trump administration announced this week that it had begun a crackdown on illegal immigration in the city, elected officials and local advocacy groups loudly pushed back, citing Chicago’s history as a city that has welcomed immigrants.
More than half a million Chicagoans were born outside the U.S.
Chicago’s population of 2.7 million is roughly split in thirds among white residents, Black residents and Latino residents, plus a small but growing number of Asian residents.
According to the American Community Survey for 2023, 560,000 of Chicago’s residents are foreign-born, the majority of whom have legal status in the United States. In the city, at least 150,000 people are undocumented, encompassing about 8 percent of Chicago households, according to Mr. Paral’s research.
In the 19th century, immigrants came from Europe to Chicago in waves, seeking work at meatpacking plants, railroads and factories.
The largest group of immigrants in Chicago today are from Mexico, followed by China, India, the Philippines and Poland, according to census data. The 1980s in particular saw a rush of arrivals from Mexico.
Mexican-born Chicagoans have lived and built businesses for generations in neighborhoods including Pilsen and Little Village, and more recently, in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side, and Brighton Park and Gage Park on the Southwest Side.
More than 800,000 Chicagoans in the 2020 census identified as Hispanic or Latino.
Asian Americans, a growing population in Chicago, are concentrated in Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Chinatown, as well as the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side.
More than 30,000 Ukrainians have also flooded into Chicago in recent years to escape their war-scarred country, with some families choosing to stay in the city and others eventually moving to nearby suburbs with heavy Eastern European populations.
Chicago has restricted local officials from helping ICE.
Laws in Chicago tend to be protective of immigrants’ rights. Chicago is known as a sanctuary city for its laws that prevent local officials from helping federal immigration agents enforce immigration law.
In 2012, under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago passed a new Welcoming City Ordinance that prevents police officers from detaining people solely on the belief they are illegal immigrants.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has repeatedly affirmed Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.
A recent surge of migrants strained Chicago.
Occasionally, tensions over immigration have risen in Chicago.
In 2023, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending buses of asylum seekers from Central and South America to Chicago, saying that his own state was unfairly overwhelmed by people crossing the border, Chicago was inundated with people who had nowhere to stay. Hundreds were sleeping in tents on sidewalks in winter and on floors inside police stations, and the cost of the effort to feed and house the migrants strained city resources.
While the buses have long stopped arriving, many Chicagoans, including Latinos, have objected to the sudden influx of migrants and worried that their integration into the city would be difficult.
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2) Gulf Powers Question U.S. Protection After Israeli Attack on Qatari Soil
The brazen attempt to kill the political leaders of Hamas in Doha could upend the foundations of an American-led order in the Middle East.
By Vivian Nereim, Reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 10, 2025
Qatar hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East, has bought billions of dollars worth of defense systems from the United States and recently gifted a luxury Boeing jet to President Trump.
Yet on Tuesday, none of that stopped Israel, a key U.S. ally, from launching a brazen military attack on Qatari soil. It was an attempt to assassinate senior Hamas officials who had gathered to discuss a cease-fire proposal to pause the war in Gaza — a deal that was backed by Mr. Trump.
“Qatar being unable to protect its own citizens with literally the U.S. Central Command on its territory has prompted locals to question the value of the American partnership,” said Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, a research group. “It’s a real problem for Gulf leaders. And it should worry the United States as well.”
The Israeli attack sent shock waves through Gulf capitals that have been courted by Israel as potential allies in recent years and have long regarded the U.S. as their main security guarantor.
The strike hit a residential neighborhood in the Qatari capital of Doha, sending black smoke into the sky and killing a member of Qatar’s internal security forces, Bader Saad al-Humaidi al-Dosari, according to Qatari officials. He became the first Gulf Arab to be killed by Israel in decades.
Qatar had agreed to host the political leadership of Hamas at the behest of the United States, positioning the country as a critical mediator in talks to end the war in Gaza. In a statement, the Palestinian armed group confirmed that the son of Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, and four other people affiliated with Hamas were killed in the attack.
It not yet clear how the Israeli strike will affect cease-fire negotiations, which were already stalled. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, said on Tuesday that “nothing will deter” his country from playing its role as mediator, even as he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel of trying “to sabotage every attempt to create opportunities for peace.”
Israel’s attack will reverberate far beyond Qatar, analysts say.
The country’s willingness to launch an attack in a Gulf state marks a potential turning point for the region, which has long been dominated by American alliances and interests.
“This is a litmus test,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. If Gulf rulers “don’t do anything forceful now, they will only be part of an Israeli orbit of power and an Israel-led regional order.”
The fossil-fuel rich Gulf countries — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain — have become increasingly ambitious in recent years, using their vast wealth to garner influence around the world. Combined, the countries control roughly $4 trillion of assets in their sovereign wealth funds, and several of them have substantial sway over global energy markets. Their domestic agendas hinge on their reputations as safe havens for trade, investment and tourism in a volatile Middle East — a reputation that Israel’s attack struck at directly.
“Netanyahu himself declared that he will reshape the Middle East,” Sheikh Mohammed said on Tuesday. “Is this a message that he also intends to reshape the Gulf?”
A military response by Gulf countries is out of the question because further escalation would harm the domestic agendas of the Gulf’s rulers. And despite frustration with U.S. policy in the region, they remain dependent on American military support.
But “they have a lot of tools at their disposal,” Mr. Al-Saif said, including diplomacy and economic leverage. If Gulf sovereign funds decided to take action through “divestment that hurts Israeli-affiliated or American-affiliated interests,” that could have an impact, he argued.
How Gulf countries will respond is not yet clear. What is clear, though, is that they are — once again — questioning the utility of American security guarantees, this time just months after Mr. Trump toured the region, singing its rulers’ praises and signing a flurry of business deals.
The United States called Qatar to warn about the attack — ten minutes after it had already happened, Sheikh Mohammed said.
“It’s difficult for the U.S. to deliver to us at this stage,” Mr. Al-Saif said, referring collectively to the Gulf countries. “We need to come up with another alternative or we need to come together with Mr. Trump again and talk security, purely, and not just have a commercial blitz.”
The attack is also likely to undermine Mr. Trump’s hopes to expand the Abraham Accords, a series of U.S.-brokered deals in 2020 that saw the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain establish diplomatic ties with Israel — agreements that the president viewed as one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of his first term.
Qatar was not part of the accords, and has had tensions with some of its Gulf neighbors.
But the attack on Tuesday united the Gulf countries in condemnation of Israel, and stirred mutual fears about their vulnerability. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirati ruler, traveled to Qatar for a state visit on Wednesday with his powerful national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed.
“U.S. partners and U.S. policymakers themselves are coming to the late realization that Israel’s militant mindset is a threat to the entire region,” said Joseph Farsakh, a former U.S. State Department official focused on the Arabian Peninsula.
In the long term, Mr. Farsakh said, the Gulf will “realize that working with Israel is simply bad for business.”
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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3) What to Know About Israel’s Airstrike on Hamas in Qatar
Why did Israel attack? Who was killed? What has been the Qatari response? Here are answers to those and other key questions.
By Ephrat Livni, Sept. 10, 2025
Damage in Doha, Qatar, after an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders on Tuesday. Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Israel attempted to kill senior members of Hamas’s leadership in an airstrike on Tuesday in Qatar, a primary mediator to end the war in Gaza and a U.S. ally.
The Israeli attack on Qatari soil could complicate ties between the nations and undermine cease-fire negotiations.
Here’s what to know.
Why Did Israel Attack?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement on Tuesday that they had ordered the attack on Qatari soil “in light of an operational opportunity” and “given the fact that it was this Hamas leadership that initiated and organized the October 7 massacre,” as well as subsequent attacks on Israel.
“Over are the days when leaders of terror enjoy immunity anywhere,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech later on Tuesday, in reference to the strike.
Who Was Killed?
A Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, said that the attack in the capital, Doha, had targeted a residential building where senior Hamas politicians lived. The area hit was near schools and foreign embassies. The strike killed a member of Qatar’s internal security forces and injured others, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Hamas said that Israel had failed to kill senior officials in the group. But the son of Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, was killed in the attack, as was his office manager and three other people affiliated with Hamas.
How Have Qatar and Others Responded?
Qatar denounced the attack, as did others in the international community.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, said, “We have reached a decisive moment where there must be a response from the entire region to such barbaric actions.” He accused the Israeli government of trying “to sabotage every attempt to create opportunities for peace.”
Middle Eastern nations, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, condemned the strikes, as did France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, who called it “unacceptable, whatever the reason” and Keir Starmer, prime minister of Britain, who warned it could “risk further escalation across the region.”
President Trump said on social media on Tuesday that he did not make the decision to attack Qatar and was informed of it too late to stop the strike. “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a Sovereign Nation and close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals,” he wrote. “However, eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.”
How Unusual Is This?
Though Israel has assassinated Hamas leaders and other enemies on foreign soil, the attack in Qatar stands out because the nation has been seen as neutral and an important intermediary. Israel has previously avoided alienating it.
Israeli leaders view Qatar with some suspicion, but its negotiators visit often and it is a strong U.S. ally, hosting an American military base.
Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been emboldened in the last year, while its enemies are weakened, to act more aggressively around the region, bombing Iran for 12 days in June, carrying out strikes and ground incursions in Syria, and invading Lebanon last year for the first time since 2006 to fight the militant group Hezbollah.
What Assassinations Abroad Has Israel Carried Out?
Ismail Haniyeh, who led Hamas’s political office, was killed last year while visiting Iran with a bomb planted in the guesthouse where he was staying. Mr. Katz, Israel’s defense minister, later acknowledged Israel’s role in the assassination.
Israel has carried out multiple killings of nuclear scientists and others in Iran, and, while at war with Iran in June, targeted Israeli attacks killed top Iranian government and military officials.
Last year, Israel also killed top officials of Hezbollah, in Lebanon, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and his presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine. Hezbollah began regularly firing on Israel shortly after the war in Gaza began, prompting first retaliatory fire and then a devastating Israeli offensive; a cease-fire was reached in November.
Israel carried out an airstrike last year in Syria that killed top Iranian military officers who worked with Hezbollah.
Last month, Israel killed senior members of the Houthi group in Yemen, including the militia’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi. The Houthis have been attacking Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea. Like Hezbollah, the group is backed by Iran and said it was acting in solidarity with Hamas.
Where Do Cease-Fire Negotiations Stand?
Hamas said in a statement that their officials were discussing a cease-fire proposal by Mr. Trump when they came under attack.
The new proposal envisions a comprehensive agreement rather than the staggered approach to talks taken previously, and Mr. Trump on Sunday predicted that there would be a deal “very soon.” But the proposal appears to leave some of the most difficult points to be hammered out in further negotiations.
Qatar will continue serving as a mediator in the war, Sheikh Mohammed, the prime minister, said on Tuesday, but the country’s government has also formed a legal team to determine how to respond to Israel’s attack.
Isabel Kershner, Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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4) Facing Israeli Assault, Many in Gaza City Say Fleeing Again Is Worse
Israel has ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate the city and go to the southern Gaza Strip, but many residents say it is no safer for them there.
By Liam Stack and Abu Bakr Bashir, Sept. 10, 2025
Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv and Abu Bakr Bashir from London.
People leaving Gaza City with their belongings head south by truck along the coastal road in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Elham Shamali, like hundreds of thousands of Gaza City residents, faces an agonizing choice. She can flee with her family — again — to suffer the uncertainties and indignities of displacement, or risk defying Israel’s evacuation orders ahead of what is expected to be a full-scale assault on Gaza’s largest city.
Ms. Shamali, 47, fled her home in the city once before during the war that began nearly two years ago, but she returned when the southern part of Gaza began to feel too dangerous.
This time, she said her family would move to a different Gaza City neighborhood that she thought might fare better in an Israeli offensive, but insisted they would not leave the area altogether.
“We know if we leave, we will never return,” said Ms. Shamali, who was a university professor before the war.
Many of her neighbors felt the same way.
In recent days, she said, she had seen them prying valuable construction materials off their homes before heading south.
“I saw people carrying window frames and doors,” she said. “Stuff that suggests they know they won’t be back.”
Israel has portrayed Gaza City as a Hamas stronghold and said it must take full control of the city to rout the group’s fighters there.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military ordered the entire population to evacuate Gaza City as it prepares for an offensive that it said will take full control of the city. It has already taken over about 40 percent of the city and bombed several high-rise towers. On Wednesday, the military struck another tower that it said was being used by Hamas.
Residents of the city, much of which has already been reduced to rubble, said in interviews that they cannot, or will not, leave. Some do not trust Israel to let them return if they flee. Others cannot afford to leave, or worry that they or their loved ones could need medical care that might be unavailable if they left.
Nearly all of the city’s residents have been forced from their homes and shelters at least once already during the war, many of them multiple times, and do not believe that any place in the territory is safe.
“I cannot leave Gaza City to go to the south. I just cannot,” said Dr. Bakr Gaoud, a physician at Al Nasser Children’s Hospital, where his son, Saif Eldin, 11, has been receiving treatment for epilepsy. “Almost all the drugs he needs are missing, but things in the south will be much worse.”
Last week, Israel began telling civilians to leave for what it called a “humanitarian zone” in the southern coastal area of al-Mawasi.
Earlier in the war, the Israeli military instructed civilians to go to that same general area. But al-Mawasi, which was thinly populated before war, lacked the shelter, sanitation, water, food distribution and medical care needed to absorb masses of people.
And Israel conducted airstrikes there repeatedly, killing dozens of people in what it had labeled a safer zone. Israeli officials said they were killing Hamas fighters.
For those who have decided to remain in Gaza City, a feeling of dread set in as they watched panicked neighbors begin to pack up what remained of their belongings.
Hidaya al-Falouji, 30, said she and her four children would stay. She said their home in nearby Jabaliya was destroyed earlier in the war by a strike that killed her husband and brother. When they had to leave the building’s ruins behind to move into a tent, she felt like she had “abandoned” both her home and her life before the war.
“I cried all along the way,” said Ms. al-Falouji, whose youngest son is now three. “I will not leave. I will not abandon Gaza. Either I die here, or I remain steadfast in my city.”
The memory of privation and violence during earlier evacuations looms large for many who said they would stay in Gaza City.
Mohamed al-Najjar, 36, said he remained haunted by his experiences in the south, where he lived for a year earlier in the war with his wife and two children. The area was as bleak and ruined as the north, and he said they eventually returned to Gaza City because the south had “no resources, no infrastructure and no safety.”
Fleeing Gaza City is too costly for many residents, and Palestinians say there is little room in al-Mawasi for them all to live.
To get there, Gazans must either walk or pay for transportation at inflated wartime rates. Once they arrive, they have to rent space in a building for thousands of dollars per month, or buy the materials to build a tent. To build the tent, they often must pay rent on a tiny plot of land. Food and medicine are scarce, and what is available is sold at sky-high prices.
Mr. al-Najjar said it would cost about $1,000 to go back to al-Mawasi and build a new tent there.
If he were to leave now, he would never see the city as he knows it again — even if he did come back.
“I am very worried this time if they manage to push us to the south, we might never be able to return,” said Mr. al-Najjar, who works as a photographer for Palestinian news outlets that are unaffiliated with Hamas. “And if we return, Gaza City will be completely flattened.”
Ms. Shamali shared his concerns. Her family does not have the money to get to al-Mawasi, and “the south is not safe at all,” she said.
“The army has been killing people in the south just like in the north, so what is the point?”
She said they will seek safety in a neighborhood of Gaza City that is further to the west than their current shelter, betting that area will be safer during the coming offensive.
When her family fled before, they expected they would only be displaced temporarily, said Ms. Shamali, who taught at a university in Gaza City before the war. They no longer believe that.
For Dr. Gaoud, the most important thing has been to stay close to the hospital so he can keep treating the wounded, but also so that his son might receive care. He said he has lost 18 family members during the war, including his brother and nephew last month. He does not want to lose anyone else.
Two weeks ago, the family’s home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood was destroyed. They were forced to move to a tent by the beach, where he said he listens to the sound of explosions at night with his wife and two children.
“But it is not too far from the hospital where I can still take care of my child,” he said. “As long as I am at the children’s hospital, I have a better chance to help him.”
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5) France and a New Prime Minister Face a Day of Disruption
Protesters blocked roads, roundabouts and tram lines across the country as Sébastien Lecornu took office.
By Catherine Porter, Reporting from Paris, Sept. 10, 2025
Police officers during protests in Toulouse, southwestern France, on Wednesday. Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
France’s newest prime minister took office on Wednesday as protesters across the country temporarily blocked highways, roundabouts and bridges in a show of frustration about the nation’s political direction.
The day of protest, a rejection of proposed austerity measures that is fueled by anger against President Emmanuel Macron, has been expected for weeks. But it arrived at a moment of extreme political volatility, less than 48 hours after the government lost a confidence vote and collapsed, opening a sudden vacuum of power.
Mr. Macron moved swiftly to fill it, appointing Sébastien Lecornu, formerly the defense minister, as the new prime minister, late on Tuesday. Mr. Lecornu began the job around midday.
By naming a center-right ally, and a proven loyalist, Mr. Macron appeared to double down on an approach that has burned through two short-lived governments over the past year. The move was interpreted by the president’s critics as more of the same and inflamed the antigovernment fury of many protesters in the movement, which calls itself Bloquons Tout, or Let’s Block Everything.
The protests were relatively small by standards in France, where labor unions regularly summon hundreds of thousands to marches. But they were scattered around the country, and they were disruptive.
On Wednesday morning, scenes of police officers confronting small groups of protesters blocking bridges, tram lines and roads unfurled across the country. By 9:30 a.m., the Interior Ministry announced that the police had made 192 arrests, including 132 in Paris, where many groups had attempted to block the ring road that circles the French capital.
The authorities deployed a heavy police presence of some 80,000 officers across the country — 6,000 in Paris alone — to guard against attempts to block essential infrastructure, including airports, public transportation lines and stations, power plants and water treatment centers.
Bruno Retailleau, the departing interior minister, told reporters that police forces had moved to clear out 50 or so disruptions targeting roads or public transit depots.
“Law enforcement has the order to not tolerate any violence, any vandalism, any blockage, any occupation of our nation’s essential infrastructure,” Mr. Retailleau warned Wednesday morning from Rungis, a Paris suburb, on a visit to a wholesale international food market there.
Mr. Retailleau said that in southwestern France, about 50 protesters had attempted to block tram lines in Bordeaux, that a bus was burned in Rennes and that cable arson had interrupted train traffic between the cities of Toulouse and Auch. In Paris, the police prevented about 1,000 protesters from entering the Gare du Nord, a train station, the authorities reported.
The Let’s Block Everything movement started online in May when a right-wing group called for shutting down the country on Sept. 10, experts say. After François Bayrou, the departing prime minister, presented an austerity budget in mid-July, that call quickly spread through social media with the hashtags #BloquonsTout or #10Septembre. Mr. Bayrou resigned this week after losing the confidence vote.
Many fear the protests could build like the Yellow Vest movement, which started online in 2018 and led to months of chaotic and sometimes violent protests across France, finally petering out after the government spent nearly $20 billion appeasing it.
A survey by the left-wing Jean-Jaurès Foundation found that a majority of people involved in the Let’s Block Everything movement were educated, highly politicized and angry far-left sympathizers. So distrustful have they become of the president, the prime minister and other institutions of power that they consider them illegitimate and want nothing less than a full-scale change of government.
Demands listed in one online leaflet reflected left-wing priorities: strengthening public services, fighting media concentration, taxing the rich.
However, like the Yellow Vests, this movement has no official leaders nor communication channels. Its positions are broad and its support is sprawling. A recent survey by the polling company Ipsos showed strong backing among both left-wing voters and those who support the far-right National Rally, and very little from the country’s centrist voters.
Tristan Mendès France, who studies online conspiracy movements, pointed out that many well-known figures from the Yellow Vest movement have also supported Let’s Block Everything.
“This movement is not centralized,” said Mr. Mendès France, who is a lecturer in digital literacy at Paris Cité University. “There are diffuse influences, including loads of extreme right influencers who have a large number of followers, but they are fragmented.”
“The atmosphere online is one of anger and frustration and dégagisme,” he said, using a French word referring to a wholesale rejection of France’s political class.
The political leader of the far-left party France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, endorsed the movement in August. Other left-wing political parties followed. Two of France’s labor unions have said they would take part in the protests, but most are waiting for a national strike set for Sept. 18.
Though one spark of the online movement was opposition to Mr. Bayrou’s proposed budget, the collapse of his government hasn’t doused it. If anything, some of Mr. Macron’s political opponents said the president’s choice of another prime minister from his inner circle would further inflame the movement.
Marine Tondelier, the leader of France’s Green Party, told the BFMTV news channel Tuesday night that Mr. Lecornu’s appointment was a “provocation” that revealed a “total lack of respect” for the French people, who would wonder what the point of voting was.
Early Wednesday morning, a group of about a hundred, mostly young protesters gathered at the Porte d’Orléans in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, and then moved up to the Place d’Alésia, knocking over recycling cans and e-bikes as they went. They erected makeshift barricades, lit trash fires, and gathered on the street to block traffic, clapping and chanting a recurring protest slogan, popularized by the Yellow Vest movement: “Even if Macron doesn’t want it, here we are.”
But the protesters dispersed quickly after the arrival of rows of police vans with flashing blue lights and officers in riot gear, some of whom charged and fired tear gas. Within minutes, the police had cleared away the debris and traffic had resumed — until the protesters re-formed several blocks away and the scene repeated itself.
That game of cat and mouse is expected to play out in Paris and elsewhere around France on Wednesday as the protesters aim not for huge street demonstrations but for chaotic, fluid disruptions.
The turnout at a roundabout near the northern border with Belgium was not as big nor successful as organizers had hoped, however.
“We thought there would be more of us,” Cédric Brun, 46, a labor union official in the area, told Agence France-Presse. “The unfortunate thing is that there are more revolutionaries on Facebook than in reality.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
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6) Gaza War Turns New Yorkers Against Israel, With Mayor’s Race as Backdrop
More New Yorkers say their sympathies lie with Palestinians rather than Israel in the long-running conflict in Gaza, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.
By Benjamin Oreskes and Ruth Igielnik, Sept. 10, 2025
The Times/Siena poll found that 44 percent of registered New York City voters sympathized more with Palestinians and 26 percent with Israel in the conflict. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Two years after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, New Yorkers now broadly sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis in the ongoing conflict, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena University.
The yawning gap of perspectives toward the conflict — 44 percent of registered New York City voters sympathized more with Palestinians; 26 percent sympathized more with Israel — is particularly stark given that the city is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. The poll also found that voters broadly think that criticizing Israel is not inherently antisemitic, 51 percent to 31 percent.
Israel’s prosecution of the war and its restrictions on aid to Gaza have played a part in sullying New Yorkers’ opinion of the country’s actions, and have led many — including traditionally staunch allies of Israel — to shift their views and speak out against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While the Times/Siena poll has not previously surveyed voters in the city on this topic, national polls have shown Americans becoming ever more critical of Israel as the war has continued.
These views have filtered down to the mayor’s race, which is currently led by Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who has aligned himself firmly with the plight of Palestinians, calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.”
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there. Residents are struggling to feed themselves amid Mr. Netanyahu’s push to expand the war. Mr. Netanyahu has said assertions of a famine in Gaza are exaggerated and that the war must continue until Hamas disarms and releases the remaining hostages it took in 2023, in an attack that killed about 1,200 people.
Mr. Mamdani’s beliefs would traditionally be considered disqualifying by many New York City voters, and they stand in stark contrast to the positions held by his two most prominent general election opponents, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. Both are Democrats who are now campaigning as independents. They, along with Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, are polling far behind Mr. Mamdani among likely voters.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo have relentlessly criticized Mr. Mamdani’s stance on Israel, calling him an antisemite and terrorist sympathizer. The poll’s findings underscore just how much Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo may have misread the electorate by expending energy to attack Mr. Mamdani’s views on Israel.
In fact, Mr. Mamdani had a slim lead among the poll’s relatively small sample of Jewish likely voters with about 30 percent support, closely followed by Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo.
More than 70 percent of Jewish voters said they sympathized with Israel, compared with about 20 percent who said they sympathized with Palestinians.
Overall, Mr. Mamdani leads the pack in terms of who voters think has best addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with 39 percent preferring his approach. By comparison, 17 percent said they thought Mr. Cuomo had best addressed the conflict and just 10 percent preferred Mr. Adams.
Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory and continued electoral strength have been driven by strong support from younger voters. This demographic group was especially likely to say Mr. Mamdani had best addressed the conflict.
Aamina Mohammed, 19, said that Mr. Mamdani’s response after he was asked during a primary debate where he would travel first if elected mayor stuck with her. Several of the other candidates, including Mr. Cuomo, said Israel, while Mr. Mamdani said he would stay in New York City.
The candidate’s focus on New Yorkers’ struggles to afford rent and his willingness to speak out against Israel has led Ms. Mohammed to back him.
“I don’t recognize a state that literally is killing people,” she said. “You cannot make up the things that people are posting online, showing you blown-up children. You can’t make that up.”
Mr. Mamdani’s backers were far more likely to sympathize with Palestinian interests, the poll found. Mr. Cuomo’s supporters were slightly more sympathetic to Israel (38 percent), but a sizable share (28 percent) were sympathetic to Palestinians and many (18 percent) supported both groups equally. Even among Mr. Cuomo’s own supporters, only about half said he had best addressed the conflict; 12 percent of them said Mr. Mamdani had done a better job.
During the primary, Mr. Cuomo assiduously courted Jewish voters — particularly Orthodox Jews who had previously been skeptical of him because of Covid restrictions during his governorship. Last year, Mr. Cuomo founded a pro-Israel advocacy group and said he would join Mr. Netanyahu’s legal defense team after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him.
“Do you stand with Israel or do you stand against Israel?” Mr. Cuomo said in 2023. “Because silence is not an option.”
Mr. Mamdani has strongly disputed assertions that he is antisemitic and has spoken frequently about expanding the city’s efforts to protect Jewish New Yorkers and combat antisemitism if he is elected.
While Mr. Cuomo has continued to denounce Mr. Mamdani’s views, the former governor’s supporters are not especially likely to say that criticizing Israel is antisemitic. A plurality of his supporters, about 43 percent, said that such criticism is not antisemitic, not dissimilar to the share of New Yorkers overall. About half of registered voters said they thought criticizing Israel is not inherently antisemitic.
“The Israeli government is extreme. It’s right-wing, and the public is not happy with them,” said Lisa Sopher, a Manhattan resident who is Modern Orthodox. She supports Mr. Cuomo, she said, in part because she objected to Mr. Mamdani’s initial reluctance to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which some see as a call for violence against Jews.
Mr. Mamdani has since said he does not use the phrase and would discourage its use.
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7) Anger Mounts in Korea as Release of Workers Detained in Georgia Is Delayed
It is unclear when the South Korean detainees will be repatriated. They were previously scheduled to depart the United States on Wednesday.
By Choe Sang-Hun and Jin Yu Young, Reporting from Seoul, Sept. 10, 2025
A rally in Seoul on Tuesday in support of the South Korean workers arrested in an immigration raid in the United States. Credit...Yonhap, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The repatriation of hundreds of South Korean workers arrested in an immigration raid in the United States has been delayed, officials in Seoul said on Wednesday, as frustration and anger with the Trump administration here began to mount.
It was unclear when a chartered Korean Air flight, which was previously scheduled to fly from Atlanta on Wednesday, would take off. But the plane’s departure was delayed because of issues on the American side, the South Korean foreign ministry said, without elaborating.
Last week’s images of armed U.S. agents dragging away South Korean workers in handcuffs and ankle chains from a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, Ga., outraged many in South Korea. Seoul has tried to prevent the raid from unsettling its decades-old alliance with Washington, a key to South Korea’s security. And it has scrambled to diffuse the tension by hurriedly negotiating the workers’ release and sending a plane to pick them up.
But the raid has been raising political hackles in a country where people are known to take to the streets in anti-U.S. protests when they feel their national pride has been slighted by the Americans.
In recent days, small groups of people have held rallies near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, criticizing the way South Korean workers were treated.
“Why should we be treated like this when we are providing the United States with our technology, our money and our investments?” Kim Joon-hyung, an opposition lawmaker said during a parliamentary hearing on Monday.
Mr. Kim urged the government to tally all the Americans visiting South Korea on tourist visas and making money by teaching English. He said he suspected that their number could be in “thousands or tens of thousands.” He stopped short of asking the South Korean government to detain and deport them but asked: “Isn’t that illegal?”
On Wednesday, frustrated allies of President Lee Jae Myung spoke out.
Lee Eun-ju, a top member of the president’s governing Democratic Party, suggested that if necessary, South Korea would withdraw all its nationals working on investment projects in the United States and suspend all its investments, including factories under construction, until the safety of South Korean workers is guaranteed.
Ms. Lee said South Korea cherished its ties with the United States and respected the American-led international order. But there is a limit, she said.
“It’s just too much,” she said, referring to South Korean workers in shackles. The U.S. Embassy in Seoul did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many of the South Korean detainees were being held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Folkston, Ga. The private prison is unclean, poorly run and unpleasant to be in, said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer based in Georgia who is representing 12 of the South Korean detainees.
“It is jail,” he said.
Han Jae Lee, a lawyer based in Seoul, said he received a message from his brother-in-law, a battery facility engineer, on Thursday saying that he was being investigated by I.C.E. Initially, Mr. Lee didn’t think much of the message, as his brother-in-law had been granted a B-2 visa before flying to the United States.
But when he turned on the news, Mr. Lee saw images of South Korean workers being arrested in Georgia, where his brother-in-law landed.
“Seeing my relative and his colleagues being taken away in handcuffs and ankle chains, as if the U.S. government was bragging about it, was terrifying,” he said. Mr. Lee said he still has not been able to contact his brother-in-law and criticized both governments for not being transparent.
“Our family still doesn’t know what law he violated and what he was arrested for,” he said. “What I want now is for him to return to Seoul as soon as possible.”
South Korea’s foreign minister, Cho Hyun, flew to Washington on Monday to secure the workers’ release and discuss ways of protecting other South Korean businesses from similar raids.
The detained workers had been working in Georgia to build an electric vehicle battery factory jointly owned by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, both South Korean companies. It is one of dozens of factories South Korean manufacturing giants like Samsung, Hyundai, SK and LG have built or are building in the United States with the encouragement of both governments.
U.S. immigration officials said the South Koreans were working there illegally, undermining the chances of American citizens to find jobs.
Industry officials have said that many of the detained workers arrived in the United States with short-term business visas or under a visa waiver program.
That was the easiest way for South Korean businesses and subcontractors to bring in skilled workers because it is hard to find American workers experienced in building battery factories, or to secure long-term work visas for foreign workers under the Trump administration, according to South Korean officials, politicians and business executives.
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8) It’s Not You. It’s the Food.
By Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall, Sept. 10, 2025
Ms. Belluz, a journalist, and Dr. Hall, a scientist, are the authors of the forthcoming book “Food Intelligence.”
Vicente Cayuela Aliaga for The New York Times
Over the past couple of decades, the two of us have explored a central mystery about human health.
For Kevin, a former National Institutes of Health nutrition scientist, the question was why no particular diet seemed to have a meaningful impact on body fat. For Julia, a journalist, it was personal: Why had she, like so many others, struggled with body weight?
When Kevin started his lab at the N.I.H. in 2003, low-carb diets were surging in popularity as carbs were widely blamed for obesity. He spent more than a decade running rigorous studies comparing the effects of diets varying widely in macronutrients — low-carb, low-fat — only to find that none had any great edge for losing body fat.
Julia unwittingly conducted an experiment of her own, trying — and failing — to lose weight with just about every imaginable wellness gimmick. Searching for answers through her reporting, she spent a night in a so-called metabolic chamber and had her genes analyzed. Neither test result could explain why she had been a chubby kid and was a chunky adult.
We had both assumed the mystery of obesity would be solved through a better understanding of individual biology and each person finding the right diet for him or her. We were not the only ones. If you are interested in health and wellness, your social media feed is probably flooded with such advice — influencers spouting tips on protocols and products that promise to optimize your individual health.
Such advice has won the backing of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who makes valid critiques of the state of America’s health while promoting wearable health devices to help people “take responsibility” and promising to free Americans from the Food and Drug Administration’s “aggressive suppression” of vitamin supplements, which he views as a key part of a healthy lifestyle.
Calley Means, a top aide to Mr. Kennedy, co-founded Truemed, which helps consumers to use tax-free funds from their health savings accounts for the purchase of such wellness products. Dr. Casey Means, his sister, a physician and Mr. Kennedy’s pick for surgeon general, also promotes supplements and sells continuous glucose monitors to track the body’s sugar fluctuations.
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After we wrote a book on what shapes eating behavior, we now know that these individual wellness fixes are a trillion-dollar distraction from addressing the root cause of America’s chronic disease crisis: our toxic food environment.
The Trump administration seems to agree to an extent. On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy released a new report from the Make America Healthy Again commission, which correctly identified the rise in diet-related chronic disease as being driven by a food environment that is increasingly composed of highly processed foods. But instead of suggesting policies for reducing their consumption, the report makes vague recommendations. When it comes to ultraprocessed foods, it says only that the government will “continue efforts to develop” a definition for them and will recommend reducing consumption of highly processed foods in forthcoming dietary guidelines that Americans have traditionally struggled to follow. That doesn’t go far enough.
If large swaths of the population were being sickened by a poison released from an industrial plant, no one would suggest that the solution is to just offer home filters, wearables and supplements. The only real path to restoring health would have to include mandating the removal of the poison from the environment.
The science on this is surprisingly clear, as Kevin’s research has shown. A few years ago, he became interested in investigating different food environments — how the physical, economic, social and cultural milieu surrounding the food available to people affects what and how much they eat.
He discovered that people spontaneously gorge on hundreds of extra calories each day and gain significant amounts of body fat when they live in food environments with an abundance of ultraprocessed foods, which are highly engineered and contain ingredients not used in restaurants or home kitchens. On the flip side, reducing or eliminating ultraprocessed foods results in spontaneous fat loss without effort.
Kevin’s studies build on earlier research that found that as societies shift toward Western-style eating patterns — dense in calories, rich in ultraprocessed foods — people tend to grow fatter. The change is easiest to see in immigrants. When they leave home countries where traditional diets still dominate, for places like the United States and Britain, they gain weight and develop chronic diseases at much higher rates than the people they leave behind.
Scientists now have a theory about what’s going on. Humans are born with a system of internal signals — think hormones and neural pathways — that guides our food choices and how much to eat. Toxic food environments disrupt this symphony of internal signals in ways we aren’t conscious of. Our bodies weren’t designed for a calorie onslaught, in the same way a house built for moderate weather isn’t designed for a heat wave.
In Kevin’s studies, participants were told to eat as much as they wanted, without trying to gain or lose weight. They rated the whole food and ultraprocessed meals as equally pleasant to eat. Yet in the ultraprocessed food environments, their bodies’ internal controls seemed to malfunction, mysteriously recalibrating toward weight gain.
Some 70 percent of the calories available in America today are deemed “hyper-palatable,” and are in foods designed for the overconsumption that chronically sickens us. They’re also heavily marketed and cheap. Chronic disease hot spots are the most socioeconomically deprived, with food environments akin to toxic waste sites.
So what can be done?
Healthy and tasty foods have to become a lot more accessible, convenient and affordable. The only way to get there is through policy and regulation, not handshake deals with the food industry to voluntarily remove food dyes or by calling Coca-Cola’s offering of a cane sugar soda alongside its corn syrup version a win.
The Food and Drug Administration recently updated its definition of a healthy food, providing a helpful guide for better packaged foods. According to the agency, healthy foods include vegetables, legumes, fruits and whole grains, and they are low in sodium, sugar and saturated fat. We think that ultraprocessed foods that don’t meet the F.D.A. definition and that can drive overconsumption should be treated as recreational substances to which we must apply aggressive tax policies, front-of-pack warning labels, marketing restrictions and more, especially for foods marketed to children.
The revenues from taxes we propose on unhealthy food should be directed toward making healthy food more accessible. We don’t mean just sending people healthy, whole food, as the administration plans to do with its “MAHA boxes.” Not everyone has the time, skill or motivation to cook from scratch. We mean supporting small businesses, grocery stores and food companies that offer healthy, delicious, prepared meals, and making these eligible for SNAP, the federal food assistance program. Schools and hospitals should also be incentivized to serve healthy options, not junk food.
To date, the closest this administration has come to tackling the food environment is granting waivers to states to restrict SNAP recipients from using their benefits to buy junk food. Tuesday’s MAHA report promised to continue that effort, but on other food environment fixes, the suggestions were largely toothless or vague. On restricting the marketing of junk food to children, for example, the report only promises to “explore the development of potential industry guidelines.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has ended federal support to programs that helped schools and food banks buy fresh, local produce. It has also rolled back environmental regulations and made cuts to SNAP.
Kevin left his job at the N.I.H. studying ultraprocessed food after his research was censored, a signal that the administration wasn’t taking science on toxic food environments seriously. Conversations with leadership about bringing Kevin back to improve human nutrition research also fell through. Many in the administration, including Mr. Kennedy, also seem opposed to interventions like the weight-loss and diabetes drugs called GLP-1s, which can help those most susceptible to toxic food environments.
MAHA leaders may decry the evils of the health care system and promote their own products as an alternative, but did everyone fail to notice that the $6 trillion-plus wellness industry grew alongside rates of chronic disease? Obesity and diabetes are not the result of weak willpower and poor choices. We shouldn’t expect investing in more of the same hacks will have different results.
The path to fixing America’s food environment will be bumpy. The global food industry has revenues valued at more than the oil and gas industry — roughly $8 trillion. The grass-roots MAHA movement, which is calling for healthier food and less chronic disease, should demand more from this administration and beyond. Science has demonstrated that individual people are not to blame. It has been a failure of leadership that has allowed our food environment to chronically sicken us. No supplement or wearable will help.
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9) Boat Suspected of Smuggling Drugs Is Said to Have Turned Before U.S. Attacked It
The Trump administration has argued that the summary killing of 11 people it accused of running drugs was legal under the laws of war.
By Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 10, 2025
Mr. Trump posted a video on social media that he said showed an airstrike on a Venezuelan boat he asserted was transporting illegal narcotics. Credit...Truth Social, via Reuters
A Venezuelan boat that the U.S. military destroyed in the Caribbean last week had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to American officials familiar with the matter.
The military repeatedly hit the vessel before it sank, the officials added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. President Trump has said he authorized the strike and claimed the boat was carrying drugs.
The disclosures provide new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats. Legal specialists who have called it a crime to summarily kill suspected low-level smugglers as if they were wartime combatants said the revelations further undercut the administration’s claim that the strike was legally justified as self-defense.
Mr. Trump announced the strike last week, saying it took place in international waters and had killed 11 people who he said were transporting drugs “heading to the United States” and were part of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. He has not put forward evidence to support those assertions but has said “we have tapes of them speaking.”
While the White House has not provided a detailed legal rationale, it has put forward the outlines of a novel argument that using lethal military force was permissible under the laws of armed conflict to defend the country from drugs because 100,000 Americans die annually from overdoses. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said people suspected of smuggling drugs toward the United States pose “an immediate threat.” Mr. Trump, in a letter to Congress, justified the attack as a matter of self-defense.
Many legal specialists, including retired top military lawyers, have rejected the idea that Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to treat suspected drug smuggling as legally equivalent to an imminent armed attack on the United States. Even if one accepted that premise for the sake of argument, they added, if the boat had already turned away, that would further undermine what they saw as an already weak claim of self-defense.
“If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” said Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed — which I don’t think they did.”
Rear Adm. James E. McPherson, the top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2004 to 2006 who later served in the first Trump administration in several prominent civilian military roles, including general counsel of the Army, agreed.
“I would be interested if they could come up for any legal basis for what they did,” he said, adding, “If, in fact, you can fashion a legal argument that says these people were getting ready to attack the U.S. through the introduction of cocaine or whatever, if they turned back, then that threat has gone away.”
The White House did not directly address questions about the boat’s maneuvers or the nature of the strike, instead repeating the administration’s position on the attack. Mr. Trump “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country” from “evil narco terrorists trying to poison our homeland,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman.
Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said, “This strike sent a clear message: If you traffic drugs toward our shores, the United States military will use every tool at our disposal to stop you cold.”
The U.S. Coast Guard, sometimes with help from the Navy, has frequently interdicted boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, searched for illicit cargo, and — if its suspicions were accurate — arrested the people aboard for prosecution.
Mr. Trump has long wanted to take much harsher steps against drug trafficking, including saying that drug dealers should get the death penalty. In his first term, he praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” in the nation where Mr. Duterte’s government had approved the summary killing of suspected drug dealers. Mr. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court over his drug war.
After returning to office, Mr. Trump directed his administration to begin labeling various Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels as terrorist organizations, breaking with the tradition of limiting that status to violent groups that are motivated by ideology rather than illicit profit. Legally, such a designation permits sanctions like freezing a group’s assets, but it does not create authorization to use military force against it.
In July, Mr. Trump signed a still-secret directive instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some of the criminal groups his team had designated as terrorist organizations. The attack on the boat last week appears to signal an opening phase of operations stemming from that directive.
Mr. Trump, in announcing the attack, posted a 29-second video on social media that edited together several clips of aerial surveillance. It showed a speedboat cutting through the water, with a number of people onboard, before an explosion.
But officials briefed on the strike said that the video does not tell the entire story. It does not show the boat turning after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it, the officials said.
Mr. Trump’s aides have boasted that the operation is only the beginning of a war against suspected drug smugglers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters last week, “We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean, and when other people try to do that, they’re going to meet the same fate.”
Adding to the legal controversy is uncertainty over what standards, if any, the Trump team has set for the strength of the intelligence about who and what is on a boat for the U.S. military to summarily kill everyone aboard. Mr. Trump joked last week that not just drug smugglers but also fishermen may now think twice about going to sea in the region.
“I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.’”
One open question is where the boat was headed. Mr. Rubio initially told reporters last week that it was probably headed toward Trinidad and Tobago or some other country in the Caribbean, but administration officials have since characterized it as destined for the United States.
Another is what it was carrying. Some have expressed doubts that a vessel of its size would need an 11-member crew. Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has called it “despicable and thoughtless” to glorify killing people accused of crimes without trials, has argued that if there were drugs, it was more likely cocaine than fentanyl — the drug most responsible for overdoses.
On Tuesday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN that the administration had provided no evidence that the boat was taking drugs to the United States.
“If there’s a civilian boat that’s suspected of anything, particularly in international waters, you have to make an attempt to stop the boat,” he said, describing what he said was supposed to be standard rules of engagement. “You only fire, really, if fired upon.”
The legal question is whether Mr. Trump can simply choose to reject that approach and shift the problem of drug smuggling from law enforcement rules to the harsher framework of wartime rules, especially when Congress has not authorized any armed conflict with gangs and cartels like Tren de Aragua.
Geoffrey Corn, a retired uniformed lawyer who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said he believed Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Hegseth’s order was not justified as an act of self-defense. He expressed concern that what he saw as an apparently illegal order was passed down through the military chain of command and carried out.
The apparent turning of the boat before the attack began, he said, reinforced that judgment.
“I think it’s a terrible precedent,” he said. “We’ve crossed a line here.”
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
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10) The Jarring Contradiction at the Heart of Kennedy’s Agenda
The health secretary has begun a full-on assault against vaccines but has taken a more restrained approach to pesticides and unhealthy foods, also MAHA priorities.
By Benjamin Mueller and Dani Blum, Sept. 11, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, on a visit to a food bank in Mesa, Ariz., during a Make America Healthy Again tour earlier this year. Credit...Ash Ponders for The New York Times
Since taking office in February, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has put an unmistakable stamp on American vaccine policy.
He has effectively restricted access to Covid shots, installed skeptics to influential posts and ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she defied his orders on inoculations.
But Mr. Kennedy has applied a far lighter touch to what he and his Make America Healthy Again movement have described as the other major scourge plaguing American children: pesticides and unhealthy foods.
Far from cracking down on food and farming practices, Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA commission report on Tuesday defended existing pesticide review procedures and, in some cases, called for loosening food regulations, even as the report promised future steps to clean up what children eat.
To many scientists — and some of Mr. Kennedy’s own followers — the gap between the health secretary’s use of his authority over food quality and his pummeling of vaccines has created a jarring split screen.
“It seems like the vaccine issues were very much like, ‘Go ahead, Bobby, here’s your green light, do what you want,’” said Elizabeth Frost, a MAHA organizer in Ohio. “It feels like it’s a very different conversation and a very different environment around pesticides and food.”
Mr. Kennedy’s restraint in using the levers of government on those parts of the MAHA agenda has dismayed some supporters, threatening to fracture the uneasy alliance between the movement’s anti-chemical activists and Republican lawmakers who see themselves as champions of the agriculture industry.
At the same time, scientists sympathetic to the health secretary’s ideas about cleaning up the food supply worry that he has diluted measures long backed by studies, even as he works aggressively toward a separate goal — undercutting vaccines — that defies decades of research.
“In the vaccine world, he’s forcing change, and I would say that when it comes to food and nutrition, it’s really been all talk,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“MAHA has talked a big game about wanting to end chronic disease through better diet and physical activity, but has so far been unwilling to implement the kind of meaningful policy change required to do that,” she said.
In campaigning for President Trump last year, Mr. Kennedy described protecting Americans from pesticides as a main reason for the pair’s growing bond. At an August 2024 rally in Glendale, Ariz. after he endorsed Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy never mentioned vaccines.
He instead emphasized their shared commitment to safe food. Mr. Trump agreed. “Millions and millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water and a healthy nation have concerns about toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food,” Mr. Trump said.
Days before the election, Mr. Kennedy went further, pledging that if he were chosen to serve in a second Trump administration, he would “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.”
His early actions as health secretary heartened MAHA supporters. Food companies volunteered to phase out several artificial food dyes in the coming years, a response to calls from Mr. Kennedy and the cultural reckoning he had forced into view.
The health secretary took his campaign for clean food to the states, standing beside Republican lawmakers in the spring to celebrate state laws banning certain food dyes — laws that had once appealed largely to Democratic legislators.
And the Trump administration granted waivers to some states restricting recipients of federal food assistance from using their benefits to buy junk food.
“That is something that no prior administration has been able to do,” said Alyssa Moran, a nutrition policy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it really is taking on Big Soda.”
But a MAHA movement that Mr. Kennedy once said would bring about a clampdown on toxins in the food and soil has recently run headlong into the deregulatory agenda of other segments of the Republican coalition.
The Environmental Protection Agency has weakened limits on certain environmental pollutants, including mercury, whose dangers Mr. Kennedy has inveighed against for years.
Instead, House Republicans have pushed measures that would grant liability relief to pesticide companies and constrain E.P.A. regulation of so-called forever chemicals.
The latest MAHA commission report represented the Trump administration’s most public attempt to resolve the tension between a MAHA movement bent on restricting certain foods and chemicals and Republican lawmakers allied with the very industries behind those products.
The report did say that the Food and Drug Administration would close a loophole that allows companies to add substances to the food supply without informing the agency, a step that Dr. Moran said nutrition activists have sought for years.
And on a separate front, Mr. Trump directed his administration later Tuesday to revive a decades-old policy that would restrict advertising of prescription drugs on television.
In an interview, Calley Means, a close adviser to Mr. Kennedy, said the administration was moving “as fast as humanly possible” to enact reforms and update the nation’s dietary guidelines, even as he said that compromises were inevitable.
“In the first year of the Trump administration, the federal government will enact more food policy reform than at any time in modern American history,” he said.
Mr. Means added: “Secretary Kennedy and many in the MAHA movement have transitioned from advocates to controlling levers of power at the federal government. The U.S. democratic system involves compromise balancing American health, the American economy, American innovation, many complicated factors.”
To the chagrin of some who were partial to the food and pesticide measures that Mr. Kennedy backed as an advocate, the report on Tuesday did not propose bans on pesticides. It offered no clear timeline for reducing the country’s reliance on ultraprocessed foods. It steered clear of other regulations, like taxes on sugary drinks.
And calls for revisions to nutrition labels and limits on the marketing of unhealthy food to children were thin on details about how such programs would be funded or implemented.
The idea that inducing food makers to swap artificial dyes for natural dyes would itself make food healthy was far-fetched, scientists said. Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said the evidence on color additives was “very mixed and weak” in the first place.
And rather than restricting school sales of beverages like flavored milk that have added sugar, the report instead proposed opening the door to more whole milk in schools, a far lower priority for nutrition scientists. That proposal appeared in a section titled “food deregulation.”
Dr. Taillie said, “Usually when you see something like that, it speaks to industry lobbying.”
The health secretary’s allies also noticed.
David Murphy, a former finance director for Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, called the report a “clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House.”
The report’s promise to make the public aware of what it described as “robust review procedures” governing pesticide use was “a pathetic attempt to assuage the American people,” said Zen Honeycutt, the founder of Moms Across America, a group closely linked to the MAHA movement.
Jillian Michaels, a fitness trainer best known for her work on “The Biggest Loser” and an influential voice in MAHA circles, said in an interview that she was shocked the Trump administration had taken such significant steps on vaccines, like canceling federal money for developing mRNA shots.
“Any win is a win,” she said. “I can’t believe when there is one.”
But when it comes to “the 50,000 chemicals you’re coming into contact with every single day that you and I aren’t even aware of,” Ms. Michaels said, people could only do so much on their own. “You need some regulatory help, period,” she said.
“Baby steps,” she added. “You’ve got to be patient.”
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy has power over vaccines that he does not over pollutants or farming practices, which are the responsibility of the E.P.A. and the Department of Agriculture.
Mr. Kennedy has also surrounded himself with unconventional advisers, leaving the health department without the types of seasoned regulators and rule makers who might have been more adept at turning his anti-chemical campaign into government action, analysts said.
“To put the best possible face on it, he’s been outmaneuvered,” said Ken Cook, the president of the Environmental Working Group, which has fought for state regulations on food chemicals.
The health secretary deserved credit for backing those state measures, Mr. Cook said. But, he added, “We’ve had to resort to this piecemeal state-by-state thing because the federal government wasn’t doing its job.”
He added: “Now you’re there, Bobby. You could do it.”
The rollout on Tuesday of the MAHA commission report offered a vivid illustration of the health secretary’s caginess on the causes that once powered his own presidential campaign.
Asked by a reporter about pesticides, Mr. Kennedy demurred.
“You want to answer, Lee, or … ” the health secretary said, trailing off.
He was referring to Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, whose agency has not only relaxed standards for mercury pollution but also delayed the implementation of Biden-era regulations of dangerous chemicals.
Mr. Kennedy’s cabinet colleagues went on to praise the government’s existing pesticide review process.
By contrast, the health secretary was unbridled in talking about plans to investigate the dangers of vaccines. Asked about the report’s promise that the government would strengthen oversight of vaccine injuries, Mr. Kennedy gave a three-and-a-half minute answer.
“We’re changing the system,” he said. “We are recasting the entire program.”
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11) Where Will Everyone in Gaza City Go?
By Josh Holder, Sept. 11, 2025
The Israeli military has said that its planned operation in Gaza City would prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping and planning future attacks. Israel entered Gaza City earlier in the war, but said this time it would move into parts of the city that Israeli soldiers have not previously attacked or held.
The risks to civilians who leave — and those who stay — are enormous. Further intensification of military operations in Gaza City would cause a “catastrophe” for civilians, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has warned.
Gaza City and the surrounding region are officially suffering from famine, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification announced in August. The United Nations and aid agencies rely on the group, known as the I.P.C., to monitor and classify global hunger crises.
Photos and videos taken on Tuesday showed crowds of Palestinians heading south from Gaza City. Still, others said they planned to stay, saying the journey was too expensive, that they had nowhere to go, or that if they left, they feared they could never come back.
In its evacuation order for Gaza City, the Israeli military instructed people to go to what it called a “humanitarian zone” in the southern half of the territory, a thin coastal strip where hundreds of thousands of people have already taken refuge.
The Israeli military said there were “vast empty areas” that were “free of tents” there. But hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already live there, and parts of the zone overlap with areas the military has ordered evacuated.
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12) What Drove Israel’s Brazen Attack on Hamas in Qatar?
Israeli officials and analysts say that revenge for the Hamas-led 2023 attack on Israel, and frustration over moribund Gaza truce negotiations, informed the decision to strike in Doha.
By Adam Rasgon and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 11, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv and Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem
A photo posted on social media showing an explosion in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday. Credit...Associated Press
Since Hamas killed and abducted hundreds of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has assassinated leaders of the Palestinian militant group in Lebanon, Iran and Gaza.
But Qatar, where some of Hamas’s top leaders have been living, was long seen as off-limits.
The wealthy Gulf nation hosts the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East and has maintained informal relations with Israel. It has also been mediating between Israel and Hamas to end the Gaza war.
So it was startling when Israel set all those considerations aside and sent warplanes on Tuesday to try to assassinate Hamas’s leadership in the Qatari capital, Doha, targeting a burnt orange building in broad daylight in a residential neighborhood with schools and embassies.
Hamas said no senior leaders were killed in the attack. The son of Khalil al-Hayya, a leading figure who helped plan the 2023 attack, was killed, along with four other people associated with the group and a member of Qatar’s internal security forces.
A number of civilians were also wounded, according to Qatar’s interior ministry. Israeli officials have not publicly commented on their own assessments as to whether any of its Hamas targets were killed or injured.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the strike as a part of Israel’s oft-stated mission to avenge the Hamas-led October 2023 attack, and make sure it can never be repeated.
“The days in which terrorist chiefs enjoy immunity anywhere have ended,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Tuesday night, hours after the strikes. On Wednesday, he expanded on his reasoning, condemning Qatar for giving “safe haven” to Hamas.
Qatar “harbors terrorists,” he said in a statement. “It finances Hamas. It gives its terrorist chieftains sumptuous villas.”
Qatari officials have said they hosted Hamas officials at the request of the U.S. government, so as to facilitate channels of communication with the group. Mr. Netanyahu has in the past relied on Qatar to send millions of dollars a month to Gaza, a policy intended to buy quiet and keep the peace but that also helped prop up Hamas’s rule over the territory.
The prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, described Israel’s attack as “state terror” in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, and said Mr. Netanyahu should be “brought to justice.” He said the strike had “killed any hope” for the hostages.
Current and former Israeli officials said the attack in Doha underscored Israel’s determination to hold its adversaries accountable.
Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser, said that Israel had limited its actions in the past to avoid provoking conflicts or upending delicate relations with states like Qatar.
“Now, we’re saying if you’re trying to kill Israelis, you’ll be killed wherever you are,” he said.
Since the October 2023 attack, Israel has taken military action against its enemies in a way that is more aggressive than before, killing the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and conducting a large-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But pursuing this strategy could have significant and unwanted repercussions at a precarious time in the Middle East, including undermining Israel’s effort to expand its ties with the Gulf Arab countries.
Some Israeli observers said the attack illustrated that Mr. Netanyahu prioritized the dismantling of Hamas over the release of the hostages, or the development of a plan for the future governance of Gaza.
“He’s making it clear that destroying Hamas is his first and most important goal,” said Adi Rotem, a retired Israeli intelligence officer who served on Israel’s Gaza war negotiating team until December 2024.
Mr. Netanyahu has said he is committed to both wiping out Hamas and returning the hostages. But it has increasingly become clear that the only way Israel can bring home all of the hostages is through an agreement with Hamas, analysts said.
And Hamas has made the release of all remaining captives conditional on agreeing to a permanent end to the war — a scenario that Mr. Netanyahu has rejected as long as it allows the group to retain weapons and continue to wield power over Gaza.
Former officials and experts familiar with the government’s thinking said the strikes in Qatar were also intended to shake up the long-stalled negotiations with Hamas for a cease-fire and the release of hostages.
The idea, they said, was to try to shift the focus of decision-making from the Hamas leadership in Qatar to other figures in the movement, including the remaining commanders on the ground in Gaza. These commanders, they said, hold the hostages and stand to lose from Israel’s threatened ground invasion of Gaza City, which is said to be one of Hamas’s last strongholds.
Qatari and Egyptian officials have said that Hamas’s commanders on the ground in Gaza have had the most say in decisions about the war.
The Gaza City offensive has already displaced tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and threatens hundreds of thousands of others who remain in the area.
President Trump pressed Hamas on Sunday to accept a new, American-backed proposal. It called for Hamas to hand over all the hostages at once in return for a cease-fire and further negotiations to end the war.
The group did not agree, but gave a general response saying it was ready to immediately enter negotiations.
Shalom Ben Hanan, a former official of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency who is regularly briefed on the cease-fire talks, said the talks were not progressing.
“There was a desire to move the negotiations along with the only tools Israel has,” he said, meaning greater pressure and military force. What Israel views as Hamas’s strategy of stalling, he added, “doesn’t work anymore.”
There were widespread fears in Israel that the strike in Qatar could backfire, and put the lives of surviving hostages at risk should their captors wish to avenge the attack.
Hamas has often demonstrated in the past that the killing of its leaders does not soften its positions. Earlier in the war, the group refused Israeli demands to surrender, even after its top officials and commanders were killed, including Yahya Sinwar, one of the architects of the 2023 attack.
“He who thinks that assassination attempts can terrorize Hamas and push it to reverse course is delusional,” said Ibrahim Madhoun, a political analyst close to Hamas. “The movement was founded on the culture of sacrifice and its leadership realizes that being in a decision-making position always makes one subject to becoming a martyr.”
Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the political intent of Tuesday’s strike was “to change the structure of the negotiations,” alongside the goal of eliminating important officials that have long been in Israel’s sights.
“It was clear everything was stuck,” Mr. Yaari, who is regularly briefed on the government’s thinking, said of the truce negotiations. “So they needed to change the dynamic.”
That meant making an effort to shift negotiations away from Qatar and strengthening the role of Egypt, another mediating country, he added.
Mr. al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, suggested in his interview that Mr. Netanyahu had not been serious about negotiations in recent weeks, adding that he “was just wasting our time.”
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13) Nepal’s Young Protesters Find an Unlikely Partner: The Army
After an explosion of popular rage tore through the country, its respected army was the only institution left standing. It’s now in talks with the protesters.
By Alex Travelli, Reporting from New Delhi, Sept. 11, 2025
Army personnel standing guard at a road checkpoint in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Thursday. Atul Loke for The New York Times
When protesters in Nepal torched Parliament, the Supreme Court and the homes of five former prime ministers on Tuesday, no one seemed to be in charge of a country in anarchy. Then, that night, Gen. Ashok Raj Sigdel, the chief of the Nepali Army, appeared in a short video, urging calm in the streets.
His soldiers took control at 10 p.m., and violent protests in the capital, Kathmandu, had begun to fizzle. That same night, army officers were sitting down with the young and little-known leaders of the self-declared Gen Z protest movement to hash out a plan for peace.
The Nepali Army was the only institution left standing to negotiate with the people behind the uprising. That has put the army, an internationally famous fighting force, in an unfamiliar position. It has never held power on its own and commands respect within the country, but now it is caught in a difficult transition for Nepal.
Harka Sampang, a social activist who serves as mayor to a small city in the east, said he “had come to Kathmandu to talk to the army chief.” He implied that there was not much choice, “after thousands of people requested it.” Eventually the protest leaders told the general that they wanted Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, as the leader of an interim government.
Whatever comes next, the power vacuum will likely be filled by an agreement between the angry and inchoate youth movement on one side and the military leadership on the other.
Nepal’s existing power structures went up in smoke during two days of violence, with the country’s prime minister fleeing and other top officials resigning. The nation’s president was nowhere to be seen. A similar compromise was forged in Bangladesh just over a year ago when a student-led protest movement and the army chose an interim government led by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
“The army will definitely create a secure environment until the election is held,” said Maj. Gen. Binoj Basnyat, who retired from the Nepali Army in 2016. When be began his service, it was called the Royal Nepalese Army, and General Basnyat shares his pride in the army with most Nepalis, 91 percent of whom trust it more than any other institution in Nepal, according to a poll conducted by the Asia Foundation in 2022.
The people can trust the army, General Basnyat believes, because its leadership is committed to remaining under the civil authorities, he said. It was armed police who fired on Gen Z protesters on Monday, he said, not the Nepali Army. At least 19 people were killed that day.
The army’s deference to civilians this week is remarkable because, as a royal army, Nepal’s used to answer only to the king, even after Nepal became a multiparty democracy in 1990. During the country’s brutal civil war, fought between the state and Maoist rebels from 1996 to 2006, the soldiers were loyal to the crown in Kathmandu and not their fellow subjects.
Almost 500 years old, the Nepali Army flies a battle flag featuring the drums and trident of Shiva, the Hindu god. Nepal’s soldiers had earned such a reputation for courage by the end of the 18th century that British colonial rulers recruited them as a whole unit, called the Gurkhas, into their own armies.
To this day, the United Kingdom and India maintain esteemed Gurkha units manned by native-born Nepalis. The famous Indian Gen. Sam Manekshaw is often quoted as saying: “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha.”
In modern times, Nepal’s soldiers have become indispensable members of United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Nepal’s army doubled in size during its civil war, said Ashok K. Mehta, a retired Indian general who worked extensively with the Nepali military. Its wartime upgrades, he thinks, won the peace, by forcing the Maoists to the negotiating table in 2005.
But the Nepali Army’s transformation is still in progress, General Mehta said. Its feudal history has not equipped it to be a natural defender of democracy.
The tumult of the past few days, when Nepal’s civil authorities evaporated, has forced the army into a role it was never meant to fill, according to General Mehta. He said the army chief, General Sigdel, faces “a very grim” situation: For the first time in the nation’s history, the military is “occupying the pinnacle” of political power.
General Mehta does not see the Nepali Army as being power hungry, so much as uncertain. Its great mistake, he said, was failing to act sooner on Tuesday, when it could have spared lives and billions of dollars worth of destruction by taking the reins faster.
General Sigdel himself is something of an unknown. General Mehta, who knows him, said he “doesn’t enjoy personality and charisma. He’s not a very effective communicator.”
Such qualities mattered little during most of the Nepali Army’s long history. But faced with a bunch of empowered young protesters, Nepal’s generals may find themselves in need of some new tricks.
Bhadra Sharma contributed reporting.
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