Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable?
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr. Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed here, in no way calls for violence.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the President of the Texas State University system so easily–who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
*Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
*Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
*Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
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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) The High School Teacher Leading Mexico’s ‘Fashion Police’
A teacher and journalist has gained a large following for highlighting the apparent luxury items worn by politicians. It has also earned him high-profile detractors.
“There’s a disconnect between the official discourse and the lifestyle of the politicians,” said Jorge García Orozco, a high school teacher who showcases the lifestyles of Mexican officials on social media. Credit...Jorge García Orozco
Mexican politicians have new reason to be cautious.
The fashion police are watching.
Over the last few months, social media users have been hunting for designer labels, luxury watches and other hints of wealth on Mexican politicians, asking — even in a country where many are jaded by corruption — how could public servants afford such apparent luxuries?
“There’s a disconnect between the official discourse and the lifestyle of the politicians,” said Jorge García Orozco, a high school teacher and journalist who has built a growing social media following by showcasing the lifestyles of Mexican officials and questioning how they can afford them on government salaries.
“Many citizens, myself included, were fed up with the ruling political class,” he said.
Garnering over 100,000 followers on his X account, Mr. García Orozco’s work exploded in popularity this summer. Many of his posts started with online tips from people acting as what he called the “fashion police for politicians.”
The attention has also made him enemies. Gerardo Fernández Noroña, a senator who has been featured in his posts, has called some of his work “despicable” and accused him of working for the government’s opponents.
In an interview, Mr. García Orozco, 37, denied that accusation and said he was actually inspired by remarks once made by the man who founded the senator’s leftist party, Morena. He recalled being a teenager and hearing the founder, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, rail against corruption long before riding a wave of populist energy to the presidency in 2018.
“He said that Mexicans are fed up with braggart politicians who earned a lot of money, were ostentatious, had a lot of advisers, wear designer watches and shoes. And what people want is good public services,” Mr. García Orozco said. He said he remembered thinking then, “That’s what I want for my country.”
He added, “Maybe they changed, but not me.”
Mr. García Orozco, who also teaches high school Spanish in Guadalajara, has spent years digging up public records and investigating officials, recently for the online outlet Eme Equis. (His followers include some students, he said.)
But it was his recent social media posts about politicians’ appearances that struck a chord, especially as Morena has come to dominate all three federal branches of government, in part with mottos of austerity and helping the poor first.
Mr. García Orozco admitted that he has made some inaccurate posts. He recently deleted a claim that a Morena senator was wearing a Cartier watch, and shared her message saying it was a cheaper Anne Klein.
“Because I don’t have an agenda, I gave her a space to reply,” he said.
The surge of interest in his X account is making money for Mr. García Orozco, too, though he declined to say how much. But he insisted his main goal is to show the public how politicians are behaving, saying, “You have to keep questioning the powerful.”
Mr. García Orozco’s prominence rose as he showcased what appeared to be the luxurious lives of Sergio Gutiérrez Luna, then the president of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and his wife, Diana Karina Barreras, also a lawmaker.
He posted screenshots of them wearing what he claimed were, among others, Hublot or Cartier watches, Moncler jackets, Chanel sunglasses and Dolce & Gabbana shoes. He also raised questions about expensive paintings at their home and V.I.P. Formula 1 tickets.
Ms. Barreras and Mr. Gutiérrez Luna did not respond to requests for comment. But last month he claimed that the attention was a campaign by opponents targeting him. He denied some items were expensive and said his critics had not considered that he had worked as a private lawyer for a dozen years.
“You have to distinguish the private from the public part,” he said, adding, “During periods of my life, I wasn’t a public servant.”
Mr. García Orozco acknowledged that he cannot know for sure the origin of items worn by politicians. But he said most scenarios were a bad look.
If the opulent accessories are real, he said, they are incongruous with the typical salary of lawmakers in Mexico’s lower house, about $56,000 a year.
If they are fakes, he said, it raises a different set of uncomfortable questions.
“They are politicians who are supposed to be examples and piracy here is a crime,” he said, adding, “This type of person doesn’t wear knockoffs.”
Mr. García Orozco has focused on more than just federal lawmakers, making waves with claims that the mayor of a city in western Mexico wore Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry — he valued one item at $21,000 — and Cartier watches as expensive as $16,000. (The mayor did not respond to an email seeking comment.)
And when Mexico’s new Supreme Court justices took office this month, Mr. García Orozco showed what he said looked like Salvatore Ferragamo shoes worth $900 on the chief justice, Hugo Aguilar Ortiz.
In July, Mr. Aguilar Ortiz laughed off such suggestions, saying he actually wore “sad Flexi shoes.” Asked about Mr. García Orozco’s allegation, a court spokeswoman sent a screenshot of the Sears website where Flexi shoes sell for roughly $70.
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2) The Firing of Educators Over Kirk Comments Follows a Familiar Playbook
Conservative efforts to call out and punish educators over liberal ideas have grown for years, led in part by Charlie Kirk himself.
By Stephanie Saul, Sept. 22, 2025
James Bowley, a professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi, was ordered to leave campus over a comment he made about President Trump’s victory in 2024 that spread on social media. Credit...Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
“NO CLASS TODAY,” read the email. It was the morning after the November 2024 presidential election. “Need time to mourn and process this racist, fascist country.”
The email rapidly spread on social media and would soon unravel the career of Prof. James Bowley, who had sent it to the three students enrolled in his “Abortion and Religions” class at Millsaps College. One of them shared it on Instagram. The professor was ordered to leave campus the next day.
The episode reflected a growing clampdown on campus speech that had been gaining steam since the onset of pro-Palestinian campus protests. And it presaged the enormous current backlash against teachers and professors following the killing of Charlie Kirk. Many of those educators now face investigations or dismissal after voicing criticism of Mr. Kirk.
The American Association of University Professors, an organization founded to defend academic freedom, said it was aware of retaliation against about 60 professors and teachers in connection with critical comments they made about Mr. Kirk or people mourning him.
Faculty First Responders, an organization that works with the association to advise educators who are the victim of doxxing and harassment campaigns, has reached out to 35 academic workers in the past week, most of them professors, whose comments about Mr. Kirk have been spread in right-wing media, according to Heather Steffen, the group’s director.
At Clemson University, a public institution in South Carolina, two professors and a staff member have been fired over social media posts, including one that called the murder of Mr. Kirk “swift and ironic” karma because of offensive things Mr. Kirk had said over the years. The firings followed pressure from Republican politicians.
A law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was suspended after comparing people mourning Mr. Kirk to the Ku Klux Klan.
A retired professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law lost his emeritus status, which gave him special campus privileges, over a social media post that referred to Mr. Kirk. A campus publication, the Independent Florida Alligator, reported that the post said, “I did not want him to die,” and added, “I reserve that wish for Mr. Trump.”
The Texas Education Agency has said it is investigating hundreds of employees at elementary or secondary schools for similar reasons.
The campaigns to silence educators who speak critically of figures on the political right have been effective, suggesting they are likely to expand, Dr. Steffen said. “I’m concerned that this will continue to be a strategy used to limit free speech and academic freedom,” she said.
The strategy has the endorsement of the Trump Administration, as evidenced by comments Vice President JD Vance made recently to Fox News. While acknowledging that the First Amendment protects “very ugly speech,” he added, “If you are a university professor who benefits from American tax dollars, you should not be celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and if you are, maybe you should lose your job or your university should face a loss of funding.”
Dr. Bowley, the former Millsaps professor, is a scholar of religion and an expert on the political and social factors that gave rise to the Holocaust. He said he was considering suing Millsaps, a small United Methodist Church-affiliated college in Jackson, Miss., where he had taught for 23 years, over his dismissal.
Dr. Bowley said he believed he was a victim of homegrown American fascism. “I did not use the word fascist lightly,” he said.
Officials at Millsaps declined to be interviewed about the matter, citing privacy concerns. They said in a written statement that “Millsaps is dedicated to academic excellence and open inquiry.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the firings, saying they infringe on the First Amendment rights of the educators.
If they choose to mount a legal fight, fired employees of public institutions, which are bound by the First Amendment, probably have better chances of prevailing in court than those fired from private institutions.
In a letter last week, for example, Alan Wilson, the attorney general of South Carolina, wrote to Clemson, saying that if the dismissed professors believed their First Amendment rights were violated, they may sue the university. “However,” he wrote, “it should be noted that the First Amendment is not absolute.”
Although some states have restricted the ability of private employers to fire employees for their opinions or speech, in many places private employers have broader discretion to do so than public employers do.
The killing of Mr. Kirk, an influential figure on the right, devastated his fans and people close to President Trump, who has himself been the target of assassination attempts. Mr. Kirk’s supporters, including many in the Trump administration, have made strong statements in the past supporting free speech, no matter how ugly. But now, many of those same officials are trying to limit speech that they say could lead to more violence.
Mr. Kirk, who was known for making statements that were often criticized as racist, antisemitic and sexist, declared himself to be a proponent of free speech. Though comments made by some of his critics may seem callous and inappropriate in the wake of his shooting, even some of his right-leaning supporters have defended people’s right to say them.
Most of the attacks on professors have come from the right, but progressive activists have also waged campaigns at times against educators and others they disagreed with.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the unrest that it spawned, Charles Negy, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida, found himself under attack over his social media posts about race. “Black privilege is real,” he wrote.
When the university tried to fire him, he sued on First Amendment grounds, and in May, a federal judge ruled that his case could proceed.
Proponents of academic freedom see the current crackdown on professors as an assault on freedom of expression that echoes dark periods in American history. At Brooklyn College, where four adjunct professors were dismissed this year for their pro-Palestinian activism, a faculty union called the movement to curb educators’ speech the “New McCarthyism.”
One of the four, Corinna Mullin, who was an adjunct professor of political science, said that recent developments show that academic freedom is not a universal right but a conditional privilege.
“And it seems that it’s granted or withdrawn based on the context of our speech — those who echo power are shielded,” said Dr. Mullin, who was arrested during a police raid on a Gaza Solidarity encampment at City College in 2024. Trespassing charges against her were later dropped.
She said she believed that activists on the right will continue to expand their attacks to take in “all speech on the left associated with social justice, racial justice, all these uncomfortable truths that challenge power in this country.”
In a written statement, a spokesman for Brooklyn College, Richard Pietras, said the school strongly supports freedom of expression. He said the college chose not to reappoint the four adjunct faculty members based on their conduct, not their political beliefs. He declined to give more specifics.
Katherine Franke, a well-known professor at Columbia Law School, was forced to retire in January following comments she made criticizing Columbia students who had served recently in the Israeli Defense Forces over what she viewed as the students’ harassment of Palestinian students.
She said in an interview that the growing attacks on Mr. Kirk’s critics was a frightening, but not surprising, next step.
“In some ways, this bears a family resemblance to the Red scare of the 1950s,” Ms. Franke said. “In other ways, this is different. It’s not just a single ideology, and it’s not just one senator. It’s an across-the-board exercise of the whole of government to bully universities, law firms, the media, all of us into a kind of obedience.”
A recent case at Texas A&M University illustrates the increasing breadth and depth of outside influence over speech on university campuses. A professor there was fired over a lecture about gender expression, an episode that also spurred last week’s resignation of the university’s president, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III.
The controversy arose after a student circulated a video of an exchange with the professor over the lecture — an increasingly common worry for professors. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and other Republican state politicians complained ti the university about the lecture.
Turning Point USA, the campus group Mr. Kirk led, often placed giant beach balls on campuses and invited students to write on them, in a symbolic exercise of their free speech rights. Mr. Kirk also invited students to debate him, advocating “reasonable disagreements.”
In several instances, Mr. Kirk has used the First Amendment to sue universities that tried to block his organization’s campus presence.
But critics have argued that Mr. Kirk’s promotion of free speech was riddled with hypocrisy. Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia who has written a book that focuses heavily on Mr. Kirk, “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” called Mr. Kirk’s stance “an empty support of free speech.”
Turning Point’s efforts to target professors it sees as radical dates back nearly a decade, to 2016, when it began asking students to report professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Some of the educators whose names were put on the group’s “watch list” have said they became the targets of merciless harassment on social media.
A spokesman for Turning Point USA, Andrew Kolvet, said the watch list “doesn’t target professors.” “It simply organizes already public statements, articles or quotes professors make, putting them in one easy-to-find places as a resource for parents and prospective students,” Mr. Kolvet continued. “Families deserve to know what professors really believe.”
But Dr. Boedy, whose name was placed on the list over an opinion piece he wrote criticizing legislation that permitted weapons on campus, said the list was “a prime example of their free speech hypocrisy — they’re targeting people they don’t like.”
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3) Trump Appointees Roll Back Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws
Interviews and internal documents show that signature civil rights protections in housing are being dismissed as ideologically driven and D.E.I. in disguise.
By Debra Kamin, Sept. 22, 2025
Debra Kamin reviewed dozens of memos, text messages and emails written by employees of HUD’s Fair Housing Office.
Whistleblowers within HUD’s Office of Fair Housing say it has become increasingly difficult to do their jobs. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
In one email, a Trump appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development described decades of housing discrimination cases as “artificial, arbitrary and unnecessary.”
In another, a career supervisor in the department’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity objected to lawyers being reassigned to other offices; the supervisor was fired six days later for insubordination.
In a third, the office’s director of enforcement warned that Trump appointees were using gag orders and intimidation to block discrimination cases from moving forward. The urgent message was sent to a U.S. senator, who is referring it to the department’s acting inspector general for investigation.
The emails are among dozens of pages of internal communications, memos and other documents reviewed by The New York Times that show efforts by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark civil rights law that has prohibited discrimination in housing for nearly six decades.
In interviews, half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs, which involve investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family status or disability.
Several lawyers said they had been blocked from communicating with clients without approval from a Trump appointee, and had been barred from citing some past housing civil rights cases when researching legal precedent for possible new prosecutions.
One internal memo from a top Trump appointee in the office said that archival documents that were “contrary to administration policy” would be removed or replaced, and that “tenuous theories of discrimination” would no longer be pursued.
“If you’re not enforcing the Fair Housing Act, then it’s just another dead law,” said one of the career lawyers in the office, Palmer Heenan, who has been told without explanation that he will be reassigned next month.
65%
The staff reduction at HUD’s fair housing office
Some of the internal documents framed the changes as efficiency measures, and the resulting cuts to the office have been drastic. When the so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiated its cost-cutting spree, federal offices lost, on average, about 10 percent of their employees. Within the Office of Fair Housing, the reduction was 65 percent. There were 31 employees in January; once mandatory transfers go through next month, there will be 11.
Kasey Lovett, a spokeswoman for HUD, said in a statement that it was “patently false” to suggest the department was looking to blunt enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, she said, “is using its authority to uphold the law, protect the vulnerable, and ensure meaningful access to housing.”
Ms. Lovett also said that the new administration had inherited a “deeply inefficient case system,” and accused the Biden administration of allowing cases to “languish.”
Since President Trump took office, the department has handled over 4,100 cases, according to the statement, which is on par with previous years, accounting for cases that carry over from one year to another. Ms. Lovett did not address, however, how many of the cases had been investigated or had resulted in legal action.
Lawyers in the office contend that cases often take longer than expected because of complexity and insufficient resources. Before the cuts, the office had 22 lawyers working on fair housing cases, fielding around 2,000 new complaints a year. Local fair housing nonprofits receive around 32,000 additional inquiries each year.
32,000
The number of inquiries made to local fair housing nonprofits each year
By Oct. 5, when the latest rounds of reductions will take place, there will be six of those lawyers remaining, according to several staff members who have received notices of reassignment.
“I never thought I would be in this position,” said Paul Osadebe, another fair housing lawyer. “We have people who are trying to destroy a baseline that people relied on.”
More concerning than the vacant desks, the current and former employees said, were the hundreds of cases that had been halted or dropped.
6
The number of lawyers who will soon remain at HUD’s fair housing office, down from 22 lawyers
The shift began during President Trump’s first week in office, they said, when he issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in both the public and private sectors.
That same week, fair housing employees received a stop-work order via email from HUD leadership, ordering them to “cease and desist all work activities associated with environmental justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
In short, the staff members said, much of the office’s fair housing work was being characterized as an offshoot of D.E.I. Documents reviewed by The Times show that the work was repeatedly referred to as “not a priority of the administration.”
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Data from the first seven months of the Trump administration show the nearly instant results of the changes.
In each of the last five years, the fair housing office typically collected between $4 million and $8 million in legal settlements for Americans who accused housing providers of discrimination. From January to July, however, the office approved less than $200,000, said Jacy Gaige, until recently its director of enforcement.
4
Charges of discrimination issued by HUD’s fair housing office since Trump took office, down from an average of 35 a year
Charges of discrimination are also sharply down. When investigators find evidence of a crime, they issue a formal document that requires the accused to appear before a judge. On an average year, HUD issues 35 charges; since the beginning of the Trump administration, there have been four, according to lawyers in the office.
‘Tenuous Theories of Discrimination’
The slowdown can be traced, at least in part, to new procedures that stripped career officials of the authority to approve settlements or issue charges, said Ms. Gaige, a career employee for the past 13 years.
Instead, only a small number of Trump appointees now have that authority. While every new administration brings political appointees to top roles, not one has monopolized the work flow so thoroughly, including the first Trump administration, Ms. Gaige said.
“With one email, the entire process was shut down,” she said. “It essentially stopped the settlement process, which is time sensitive because complainants and respondents come to an agreement about what they want to do to resolve a case. And often that is driven by specific deadlines that are occurring in people’s lives.”
In addition, hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated, according to the interviews and the internal communications.
In one instance, a large homeowner’s association in Texas was found to have banned the use of housing vouchers by Black residents. That case had been referred to the Justice Department, but the referral was abruptly withdrawn by the new Trump appointees.
“The sudden abandonment of the case was a pretty significant about-face,” said Rebecca Livengood, a lawyer with Relman Colfax in Washington, D.C., who represented the housing authority that had sued the homeowner’s association. “There’s every reason to think that in another administration, what were, at that point, sustained allegations of widespread racial discrimination would have been pursued.”
Fair housing cases have historically covered a broad range of civil rights violations.
They have involved landlords refusing to rent to single mothers with children, or people of a certain religion. They have combated discrimination against disabled veterans who needed to live with a service animal. They have targeted real estate agents who did not want to show Black buyers homes in white neighborhoods. And in recent years, they have protected survivors of domestic violence from being denied housing assistance when attempting to escape a stalker or abuser.
Last week, John Gibbs, the Trump-appointed principal deputy assistant secretary for fair housing, sent two memos detailing how “future enforcement efforts will proceed.”
In previous administrations, he wrote, fair housing offices “leveraged the Fair Housing Act” against mortgage providers, appraisers and others “in an ideological matter,” but that would now change.
Cases involving “tenuous theories of discrimination” would “no longer be prioritized,” he wrote.
The types of cases identified by Mr. Gibbs had been central to the office’s work.
They included appraisal bias, which typically involves white appraisers undervaluing homes owned by Black families; zoning restrictions used to block housing that might be occupied by Black and Latino families; and gender or gender expression cases, including new housing protections added under the Biden administration.
The memos also described previous approaches to redlining and reverse redlining as “legally unsound.” The two racist practices involve denying mortgages to minorities and those in minority neighborhoods, and other predatory and discriminatory lending practices. A full review of the organization’s guidance on those subjects, he added, was ongoing.
‘In Mortal Danger’
The staff reassignments and cuts have been particularly hard felt in the handling of housing complaints under the Violence Against Women Act, a 1994 law designed to protect women from stalking, assault and domestic violence that was updated in 2022 to include new housing protections for the growing number of survivors of domestic violence.
About 500 women a year reach out to HUD to request help under the law, but only two of the six lawyers remaining in the fair housing office have experience with the law, according to interviews with the lawyers.
“These are life and death requests,” said Mr. Osadebe, one of the lawyers being transferred next month. “These women are legitimately in mortal danger, and often without the government stepping in, nothing will be done.”
Mr. Osadebe said he and his fellow lawyers were told in January that they could not communicate directly with the people who filed complaints, making it virtually impossible to do their jobs. “They cut us out of the process,” he said.
Mr. Osadebe is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network, a group of workers and their supporters who are working across the federal government to push back against the Trump administration changes.
“This is a deliberate plan, and it’s about shutting down fair housing,” he said.
‘Dire Consequences’
Ms. Gaige took a different protest route. She quit in July, but only after firing off an email to Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee responsible for overseeing HUD.
The nation’s fair housing laws were no longer being enforced, she wrote. Someone needed to intervene.
Others in the office sounded the alarm as well.
Erik Heins, a lawyer in charge of enforcement, wrote two emails to HUD’s Office of General Counsel in June, outlining the serious repercussions of the staffing reassignments to other offices.
“It was very clear pretty quickly that this was not about solving a need in those offices,” Mr. Heins said in an interview. “My staff was being retaliated against for being civil rights practitioners, and losing a dozen civil rights attorneys would cripple HUD’s ability to enforce its civil rights protections.”
Six days after sending those emails, he was informed by Amy Brown, HUD’s deputy general counsel for housing programs, that he had engaged in “unacceptable conduct.” He was fired the same day.
“As a manager, you are expected to be professional and trustworthy in your conduct to support the Agency’s goals and mission,” Ms. Brown wrote.
In other emails about the cuts and reassignments, HUD managers told lawyers who raised concerns that they “appreciate your feedback,” but were committed to having a “full-time staff reassigned who are fully committed to the workload, goals and objectives of that office.”
Those not wanting to be “voluntarily reassigned” were told that they would be “subject to removal,” according to memos reviewed by The Times.
Early this month, four current staff members of the fair housing office also reached out to Ms. Warren and provided her with documents they had compiled backing up their allegations.
On Monday, according to a spokesman for Ms. Warren, the senator sent a request to Brian Harrison, HUD’s acting inspector general, to open an investigation into the office. The allegations, she wrote, “suggest that HUD is no longer enforcing Fair Housing and Civil Rights Laws — with dire consequences.”
Mr. Osadebe, who like some of the lawyers describes himself as a whistle-blower, said he knows his job may be on the line for speaking up.
“We took an oath to defend the constitution,” he said. “These are the moments we took that oath for.”
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4) Europe Talks Big on Gaza but Struggles to Act
Even as criticism of Israel ramps up and a growing number of countries say they’ll recognize a Palestinian state, concrete actions remain limited.
By Jeanna Smialek, Reporting from Brussels, Sept. 22, 2025
A rally in Brussels this month in support of Palestinians. European efforts to punish the Israeli government for its actions in Gaza have stalled amid opposition, notably from Germany. Marius Burgelman/Belga, via Agence France-Presse
European nations are lining up behind a plan to recognize Palestine as a state at this week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York. Top officials widely condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza, and some have even begun to call the war “genocide.”
But big talk has yet to lead to big action.
The European Union has proposed higher tariffs on Israeli goods, but it is not clear if that will happen. Other efforts to punish the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have stalled amid opposition, notably from Germany.
Actions by individual countries have also fallen short of the rhetoric. Attempts to funnel aid into Gaza have been limited, even as starvation grips the territory. And nations have been accepting only a trickle of asylum seekers from Gaza, with immigration often a domestic political flashpoint.
Belgium has more Palestinian asylum applicants than anywhere else in Europe, likely because of its relatively permissive immigration practices and large existing Palestinian community. But even there, applying for asylum can be difficult. Many hopefuls have been rejected this year. While Belgium has been evacuating its citizens and the family members of its own residents and refugees from Gaza, the country closed its evacuation list, which then numbered about 500 people, in April.
Bahjat Madi, 34, from the southern Gaza city of Rafah, has been in Belgium since 2022 and has been a resident since 2024. He is witnessing the fallout firsthand: Mr. Madi’s father is still in Gaza, he said, struggling to get out.
“I want to do anything for my father to be alive,” said Mr. Madi, who is bringing a court case to get his father’s visa application accepted remotely.
His father is seeking a humanitarian visa but is required to apply at the consulate in Jerusalem, which is all but impossible for someone trapped in Gaza. If he can get the visa, he might eventually be added to an evacuation list. It is a long shot and could take years.
“I want to talk to myself at night and say, ‘I do my best,’” Mr. Madi said. “But it’s not enough.”
For policymakers, the question is whether Europe will turn words of condemnation and concern into more powerful action. European public opinion has turned against the Israeli conduct of the war, but longstanding alliances and fraught political histories have kept nations like Germany and Italy from supporting major action.
“I haven’t seen any moment where such international momentum has built up in such a short time, so I think there’s a real opening,” said Kristina Kausch, deputy managing director for the German Marshall Fund South, a think tank focused on international relations. “But we will have to see what tangible commitments come, beyond the wording.”
“This is not only about Palestinians,” she added. “This is about whether the West, and Europe, can uphold international law and uphold multilateralism.”
Luxembourg announced last week that it would join Belgium, Britain and a raft of other nations in recognizing a Palestinian state at the U.N. meeting in New York, a push spearheaded by President Emmanuel Macron of France that is meant to increase pressure on Israel. Last Tuesday, a United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, a topic poised to be prominent at the U.N. meeting. Israel calls such an accusation “distorted and false.”
Some individual European nations have taken more concrete actions. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain recently pledged a permanent ban on the sale of weapons and ammunition to Israel, for instance, after canceling a contract worth 700 million euros, or about $825 million, to buy rocket launchers. Belgium recently announced plans for a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
But such moves have had little impact on the course of the war. And other measures — like helping people to flee the region — are politically more difficult.
After big flows of Syrian refugees in 2015 helped to fuel the rise of the far right in Germany and elsewhere, countries have been cautious about accepting displaced Palestinians in large numbers. That has left many from Gaza either trapped in place or stuck in limbo in neighboring countries like Egypt.
Nations have argued that there are limits to what any one country can do and have urged the European Union, with its economic and diplomatic might, to respond. Taken together, the bloc is Israel’s biggest trading partner, and in 2024, accounted for 32 percent of Israel’s total trade in goods.
“It is really an emergency for Europe to take action,” Maxime Prévot, the Belgian foreign minister, said in an interview this month. “Many, in public opinion, do not understand why Europe is so timid.”
But bloc-wide efforts have struggled to get off the ground.
When the European Union’s diplomatic branch conducted a review this year of a treaty that governs the bloc’s relations with Israel, it found indications that Israel had breached its human rights obligations under the pact.
After that conclusion, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, proposed that Europe’s political leaders could ban Israel from participating in a research-funding program called Horizon Europe. But even that step struggled to garner enough support among member states.
More than 200 former bloc ambassadors and diplomatic staff members wrote to European Union leaders last month expressing their “profound disappointment” in the failure to pressure Israel more effectively.
Now, the commission is making its biggest push yet, attempting to suspend part of the bloc’s trade agreement with Israel. Doing so would remove preferential treatment from billions of euros of trade.
“What is happening in Gaza has shaken the conscience of the world,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, said in a recent speech.
The proposal signals a condemnation of what Israel is doing. Because passing it would require a large majority — but not unanimity — analysts said it was possible that it could become policy.
But that remains far from guaranteed.
Germany in particular, with its Holocaust history, has hesitated to criticize Israel too overtly. Italy, too, has been reluctant.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany warned last week that criticism of Israel was “increasingly a pretext under which the poison of antisemitism is spread.” Mr. Merz suggested on Thursday that his government would decide by the start of next month whether to support the European Union’s attempts to punish Israel.
Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s top diplomat, suggested on Wednesday that the challenge in finding agreement might persist.
“The political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far,” Ms. Kallas said.
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5) Palestinians Need More Than the Gesture of Statehood
By Mustafa Barghouti, Sept. 22, 2025
Mr. Barghouti is the leader and a founder of the Palestinian National Initiative. He wrote from Ramallah, the West Bank.
A collapsed residential building in Gaza City after it was hit in an Israeli airstrike on Sept. 8. Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal on Sunday recognized the State of Palestine ahead of a conference this week at the United Nations. Other countries were expected to do the same during the gathering, which was designed to revive prospects for a two-state solution as a basis for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Recognition of Palestinian statehood — now formalized by some 150 countries — is welcome in the face of Israel’s decades-long denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination and a settlement expansion plan that “buries the idea of a Palestinian state,” as Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, recently put it.
However, it is empty symbolism at best, and at worst, a distraction from a lack of action to stop Israel’s war in Gaza and the starvation and forced displacement of roughly two million Palestinians living there. Any recognition of Palestinian statehood should be accompanied by concrete action to hold Israel accountable for its illegal, destructive policies.
Watching from the West Bank, where for decades Israel has been expanding its settlements to block Palestinian statehood, I am struck by a strong sense of déjà vu at how the push for a two-state solution never seems to take into account the one-state, apartheid reality Israel has imposed on Palestinians and is entrenching more deeply every day.
In August, in an apparent response to France and others announcing plans to recognize Palestine, the Israeli government approved settlement expansion in the so-called E1 area east of East Jerusalem. That will effectively sever in two the occupied West Bank, which is supposed to form the heartland of a Palestinian state. Israel had refrained from building settlements in the area for decades out of concern for the international repercussions. Doing so had been seen as a death blow to the two-state solution, even though to many it already appeared to be moribund.
Since Israel’s far-right government took power in December 2022, the E1 approval is just the latest in a wave of illegal settlement expansion, including the approval of 22 new settlements in the West Bank this spring. As explained in a joint statement by Mr. Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz, those settlements “are all placed within a long-term strategic vision, whose goal is to strengthen the Israeli hold on the territory, to avoid the establishment of a Palestinian state and to create the basis for future development of settlement in the coming decades.”
Israel already illegally annexed occupied East Jerusalem 45 years ago and has deepened its control of the city with a ring of settlements cutting it off from the West Bank. Since October 2023, Israel has laid waste to Gaza, rendering it largely uninhabitable, and with the new offensive is in the process of systematically destroying Gaza City and driving Palestinians into confined areas in the south. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have said in May that the destruction in the Gaza Strip would force Gazans to emigrate elsewhere.
Simply recognizing a Palestinian state and producing a document with recommendations will do nothing to change any of this. Instead, action is needed.
First, the international community must stop Israel’s war in Gaza, which rights groups and a growing number of other experts have concluded is genocidal, and to prevent Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Second, there must be serious pressure applied to Israel to force it to change its policies regarding the Palestinians, including repealing the law establishing that only the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in historical Palestine and recognition of the State of Palestine.
To achieve these objectives, governments — especially Israel’s Western backers — must impose economic sanctions, as some are considering, and a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, which rights groups have been demanding for years over Israel’s settlements and other violations of international law.
Palestinian freedom cannot be conditioned on Israeli approval. The power disparity between Israelis and Palestinians must be recognized. One of the biggest mistakes of past efforts to make peace was falsely equating the two sides, as if Palestinians have been colonizing Israeli land and systematically dispossessing Israelis for nearly eight decades, rather than the other way around. Neither side will enjoy security unless the root causes of injustice are dealt with.
Millions of Palestinians are a stateless, occupied people oppressed by Israel, a nuclear-armed regional superpower. A new paradigm is needed to address this imbalance and support the people struggling for their freedom, as was done to support the struggle of South Africans against apartheid in their country.
About 7.4 million Palestinians live under Israeli control, either as citizens or in the occupied territories; there are about 7.2 million Jewish Israelis. The Palestine Liberation Organization accepted the partition of the land decades ago, even though it meant effectively giving up more than half of what the United Nations had decided in 1947 should be the Palestinian state.
It was a major compromise. The P.L.O. went on to officially recognize Israel twice, first in 1988 and again in 1993. Israel, on the other hand, has continued to deny the right of Palestinians to have an independent state or self-determination of any kind. To the contrary, successive Israeli governments have spent more than half a century working to entrench their apartheid system.
The international community must finally recognize the failures of the past and the reality on the ground. No true or lasting peace can be made without the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system. Real pressure must be applied to Israel for this to happen.
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6) Did Amazon Trick Customers Into Prime? A Jury Will Decide.
A trial in federal court in Seattle will determine if millions of customers signed up for Prime because it’s a great deal, or because they were duped.
By Karen Weise, Sept. 22, 2025
Karen Weise is based in Seattle and has covered Amazon since 2018.
Subscriptions, primarily Prime, brought more than $44 billion to Amazon last year. Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
A trial in federal court in Seattle set to begin this week will cut to the heart of how Amazon defines itself as a champion for the hundreds of millions of consumers who regularly use its online shopping service.
The Federal Trade Commission claims, in a lawsuit filed two years ago, that Amazon tricked tens of millions of people into signing up for its Prime membership program, and then made it hard for customers to cancel when they wanted out.
“Amazon was aware for years that it was taking consumers’ money without their consent, yet chose to do nothing about it,” the F.T.C. wrote in a recent court filing.
Amazon, which denies those claims, hopes a jury will believe that customers signed up for Prime simply because they thought it was a good deal.
“The way Amazon drives Prime subscribers is by making the service useful and valuable,” Mark Blafkin, an Amazon spokesman, said in a statement. “And our approach works — Prime, with hundreds of millions of members, is among the highest performing subscription programs of any kind, as measured by renewal rates and customer satisfaction.”
Though less sweeping than the F.T.C.’s antitrust case against Amazon, targets the company for the way it runs a popular subscription program central to its business and ubiquitous in the lives of many of its customers.
“The Trump-Vance F.T.C. intends to secure justice for Americans harmed by Amazon’s practices,” Joe Simonson, an F.T.C. spokesman, said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to the trial.”
Since Prime was introduced two decades ago, it has grown into what the F.T.C. called “the world’s largest subscription service.” Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has long called it a “pillar” of the company. It costs $139 per year or $14.99 a month, and includes fast shipping, video streaming, discounts at Whole Foods, which Amazon owns, and other perks.
“We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member,” Mr. Bezos wrote in 2016.
Judge John H. Chun of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled last week that at least two senior executives, Neil Lindsay and Jamil Ghani, would automatically be considered personally liable if a jury finds that Amazon violated the law.
Amazon said the executives acted properly and put customers first.
Judge Chun also scolded Amazon for withholding tens of thousands of documents he ruled were improperly marked privileged. He wrote that it “appears that the desire to gain a tactical advantage led to such conduct” and that was “tantamount to bad faith.”
“We remain confident that the facts will show these executives acted properly and we always put customers first,” Mr. Blafkin, the Amazon spokesman, said in a statement.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday, with opening arguments starting on Tuesday. The case is set to last for about a month. If the jury concludes that Amazon broke the law, the judge will determine any penalties. The F.T.C. has not yet asked for specific monetary damages.
An estimated 200 million people in the United States use Prime to shop on Amazon. Subscriptions, primarily Prime, brought in more than $44 billion last year, but it’s value to Amazon goes far beyond the monthly fees. Prime members are the company’s best customers — they buy more things, and more often, than people not signed up for the service.
Customers rarely drop Prime, and the subscription feeds shopping habits, said Michael Levin, whose company, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, has surveyed Amazon shoppers for more than a decade. His firm estimates that Prime members spend twice as much on Amazon compared with non-Prime customers.
“We can’t stress enough how important Prime is to Amazon’s retail business,” he said in an interview.
The F.T.C. case centers on the idea of “dark patterns” — whether a website’s design knowingly steers customers into subscriptions they don’t really want or makes it very difficult for them to cancel. The F.T.C. said documents show the process for canceling a Prime membership internally was called Iliad, after the ancient epic poem about the long war between the Greeks and the city of Troy.
“Rather than simply allowing consumers to cancel, each page of Amazon’s Iliad process bombards consumer with links, offers and other information to remove them from the cancellation flow,” the F.T.C. argued in a court filing last week.
The company built its business with a patented “1-Click” ordering button, making it faster to buy an item. But executives said in an internal meeting that they wanted customers “to pause and think a bit before canceling” the subscription, the F.T.C. said in a court filing.
Amazon countered that nudging customers to try new services and requiring a few clicks to cancel was standard industry practice that customers had come to expect. “Consumers are familiar with — and therefore readily understand and navigate — cancellation processes that contain offers and other marketing information,” the company argued.
Amazon said in its own court filings that the F.T.C.’s case misinterprets internal data and takes correspondence out of context. “Leadership consistently emphasized that customer trust — which will be broken if customers feel tricked, confused or deceived — was paramount,” the company wrote.
Amazon first heard from the F.T.C. in March 2021, two months into President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term, when the agency issued a civil investigative demand for various documents related to Prime. It was just a few days before Mr. Biden announced he planned to nominate Lina Khan, a scholar who built her career on legal arguments critiquing Amazon, to the commission, and she eventually became the chair.
When the F.T.C. sued Amazon in 2023, it was the first time the agency had taken Amazon to court under Ms. Khan.
But the F.T.C. didn’t actually start looking into Prime until the waning days of the first Trump administration, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly. Under the second Trump administration, the F.T.C. has continued pursuing the case. This summer it settled with the education technology company Chegg and the dating app Match over similar subscription issues.
Amazon “knew about the staggering amount of harm their practices caused Prime consumers, and yet they did nothing to solve the problem, or even required it to continue, out of fear of harming Amazon’s bottom line,” the F.T.C. argued in a recent filing.
Amazon countered that given Prime’s scale, it was inevitable that some customers would be frustrated or make mistakes. “Evidence that a small percentage of customers misunderstood Prime enrollment or cancellation does not prove that Amazon violated the law,” the company said.
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7) How Universal Child Care Could Change the Economy
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has proposed no-cost, universal child care, helping to reignite a national conversation.
By Sydney Ember, Sept. 22, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said the lack of universal child care was a “major cost to our economy.” Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Universal child care has long been viewed as a pie-in-the-sky item on the progressive policy agenda.
But the idea recently took on new life in some circles, after Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, pledged to make free child care available to every resident in the country’s largest city.
Even proponents of free universal child care acknowledge that the United States is unlikely to establish a national program along these lines anytime soon. Yet Mr. Mamdani’s promise has jolted the conversation about the government’s role in child care and the potential economic impact of a more comprehensive system.
“There are a lot of reasons building a child care system that works for everyone is important to our children, to parents, to employers and to economic growth,” said Julie Kashen, the director for women’s economic justice and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank.
“Most families need all parents to be working right now in order for them to have any sort of economic security,” she added, “Having access to child care helps with that.”
In a short video explaining his plan, Mr. Mamdani said the lack of universal child care has had a “major cost to our economy.” He nodded to a report from the New York City Economic Development Corporation that found that parents leaving the city or cutting back their work hours because of caregiving responsibilities cost the city $23 billion in 2022.
Critics of universal child care typically cite the significant cost to taxpayers of subsidizing not just low-income families but also higher-income families.
“Child care money that is spent at any level of government should really be targeted to those most in need,” said Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, for instance, estimates that his plan would cost $6 billion annually. He said money to fund his policies, including his child care program, could be generated by lifting the state’s corporate tax rate, raising the city’s income tax by 2 percentage points on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year and collecting fines the city is owed.
In interviews with economists and child care policy experts, however, many said that zeroing in on the cost to taxpayers of a universal system did not factor in its potential economic effects.
Most arguments in support of universal child care — as opposed to programs with income limits, say — revolve around more readily quantifiable economic impacts, including an increase in the share of mothers with young children in the labor force, a rise in their number of hours worked and greater lifetime earnings. Because families would no longer have to devote large portions of their budgets to child care, proponents say, they would have more disposable income.
Some economists also pointed to possible benefits for companies such as more stable work forces, which could improve productivity and reduce spending on recruiting and training.
“What free child care does is basically take the economic costs to families, and all of the disruptions to the economy overall that come from those costs, out of the equation,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy consultant.
The share of women in their prime working years who are in the labor force was 77.7 percent last month, down slightly from its all-time peak last August of 78.4 percent. Among women with children under 5, that number was about 68 percent in May. That is down from an all-time high of 71 percent in September 2023, according to an analysis in July from the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution. The labor force participation rate for men ages 25 to 54 was 89.8 percent last month.
“You are looking for those pockets of slack — and those pockets of places where those policy interventions would make a big difference,” said Lauren Bauer, the associate director of the Hamilton Project. “This is clearly one of those places.”
In January, the New York City Office of the Comptroller released a report estimating the economic impact of free, universal child care for mothers of young children. The report found that 14,200 mothers in families earning up to 150 percent of the city’s median income would enter the city’s labor force, and would generate earnings of $670 million a year. The policy, according to the report, would also result in an addition 8.8 million hours worked annually by mothers who were already employed. Taken together, the increase in labor force participation and hours worked would lift mothers’ earnings by about $900 million.
Economists have pointed to history as evidence that more expansive child care policies could meaningfully change the broader economy. The Lanham Act, a federal infrastructure bill passed in 1940, was used to create a near universal, federally-backed child care program during World War II so that mothers with young children could contribute to the war effort.
The Lanham Act made federal funds available to help set up and maintain child care facilities and train and pay teachers. The program was not free but was heavily subsidized and available to families regardless of income.
The Lanham Act “had pretty profound impacts on mothers’ employment both in the short run and in the longer run,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University who studies the economics of child care and early childhood education. “A lot of the mothers who started to work during the war because of this child care program continued to work well after the war ended.”
Mr. Herbst also noted that the children who attended its child care centers were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to attend and graduate college and had better labor market outcomes and higher career earnings than children who were less exposed to the program.
“When these policies are done right, they have two-generation effects,” he said. “There are positive effects that accrue in the short run to parents through the increase in employment, and also to their kids.”
There is already a large body of evidence that universal preschool programs pay big economic dividends. A working paper published in May that analyzed the effects of universal prekindergarten programs in nine cities and states found that they resulted in a 1.2 percent rise in labor force participation, a 1.5 percent increase in employment and 1.6 percent growth in hours worked. The paper analyzed programs in Georgia, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., Vermont and New York City.
Mothers experienced the greatest employment bump, according to the paper. But the benefits also extended to other women, suggesting that universal prekindergarten programs also allowed informal caregivers to seek employment as well.
“Not only is it helping mothers with young kids work more but it might actually have this spillover to neighbors and relatives, and it might help this local economy,” said Jacob Bastian, an assistant professor of economics at Rutgers University and one of the study’s authors.
The child care system in Quebec offers another salient case study. In 1997, the Canadian province introduced universally accessible, highly subsidized child care, extending the coverage to all children up to age 4 by September 2000.
Research published last year found that the Quebec program’s impact — including improving maternal labor force participation rate — was attributable to the increased availability of child care, not just its reduced price.
“The effects are much bigger in places were the supply expanded more,” said Sébastien Montpetit, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick and one of the study’s authors. “So we care about affordability but availability is at least as important.”
A separate study found that the program bolstered the performance of businesses in terms of sales growth and increased labor productivity. And because child care was not tied to their firms, women were more likely to voluntarily switch employers for more ambitious careers.
Earlier this month, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat, announced that her state would become the first in the country to offer free universal child care starting Nov. 1. The plan, which is expected to cost about $600 million in its first full year, builds on a program in the state that offered free child care to families making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Money for the program will come from an early childhood education trust endowed with oil and gas tax revenue, as well as federal funding and other state contributions.
But whether there is the political will to institute any kind universal child care system across the country is an open question.
There is generally bipartisan support for making some form of child care more affordable, but universal care has been a harder sell for Americans. The cost to taxpayers of a new social service is one impediment. Another is the argument, advanced largely in conservative circles, that children should be at home with their mothers.
Still, the fact that Mr. Mamdani has put universal child care front and center in his campaign has given supporters of these policies a reason for optimism.
Mr. Mamdani’s proposal was “one of the first times in the U.S. that we’ve seen a political figure truly embrace universal child care,” said Elliot Haspel, an early childhood education expert at Capita, a family policy group.
Although he is skeptical that the federal government will enact a universal child care program in the near future, he said, “I think we could start building the momentum now.”
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8) In Israel, Government Backlash Brews Over Palestinian State Recognition
As more countries moved to formally recognize a Palestinian state, a far-right member of Israel’s government called for “countermeasures” including the annexation of the West Bank.
By Liam Stack and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Reporting from Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel, Sept. 23, 2025
An Israeli military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, in March. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, said recognition of Palestinian statehood called for “immediate countermeasures,” including the annexation of the West Bank. Afif Amireh for The New York Times
The formal recognition of Palestinian statehood by a number of countries in recent days has provoked anger from Israeli officials and fear among Palestinians about how Israel’s government might respond.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, said on Monday night that the moves demanded “immediate countermeasures,” including the annexation of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Mr. Ben-Gvir said he would soon propose the application of “sovereignty” in the West Bank to the cabinet, where the idea has broad support. He also threatened “the complete crushing” of the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the territory and cooperates with Israel on security, and which much of the world sees as the basis for the government of an independent Palestine.
On Tuesday, the Israeli authorities said they had once again closed the Allenby Bridge border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan until further notice. The crossing had briefly reopened this week after it was shut last week, when a Jordanian truck driver armed with a gun and a knife killed two Israeli soldiers there.
The Allenby Bridge is the primary gateway between the West Bank and Jordan, and its closure makes it nearly impossible for commercial goods to move between the two places or for Palestinians to travel internationally. It has also been part of the route taking humanitarian aid from Jordan to Gaza.
The Israeli military did not provide a reason for the closure, but referred to a statement by Israel Airports Authority, which said it was ordered by the political leadership.
On Monday, a number of countries, including France, formally announced they would recognize Palestinian statehood at a summit in New York head of the U. N. General Assembly. More than 150 countries now recognize a Palestinian state.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said in a video statement to the summit in New York that the Authority aimed to form a government of the state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and that it would exclude Hamas.
Speaking via video link because the United States had denied him a visa to participate in the summit in New York, Mr. Abbas addressed the people of Israel directly.
“Our future and yours depends on peace,” he said. “Enough war.”
But a Palestinian state cannot be created unilaterally without the agreement of Israel, which largely controls both the West Bank and Gaza, where millions of Palestinians live.
The current Israeli government opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and has approved a number of new settlements in the West Bank, further splintering the territory in a way that critics say would make a new nation increasingly untenable. The government seems to be prepared to take additional action to block a Palestinian state, such as annexing at least some of the land envisioned for it.
“A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan River,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday. “For years, I have prevented the establishment of this terrorist state facing tremendous pressures at home and abroad.”
Many Palestinians view these declarations of statehood as merely symbolic and worry they will do little to change the reality on the ground or improve their lives.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat to the United States, said he thought the world leaders who recognized a Palestinian state in recent days knew it would not “affect reality or impact things on the ground in any significant way in the short term.”
The goal of Britain, Australia, France and others in recognizing Palestine appeared to have been to “create a principle around which the world is coalescing — a Palestinian state, and for that matter a two-state model,” he added.
Mr. Pinkas said it reminded him of other times in history when countries recognized a state that did not quite exist to send a message, including when Western powers recognized Taiwan or Kosovo as independent nations.
About 10 countries either have recognized Palestine as a state over the past week or are expected to do so soon. Britain and Canada have already done so, putting diplomatic pressure on Israel amid widespread international condemnation of the war in Gaza.
In Gaza, there is little hope of a diplomatic end to nearly two years of war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and left the territory in ruins. The war began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Last week, a U.N. commission investigating the war said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has denied the accusation.
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9) Defense Department Delays Cleanup of ‘Forever Chemicals’ Nationwide
The new timeline could slow cleanup in some communities by nearly a decade. The chemicals, widely used in the military, are linked to cancers and other health risks.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Sept. 23, 2025
Forever chemicals are used in firefighting foam. Above, a training exercise in 2012 at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, one of several sites where groundwater has been contaminated. Credit...Stocktrek Images, via Getty Images
The Department of Defense has quietly delayed its cleanup of harmful “forever chemicals” at nearly 140 military installations across the country, according to a list of sites analyzed by The New York Times.
The Pentagon has been one of the most intensive users of these chemicals, which are also known as PFAS and are a key ingredient in firefighting foam. For decades, crews at U.S. military bases would train to battle flames by lighting jet-fuel fires, then putting them out with large amounts of foam, which would leach into the soil and groundwater.
In 2017, military communities nationwide began to report alarming levels of the chemicals in their drinking water. A growing body of research has linked PFAS exposure to serious health concerns including certain types of cancer as well as child developmental and fertility issues.
The Pentagon’s new timeline would delay cleanup around military sites by nearly a decade in some cases, according to the latest list, which is dated in March and was posted publicly in recent weeks without an announcement. The delays vary by site. They add up to a significant revision from the Pentagon’s earlier cleanup timetable, which had been released three months earlier, in December 2024, in the final days of the Biden administration.
The Department of Defense, which the Trump administration now refers to as the Department of War, did not respond to requests for comment.
The new timetable comes amid possible cuts to funding for toxic-site cleanups even as the military struggles to address the contamination crisis. The Defense Department has spent $2.6 billion since 2017 to begin investigating the extent of contamination. In some of the worst cases, it has distributed clean drinking water to affected communities.
PFAS, which is short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are known as forever chemicals because they are so long-lasting in the environment. The Defense Department has said in the past that its wider cleanup effort, which has yet to begin, will take years and billions of dollars to complete.
Now, some communities may need to wait longer.
The Defense Department’s new delays affect some of the preparatory work that must be completed before actual cleanup can begin — for example, the work to identify the most effective cleanup strategies. This preparatory work itself can take several years. As a result, at some of the sites, cleanup might not begin until at least 2039, according to the new timetable.
According to the Defense Department’s list, the preparatory work has been pushed back for about a quarter of the nearly 600 military sites with known PFAS releases. At those locations, the work was delayed by an average of about five years compared to the December 2024 timetable.
Officials in communities near the affected military sites said they have been caught unawares.
“There’s been no discussion of a delay,” said Kristen Mello, a city councilor in Westfield, Mass., home to the Barnes Air National Guard Base. Ms. Mello, a chemist by training, grew up near the Barnes base, where her father was a lieutenant colonel. “It’s very upsetting and depressing that we haven’t had clearer communications.”
The delays come as the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026 seeks to significantly cut funding for the cleanup of toxic sites. The measure would also undo a ban on the purchase and use of PFAS firefighting foam, raising concerns that more PFAS could be released into the environment.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has come under fire for his proposed budget cuts for the Pentagon. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has questioned whether Mr. Hegseth’s “rushed, arbitrary strategy” would jeopardize national security.
Communities “are sick and tired of roadblocks, inaction, red tape and further delays,” said Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This is not a partisan issue, and President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have no excuse here.”
The sheer scale of the cleanup effort is a major obstacle. In a report issued by the Government Accountability Office this year, Defense officials described the number of installations nationwide that must be assessed for PFAS contamination as “overwhelming.”
They had little information on where PFAS might have been used at each site, they said, which meant they needed to carry out testing across the entire installation, in some cases covering hundreds of thousands of acres.
There is also no widely available technology that quickly removes 100 percent of PFAS contamination in soil and water, Defense Department officials pointed out in that report, and existing technologies are imperfect and arduous. Removing PFAS from groundwater, they say, requires pumping the water out of the ground, running it through a filter, and then inserting it back.
Under the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency also set new limits on PFAS levels in drinking water, in an effort to protect people’s health. Those regulations also raised the bar on the Defense Department’s cleanups, potentially contributing to delays.
The federal government estimates that cleaning up all of the PFAS around contaminated military sites will take decades and cost nearly $7 billion a year. That figure has surged 1,500 percent from just three years ago as the extent of contamination has become clearer, according to the G.A.O. report.
“It’s a very long-term process, and there’s just so much uncertainty,” Alissa H. Czyz, director of defense capabilities and management at the Government Accountability Office, said in an interview. “This is going to be a massive effort,” she said.
Even current cost estimates could soon prove to be too low, she said. Ultimately, the cleanup process will take years and potentially as much as a century to complete, the report concludes. It also urged the Defense Department to provide more information to Congress about the process.
“We understand that the D.O.D. is still trying to get a handle on what would be involved,” she said. “But they haven’t really been transparent with Congress about just how much this could potentially cost.”
A House bill has been seeking to require the Secretary of Defense to update Congress annually on PFAS funding and cleanup details.
“Communities impacted by PFAS chemicals have been waiting decades for cleanup, and they’ve been kept in the dark,” said Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat from Michigan. “When cleanup timelines change, residents deserve to know.”
For many communities, cleanup can’t come quickly enough.
Last month, the New Mexico environmental regulator released a study showing elevated levels of PFAS in the blood of people living or working near the Cannon Air Force Base, south of Clovis, N.M. There, crews for decades used PFAS-laden firefighting foam in training exercises and in response to aircraft fires, polluting the local drinking water.
The chemicals are also used in consumer products like nonstick pans, rainproof jackets, stain resistant carpets and dental floss.
New Mexico sued the U.S. Air Force in 2019 over PFAS contamination from military bases within its borders, saying the federal government should clean up the pollution and pay for damages to the state’s natural resources and private property.
According to the latest Pentagon list, the cleanup around Cannon Air Force Base has been postponed by almost six years.
“The longer they delay in cleanup, the greater the impacts to New Mexico’s water, and to New Mexicans,” said James Kenney, secretary of New Mexico’s environment department, in an interview.
The Defense Department’s delays are also affecting companies that had been gearing up to take part in the cleanup. Randol Aikin is chief executive of Remedy, a California-based start-up that is developing a new way to eliminate PFAS in the soil.
His company is taking part in a DOD certification program for new technologies. “As a technology start-up, we’re really sensitive to timing,” he said.
At the Barnes Air National Guard Base, which contaminated the water supply of the city of Westfield, the Department of Defense in 2020 installed water treatment systems to start removing PFAS from the groundwater.
Ms. Mello, the city councilor, said the new timeline hadn’t been mentioned by Defense Department in their July meeting to a local cleanup advisory board. Still, she understood what an immense cleanup the military had ahead of it.
“We understand that an enormous environmental disaster happened here,” Ms. Mello said. “I’m not even sure that with six more years, they’re going to figure out how to do this.”
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10) Trump Signs Order Targeting Antifa Movement
President Trump’s executive order threatened to prosecute donors who support antifascist philosophy and issued a domestic terrorism designation that doesn’t exist under U.S. law.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 22, 2025
President Donald Trump boarding Marine One as he departs from the South Lawn of the White House on Monday. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday targeting the left-wing antifascist movement, known as antifa, threatening “investigatory and prosecutorial action” against those who financially support it.
But Mr. Trump’s order said that he was declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law. Anti-fascism, like fascism itself, is a broad political ideology rather than a specific organization, and the U.S. does not have a domestic terrorism law.
The order came amid a wider intimidation campaign by the president and his administration targeting his critics, political opponents and major media institutions. Mr. Trump demanded over the weekend that the Justice Department move quickly to prosecute his political enemies, and his administration has undertaken a broad effort to threaten liberal protesters and donors to progressive groups after the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Antifa is a diffuse and sometimes violent protest culture of left-wing activists who want to stop the far right. The group takes its name and iconography from the antifascist movement that opposed the Nazi Party and other far-right political parties in the 1920s and 30s. Like their predecessors, the modern antifa movement is associated with an aggressive form of protest that sometimes crosses into illegal or violent activity like breaking store windows or setting police cars on fire.
Mr. Trump had threatened last week to designate antifa a terror group, after trying and failing to do so in his first administration after the group gained prominence in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Even though the language of Mr. Trump’s executive order echoes those he has aimed at foreign criminal organizations like Latin American drug cartels and gangs, it lacks the same teeth.
Federal law empowers the government to label overseas groups “foreign terrorist organizations,” a status that allows the U.S. to freeze their assets and makes it a crime to provide material support to them. But there is no equivalent domestic terrorism law, and legal experts downplayed the legal effect of Mr. Trump asserting his authority to label domestic groups as terrorists.
The antifa order does not attempt to use those powers, instead directing agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations” by the movement — something they already have the authority to do.
Even if a domestic terrorist organization designation did exist, using it against antifa would face practical difficulties.
Antifa does not have a leader that could be targeted, a roster of known members, bank accounts to freeze or a centralized structure.
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11) Anti-Genocide Protesters Take Over the Streets of Italy
By The Cradle News Desk
—The Cradle, September 22, 2025
Workers across Italy launched a nationwide strike on 22 September to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza, halting public transport, rail services, schools, public offices, and ports in more than 60 cities.
Italian grassroots trade union, Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), called the strike to force Rome to “immediately break off relations with the terrorist state of Israel, which is the concrete way in which Italy can, and must, react to the genocide that is taking place.”
Rail freight was suspended on Sunday night, with ports including Ravenna, Livorno, Trieste, and Genoa joining the actions.
In Genoa, dockworkers blocked a vessel scheduled for Israel, while in Livorno, access to the port was restricted by protesters.
In Rome, several regional trains were canceled and others delayed for more than an hour, while in Milan, the city’s M4 metro line was shut down.
Students in Bologna occupied university lecture halls under the banner of the Cambiare Rotta group. Demonstrators also marched through Milan in heavy rain to demand a ceasefire and express support for the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla.
USB said protests were taking place in 81 locations across Italy, declaring, “For a free Palestine from the river to the sea, we will shout in every square.”
UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese voiced support for the strikes, writing on X, “In Italy, the general strike has shut down train lines, ports, highways, schools & shops. With a genocide ongoing, there can be NO business as usual. Stay peaceful, everyone. Do not react to any provocation. Freedom for all allows no mistakes.”
Protest organizers said more than 200 lawyers had issued an appeal to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani recently told the Senate that Rome was prepared to consider EU trade sanctions against Israel, including measures targeting Israeli ministers over what he called “unacceptable” policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
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12) Why Obamacare Bills May Double Next Year
Extensive subsidies that reduce premium costs for millions are set to expire, unless Congress extends them.
By Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, Sept. 24, 2025
The reporters have been covering the effects of Obamacare since its launch in 2014.
Works in progress on Ms. Morringello’s shelf. About half of the people now enrolled in Obamacare either work for small businesses that do not offer coverage or are self-employed. Ashley L. Conti for The New York Times
Earlier this month, Julie Morringello, an artist in rural Maine, received a notice that her health care premiums could nearly double next year.
She now pays $460 a month for her Obamacare plan, but that amount is contingent on government subsidies that the Republican-controlled Congress may not extend.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Ms. Morringello, 58, said. Her insurance also covers her 14-year-old daughter, and forgoing a plan altogether isn’t an option because Ms. Morringello has a history of cancer and needs continuing care.
Similar sticker shock may await millions of Americans who must start to sign up for coverage in November. The vast majority of people enrolled in plans under the Affordable Care Act receive additional federal tax credits that were first expanded by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Congress in 2021.
Those subsidies, set to expire at the end of the year, are now the subject of a standoff between Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate have demanded an extension in exchange for their support of a government spending bill that must pass by the end of this month to prevent a government shutdown.
Republican leaders have cited the high cost of the subsidies, estimated at about $350 billion over 10 years, and potential fraud in enrollments for the program. And they have balked at attaching an extension onto this month’s short-term spending bill.
But many individual Republican lawmakers have expressed a willingness to extending the funding in some form, acknowledging that its disappearance would hurt their constituents before the midterm elections.
If a deal is not struck, more than 20 million Americans will face higher insurance premiums next year. The Senate was unable to pass any version of the spending bill last week, increasing the risk of a government shutdown over the issue.
“The consequences are potentially pretty dire for the 24 million people in the marketplaces whose costs are going to skyrocket,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of KFF, a nonpartisan health research group.
KFF has estimated that Americans’ share of premiums could increase by an average of more than 75 percent. About two million people are expected to lose their coverage next year if the extra funding expires, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. And the number is expected to grow over the next decade.
The generous credits now apply to more people and cover more of the cost of premiums than before the pandemic. At the low end of the income scale, individuals now pay nothing in premiums for plans with low deductibles. The extra subsidies also helped higher earners — like a family of four earning more than $160,000 a year — for the first time.
Reductions in the subsidies could have effects that cascade into the overall markets. Coupled with other changes made by this Congress and the Trump administration, the number of people with A.C.A. plans could eventually decline by roughly half, with states like Florida and Texas seeing the most significant drops, according to an analysis by the actuarial firm Wakely Consulting before Republicans passed their major tax and domestic policy bill this summer.
Actuaries expect that people with continuing medical needs, like Ms. Morringello, will be more likely to stay enrolled despite the higher costs, while younger, healthier people may be more likely to drop coverage.
Health insurers are watching warily, and most have increased rates to account for the anticipated flight of healthy customers. According to an analysis by KFF of company filings, insurers are increasing premiums by around 4 percentage points on average to account for a sicker group of customers next year. They are also raising prices because of increasing medical costs.
Other recent Trump administration actions could erode sign-ups among younger, healthier people. Health officials recently embraced less comprehensive forms of insurance that were not as expensive. They have also initiated rules that make it more complicated to enroll in Obamacare plans and harder to renew at the end of the year. Many of those changes are under legal challenge in the courts.
No one expects the Obamacare market to collapse. But after next year, experts warn, some insurers are likely to think twice about whether to sell plans in some markets, and choices could decline. In May, Aetna, the insurer owned by CVS Health, decided to leave the Obamacare markets altogether (though it only covered about one million people nationwide).
“I don’t think it will go away, but I think it will be a lot worse,” said Jeanne Lambrew, the director of health reform for the Century Foundation and a former state commissioner of Health and Human Services.
Linda Greenfeld, a senior executive at L.A. Care Health Plan, which offers Obamacare plans to low-income residents of Los Angeles County, said that losing the expanded subsidies would have “a devastating effect” on the plan’s customers. More than half are enrolled in plans where they don’t have to contribute to their premiums’ cost at all, which she said makes coverage “a reality for most people.” Even the difference between paying nothing and $50 a month would force some people to choose between health coverage and putting food on the table, she said.
Some critics of the subsidies argue that the expanded tax credits are helping wealthier Americans who don’t need the assistance. Others say the plans that require no direct payments from participants have led to fraudulent and duplicative enrollment. Some House Republicans have described the effort to make the expanded credits permanent as “massive taxpayer-funded handouts to the wealthy and large health insurance companies.”
Brian Blase, the president of the Paragon Health Institute, an influential conservative health policy group, has argued that Congress should eliminate the zero-dollar premiums to prevent fraud.
“I would say the underlying Obamacare subsidies are themselves very generous,” he said, noting that if the expanded subsidies disappeared, the lowest-income Americans would still pay around $30 a month for insurance.
But despite their party’s longstanding aversion to Obamacare, some Republicans appear increasingly interested in keeping at least some of the tax credits. Coverage losses are expected to occur disproportionately in Republican-governed states like Florida and Texas. And vulnerable Republican lawmakers worry about a political backlash if their constituents experience sticker shock before the midterm elections. Ten Republican House members have cosponsored legislation to extend the subsidies temporarily. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, introduced her own such bill last week. And a number of other Republican senators have expressed interest or openness to an extension.
But so far, Republican leaders have said they will not include the measure in the government spending bill, as Democrats have demanded.
In Alaska, where Obamacare insurance is particularly expensive without subsidies, higher earners would see large increases.
Without the extra aid, Natalie Kenley, 43, said that she expected her family’s premium to jump to more than $2,000 from $1,600 a month. Ms. Kenley, of Palmer, Alaska, whose husband owns a dental practice where she also works, has multiple sclerosis and needs the coverage. “I’m really concerned about health care costs because they feel very unpredictable,” she said.
Obamacare has become a critical insurance option for those without access to health insurance at work. About half of the people now enrolled either work for small businesses that may not offer coverage or are self-employed, according to a recent analysis by KFF.
Ms. Morringello’s husband is retired and on Medicare, and she has already chosen one of the least expensive plans, which includes a $7,500 deductible. Coming up with an extra $5,000 a year to pay for premiums won’t be easy — she is thinking about canceling things like her membership at the local Y.
“If I can’t pay it, I’ll have to use my savings,” she said.
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13) Relief, Grief and Pain as Gaza’s Wounded Are Flown to Safety
Hungry and injured passengers on a medical evacuation flight showed the toll of nearly two years of bombardment.
By Ismaeel Naar, Sept. 24, 2025
Ismaeel Naar traveled on an evacuation flight that took Gazans from Eilat, Israel, to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Members of the Mqat family with their father, Mohammed, after being evacuated to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Rajab, left, who is 10, was injured in Gaza in March. Natalie Naccache for The New York Times
Ismaeel Naar traveled on an evacuation flight that took Gazans from Eilat, Israel, to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Mohammed Rajab Mqat could not grasp that the crew on the evacuation flight from Gaza was offering him an entire roast beef sandwich — not one to be split with his four children traveling with him.
“Wait, is this for each of us?” the 37-year-old Palestinian father asked, when each was given a tray with a sandwich, fruit, orange juice and water. After nearly two years of war in Gaza, Mr. Mqat said his weight had dwindled from more than 240 pounds to 165.
“Famine slaughtered us,” he said as they headed last month to the United Arab Emirates to get medical treatment for his 10-year-old son, who was hurt in an airstrike in March.
The medical evacuation flight organized by the United Arab Emirates provided a route to safety for 155 Gazans. Their injuries and hunger were a visceral reminder of the continuing Israeli bombardment and the deepening humanitarian crisis in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza. It’s a situation made more acute by the Israeli military’s ground offensive in Gaza City.
Since November 2023, shortly after the war began, the Emirates has operated 27 such flights from Gaza, ferrying 2,904 patients and family members to a government complex in Abu Dhabi, according to the Emirati Foreign Ministry. Evacuations are in conjunction with the World Health Organization.
When asked how long the evacuees could stay in Abu Dhabi, the Emirati government said in a statement, “These families must be able to return to their homes once their treatment is complete” and “when conditions permit them to do so in safety and dignity.”
Around 16,000 people in Gaza need medical evacuation, according to a W.H.O. estimate.
As the war drags on, the demand has grown, along with the challenges of treating the sick and wounded, aid officials and medical workers say.
“From the very first flight, we saw objective evidence of malnutrition: iron deficiency in blood tests, children who were visibly hungry and some who ran up to food like they had never seen it before,” Dr. Maha Barakat, assistant health minister at the Emirati Foreign Ministry, said in an interview. “Starvation is a medical condition we thought the world had stopped needing to treat.”
In August, a panel of international experts reported that parts of Gaza were experiencing an “entirely man-made” famine, which a top United Nations humanitarian official said was caused by Israel’s “systematic obstruction” of aid. Israel imposed a blockade from March to May, when some aid distribution resumed under a much-criticized, Israeli-backed system that bypassed the United Nations.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has called the report “an outright lie.”
Israeli officials have said they let enough food into Gaza but argue that it is stolen or that aid agencies are struggling to distribute it properly. The United Nations and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays requests to pick up supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.
The W.H.O. said that, to be selected for evacuation, a patient must have been referred by a doctor in Gaza for treatment that is unavailable locally. It also said that Gaza’s health ministry then vets cases and, if approved, sends them to the W.H.O., which finds a host country and secures clearance from the Israeli authorities for the patients to leave.
The journey to Abu Dhabi was arduous for the evacuees in August: They entered Israel at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, southern Gaza, and were then driven to Eilat in southern Israel before boarding the three-hour evacuation flight.
The trip had exhausted Asma al-Ladawi, who sat on the plane clutching her belly, barely noticeable even at eight months pregnant, with her daughter and son by her side.
Ms. al-Ladawi said that a blast in December 2023 had landed close to their tent at a school in northern Gaza, throwing her son, Ahmad, 12, into the air and breaking both his legs. The Israeli military asked for more information about the blast but did not immediately comment.
After Ahmad’s initial treatment, his mother said, she took him from one hospital to another, seeking advanced care. But Gaza’s medical system has been devastated by Israel’s military campaign. By the time he was evacuated, Ahmad was unable to walk unassisted.
The war’s toll on children in Gaza has been immense.
The ordeal of Iyad al-Masri, 6, began in April when he picked up unexploded ordnance, his mother, Shireen al-Masri, said. The resulting blast embedded shrapnel in his abdomen, severed two of his toes and shredded his legs.
Iyad’s legs were pinned with bolts, and he has relied on a wheeled mobility aid to walk. A bright boy who used to be gregarious, Iyad has become withdrawn, Ms. al-Masri said.
Ms. al-Masri said Iyad was injured during a period of intense food shortages. The prospect of life in the Emirates, and a full plate of food, felt like a miracle, she said.
On the flight, Mr. Mqat and other parents said they were grateful to be safe but were tormented by guilt and worry for loved ones left behind.
Mr. Mqat said that his wife was still trapped in the destroyed landscape of northern Gaza along with his mother and three eldest daughters.
“Half of me is here and half of me is there,” Mr. Mqat said, his voice breaking into a sob. “Imagine yourself in my place.”
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14) Israeli Strike Kills Gazans Sheltering in Warehouse, Local Reports Say
The Israeli attack in Gaza City killed nearly two dozen Palestinians, the reports said. The Israeli military said it had hit two “Hamas terrorists.”
By Liam Stack, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Sept. 24, 2025
Mourners at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Wednesday carrying the bodies of people who medics said were killed in an overnight Israeli strike. Credit...Ebrahim Hajjaj/Reuters
An Israeli airstrike near a market in Gaza City killed nearly two dozen Palestinians on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense rescue service.
The civil defense said six women and nine children were among at least 22 dead in the attack near Firas Market on the eastern side of the city. The Wafa news agency, which is linked to the Palestinian Authority administration in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said all of those killed were seeking shelter in a warehouse that was hit by the strike.
An Israeli military statement said the strike had hit “two Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip,” without providing further details about who they were. It went on to say the number of casualties reported “does not align with the information” obtained by the Israeli military. But the military did not say how many people it believed had been killed in the strike.
Israel has said it launched the ground invasion of Gaza City last week to root out the Palestinian militant group Hamas from one of its last strongholds. Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war. The Israeli military has said that its operations in Gaza target militants and the infrastructure they use to mount attacks, such as weapons caches or tunnels, and that those targets are often located in civilian areas.
Israel has come under growing international pressure recently for escalating the war with the ground invasion of Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban center. The operation has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have been displaced before in the war, and deepened a humanitarian catastrophe across the Gaza Strip.
In the past few days, almost a dozen countries have expressed their frustration with the conflict by formally recognizing a Palestinian state, angering Israeli officials.
On Wednesday evening, a drone from Yemen struck the Israeli city of Eilat, the military said. Twenty people were injured in the attack, two of them seriously, according to Israeli paramedics. The military said it had attempted to intercept the drone, which evaded Israeli air defenses.
The Houthi militia in Yemen, an Iran-backed group, is the last of Israel’s regional adversaries that still regularly attempts to attack the country. Most of their attempts — which the Houthis say are launched in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza — are intercepted or are otherwise unsuccessful and casualties are rare.
Before launching the ground invasion of Gaza City, the Israeli military ordered the entire population — hundreds of thousands of people — to evacuate. It instructed them to go to what it described as a humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.
But many civilians remained in the city, with some saying they could not afford to leave and others skeptical that anywhere in Gaza was safe to flee to.
Wafa reported that in addition to the deaths in the warehouse, another five people were killed in strikes on Wednesday in different parts of Gaza City, four women and a man.
The civil defense said it had also retrieved four bodies from the rubble of a building that had been hit by another strike in Nuseirat in central Gaza, roughly seven miles south of Gaza City. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment about the strike in Nuseirat.
Nedal Abu Sherbi, 37, a resident of Gaza City, said he could not afford to leave. But even if he could, he could not imagine fleeing again.
Earlier in the war, he said, he left the city to seek shelter in the south but found it to be “a very humiliating experience.”
“If I am going to suffer anyway, then I am staying here,” said Mr. Abu Sherbi, a freelance journalist. He is now sheltering in a school in Rimal, a once upscale neighborhood, after his home was destroyed.
He said Israeli troops appeared to be “in full control” of many neighborhoods, but not in the area where he was staying. But it was impossible to walk more than a few blocks in any direction from his shelter, he said.
“Things in Rimal are relatively better than in other areas, but strikes still take place all the time,” he said. “We cannot sleep through the night because of the constant strikes.”
Before the evacuation order, the United Nations said nearly one million people were living in Gaza City, about half of the territory’s total population. Israeli officials have said estimated that 640,000 people have fled the city since the evacuation orders were given.
Israel has destroyed large areas of the city in recent months.
A New York Times analysis of satellite images showed one Gaza City neighborhood, Zeitoun, was transformed into a barren wasteland over a few weeks in August, when many if not most of its buildings were destroyed.
In recent weeks, a U.N.-backed panel of food experts has said there was famine in Gaza City, and a U.N. commission investigating the war in Gaza has said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians there. Israel has denied both claims.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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15) Immigration Agents Collected U.S. Citizens’ DNA at Border Checkpoints
A report said DNA collected at checkpoints from about 2,000 Americans, mostly during the Biden administration, was sent to an F.B.I. database. Hundreds were not charged.
By Francesca Regalado, Sept. 24, 2025
Border patrol agents collected DNA from about 2,000 U.S. citizens at border checkpoints over a four-year period, researchers at Georgetown University said in a report. Credit...Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
Immigration agents collected DNA samples from about 2,000 U.S. citizens who were stopped at border checkpoints over a four-year period, even though hundreds of them were not charged, researchers at Georgetown University said in a report on Tuesday.
The report by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology is based on data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in February. The data came from forms that immigration agents fill out when they send genetic information to an F.B.I. database of convicted criminals, missing persons and evidence from crime scenes.
The report’s authors argued that border agents were exceeding their authority with the collections, accusing them of violating U.S. citizens’ rights under the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
The report analyzed data from October 2020 to December 2024, a period covering a few months of the first Trump administration and most of the Biden administration. The researchers found that of the 2,000 Americans subjected to cheek swabs agents from Customs and Border Protection, more than 800 were not arrested or charged with a crime at the time.
Law enforcement officers in the United States are allowed to collect DNA from citizens arrested in connection with serious crimes.
The Georgetown report said that federal agents sending genetic information to the F.B.I. had provided “legally questionable, nonsensical, or altogether absent” justifications for collecting DNA samples.
Neither U.S. Customs and Border Protection nor the F.B.I. responded to requests for comment overnight.
A February directive from U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that federal agencies are required to collect DNA samples from Americans who were under arrest, facing charges or convicted, and from noncitizens in U.S. detention. The directive said that DNA collection by agency was a “routine booking measure parallel to fingerprinting.”
The authors of the Georgetown report said that data on DNA collection by U.S. Customs and Border Protection during Mr. Trump’s second term was not yet available. They said they expected it to “reveal an even broader and more reckless approach” because of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The second Trump administration has overseen a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, threatening mass arrests and deportations.
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16) A Sitcom Star and the King of England Walk Into a Fire Ceremony
By Rainn Wilson, Sept. 24, 2025
Mr. Wilson is an actor, a producer and an environmental activist in Los Angeles.
Liew Li Anne
As the shaman guided us to turn to the east, our hands outstretched to the sky in supplication, I looked around and took in a series of absurd facts:
That the roughly 50 of us invited to Highgrove Gardens in Britain to explore new directions in climate action were dressed in prim suits and summer dresses, while the handful of Indigenous elders among us from Mexico, Hawaii, the Amazon and South Africa were decked out in elaborate feathers, beads and hand-tooled leather.
That the air was full of smoke from a bonfire, a smell that reminded me that half of my house had burned down in the Los Angeles area wildfires only eight months before.
And that about 20 feet away, his royal arms in the air, was Charles, the king of friggin’ Britain.
This gathering in July was sponsored in part by an environmental group I work with called Grounded, and it was one of many I’ve attended in my newfound role as a part-time climate activist. You see, about six years ago, during my daily practice of sitting in my underwear and sending out angry tweets to climate science deniers, I looked at myself in the mirror and decided it was time to be more than a keyboard warrior.
Absurdity aside, the event at Highgrove cemented one central idea: To transform our relationship with our planet in this time of climate crisis, we need to value nature as profoundly sacred. Spiritual, even.
As global warming speeds up, the impacts are growing more frequent and destructive. Just last month, my family and I had to evacuate our cabin in Oregon because of wildfires worsened by a heat wave, our fourth evacuation in the past six years. (I’m starting to take this personally. I mean, give me a break, Oh Vulcan, god of fire!)
Between heat stress, habitat destruction, food scarcity and increased parasites, biodiversity loss is also increasing exponentially. According to the National Audubon Society, over 30 percent of California’s native species are threatened with extinction.
We can pass all the legislation and sign all the international agreements we want, but if most humans have learned to treat the earth as an A.T.M. to suck resources out of, and a garbage can to dump waste and pollution into, there is a much deeper imbalance.
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Without respect for nature, our hearts stiffen, as the Lakota leader and author Luther Standing Bear wrote in 1933: “The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too.”
Around the same time, Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man, wrote, “Let every step you take upon the earth be as a prayer” in “Black Elk Speaks.”
Encouraging more people to make a spiritual connection with nature may sound ambitious if not downright delusional. But it is something that the political right and left could potentially embrace. The left might find this in science and the beauty and interconnectedness of life. The right might find resonance in God’s creation and the stewardship of agriculture, and in the conservation of land and water.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why should I listen to 1970s hippy-dippy, tree-huggy concepts from the guy who played Dwight in “The Office”? We need climate action, stat! Laws. Accountability. Renewables instead of coal and oil.
And to that, I draw upon my years of improv training and say, “yes, AND!”
We must pass laws to cut emissions and we must deepen our relationship to the majesty of the Earth. Awe is a gateway to deeper environmental healing. It can inspire us toward ever more committed action.
But what exactly do we do, weirdo? I mean easier said than done!
If we want to plug into the wonder of nature we need to start by actually spending time outside.
Rachel Hopman-Droste is one of many scientists who have studied the neurological changes that happen when we have regular contact with the outdoors. She found changed cognitive functioning and reduced stress and anxiety.
She came up a 20-5-3 rule for spending time in nature: Go outside for 20 minutes three times a week, for example a stroll or time in a park. Spend five hours per month in a semi-wild place such as a forested park, lake or river. Spend three days once a year off the grid in a cabin, tent or on a boat without a cellphone.
Granted, it’s going to take a lot more than camping and dog walks to move our culture’s relationship with nature in the right direction. But it’s a start.
It was actually at a Baháʼí religious youth camp in Seabeck, Wash., where we sang for hours around a campfire, collected shells at the beach and prayed and meditated under a cathedral of Douglas firs, that I first discovered blissful interconnectedness with nature. Perhaps instead of obsolete classes (I’m looking at you cursive!), we could systematically impart that same spirit in a nondenominational way to our children. We can call on leaders from across the political spectrum to prioritize teaching our children about conservation and the majesty of the natural world through outdoor experiential learning.
Back in Britain after the fire ceremony, our sundry group circled in to learn from the wise men and women who had come from Latin America, Hawaii and Africa. Civilization, they told us, has, for the last several hundred years, had a relationship of extraction with our sacred Mother Earth. Instead we need one of sacred regeneration.
Regeneration is the key word in this conversation; it points to the cycle of death, growth and life. Regeneration is hope.
Since that unforgettable afternoon, I have let this concept sink in so that it motivates me to make my steps upon this Earth be more like prayers. And so that the fires in the future are the kind that involve Indigenous elders (and perhaps the king of friggin’ Britain).
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