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Dear Friend,
Since March 2025 the prison administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections was aware that Mumia's eyesight deteriorated to 20/200 (legally blind). Mumia was not able to read, including his mail, nor retrieve phone numbers, or proceed with his research and writing to complete his Phd dissertation.
For over seven months no treatment was provided. On September 2, Mumia was treated for complications from cataract surgery a few years ago. However, he remains disabled and at risk of loss of sight in his other eye, damaged by severe diabetic retinopathy. He needs that treatment immediately.
This is an outrageous attack on an innocent prisoner serving a life-without-parole sentence! A long history of Mumia’s 43 years imprisoned (29 of them on death row), have shown that prison authorities, who are required to provide adequate health care, failed to do so, leading Mumia’s supporters to the conclusion that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has actively tried to disable and even kill him. (They tried this in 2015 by failing to diagnose and treat Hepatitis C, sending Mumia into a near-fatal crisis.)
A loud and determined public response is required to win immediate treatment to restore Mumia’s full eyesight.
Please join this effort, do your part, and share this information.
Sincerely,
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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) Extreme Heat Spurs New Laws Aimed at Protecting Workers Worldwide
Governments around the world are enacting measures to try to protect workers from the dangers of heat stress. They’re barely keeping up with the risks.
By Somini Sengupta and Hisako Ueno, Sept. 13, 2025
Somini Sengupta reported from New York, Hisako Ueno from Tokyo and Toh Ee Ming from Singapore
A construction worker in Boston in July, when temperatures were in the 90s. Boston passed a law this summer requiring city projects to have a “heat illness prevention plan.” Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For years, researchers have raised the alarm about the dangers of extreme heat in the workplace. Now, as more workers get sick — and sometimes die — from increasingly intense and frequent heat waves, labor laws are barely keeping up with the new hazards of climate change.
This summer it was so hot in southern Europe, where temperatures passed 115 degrees Fahrenheit, that local governments in many areas of Greece, Italy and Spain ordered outdoor work to stop in the afternoons for several weeks.
Japan, reeling from one of its worst heat waves on record, required employers to protect workers from heat stroke risks or face $3,400 fines.
In Singapore, employers must install sensors to measure heat and humidity levels every hour at large outdoor work sites, and provide relief accordingly.
In the United States, even as a national heat standard is yet to be finalized, local governments are enacting local measures. Boston passed a law this summer that required all city projects to have a “heat illness prevention plan” that trains work crews to spot heat illness and guarantee water and shade breaks.
Most of these measures are nascent and uneven. Critics say they are poorly enforced. They often collide with the needs of gig workers, who say they need to work no matter how hot it is.
But the fact that they’re happening at all underscores the scale and severity of the problem. Worldwide, an estimated 2.4 billion people are exposed to heat stress at work, according to a recent report published the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization.
“Governments are beginning to accept that extreme heat is now a predictable, recurring occupational risk that requires structured regulation and enforcement, not just temporary crisis management,” said Andreas Flouris, a professor at University of Thessaly in Greece and an expert on occupational heat strain.
Heat waves are not new. But with rising global temperatures, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, heat records are being broken at a fast clip, so much so that the last three summers were the hottest ever across the Northern hemisphere. So what was already arduous manual labor — fixing roofs, picking crops, stitching clothes in hot, stuffy factories — has become dangerous. The report from the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization called heat stress at work “a global societal challenge.”
The report estimated that exposure to extreme heat leads to occupational illnesses among nearly 23 million workers a year, including kidney damage, dehydration and heatstroke, “all of which hinder long-term health and economic security,” it said. Roughly 19,000 workers die every year in heat-related injuries and illnesses, the report estimated.
In Bangladesh, for instance, garment workers told researchers with Climate Rights International, an advocacy group, that the heat becomes so intense inside their factories that some of them faint, or they cut their work hours short and lose a portion of their earnings. The World Health Organization has urged government authorities and employers to enact heat policies tailored to specific locations and industries.
In some places, workers are taking matters into their own hands. In India, a union of women who are self-employed as seamstresses or vegetable vendors offers low cost insurance that generates a small payment when temperatures spike to dangerous levels.
In the United States, only seven states — California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — have heat-protection standards for workers. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the process of finalizing heat standards. And a handful of states, including Texas and Florida, prohibit local governments from passing laws that would mandate rest and water breaks.
Other countries are taking slightly different approaches.
Older workers face higher risks in Japan
Wander around Tokyo for a day and you’ll see delivery workers wearing wristbands that track their core body temperature, warn them of heatstroke symptoms and remind them to drink something. Yamato Transport, the country’s largest package delivery service, rolled out the wristbands to 2,500 workers as a pilot project this year, after Japan witnessed its hottest year on record and workers complained about threats to their health.
The 2024 heat wave prompted the government to tighten occupational health regulations. Under the new rules, employers must ensure that workers have cooling measures when the wet-bulb globe temperature, a metric based on heat and humidity, reaches 28 degrees Celsius (82 Fahrenheit). Failure to do so can result in a fine of 500,000 yen, or $3,400, or even a prison term.
This year Yamato also installed sensors to keep track of the heat index at all its offices and warehouses. It also expanded the use of cooling vests, with fans hooked to their sides, to 75,000 workers around the country.
Not everyone welcomes the extra gear. A delivery worker in Tokyo, Masami Tabata, said he refused to use the vest. “I don’t like to be bothered by the weight as I have to move around a lot,” he said.
Vests and wristbands are among several accessories that Japanese companies are offering outdoor workers, from towels that turn cold when they’re soaked in water to shirts that protect against the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Yamato said it has increased its budget for heat-safety measures, although it declined to say by how much. Some companies are offering bonuses for working on hot days.
Japan’s occupational heat risks are exacerbated by demography. The country has an aging population. The median age is over 48. Older workers can be far more vulnerable to heat.
Stopping work in southern Europe
As heat waves become more frequent and last longer, work stoppages are no longer “exceptional emergency measures,” Mr. Flouris said. Government authorities are under growing pressure to set stricter rules.
Spanish law now says that when the National Weather Service issues a red or orange heat alert, signifying high levels of risk, outdoor work should be shortened or suspended. But even that rule, issued in 2023, wasn’t enough this summer, when temperatures pushed well past 100 degrees Fahrenheit for several days. In Barcelona in June, a street cleaner named Montse Aguilar collapsed and died. The city quickly tightened the rules. Her death remains under investigation.
In Greece, the labor department ordered work stoppages in the afternoons in several regions during successive heat waves this summer, when temperatures soared above 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit).
Likewise, several regions of Italy banned outdoor work in afternoons for much of the summer. It was doubly punishing to delivery workers, for whom no outdoor work meant no pay.
An analysis by Allianz Research found that this summer’s heat waves could slow economic growth by half a percentage across Europe. Scientists looked at heat deaths in just 12 cities this summer and concluded that said climate change tripled the number of casualties.
Risk versus migrant rights in Singapore
In Singapore when it comes to large outdoor work sites, an employer’s first obligation under a 2023 law is to install sensors that track and display wet bulb globe temperature at the work site.
When the wet bulb globe temperature reaches a threshold of 31 degrees, the law mandates hourly water breaks. At 32 degrees, it mandates a minimum of 10 minute rest breaks each hour and at 33 degrees, a minimum of 15 minute breaks. There’s also a suggestion to “reschedule outdoor physical work to cooler parts of the day, where feasible.”
Sensors are easy to put up. The problem is that Singapore’s outdoor workers are mainly temporary migrants. They usually come from poorer countries in South Asia, and they work on temporary contracts with salaries that their families rely on back home.
When labor advocates surveyed workers earlier this year, they found a reluctance to speak out about health risks, pressures to meet deadlines, and a lack of enforcement. Labor advocates say heat stress remains largely underreported. “Many employers feel a sense of impunity,” said Alex Au, vice president of a Singapore-based advocacy group, Transient Workers Count Too. “Migrant workers burdened by debt and at the mercy of employers for job security feel totally powerless in speaking up.”
Workers surveyed by his group rarely reported of a work stoppage on exceptionally hot days. Some said there were no shaded rest areas.
One safety supervisor, a Bangladeshi migrant Kabir Hossain Bhuiyan, said that when temperatures spiked to 34 degrees Celsius earlier this year, many workers had to take sick days. Employers have by and large become more careful about water and rest breaks since the law’s passage, but there are still some bosses who have to be badgered by their employees to provide the required water and rest breaks.
Government inspectors found that nearly a third of the 70 sites they checked last year were not complying with the law.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey contributed reporting from New York and Toh Ee Ming contributed reporting from Singapore.
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2) This Is What Malnutrition Does to Children’s Bodies
Why Gaza’s young are especially vulnerable.
By Pablo Robles, Stephanie Nolen and Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 14, 2025
A nurse examining a child for malnutrition at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Ramadan Abed/Reuters
When children are deprived of sufficient food, a cascade of health failures can quickly follow. Critical illness and death threaten, and even those who survive may face a lifetime of health challenges.
Young Palestinians, particularly those under age 5, are especially vulnerable in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has imposed restrictions on the entry of aid throughout the war, at times shutting crossings entirely. The highest levels of malnutrition since the war began were reported this summer, and its largest city has been officially declared under famine by a panel of food-security experts.
Food and other critically needed supplies began trickling back into Gaza in May after an 11-week blockade imposed by Israel. It wasn’t enough. In July, food consumption hit its lowest point since the war began, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a U.N.-backed group of experts who monitor world hunger.
More aid has gone into Gaza since then. But food shortages remain widespread, and for some of the most vulnerable Gazans, the damage may already have been done.
When children are severely malnourished, their bodies draw on reserves to wage a last-ditch battle for survival. Eventually, their organs begin to break down.
Sometimes they become skeletally thin. Other times they swell up. They can be lethargic to the point of motionlessness, and stop eating even if there is food, because eating takes energy they don’t have. As their defense systems begin to fail, they may die suddenly from common diseases that a healthier child might withstand.
This is what happens to a malnourished body.
When children are experiencing acute malnutrition, most regular foods won’t reverse the process.
The World Health Organization recommends that acutely malnourished children be fed energy-dense foods, such as nut butters and sweet potatoes, and sometimes these can be found locally.
But they are not always readily available in Gaza, where markets and farms have been destroyed. Children there need a specially formulated therapeutic food: an enriched milk, for very young children, or a peanut-based product packed with calories, vitamins and nutrients. The W.H.O. also recommends a broad-spectrum antibiotic to treat infections.
The most seriously malnourished children need to be treated in a hospital, in part because they have no appetite and their bodies are trying to conserve energy. These children are fed specially formulated milk, often through a nasal-gastric tube.
Sharif Matar, a pediatrician at al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in northern Gaza, said doctors were struggling to cope with a shortage of that enriched milk. While more is available now than even a month ago, health workers still find themselves rationing it to make sure the most severe cases have enough, he said in an interview in late August.
“We are trying to do our best with what we can,” Dr. Matar said. “But in terms of the quality or quantity of what’s available, it’s not enough.”
Throughout the war, Israeli officials have consistently played down the severity of hunger in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called the recent Gaza City famine declaration “an outright lie,” and said the experts behind the famine report had overlooked Israeli efforts since late July to bring more food into the territory.
Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed. During the first two weeks of August, the U.N. said nearly 6,000 children out of more than 58,000 screened were found to be acutely malnourished.
Gaza’s doctors are not used to handling such acute malnutrition, said Dr. Matar, as the enclave has never faced a crisis this severe. Some clinicians at his hospital have been taking emergency classes organized by the W.H.O., while others were trying to read whatever they could on how to treat it, he said.
Health officials in Gaza say dozens of children have died of malnutrition since June, but it is not clear how many of them were suffering from both malnutrition and other illnesses or preexisting conditions. Children suffering from malnutrition can be more susceptible to contracting other illnesses, and children with preexisting conditions can be more vulnerable to becoming malnourished, experts say.
Some of the children who get treatment have recovered, including one critically ill 5-year-old girl who was saved with therapeutic milk, Dr. Matar said.
For a child, food is not just energy for the day at hand. It’s the essential building block for a life ahead, needed for the development of muscle, bone and brain.
Even if children experiencing severe malnutrition receive effective treatment and survive, they may suffer from stunted growth, soft bones, liver and kidney problems and cognitive issues. Over the longer term, there may be increased risk of stroke, diabetes and heart disease.
Given the widespread lack of food in Gaza, treating even a single child can at times feel Sisyphean, said Jamil Suleiman, the director of al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. Some have been released from care to tent encampments where their parents are still struggling to find enough food, Dr. Suleiman said.
“Some of the children we release come back with the same problems a week later,” he said.
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3) Arriving in Israel, Rubio Meets Netanyahu at Jerusalem’s Western Wall
The secretary of state is visiting Israel to consult with officials on security issues including the war in Gaza, which is testing relations with the United States.
By Michael Crowley, Sept. 14, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Sunday. Credit...Pool photo by Nathan Howard
Secretary of State Marco Rubio began his visit to Israel with a visit on Sunday to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed him with an affirmation of the U.S.-Israel relationship, even as it is tested by the war in Gaza.
“I think his visit here is a testament to the durability, the strength of the Israeli-American alliance,” Mr. Netanyahu told reporters. “It’s as strong, as durable as the stones in the Western Wall that he just touched. Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio and their entire team, this alliance has never been stronger.”
Mr. Rubio visited the wall in Jerusalem’s Old City shortly after landing. He is visiting Israel to consult with officials on several security issues, including the war in Gaza. Before departing Washington on Saturday, Mr. Rubio told reporters that he would emphasize Mr. Trump’s impatience for an end to the war in Gaza, as well as Mr. Trump’s concern that Israel’s airstrike against Hamas leaders in Qatar last week might set back efforts to reach a cease-fire deal with the group.
Mr. Rubio, who is also Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, was joined at the wall by Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel. The two Americans joined Mr. Netanyahu in placing prayer notes into the wall’s cracks. They did not take questions from reporters.
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4) Arab Ministers Gather to Decide Response to Israeli Attack in Qatar
Arab foreign ministers were expected to meet on Sunday in the Qatari capital, Doha, to lay the groundwork for a summit there on Monday.
By Vivian Nereim and Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 14, 2025
Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.
A damaged building in Doha, Qatar, last week after an Israeli strike. Arab foreign ministers are expected to gather on Sunday to debate how to respond to Israel’s missile attack. Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Arab foreign ministers were expected to gather on Sunday in Qatar to formulate a united response to Israel’s brazen missile attack there last week that sought to assassinate senior leaders of Hamas.
The ministers, meeting in the Qatari capital of Doha, will lay the groundwork for an emergency summit there on Monday with the leaders of Arab and Islamic countries.
The Israeli strike on Tuesday targeted senior Hamas officials who had gathered in Doha to discuss a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal to stop the fighting in Gaza. It hit a residential neighborhood in broad daylight, killing several people affiliated with Hamas as well as a member of Qatar’s internal security forces. Hamas said it had failed to kill any of the targeted officials. Israel has not released its own assessment of whether the strike had achieved its intended consequences.
The attack on a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military installation in the Middle East drew sharp international condemnation. Even close allies of Israel have denounced it as a violation of the Qatar’s sovereignty.
Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, landed in Israel on Sunday amid signs that President Trump was growing frustrated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for prolonging the war in Gaza.
Mr. Rubio said he would discuss the Qatar attack with Mr. Netanyahu, who he is expected to meet on Monday. President Trump “didn’t like the way it went down,” Mr. Rubio told reporters before his departure on Saturday.
“We’ll talk about what impact it’s going to have on efforts to get all the hostages back, get rid of Hamas, end this war,” he added.
Qatari officials have said they agreed to host political leaders of Hamas at the behest of the United States, to keep open channels of communication. That has positioned the country as a critical mediator in talks to end the war in Gaza.
It remains unclear how the Israeli strike will affect cease-fire negotiations, which were already stalled. Qatar or Egypt could suspend their roles as mediators, but have stopped short of doing that so far.
The attack sent shock waves through Gulf capitals that in recent years have been courted by Israel as potential allies and that have long regarded the United States as their main security guarantor.
Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani of Qatar, in an interview with CNN last week, described the summit as a chance for regional leaders to decide how to respond to the attack.
“We are hoping for something meaningful that deters Israel from continuing this bullying,” he said.
Analysts say that a military response by Gulf countries is out of the question because further escalation could harm the domestic agendas of the Gulf’s rulers, and they remain dependent on American military support.
Gulf sovereign wealth funds control around $4 trillion in assets around the world, giving them financial and economic leverage that they could deploy against Israel or the United States, a close ally that supplies Israel with weapons.
The regional leaders could decide to downgrade or abrogate the Abraham Accords, a 2020 deal backed by the United States under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco established diplomatic relations with Israel.
President Trump viewed the accords as one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of his first term. But they have already been significantly strained by the war in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu has defended the attack in Doha. In comments on social media Saturday night, he claimed that the Hamas leaders outside of Gaza had “blocked all cease-fire attempts in order to endlessly drag out of the war.”
“Getting rid of them would rid the main obstacle to releasing all our hostages and ending the war,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents — including many Israelis — argue that he is the one who has dragged the war out to mollify his hard-line coalition allies. The war in Gaza began after Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes. Human-rights groups argue that Israel’s campaign now constitutes a genocide.
Israeli officials refute that charge and argue that they are fighting a defensive war against Hamas. They say Hamas could end the fighting by laying down its arms and returning the hostages still held in the enclave, which it has refused to do.
Israel is now gearing up for a large-scale operation to seize Gaza City, a major population center in the northern part of the enclave. The military has ordered hundreds of thousands of people living there to flee south to already crowded areas.
Many Palestinians have been reluctant to flee for their lives yet again. Some believe there is no safe place to go, although Israel has designated a “humanitarian zone” farther south.
Olga Cherevko, a spokeswoman for the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, said on Sunday morning that tens of thousands of people had fled south over the past two days alone. But some who made it south wound up returning, she added, because there was no space for them to pitch their tents.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.
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5) Shawn Fain, Who Pledged to Reform U.A.W., Faces Internal Dissent
Dissidents are seeking to oust Mr. Fain as president of the United Automobile Workers union as he prepares to run for re-election next year.
By Neal E. Boudette, Sept. 15, 2025
Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers union, is credited with leading strikes in 2023 that produced major wage gains. But dissidents say he is wasting the union’s money. Credit...Cydni Elledge for The New York Times
Two years ago, Shawn Fain led the United Automobile Workers union through simultaneous strikes at three large carmakers, a strategy that helped produce big gains in wages and benefits for the union’s members.
Mr. Fain was hailed by progressives and Democratic politicians like former President Joesph R. Biden Jr. who saw him as the vanguard of a new generation of labor leaders who could get more workers to sign up to join unions, reversing the long slide in the labor movement’s ranks. He campaigned for Mr. Biden and later former Vice President Kamala Harris and exchanged insults with President Trump.
Now, however, a small but vocal faction in the U.A.W. is gearing up for a long-shot bid to oust Mr. Fain as he prepares to run for re-election next year.
The dissident workers’ main complaints about Mr. Fain are rooted in internal union matters like budgets and his treatment of other union officials, rather than in grand philosophical disagreements about labor and political issues.
The people seeking to oust him say that he has spent too much of the union’s money on organizing campaigns in the South and other initiatives they consider misguided. They contend that he has improperly stripped two board members of critical duties and say he failed to prevent a Michigan-based automaker from laying off thousands of workers.
“We’re spending more money than we’re taking in,” said David Pillsbury, 51, who works at a General Motors truck plant in Flint, Mich., and is a leader of the movement to remove Mr. Fain. “Shawn promised transparency and a lot of things, and none of that has come to fruition.”
Dissension in unions is common, but the efforts to remove Mr. Fain are noteworthy because he was elected on a pledge to overhaul and bring stability to the U.A.W. after federal corruption cases sent its two past presidents to prison. Under an agreement with the Department of Justice, a court-appointed monitor is overseeing the union’s reform efforts.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Fain said he believed that a large majority of U.A.W. members supported him, his combative approach to bargaining and the union’s achievements in the last two years. The 2023 strikes against G.M., Ford Motor and Stellantis resulted in contracts that raised the top wage by 25 percent, to more than $40 an hour. Workers lower on the wage scale will climb to the top wage level by the end of next year, with some seeing their pay doubling.
The union has also organized a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee — its first win at a foreign-owned car plant in the South — and at an Ohio battery plant partly owned by G.M. This month, the U.A.W. said workers at a Kentucky battery plant that is partly owned by Ford voted to join the union. That result is not yet official because of a dispute over whether some ballots ought to count.
“For decades, we went backwards, we made concessions,” Mr. Fain said. “But we won the biggest contracts in the history of the Big Three. We won cost-of-living back. We organized in the South, where people said it wasn’t possible to win.”
As for his leadership style, he thinks members appreciate his approach, he said, adding, “They expect me to be real.”
His efforts to organize workers in Southern plants seem to have petered out, at least for now. The union was rejected in a vote at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama in 2024. And the U.A.W.’s plans to hold union votes at plants owned by Toyota, Nissan, Honda and other automakers have not advanced.
Over the last few months, the movement to oust Mr. Fain made some progress. Six U.A.W. locals voted to approve petitions to remove him, which would have been enough to send formal charges against the union president to the U.A.W. executive board, a process outlined in the union’s constitution.
But the petitions they used were formulated incorrectly, invalidating all six votes. Now Mr. Pillsbury and his allies are working on a new petition to be put to votes in the six locals, and others.
“I think we’re going to get more than six this time around,” said Brian Keller, a worker at a Stellantis parts distribution center in Michigan who plans to run against Mr. Fain in the union’s 2026 election.
The petition votes may face stiffer opposition this time. The previous votes were held in the summer, and drew small numbers of workers in part because many members were on vacation or otherwise disengaged from union activities. Eighty members of U.A.W. Local 140 in Warren, Mich., voted unanimously to approve a petition against Mr. Fain in July, but the local has more than 4,000 members. At Local 1700, also in Warren, the vote was 62 to 1, but it has roughly 6,000 members.
Mr. Fain and his allies have started to mobilize their supporters. Late last month, more than 100 people in leadership posts at more than 50 U.A.W. locals signed a petition backing Mr. Fain.
“My local would not support any type of vote against Shawn,” said Greg Suggs, president of U.A.W. Local 5286, which represents 850 workers at a Daimler Truck locations in North Carolina. Their new contract, signed last year, included a 25 percent raise, profit-sharing and cost-of-living adjustments.
“My members really don’t care about board politics,” Mr. Suggs said. “They care about protecting their families, and the last contract we got, under Shawn, was a game-changer.”
Mr. Pillsbury, Mr. Keller and other dissidents are particularly angry about the moves by Mr. Fain and his board allies against Margaret Mock, the union’s secretary-treasurer, and Rich Boyer, its vice president.
In 2024, Ms. Mock was stripped of some responsibilities after she declined to approve expenses for, among other things, an organizing campaign in Tennessee, the rollout of an online store and signage during the 2023 strikes.
Mr. Boyer had served as the U.A.W.’s main negotiator with Stellantis. He was stripped of that responsibility after the automaker initiated layoffs amid a drop in sales and profits that led to the ouster of the company’s chief executive.
In June, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the U.A.W.’s reforms said the changes to Ms. Mock’s responsibilities were unjustified. The monitor — Neil M. Barofsky, a New York lawyer — wrote that he was continuing to investigate other allegations “concerning a retaliatory pattern of conduct” by Mr. Fain.Ms. Mock and Mr. Boyer did not respond to requests for comment made through their lawyers.
Opponents of Mr. Fain blame him for the layoffs at Stellantis.
“Shawn very well could have sent Rich back to the negotiating table, but he didn’t,” Mr. Keller said. “There are all these loopholes in the contract that let Stellantis lay people off.”
Mr. Barofsky was appointed to the monitor position in 2021 under a settlement stemming from a federal investigation of corruption at the top of the U.A.W. Mr. Fain was narrowly elected president in 2023, a vote overseen by Mr. Barofsky.
Mr. Fain dismissed the complaints about what had happened with Ms. Mock and Mr. Boyer as garden variety disputes. “Whether it’s corporate boards or union boards, every leadership body has its disagreements,” he said.
Most of the union’s executive board said in a statement this summer that they stood by the decision to relieve Ms. Mock of some of her duties.
Mr. Fain said the dissidents would not distract him from working to win a new contract with GE Aerospace, where 600 U.A.W. members are on strike in Ohio and Kentucky.
“I’m confident with the work we’ve done, and I think the majority of our members understand that,” he said.
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6) The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated.
For years, only a small portion of the people experiencing long spells of joblessness were college graduates. That’s starting to change.
By Noam Scheiber, Sept. 15, 2025
Sean Wittmeyer has two master’s degrees and is skilled in two fields, but he’s been looking for work for a year and a half. Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times
Sean Wittmeyer would seem to be highly employable. He has more than a decade of experience in architecture and product design, impressive coding chops and two master’s degrees. His skills make him an asset in two industries, technology and construction, which helped power the economy’s growth over the last 15 years.
But construction activity has faltered since 2023, after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and many tech companies began layoffs around the same time.
That helps explain why Mr. Wittmeyer, 37, has been unemployed for a year and a half, since he lost his job in business development for a company that makes software to help with real estate projects. He has been so eager to earn income that he has applied for positions befitting an intern, only to be told he was overqualified. “I can’t even work at the little board game store down the street,” he said.
When the federal government released its August employment numbers on Sept. 5, the overall unemployment rate was still relatively low, at just over 4 percent. But underneath was a concerning statistic: The portion of unemployed people who have been out of work for more than six months, which is considered “long-term,” rose to its highest share in over three years — to nearly 26 percent.
The trend has alarmed some job-market watchers. “Such an increase is unprecedented outside of recessions,” said an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, alluding to a steady worsening of the long-term unemployment rate. Economists at Goldman Sachs recently expressed concern that a collapse in the number of job openings “risks locking out” those who are already unemployed.
But just as surprising as the rise in long-term unemployment is the subset of workers who are increasingly driving it: the college educated. The fraction of long-term unemployed people with a college degree has grown from about one-fifth a decade ago to about one-third today, according to government data compiled by Matthew Notowidigdo and Jingzhou Huang of the University of Chicago. The problem has worsened over the past year or two after easing temporarily.
More of the College Educated Are Unemployed Longer
The share of long-term unemployed workers with college degrees has been steadily rising.
Economists cite a number of reasons for this trend. There are simply more college graduates today than there were 10 years ago, and the job market for people without college degrees improved, reducing their share of long-term unemployed.
But employers also appear to have less need for college-educated workers, driven by technological change, automation and, most recently, President Trump’s cuts to federal workers and funding, which have disproportionately affected the college educated.
“The data is signaling that there’s some restructuring going on,” said Andreas Mueller, an expert on long-term unemployment at the University of Zurich. “People are losing jobs and can’t find jobs in high-skilled occupations.”
Any bout of unemployment can be traumatic, but the psychological and financial toll of long-term joblessness tends to be especially serious. More than 200 people responded to a New York Times questionnaire about being unemployed for longer than six months, and many mentioned depression or anxiety. A few alluded to thoughts of suicide.
“I have checked all the boxes of ‘success’ my entire life: went to college, got a degree, worked toward a career,” wrote Katie Gallagher, a former sales and marketing director in Portland, Ore. She has been out of work for almost a year and estimated that she had applied to more than 3,000 jobs.
“The stress of rejection is unbearable, along with the looming threat of financial insecurity,” Ms. Gallagher, 34, continued. “I have never felt depression like this before in my life.”
In an interview, Ms. Gallagher said she had $6,000 in credit card debt and was relying on supplemental nutrition assistance. She said she recently borrowed about $4,000 from her brother to enroll in a course on A.I. automation and started a business that helps other firms automate functions like sales and on-boarding customers.
Employers’ need for college-educated workers appears to have slowed during the past decade or two, according to several studies by economists. Even before ChatGPT was released, applications like accounting software and earlier forms of artificial intelligence used in fields like finance and merchandise planning rendered some skilled workers obsolete. Data from Indeed, the job-seeking platform, shows that the portion of job advertisements requiring a college degree has dropped about 6 percent since 2019.
“There were big advances in A.I. starting around 2016 ,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence has only accelerated the trend. Mr. Wittmeyer, who also lives in Portland, said the coding projects he once did — like creating a tool that calculates the optimal window sizes for a facade — can often be done by someone far less skilled than he is. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he said.
Until she was laid off in the spring of 2024, Charlene Chen worked as the corporate counsel for a medium-sized law firm in New York, where her responsibilities included handling the firm’s employment agreements and contracts with vendors. She said that many companies have software that automates some of these functions, which may have complicated her job search.
As her search stalled, she began to look outside her field and at one point landed a temporary data-privacy compliance job with a New York City municipal agency. She quit after the first day. “There was a mouse trap under my desk and it smelled like urine,” she said. “Sitting there in the cubicle looking at that mouse trap made me feel so bad about myself.” She later flirted with paying $3,600 to a career coach before deciding it was too costly and might be a scam. She was thrilled to land another temporary job last week.
Dr. Mueller, the expert on long-term unemployment, said that college-educated workers may have more trouble finding jobs in a shrinking industry than workers without a degree because they are more likely to have skills or connections that are unique to that field. They may also be prone to excessive optimism and slow to realize that some of their traditional jobs are vanishing.
“You find yourself in a situation where you think, ‘I should have accepted that job earlier,’” Dr. Mueller said. “That mechanism could be strong in a market where you have this restructuring and people have to switch from one sector to another.”
Jeremey Davis, who was laid off as a senior director of engineering at Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, was offered a job early in his search, but turned it down because he was interviewing for another that he preferred. Roughly 11 months, 1,200 applications and 17 interviews after losing his job, he is still out of work. “I rolled the dice and they didn’t offer me the other position,” he said.
A colonel in the National Guard, Mr. Davis volunteers for extra guard duty to help pay the bills. He says that the number of applicants for each job has increased now that it is so easy to apply online, and he worries that it has become harder for job candidates to stand out.
Emma Wiles, an expert on the use of algorithms in hiring at Boston University, said that A.I. and other software tools can make the hiring process more random by creating a flood of similar-looking applications. That could hurt college-educated workers, who may have been less likely to get overlooked beforehand.
Mr. Wittmeyer has also chafed against what he sees as an explosion of applications on sites like LinkedIn. He has sent out over 200 applications and heard back from only seven companies. In the meantime, he is thankful that his wife has a steady job and he has been trying to turn his hobby — board-game making — into a career.
In 2023, he and his wife raised more than $100,000 on crowdfunding sites to build a game where players pretend to be tycoons who build ski resorts, eventually turning a small profit. He is finishing up another game, in which players compete to become the most popular airline at an airport, and expects to raise funds for it this fall.
“That’ll be our third game,” he said, adding hopefully: “I think it will make some money.”
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7) Rubio, in Israel, Says a Diplomatic Solution to Gaza War May Not be Possible
Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to discuss President Trump’s desire to see the war in Gaza end soon.
By Michael Crowley, Sept. 15, 2025
Michael Crowley is traveling in Israel with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Israeli troops at the border fence with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, on Tuesday. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Secretary of State Marco Rubio cast doubt on the chances of negotiating the surrender of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, saying during a visit to Israel on Monday that a diplomatic deal to end the war in Gaza might not be possible.
Mr. Rubio spoke at a news conference alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after the two men met for several hours. His comments struck a more pessimistic tone than that of President Trump, who earlier this month said that a deal to stop the fighting in Gaza could come “very soon.”
While making clear that the United States would still pursue a peace settlement, Mr. Rubio said Hamas is “a terrorist group, a barbaric group, whose stated mission is the destruction of the Jewish state. So we’re not counting on that happening.”
His remarks were in harmony with those of Mr. Netanyahu, who reiterated that Israel “must make sure Hamas is eliminated.” At the end of the news conference, Mr. Netanyahu said he would prefer a Hamas “surrender” to continued fighting if possible, while saying nothing about the status of negotiations with the group.
Mr. Rubio made clear that with regards to the war, “the president wants this to be finished,” with the hostages released and Hamas defeated. Israel believes that about 20 hostages are still alive in Gaza.
Hamas has shown no willingness to lay down its arms. And Mr. Netanyahu, whom critics accuse of prolonging the war to extend his political career, shows no signs of compromising in his pursuit of a total victory over Hamas.
Some tensions have emerged between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump about the Gaza war and Israel’s recent strike against Hamas leaders in the Gulf nation of Qatar. The State Department announced that Mr. Rubio will travel to Qatar on Tuesday.
Despite those tensions, Mr. Rubio and the Israeli premier seemed determined to present a unified front.
“It’s obvious that Israel has no better ally than America,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The American-Israeli alliance has never been as strong as it is now.”
Still, it remains unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump are in full agreement on the conduct of the war in Gaza. Eager to cast himself as a peacemaker, Mr. Trump has promised to broker a cease-fire that would free the remaining hostages.
But his diplomacy has come up short, and Israel is now preparing a major military offensive in Gaza City that is likely to prolong the fighting for months.
There were growing signs that a ground invasion of Gaza City could begin soon. On Sunday, the Israeli military intensified airstrikes on the city and attacked four more high-rise buildings that it said were being used by Hamas.
Both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Netanyahu dodged questions on Monday about whether they had discussed the planned offensive. Israel’s leader defended its objective, saying that Gaza City was Hamas’s most important remaining stronghold.
“We’re going to take over and destroy the Hamas stronghold,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Mr. Rubio had declined to say on Saturday whether Mr. Trump supports that goal. Israel has issued evacuation orders for the city and more than 300,000 Palestinians have fled in the past two weeks, according to the Israeli military.
Aid organizations have warned that the displacement of hundreds of thousands more people to already crowded areas of central and southern Gaza will exacerbate the severe humanitarian crisis in the enclave, where hunger is rampant.
“No place is safe in Gaza. No one is safe,” Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, wrote on social media on Sunday as people fleeing Gaza City clogged the coastal road with traffic.
“More and more people are forced to leave, disoriented and uncertain, heading into the unknown,” Mr. Lazzarini added.
Gaza’s Civil Defense, the territory’s rescue service, has reported dozens killed in Gaza City over the past two weeks, since Israel declared the large urban area a combat zone and began bombing in preparation for a full-scale ground assault.
At their news conference on Monday, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Netanyahu condemned growing international calls for the recognition of a Palestinian state. The governments of Britain, France, Canada, Belgium and Australia have all said in recent weeks that they will or may recognize such a state at the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering in New York next week.
Mr. Rubio dismissed the idea as symbolic and said it would only make Hamas “feel more emboldened.” He warned that a fresh push for Palestinian statehood could provoke an Israeli backlash — a likely reference to recent calls by right-wing Israeli ministers for the annexation of the West Bank in response.
Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed last week that “there will be no Palestinian state,” offered a similar assessment.
Before leaving Washington on Saturday, Mr. Rubio had told reporters that he would press Mr. Netanyahu about last week’s Israeli airstrike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar, a U.S. ally in the Gulf that has acted as a mediator in talks to end the Gaza war. The strike angered Mr. Trump, who said it would set back efforts to reach a peace deal.
But on Monday, Mr. Rubio chose not to dwell on the subject.
“We are focused on what happens now. What happens next?” Mr. Rubio said at the news conference. He added that the U.S. would “continue to encourage Qatar to play a constructive role” as a middleman between Israel and Hamas.
While Hamas said the strike in Doha had failed to kill the senior figures in the group who were targeted, Mr. Netanyahu said he was “still getting the final reports,” and rejected the idea that the attack might have failed.
“We sent a message to the terrorists: You can run, but you can’t hide, and we’ll get you,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu also paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was assassinated in Utah last week. He called him a “tremendous, tremendous friend of Israel” who had even sent him advice on the defense of Israel.
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8) Starving Children Eat Animal Feed in Besieged Sudanese City
At least 260,000 civilians trapped in El Fasher face a dire choice: risk being starved or bombed if they stay, and raped or killed if they flee.
By Declan Walsh, Sept. 15, 2025
The reporter reached besieged residents on some of the few satellite internet connections in a city with little food.
Residents waited for free meals in El Fasher, Sudan, last month. The city has been besieged by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since April 2024. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The reporter reached besieged residents on some of the few satellite internet connections in a city with little food.
The city’s last functioning hospital has been bombed over 30 times. Between 30 and 40 severely malnourished children arrive every day, seeking help. There’s nothing to give them but animal feed.
“Even we’re eating animal feed,” said Dr. Omar Selik, tilting his camera during a video call to show his meal: a sludgy paste made from pressed peanuts that is usually given to cows, camels and donkeys. “There’s nothing else.”
El Fasher is the worst battleground of Sudan’s brutal civil war. For nearly 18 months the city, in the western region of Darfur, has been under siege by paramilitaries trying to starve it into submission. Fighters have erected a 20-mile earthen wall around its boundaries.
That leaves residents with a dire set of choices. Stay, and risk being bombed or starved. Run, and risk being killed, robbed or sexually assaulted.
“People seem to have forgotten us,” said Dr. Selik, breaking into tears as he spoke. “Oh my God, it’s a very painful story.”
The war in Sudan started more than two years ago, when clashes broke out between Sudan’s army and its paramilitary rival, the Rapid Support Forces. The fight has engulfed Africa’s third-largest country, forcing about 12 million people from their homes, killing tens of thousands and setting off a major famine. Aid groups call it the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.
Since March, when the Rapid Support Forces was expelled from the capital, Khartoum, the group has redoubled its effort to capture Darfur, the vast region in western Sudan where most R.S.F. fighters are from. El Fasher is the last city in their way.
More than 500,000 people have fled El Fasher since April, when the R.S.F. rampaged through Zamzam, a famine-stricken camp seven miles south of the city, killing between 300 and 1,500 people in what the U.N. described as one of the worst massacres of the war.
A month later, the R.S.F. began to circle the city with the giant earthen berm, according to satellite images published by the Yale School of Public Health. On Aug. 27, construction to extend the berm was continuing.
An estimated 260,000 people are left in El Fasher, trapped by the tightening siege. A kilo of pasta sells for $73, ten times the normal price, Taha Khater, one of the few aid workers left in the city, said by phone. His group, known as the Emergency Response Rooms, recorded the deaths of 14 children from malnutrition in the past two weeks. Cholera is spreading.
Food convoys from the United Nations, which has not been able to deliver food to El Fasher in over a year, have been attacked by drones as they approached the city. One strike in June, on a convoy of 15 trucks, killed five aid workers; another last month destroyed three trucks and forced the rest to turn back. It is unclear which side carried out the attacks.
Young men attempting to flee the city, scrambling over the berm at night, have been executed by fighters, Mr. Khater said.
International aid groups offer help in Tawila, a small town 40 miles to the west now heaving with more than 600,000 refugees. But the journey to Tawila is perilous. Fighters roam the area, robbing or extorting fleeing civilians. The road is lined with hastily dug graves and abandoned bodies, aid workers say.
“They are just left there,” said Sylvain Penicaud, head of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Tawila, by phone.
Rape is commonplace. The hospital treats about 40 sexual assault victims every week, but anecdotal evidence suggests “that is nothing compared to the true rate,” Mr. Penicaud said.
Sudan’s military has also been accused of widespread war crimes, including bombing raids on crowded markets near El Fasher that killed several hundred people. In January, the United States imposed sanctions on Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of Sudan’s military, for alleged use of chemical weapons.
But only the R.S.F. has been accused of genocide, and this month U.N. investigators determined that the long list of atrocities committed by its troops in El Fasher amount to crimes against humanity. An R.S.F. spokesman did not respond to questions for this story.
Foreign involvement in the war in Sudan has worsened the siege. The United Arab Emirates has supplied guns, drones and medical support to the R.S.F., hoping to push the group toward victory, The New York Times has reported. This month, Sudan’s military-led government submitted a dossier to the U.N. Security Council that accused the Emirates of hiring a group of Colombian mercenaries, known as the Desert Wolves, to fight alongside the R.S.F.
The dossier, which included passport copies, contracts and a list of 170 people said to be mercenaries, came soon after video footage and photos purporting to show Colombian fighters in central El Fasher circulated online. The Times was able to verify the location of one video, but not the identities of the fighters.
The Emirates has repeatedly denied supporting either side in Sudan’s war and dismissed the Sudanese dossier as a fabrication.
Hospitals are a major target in the conflict. Of about 200 medical facilities in El Fasher before the war, just one remains — the Al Saudi hospital, where a handful of besieged medics are hanging on, despite bombs, starvation and a vanishing supply of medicines.
The hospital has been targeted over 30 times in the war, with the worst strike in January, when an R.S.F. drone fired a missile into a crowded ward, killing 70 patients and staff, according to Dr. Suleman, a senior doctor who works there.
Now, doctors shelter in foxholes during bombing raids, and malnourished patients are sustained with animal feed, said Dr. Suleman, who asked to be identified by one name because he has received death threats for his work.
The animal feed, known locally as ambaz, is a desperate solution, because it is prone to fungal contamination, especially in the rainy season. At least 18 residents have died in recent weeks after eating ambaz, local responders said.
“But there is no other option,” Dr. Suleman said.
In recent weeks, the R.S.F. has pushed deeper into El Fasher, forcing the Sudanese military and allied ethnic militias into the city’s northwestern corner. As they fight, R.S.F. fighters have targeted civilians from the ethnic Zaghawa group, human rights groups say, raising fears of an ethnic massacre if they take the city outright.
Salwa Ahmed, a university lecturer, tried to stay ahead of the fighting. She fled her home as the R.S.F. advanced, hurrying through streets littered with the bodies of fallen fighters, she said. Eventually she reached a safer place, even if bombs continued to fall nearby, she said.
But now her husband, Essam, was missing. He returned to their home a week earlier, to fetch some belongings. By Friday, he still hadn’t returned.
“We don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” she said.
As the siege has tightened, some residents have smuggled small amounts of food and medicine into the city by scrambling over the earthen berm at night. But those caught by fighters face beatings and threats. One video that circulated recently in a Telegram channel run by R.S.F. supporters showed a man in an R.S.F. uniform wielding a whip over a man cowering on the ground.
Diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting have yielded few results. On Aug. 13, the U.N. Security Council repeated its call for an end to the siege of El Fasher, two days after R.S.F. fighters stormed a camp in the city, killing 57 people.
Three days later, the R.S.F. stormed into the camp again, this time killing 32 people, Human Rights Watch reported.
Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from Omdurman, Sudan, and Sanjana Varghese from London.
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9) Elon Musk Buys $1 Billion in Tesla Stock as Board Defends His Pay
Tesla’s chief executive bought the stock after the company’s board proposed paying him nearly $1 trillion if he achieves certain performance goals.
By Kailyn Rhone, Sept. 15, 2025
Elon Musk’s purchase of Tesla stock prompted a jump in the company’s shares in early trading on Monday. Credit...Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Elon Musk has bought around $1 billion worth of Tesla stock, his first such purchase in more than five years, as the company’s board promoted a new compensation plan that could grant him nearly $1 trillion if he meets certain performance targets.
The acquisition, made through a revocable trust on Sept. 12, was disclosed in regulatory filling on Monday. Mr. Musk purchased about 2.57 million shares on Friday, ranging from around $372 to $397 a share.
The filing comes just days after the company’s board chair, Robyn Denholm, defended the proposed pay plan. She told The New York Times on Friday that Mr. Musk could achieve world-changing technology if motivated by seemingly impossible goals.
The purchase appeared to please investors. Tesla’s stock rose more than 6 percent, to around $422, on Monday morning. Mr. Musk said on X Monday morning that the increase in Tesla’s stock over the last several years was “foretold in the prophecy.”
Tesla, which makes electric vehicles and battery storage systems, has struggled in recent quarters. Sales of its cars have been falling around the world and will likely take another dive in the last three months of the year after a tax credit for E.V. purchases in the United States expires at the end of September.
Mr. Musk sold more than $20 billion of the company’s stock in 2022 when he acquired Twitter, now known as X.
Despite those challenges, Ms. Denholm maintains that Mr. Musk’s performance-based compensation is justified. To unlock the full payout, Mr. Musk must drive up Tesla’s valuation to $8.5 trillion, from about $1 trillion today; deploy one million autonomous taxis and one million robots, and increasing its profits more than 24-fold from last year.
Tesla has only a small number of autonomous taxis that operate in a limited area of Austin, Texas. They operate with technicians sitting inside who monitor the cars and can intervene if something goes wrong. The company has shown a robot but it is not clear when that device will go on sale.
“The plan is about the future of the company and Elon’s role in that in terms of leading the company to produce fabulous products and deliver for shareholders,” Ms. Denholm said. She also said that Mr. Musk is primarily interested in increasing his voting influence at Tesla, not the monetary value of shares.
But some investors have pushed back on the compensation proposal, saying that it rewards a chief executive for staying at a company that he has managed poorly.
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10) The N.Y.P.D. Is Teaching America How to Track Everyone Every Day Forever
By Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook, Sept. 15, 2025
Ms. Daniel Vasquez was a public defender in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. She now runs the Forensic Evidence Table, a nonprofit focusing on the intersection of criminal law, technology and science.
How the N.Y.P.D. tracks people: License plate readers, Fingerprint scanners, Digital record aggregation, Cryptocurrency analysis, Internet surveillance, Social media surveillance, Social network, analysis. Source: New York City Police Department, Note: List is not exhaustive. Illustrations by Josie Norton.
I ran a practice inside Brooklyn’s public defense office focused on the police department’s use of science and technology, so I am well accustomed to the department’s collection of personal information on people being investigated for crimes. But more than a decade of observing traditional police work did not prepare me for what the department is doing today: building vast, hidden repositories of data it collects on everyone in the city, with no clear boundaries on how it can be used. As cities across the country follow New York’s lead, I am gravely worried about what this system enables, and the effect on what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis termed our most valued right: the “right to be let alone.”
The city’s police force has spent more than $3 billion amassing information that reveals where you have been, whom you have interacted with and what you have said, thought and believed. Unlike previous surveillance methods, new digital tools allow law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance persistently, universally, at an unimaginable scale. They can do so with no special permission, no oversight and no advance planning. The results amount to a digital time machine that not only makes our past constantly available to law enforcement officers but also can provide them with predictions about our futures.
Traces of this system have surfaced regularly in news reports for years. Journalists at multiple outlets have reported the N.Y.P.D.’s intrusive surveillance on peaceful protests, popular hip-hop shows and kids across the city, all in the name of fighting crime before it occurs. If you commute by car, police algorithms can predict what time you’ll likely head home on any given Wednesday and what roads you’ll take to get there. The city’s computers are constantly passively compiling this information in case it is of use to them later, a version of the film “Minority Report” made real.
The surveillance has reached such a scale that it has begun to erode a large number of people’s basic civil rights.
New Yorkers who merely fit certain demographic categories or public profiles may be subjected to a higher number of police interactions, which can result in the loss of their property and peace of mind and endanger them physically. They may lose housing and job or educational opportunities. They may have to curtail the way they move through the city, express themselves and interact with others.
Take a teenager living in the Marcy Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn. Simply because of where he lives, if he posts photos with certain classmates or if he tries out certain hashtags, he might be added to the N.Y.P.D.’s gang database, which contains active entries for more than 13,000 people, 99 percent of whom are people of color. If he is active on social media — as almost every teenager is — the N.Y.P.D.’s social media analysis and research team may track him, analyzing and collecting his online activity and networks. He could be among those who are periodically contacted on social media by undercover detectives impersonating other teenagers.
Even if there is no suspicion that this particular young man has engaged in any crime, his presence on that database exposes him to a level of monitoring previously reserved for intensive undercover operations targeting organized crime.
Once targeted, as Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, has warned, a young man in this situation might experience repeated and regular police stops. A minor infraction that would normally be ignored, or at worst result in a ticket or summons, could turn into hours of questioning about his social networks and his neighborhood and communities. Being taken to the station for questioning also often means having his cellphone seized. The N.Y.P.D. disclosed that in 2024 alone, it seized and kept more than 24,000 cellphones.
If you knew that your son actively risked being labeled a gang member because of his proximity to certain kids in his class, would you want to move him to a different school? If you anticipated that police officers could track your presence at a rally in Washington Square Park — and then open their phones to find your address in Brooklyn — would you think twice about attending?
Think of the effect on kids of being randomly approached by officers outside their houses, addressed by name and asked knowing questions about their family members, schools and jobs. Too many of our city’s children are left looking over their shoulders and wondering who has been talking about them. Paranoia spreads like a contagion.
Information obtained in these interactions — from the seized cellphones and the seized children — gets added to the N.Y.P.D.’s databases, feeding the system of surveillance all over again.
Even if you regard widespread surveillance as a reasonable precaution against crime, there is no way to be sure how this data could be used in the future, and no system in place to protect or regulate it.
To consider but one possible scenario, today, abortion is legal in New York. But in many states it is not, and some of them are actively considering whether to criminalize out-of-state travel for abortion-related care. No current laws would prevent the federal government from demanding access to the N.Y.P.D.’s data or stop the department from granting it. The system could quickly identify out-of-state cars and people who visit or have visited Planned Parenthood. Dossiers could easily be generated for each person and then expanded to include information about their travel, social networks, habits and beliefs. From there, it would be easy to create a watch list targeting suspects for further monitoring, stops, questioning and property seizures.
That may seem improbable today. Will it seem that way tomorrow?
We have all gotten used to advising our children that their actions online leave a permanent trail, and that they should be aware of how their current-day escapades may look to future employers or schools. The threat from a unified repository of our physical and digital lives — maintained by an institution with the power to arrest, jail, banish and even kill — is vastly greater.
We need to talk about our data. Most of all, we need legislation that prohibits law enforcement from pre-emptively collecting and keeping this kind of information in the first place.
Here in New York, the N.Y.P.D. has publicly disclosed using dozens of data collection systems. Once collected, the department says, the data is funneled into a storage and analysis hub called the Domain Awareness System that can retain the information for years, and use it to predict things like where we'll travel or whom we'll be in contact with.
Most of this material — gathered by social media analysis, drone surveillance and more — will never be reviewed by any court and will be entirely inaccessible to anyone outside of law enforcement. For almost 90 percent of the technologies it deploys, the department has stated that it has no obligation to obtain a warrant.
Over the past decade, similar approaches to collecting and fusing data have been adopted by police forces around the country, from large jurisdictions such as New Orleans and San Francisco all the way down to Austell, Ga. (population: about 8,000), which maintains a unified database linking surveillance cameras, license plate readers and police files.
The beginning of President Trump’s second term, however, has taken this strategy to new levels for the nation as a whole. Early this year, the Department of Government Efficiency started working to break down walls between federal data collections maintained by the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Aggregating these intentionally separated data sources not only reduces their security but also allows for the instant reconstruction of the sum of our private lives, with few or no rules on who will have access to it or how it will be used. In March, Mr. Trump issued an executive order explicitly directing all federal agencies to follow suit by eliminating boundaries between the systems they use to collect data on the populations they serve.
The early indications are not good. The federal government has significantly expanded contracts with Palantir, the powerful and secretive surveillance technology company co-founded by Peter Thiel. The U.S. Postal Service has reportedly started cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to track undocumented immigrants. State and local police officers are collaborating as well.
After reading headlines about DOGE’s access to I.R.S. data, my 73-year-old mother asked me if she should get a virtual private network to shield her from this kind of surveillance. It’s a reasonable question. But individual actions like deploying a V.P.N., changing your phone’s privacy settings or using encrypted messaging apps won’t protect you. And they certainly won’t empty the data warehouses where your records are already stored.
The only way we can protect ourselves from this extraordinarily intrusive and dangerous practice is by getting our legislators to ban it.
Nearly half of U.S. states have data privacy laws, but all of them contain carve-outs for law enforcement and national security. We urgently need to create guardrails for when and how government agents like the N.Y.P.D. are allowed to collect our data, who in government can have it, what they can use it for and how long they can keep it. For a culture that values personal freedom and private ownership, nothing would be more American than a law that confirms that we each own our own information.
Should our legislatures continue to fail to act, the only barrier to weaponizing these unconscionably powerful tools of surveillance will be our leaders’ respect for our shared values of liberty and democracy. The second Trump administration has shown us how frail that bulwark is.
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11) Panic grips Gaza City as Israel’s ground operation gets underway.
By Liam Stack, Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman, September 16, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza City described scenes of panic on Tuesday as Israel launched a new ground operation, sending in troops and tanks while pounding the area with heavy airstrikes.
The city streets were filled with people who could not find anywhere to shelter, witnesses told The New York Times. Others sought safety in buildings that were filled with smoke from nearby Israeli strikes or fires.
Nesreen Joudeh said in a telephone interview that she was sheltering with her husband and four children in an apartment whose heavily cracked walls seemed to be crumbling around them. She said she was afraid they would all soon die.
“With every single strike, pieces of concrete fall on our heads and I scream all the time,” said Ms. Joudeh, 40.
Montaser Bahja, a former schoolteacher, said he was also hiding from the Israeli assault in an apartment near the Mediterranean coast. He said an intense bombardment began overnight, and the strikes were making the ground shake beneath his building.
“We are all terrified,” he said. “Death would be more merciful than what we’re living through.”
By Tuesday, the Israeli military said roughly half a million people remained in Gaza City after 350,000 had heeded evacuation orders and fled, compounding a humanitarian disaster in the territory where most people have been displaced multiple times and hunger is rampant after nearly two years of war.
Gaza’s health officials said ambulance and emergency workers were unable to reach some of the injured people stranded on streets or trapped under rubble from Israeli strikes.
As the ground operation began on Tuesday, the Israeli military told anyone who remained in Gaza City to leave as quickly as possible. But many said they simply could not afford to do so.
“I don’t have anywhere to go in southern Gaza, no house, no tent, no car in which to travel,” said Mr. Bahja. “They’re not fighting Hamas. They’re fighting all of us civilians.”
Israel has said it is targeting Gaza City because it is one of the last remaining strongholds of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that led the 2023 attack on Israel, which set off the war in Gaza.
Ms. Joudeh said her family also could not afford to pay for transportation out of the city, the cost of which reached about $1,000 or more in recent days. They cannot leave on foot, she added, because her husband suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure. One of her sons was also injured while trying to get flour at an aid distribution site, she said.
She said she felt as if her family, and her city, were at the end of their rope.
“They broke us,” she said, referring to Israel. “What else will they do to us?”
Even if her family did survive the offensive, she said she was worried about how to feed them. She had only four pounds of flour and a few canned goods left at home, and feared there may not be an opportunity to get more aid anytime soon.
“If we get surrounded by the army, we will have to survive on this,” she said. But if the army were to advance toward her neighborhood, she said, “That is the end for us.”
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12) Israel’s ground offensive capped months of strikes, warnings and threats.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 16, 2025
Israel began its long-planned ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday, after months of preparations that intensified in recent weeks.
In the coming days, additional troops are expected to gradually advance into the city, an Israeli military official said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, adding that at least 2,000 Hamas militants remained there.
The official, who briefed journalists on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation, estimated that around 40 percent of the city’s residents had already fled the fighting. But hundreds of thousands of Gazans are still sheltering in the city.
The Israeli government signed off on a plan to take over Gaza City in August. At the time, Israeli forces were operating in the outskirts of Gaza City, and ordered the remaining residents to leave.
By the end of August, much of Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood had been razed to the ground. Since then, Israeli military strikes have destroyed multiple high-rise buildings in the city that the military said Hamas was using for surveillance and other activities. The group denied the accusations.
Satellite images from Monday showed hundreds of tents remained in central Gaza City near to where recent strikes have destroyed high-rise buildings.
Israel’s air force has attacked more than 850 targets over the past week in Gaza City, the military said in a statement. It is unclear how far troops have advanced into the city.
Three military divisions are participating in the assault, with more expected to join in the coming days, the Israeli military said. To free up manpower for the offensive, Israel has called up about 60,000 reserve soldiers and extended the service for tens of thousands more.
Samuel Granados contributed reporting.
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13) Rubio says that ‘time is running out’ for a Gaza deal.
By Michael Crowley, Michael Crowley traveled to the Middle East with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on Tuesday that “time is running out” for a negotiated end to the war in Gaza.
He spoke minutes before departing Israel for Qatar, and just as Israel was launching a military assault on the Gazan capital that it says is meant to end Hamas’ hold on the city. It is unclear if Mr. Rubio knew at the time that the full offensive had begun, but Israel has been signaling for weeks that it would start soon.
“We don’t have months anymore, and we probably have days and maybe a few weeks,” to reach a deal that would stop the fighting and free hostages held by Hamas, Mr. Rubio told reporters in Israel. “It’s a key moment.”
Mr. Rubio’s Middle East trip came amid a diplomatic storm around the new Israeli offensive, which had already drawn sharp criticism from major European and Arab states while still in the planning stages. On Tuesday, he also had to reckon with Qatar’s reaction to a Sept. 9 Israeli airstrike that had targeted Hamas officials in that country.
He met Tuesday with Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who has accused Israel of “sabotaging” the cease-fire and hostage-release negotiations with Hamas in Doha.
An official readout of Mr. Rubio’s meeting from a State Department spokesman made no mention either of Israel’s strike or the Gaza City offensive. Mr. Rubio “reaffirmed the strong bilateral relationship between the United States and Qatar, and thanked Qatar for its efforts to end the war in Gaza and bring all hostages home,” the spokesman, Tommy Pigott, said. “The Secretary reiterated America’s strong support for Qatar’s security and sovereignty, and discussed our shared commitment to a safer, more stable region.”
There was no immediate statement from the Qatari government about the meeting.
Mr. Rubio left Qatar after his brief visit and was headed to Britain, where he was meeting President Trump for his state visit there.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio met in Jerusalem with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The men discussed the imminent Gaza City operation, which analysts say is likely to prolong the war and could endanger the hostages. In remarks to reporters on Monday, Mr. Rubio gave no sign that he had urged Mr. Netanyahu not to proceed with the assault, even though President Trump has repeatedly said he is impatient for a deal to end the fighting quickly.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Trump have supported Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that Hamas is the main obstacle to such a deal, although the Israeli leader’s critics, including some former Biden administration officials, say he has willfully dragged out the conflict.
Speaking alongside Mr. Rubio on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu vowed to “defeat” Hamas, and said little about the state of peace negotiations. While reiterating Mr. Trump’s desire for a negotiated cease-fire, Mr. Rubio warned that “we also have to be prepared for the possibility that that’s not going to happen” — a more somber public assessment than most from senior U.S. officials since the war began.
Even before Israel launched its full offensive on Gaza City, which is likely to further alienate Arab states already angry over the death toll in Gaza, Mr. Rubio’s trip to Qatar was a potentially awkward one.
He arrived there just days after the Israeli airstrike that targeted a residential compound in the capital, Doha, where Hamas leaders were meeting, killing several people affiliated with Hamas as well as a member of Qatar’s internal security forces. Hamas insists that the senior leaders targeted by Israel survived; Israel says it is still assessing the outcome.
Mr. Netanyahu’s critics say the attack on Hamas operatives who have been the group’s point of contact for peace negotiations proved that he was sabotaging prospects for a deal.
In addition, Qatar and its Arab neighbors called the strike a shocking violation of sovereignty and an insult to the country’s peacemaking efforts. Qatar has played a vital role as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas.
An oil-and-gas-rich Gulf emirate, Qatar is also an important U.S. partner. It is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, regularly assists American diplomacy, and has aggressively courted the favor of Mr. Trump. In April, Mr. Trump accepted as a gift from Qatar’s ruler a 747 jetliner worth an estimated $200 million for use as a new Air Force One.
Mr. Rubio has appeared disinclined to choose sides in the furor over Israel’s strike. In a Monday interview with Fox News, Mr. Rubio staked out a neutral position and sought to move past it. “We understand they’re upset about it,” he said of the Qataris. “We understand the Israeli position on it.”
“We want them to know how much we appreciate and respect all the time and work and effort they’ve put in the past to these negotiations, and we hope they’ll re-engage despite everything that’s happened,” he added on Tuesday morning.
Qatar may not be ready to move on, however. A day before Mr. Rubio’s visit, the country hosted an emergency meeting of leaders of Arab and Muslim countries to discuss the Israeli strike.
The Arab leaders stopped short of committing to any tangible action against Israel, but they said each of their states should “review diplomatic and economic relations” with Israel. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said Israel’s actions had jeopardized diplomatic ties with the Arab nations that officially recognize the Jewish state, and the chances of formal relations with the states that do not.
At the news conference in Jerusalem on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu defiantly rejected criticism of the strike, saying that it had sent a clear message to Israel’s enemies that they could not hide from his country’s retribution, even within the borders of nations seeming to offer them “immunity.”
Standing next to Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Rubio pledged America’s “unwavering support” for Israel’s campaign against Hamas, and did not repeat Mr. Trump’s sharp criticism of the Doha strike. Mr. Trump has fumed that he was “very unhappy” about the Israeli attack, saying that it could further complicate his already foundering efforts to broker a cease-fire in Gaza.
Qatar prides itself on its role as a political bridge. It has long allowed Hamas political officials to live in Doha, with U.S. support, and has hosted countless indirect negotiations between them and Israeli officials.
But it has threatened to abandon that role in the wake of Israel’s attack, which was also criticized in many Western capitals, including the governments of France, Britain and Germany.
The strike was a “a humiliating blow” for Qatar, Tamir Hayman, the executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote last week. He added that it had “shaken” the tiny nation’s assumption that its partnership with the United States guaranteed its security.
Mr. Trump says that he was not aware of the Israeli attack until the last moment, and Mr. Netanyahu reiterated on Monday that it was “a wholly independent decision by Israel.”
Speaking to reporters in New Jersey on Sunday, Mr. Trump seemed to warn Israel against a repeat, saying the country must be “very, very careful” toward Qatar, which he called a “great ally” of the United States.
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14) Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a U.N. inquiry says.
By Nick Cumming-Bruce, Reporting from Geneva, Sept. 16, 2025
A United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza said Tuesday that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, the panel’s most sweeping findings yet about the Israeli government’s conduct in the conflict.
In earlier reports, the commission found that Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in its war with Hamas militants, but stopped short of declaring it genocide. On Tuesday, it said that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza,” the panel’s leader, Navi Pillay, a South African high court judge and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.
Israel has repeatedly rejected allegations of genocide from scholars and human rights groups, saying the target of its military campaign is the militant group Hamas. It did so again on Tuesday.
Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, denounced the report in a statement as “fake.”
“In stark contrast to the lies in the report, Hamas is the party that attempted genocide in Israel,” Mr. Marmorstein said.
Since the Israeli military launched a retaliatory assault in response to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has come under international condemnation over the toll the war has taken on civilians.
The report details the deaths of civilians killed during intense Israeli bombing of densely populated areas, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, including Gaza’s main fertility clinic, and the destruction of educational, religious and cultural sites. The consequence, it said, is the erasure of Palestinian identity.
While the U.N. commission that issued the report has no enforcement power, Ms. Pillay said in an interview that its findings would carry weight with the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, as well as with International Criminal Court. The court is weighing a petition by South Africa to declare that Israel is committing genocide.
“This is a significant, independent report, one that will have to be taken seriously by all who read it, not least by those who are advising the prime minister and government of Israel,” said Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London who specializes in genocide cases and has appeared before many international courts.
Even before the war, Israel often accused the United Nations of being biased against it and of unfairly singling it out for criticism. Relations have deteriorated still further since its military campaign against Hamas began.
The panel that issued the report Tuesday, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2021 to investigate the root causes of conflict in Gaza and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It has focused on the war in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people.
The panel’s 78-page analysis builds off three previous reports about the conflict through the end of July. They covered a range of what the commission found to be war crimes and crimes against humanity. In March, for example, it accused Israel of targeting hospitals and other health facilities in “genocidal acts” intended to prevent births. Israel says Hamas fighters have based themselves at the hospitals.
The commission has also identified what it said were war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by armed Palestinian groups. One report, released last year, found signs that participants in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel committed sexual violence in multiple locations. It also said that some of the hostages seized that day had been subjected to rape and sexual torture in Gaza.
In issuing its new findings, the panel noted developments in Gaza since the last report was put out.
“Everything that has happened since the 1st of August confirms and strengthens the conclusions to which we have come,” Chris Sidoti, a member of the panel, said in an interview. He was alluding to Israel’s escalation of military strikes on Gaza City, with Israel saying on Tuesday that it had begun a ground invasion there.
In the months since it issued its last report, commission members assessed whether the evidence they gathered met the requirements of the Genocide Convention, Ms. Pillay said. Under the International Court of Justice’s standard, for genocide to be declared, it must be “the only inference that could be reasonably drawn from the acts in question.”
In the report released on Tuesday, the U.N. panel said that was the case in Gaza.
“Israeli authorities were aware,” the commission said, “of the high probability that their military operations, the imposition of a total siege, including the blocking of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the destruction of housing and of health systems and facilities would lead to the physical destruction of Palestinians, in whole or in part, in Gaza.”
The panel also said that Israel’s relentless military strategy pursued in “flagrant” defiance of orders issued by the court and warnings from humanitarian agencies was among the most compelling factors in its conclusion that genocidal intent was “the only reasonable inference” to be drawn.
Last year, the court, allowing the genocide case against Israel to proceed, directed the Israeli government to take action to prevent acts of genocide by its forces in Gaza.
Another compelling factor was Israeli troops’ “extensive and deliberate” targeting of Palestinian children, Mr. Sidoti said. Medical workers testified they had treated many children with direct gunshot wounds to the head and upper body.
The report said that it did not preclude future investigations into whether genocide has been committed by Israel in the West Bank or by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attack.
“We’ve been gathering the evidence on the West Bank,” Ms. Pillay said. “That would come next.”
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15) Israel Launches Gaza City Ground Offensive, Officials Say
By Isabel Kershner and Lara Jakes, 3:11 a.m. Sept. 16, 2025
The Israeli military launched a ground incursion into Gaza City early Tuesday, according to three Israeli officials, embarking on a risky operation to take control of a key urban area even as hundreds of thousands of residents remain there.
Two of the officials said the ground invasion was in its early stages. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military and government operations.
The ground operation and intensifying Israeli bombardment risks deepening the humanitarian crisis in a war that has already killed tens of thousands of people.
More than 300,000 people had already fled the city by Monday, according to the Israeli military. On Tuesday, the military urged up to half a million Palestinians remaining in the city to move south as quickly as possible, by vehicle or on foot, describing the city as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Avichay Adraee, the Arabic language spokesman for the Israeli military, said that the military had “begun dismantling Hamas terrorist infrastructure in Gaza City.”
“Gaza is burning,” Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement after a night of heavy bombardment of Gaza City. The Israeli military “is striking with an iron fist at the terrorist infrastructure,” he added.
This is a developing article. Please check for updates.
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
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16) He Fled Putin’s War. The U.S. Deported Him to a Russian Jail.
Antiwar Russians are being sent back as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, despite facing imprisonment and other dangers.
By Paul Sonne and Milana Mazaeva, Reporting from Berlin, Sept. 16, 2025
Artyom Vovchenko at a mixed martial arts tournament in 2023 in Bali, Indonesia.Credit...Bali MMA
Artyom Vovchenko had been conscripted into the Russian military, escaped in opposition to the war in Ukraine and ultimately made it to the United States, a country he hoped would offer him asylum and a new life.
But last month, he found himself on a layover at the airport in Cairo, frantically trying to avoid boarding a flight to Moscow. The United States was deporting him alongside dozens of other Russians after rejecting his pleas.
As the Egyptian authorities boarded the final people onto the deportation flight, Mr. Vovchenko, 26, loitered in the restroom, possibly hoping he could resist, abscond or somehow be forgotten. He had no such luck.
Egyptian guards pulled him out of the bathroom and roughed him up, leaving him with an injury on his forehead. They marched him onto the flight and to the back of the cabin, tying him to a middle seat. The plane soon began gliding toward Moscow. Mr. Vovchenko cried for much of the flight. He knew what would come next.
This episode was recounted by a woman who sat near Mr. Vovchenko on the plane and spoke to The New York Times, as well as by a man on the flight whose account was posted online by a Russian human rights activist.
Mr. Vovchenko’s plight represents a new reality for Russians who are struggling to persuade American judges to allow them to stay in the United States on account of their political or religious views. As President Trump accelerates deportations, some are being sent back to Russia, despite facing imprisonment or worse at home.
This summer, dozens of Russian deportees have been loaded twice onto mass deportation flights, a new phenomenon during the Trump administration. The Department of Homeland Security said it was saving taxpayer dollars by “efficiently flying illegal aliens to their home country on large fights.”
Mr. Vovchenko abandoned the Russian military in 2022, meaning he faced up to 10 years in prison. The Russian military, which had already accused him in a criminal case of disgracing his country by fleeing, is known for inhumane and life-threatening reprisals against deserters.
While detained in the United States for over a year, he had pleaded with officials to recognize the danger of sending him back to Russia, according to documents obtained by The Times detailing his case. But the nation that he had thought would be sympathetic turned out to be as unforgiving as his own.
“All of his claims were found to be meritless by a judge,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.
She said Mr. Vovchenko had tried to illegally enter the United States last year, and referred questions about his treatment in the Cairo airport to the Egyptian authorities. The Egyptian government did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Vovchenko’s deportation flight crossed into Russian airspace at the end of August. The woman on the flight, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns in Russia, said she watched as he was taken away by Russian security officers at the airport.
No information about Mr. Vovchenko or his whereabouts has been made public since.
“The laws were stacked against him,” said Kenneth P. Primola, a lawyer who represented Mr. Vovchenko in his failed attempt to secure a U.S. court order protecting him from deportation because of expected harm in Russia.
“I thought sending him back was a death sentence,” Mr. Primola said. “I was kind of taken aback.”
Between Two Fires
Mr. Vovchenko’s journey, which The Times pieced together by interviewing six people familiar with it and reviewing documents, shows the perils of becoming caught between an authoritarian Russia gripped by war and a changing America carrying out an immigration crackdown.
It wasn’t just Mr. Trump’s mass deportation campaign that led to Mr. Vovchenko’s return to Moscow last month. Stricter border and detention policies that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. introduced also led to the removal, as did a fickle U.S. asylum process, where rulings often vary widely based on the judge.
The Times has withheld much of the information from the documents owing to concerns about Mr. Vovchenko’s security in Russia. His family members did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mr. Vovchenko isn’t the first Russian opposed to the war to be imprisoned after being deported back to Russia from the United States.
Leonid Melekhin, who volunteered and protested for Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was arrested and charged with justifying terrorism after his deportation to Russia in July. Mr. Melekhin had been placed in detention and denied asylum in the United States.
Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, called both Mr. Vovchenko and Mr. Melekhin “illegal aliens” whom “even the open border Biden administration” kept in detention and did not release into the United States.
It is unclear how many of the Russians deported from the United States have since found themselves in the cross hairs of the Russian authorities.
Already, some have fled a second time.
Yevgeny Mashinin, a 28-year-old antiwar Russian activist, was deported from the United States in December after a judge rejected his asylum request. Days after he stepped off his deportation flight, the Russian authorities filed misdemeanor charges against him, accusing him of hooliganism and discrediting the military, and detained him for two days. After his release, he made a second escape, to France.
News of Mr. Vovchenko’s arrest, first revealed by Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian activist who published the account of the man on the deportation flight, has prompted calls by Russian opposition figures in the West to protect antiwar Russian asylum seekers or to at least send them to safe countries. Some of those opposition figures have asked Canada to accept deported anti-Kremlin Russians.
Many Russians seeking safety in the United States are facing denials by U.S. judges who leave them unnecessarily in detention and do not acknowledge the danger they face if they are deported to Russia, said Dmitry Valuev, president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, or RADR, a U.S. organization aiding Russian asylum seekers.
He cited the example of Svetlana Orzhevskaya and Igor Orzhevsky, mother-and-son Russian antiwar activists who were detained when they arrived in the United States last year. They were held despite their use of CBP One, a since-abolished app that allowed asylum seekers to schedule appointments to enter the country from Mexico, he said.
The activists argued that they should receive asylum because Russian prosecutors had filed multiple criminal cases against them related to their political views, which guaranteed years in prison if they were to be deported. A judge denied their claim. They remain in U.S. immigration detention in California, where they are appealing, Mr. Valuev said.
“The judges sometimes refuse to see the potential threat,” he said.
A Trapped Soldier
Mr. Vovchenko didn’t enter the Russian military by choice.
After studying at a law academy in Saratov, a city in southwestern Russia, he was conscripted in October 2020, before the full-scale invasion, for a year of military service. He was posted first in Russia and later at a Russian base in Armenia.
During his time as a conscript, his military service was extended by a year without his knowledge or agreement, to October 2022, according to the documents reviewed by The Times. Mr. Vovchenko’s parents lodged a complaint with the military prosecutor protesting this common coercive practice by the Russian Army to no avail. While he was serving this additional year, President Vladimir V. Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, which Mr. Vovchenko opposed, according to the documents.
About a month before the forced contract was set to expire, Russian troops were routed on the battlefield, causing a hasty retreat. Mr. Putin signed a decree that called up 300,000 civilians and extended existing military-service contracts, including Mr. Vovchenko’s, until the end of the unspecified mobilization period.
Mr. Vovchenko was trapped.
When he heard that his unit would be sent to Ukraine, Mr. Vovchenko first visited his mother, who was dying of brain cancer, and then escaped, eventually making his way to Indonesia, according to the documents. Days after he left, his mother died.
In Bali, he pursued a longstanding passion for jujitsu, participating in tournaments and calling himself a “peaceful warrior” on Instagram.
In March 2023, Russia and Indonesia signed an extradition treaty. The Russian authorities had filed a criminal case against Mr. Vovchenko for abandoning the military, the documents show, and had been harassing his father, sending letters denouncing Mr. Vovchenko and demanding his return. It isn’t clear whether Moscow filed an extradition request.
Seeking safety, he left Indonesia and traveled through seven countries, including Mexico, continuing to practice jujitsu along the way, according to the documents.
“I thought he was a really good person,” said Heather Woods, a jujitsu athlete who trained with Mr. Vovchenko in Mexico City and was impressed with his skill. “I felt he could have made a career there, or really in any country.”
In July 2024, Mr. Vovchenko approached the port of entry in Calexico, Calif., drove over the border and immediately declared asylum, according to the documents and a Russian man who befriended him in detention in Louisiana.
What he didn’t fully realize, according to his lawyer, Mr. Primola, was that Mr. Biden had drastically restricted the ability to seek asylum at the border with Mexico, except under a few extreme circumstances, in an executive order weeks earlier and a rule the year before.
The U.S. authorities also had begun detaining Russians who crossed the border to declare asylum and holding them indefinitely in detention centers instead of releasing them until the adjudication of their asylum claims, as had often been previous practice. The mass detentions came after eight Tajik asylum seekers, including at least one with a Russian passport, crossed the border and were investigated over potential ties to the Islamic State.
Mr. Vovchenko stepped over the border into a nightmare.
A Rejection
After apprehending Mr. Vovchenko, the U.S. authorities sent him to immigration detention centers in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Mr. Primola, his lawyer, said his client could not secure asylum because of the new border policies but was still able to apply for a “withholding from removal” order. Such a case requires a higher burden of proof of the risk of persecution in the destination country.
Mr. Vovchenko appeared in April at the U.S. immigration court in Oakdale, La., before Judge Jacob D. Bashore, a former military lawyer appointed to the court during President Trump’s first term.
According to TRAC, a research center that collects court data, Judge Bashore denied 89 percent of asylum claims from 2019 to 2024, far above the national denial rate of 58 percent. In the 2024 fiscal year, 85 percent of Russian asylum requests adjudicated by a U.S. court were granted, the center reported.
Mr. Primola said that the judge didn’t believe Mr. Vovchenko or care about his principled opposition to the war, and that he equated military service in Russia with that in America.
“This judge just didn’t think it mattered,” Mr. Primola said, describing his attitude as “Who cares? You got to serve, you got to serve.”
Mr. Vovchenko broke down into tears when his request was denied, his lawyer said.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the case. The court in Louisiana referred a comment request to the Justice Department.
Mr. Vovchenko decided not to appeal because he lacked money for a lawyer and did not want to spend as much as another year locked up, according to the Russian man who befriended him in the Louisiana detention center and other people familiar with the case. So he began trying to persuade the U.S. authorities to deport him to Indonesia, where he still had active residency, the man said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns in Russia. Mr. Vovchenko appealed to the Indonesian consul for help, according to the documents.
But time was running out. Mr. Trump, now back in office, had begun his immigration crackdown, clearing out by the planeload people in detention centers marked for deportation.
Mr. Vovchenko was ordered onto a flight late last month.
The passengers sat in chains as the plane made its way to Egypt. Mr. Vovchenko’s only hope was that Egyptian officials at the Cairo airport would allow him to go somewhere other than Russia.
Mr. Valuev, the RADR president, said that previous deportations of Russians had not been done en masse and that Russians were sometimes able to negotiate a switch in destination with local officials during layovers.
“They can talk to them: ‘Can you give us our passports back? We will fly somewhere else. We don’t want to go to Russia,’” Mr. Valuev said. He noted that two anti-Kremlin Russians who were deported from the United States this month were able to persuade local authorities during their layover in Morocco to allow them to go somewhere else.
That option was not made available to Mr. Vovchenko and other Russians deported through Egypt on the two mass flights this summer.
Mr. Valuev said the flights should not be transporting Russian war dissenters to prison.
“People with criminal cases against them that are politically motivated should not be deported,” Mr. Valuev said. “They should receive some sort of protection.”
Oleg Matsnev and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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17) My U.N. Commission’s Finding: Israel Is Committing Genocide
By Navi Pillay, Sept. 16, 2025
Ms. Pillay is the chair of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
In 1995 President Nelson Mandela of South Africa asked me to serve as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The judicial panel over which I presided convicted three Rwandans of genocide. So I understand the word “genocide,” and it is not one I use lightly. It is the deliberate attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a people. It represents the most serious violation of our shared humanity and the gravest breach of international law.
Today the United Nations commission that I lead is publishing its legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. Our conclusion is stark: Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This finding is based on investigations and extensive evidence into the period between Oct. 7, 2023, when the war began, and July 31, 2025. It has been corroborated by multiple sources and assessed through the rigorous legal framework of the U.N. Genocide Convention of 1948, to which Israel is a party.
My organization, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was established by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in 2021. It is overseen by appointed experts who are supported by staff from the U.N. secretariat. The Commission reports its findings to the Human Rights Council and General Assembly.
The scale of destruction is devastating. More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 18,000 children and nearly 10,000 women, according to Gazan health officials. Estimated life expectancy in Gaza has collapsed from 75 years to just over 40 in a single year, one of the steepest declines recorded. Hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. Our analysis found that starvation has been used as a weapon of war and that the medical system has been deliberately destroyed. Maternal health care has been severely undermined. Children have been starved, shot and buried under rubble. According to UNICEF, one child has died every hour in Gaza. These are not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.
Establishing genocide requires not only the act but also the intent. Here, too, the evidence is clear. Senior Israeli leaders, including the president, the prime minister and the former defense minister, have dehumanized Palestinians. Yoav Gallant, the defense minister at the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, said, “We are fighting human animals,” while President Isaac Herzog proclaimed that the entire Palestinian nation was responsible. Their words have been matched by deeds: indiscriminate bombardment making Gaza uninhabitable, the blocking of humanitarian aid, sexual and gender-based violence and a siege we concluded was designed to starve the population to death. Together these constitute a pattern that demonstrates genocidal intent.
The commission also found that Palestinians have been killed while seeking food at distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the Israel and U.S.-backed entity that largely replaced the existing aid network. Hundreds, including children, have been shot while trying to access aid.
Some argue that the term “genocide” is too grave to apply while Israel’s war continues. But the law is explicit: The obligation to prevent genocide arises the moment a serious risk is evident. That threshold was crossed long ago in this war. In January 2024 the International Court of Justice put all states on notice that there was a serious risk that genocide was being committed in Gaza. Since then, the evidence has only deepened, and the killing has multiplied.
What does this mean for the international community? It means its obligations are not optional. Every state has an obligation to prevent genocide wherever it occurs. That obligation requires action: halting the transfer of weapons and military support used in genocidal acts, ensuring unimpeded humanitarian assistance, stopping the mass displacement and destruction, and using all available diplomatic and legal means to stop the killing. To do nothing is not neutrality. It is complicity.
I do not write these words as an adversary of Israel. I recognize the suffering of Israelis who lost loved ones in the horrific Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, which killed some 1,200 people, and the pain of the families of the roughly 50 hostages who remain in captivity, including about 20 still believed to be alive. Our commission has documented the crimes by Hamas. But no crime, however grave, justifies genocide. To respond to atrocity with atrocity is to abandon the very values international law was created to protect.
History will judge how the world responds. In Rwanda, the international community did not prevent the genocide, nor did it intervene to stop the killing once the genocide began. Today the international community is again failing to act — this time, in Gaza. The facts are reported daily. The warnings are unequivocal. The law is clear. The stakes, the survival of a people, could not be higher.
The obligation to prevent genocide belongs not only to states but also to the international system as a whole. The U.N. Security Council must not be the graveyard of conscience. Regional organizations, national parliaments, civil society and ordinary citizens all have a role to play in pressing governments to act. The Genocide Convention was born from the ashes of the Holocaust with a solemn vow: “Never again.” That vow is meaningless if it applies only to some and not to others.
I urge every government, every leader and every citizen to ask: What will we say when our children and grandchildren ask what we did while Gaza was burned to the ground? Every act of genocide is a test of the humanity that binds us.
The prevention of genocide is not a matter of discretion of states. It is a legal and moral obligation, and it admits no delay. The law requires action. Our common humanity demands it.
Navi Pillay is the chair of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. She is a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
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