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Urgent medical alert – Free Mumia
Mumia’s eyesight endangered
Mumia’s eyesight is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
An independent expert ophthalmologist has confirmed the progression of his eye disease by analyzing Mumia’s most recent eye exams. She reports that he needs surgery and medically necessary treatment “immediately” or faces the possibility of “permanent blindness.”
Mumia’s vision has plummeted from 20/30 with glasses in 2024 (near normal) to 20/200 today—legally blind—because the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) failed to adequately monitor his vision and delayed his urgently necessary medical treatment and surgery. The PA DOC has known since at least March of 2025 that Mumia needed eye surgery. Exams from 2024 – 2025 showed a sharp deterioration, demanding immediate intervention. Despite knowing the urgency, they waited until July to act and then pushed surgery off to an unspecified date in September.
Mumia believes he now suffers from “diabetic retinopathy” stemming from a diabetic coma that he endured after being given an improper and unmonitored dose of steroids for a skin disease in 2015. Mumia asserts that the PA DOC is “slow-walking [him] to blindness” in 2025 – another egregious case of the prison’s medical neglect, medical harm, and inability to treat Mumia’s medical needs.
Court records already document this pattern: (a) negligence in monitoring lab reports that led to the diabetic coma, and (b) deliberate denial and delay of his hepatitis C treatment that left him with cirrhosis.
OUR DEMANDS:
· Release Mumia now – unconditionally – into the care of his own doctors, family, and friends. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has, once again, shown it cannot monitor or provide the timely, corrective care he urgently needs.
· Schedule Mumia’s eye surgery and medically necessary treatment immediately, under the supervision of his independent ophthalmologist, and have it performed by the nearest outside provider approved by that physician.
· Provide Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Mumia’s chosen physician, with all the medical reports from the prison and any other outside examiners who have seen him in 2025.
RELEASE AGING PRISONERS:
The following report by Dr. Ricardo Alvarez details a more complete picture of the history of elder abuse by the Prison Industrial Complex – the New Jim Crow – and with particular regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners:
Parole Elder Abuse article on Mumia Abu-Jamal :
https://paroleelderabuse.org/mumia-institutional-elder-abuse-reports/
What you can do immediately to help:
Call the prison and demand that Mumia immediately receives local expert treatment
Sample script:
“My name is ________and I am calling from ________
I am calling with regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal, also known as Wesley Cook AM8335.
He is suffering from dire vision loss that can be easily treated—or else he will lose his eyesight entirely.
I DEMAND THAT THIS TREATMENT HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY.”
Primary targets:
Bernadette Mason
Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy
Call 570-773-2158
Laurel Hardy
Secretary, PA DOC
Call 717-728-2573
ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov
Central Office, PA DOC
ra-contactdoc@pa.gov
Upcoming Press Conference, Rallies and Marches are being planned so please stay tuned!!
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Scientists Denounce Trump Administration’s Climate Report
Scores of researchers reviewed the Energy Department’s argument about greenhouse gases and found serious deficiencies.
By Lisa Friedman and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Sept. 2, 2025
A heat relief station at the Salvation Army Phoenix Citadel Corps. Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
More than 85 American and international scientists have denounced a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown, saying the analysis is riddled with errors, misrepresentations and cherry-picked data to fit the president’s political agenda.
The scientists submitted their critique as part of a public comment period on the report, which was to close Tuesday night.
The five researchers who wrote the July report were handpicked by Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and they all reject the established scientific consensus that the burning of oil, gas and coal is dangerously heating the planet. The report acknowledged that the Earth is warming but said that climate change is “less damaging economically than commonly believed.”
The administration used the report to justify its recent announcement that it would repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions that stem from burning fossil fuels.
Mr. Wright has accused the report’s critics of avoiding a robust discussion of the science.
“People had been much less willing than I had hoped to engage in a thoughtful dialogue on climate change,” he said in a recent interview. “This is fundamentally a story about something that’s a real physical phenomenon that’s scientifically complicated. It’s a scientific, economic issue and people treat it too often as a religious issue.” The Energy Department declined to comment on the criticisms from scientists about the report. Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for Mr. Wright, said in a statement that the agency sought an “open and transparent dialogue around climate science.” He added, “Following the public comment period, we look forward to reviewing and engaging on substantive comments.”
The Trump administration is pursuing an aggressive agenda to ramp up the production and use of coal, oil and gas, the burning of which is the main driver of climate change.
At the same time, average global temperatures have risen by between 1.25 and 1.41 degrees Celsius (or 2.25 to 2.53 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial times. That may sound small, but the warming has impacted every region of the planet with more frequent and intense heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts and other disasters.
Ross McKitrick, one of the report’s authors, said that their climate work for the Energy Department had been paused because of pending litigation. He defended the report’s lack of peer review, saying that it underwent an initial review within the Energy Department. Critiques submitted during the public comment period will be part of the public record, he said.
Dr. McKitrick said that the report’s authors followed their assignment and focused on themes that do not typically get enough attention.
But the 85 scientists, many of whom produced work that was cited in the Energy Department report, said that the report should be discredited.
In a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal that essentially serves as a peer review, the scientists took apart some of the government’s most eye-popping claims.
“Their goal was to muddy the waters, to put out a plausible-sounding argument that people can use in the public debate to make it sound like we don’t know whether climate change is bad or not,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, who led the rebuttal.
The Energy Department report could have a significant impact on federal policy. Climate denialists have for years acknowledged that they wanted to put the imprimatur of the federal government on research that runs counter to accepted climate science. That could give them more influence with Congress and strengthen their ability to legally challenge climate regulations.
Already the Environmental Protection Agency is using the Energy Department analysis to justify the repeal of the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific declaration that climate change poses a danger to human health and welfare. That finding is the basis for regulations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from such sources as automobiles and power plants.
Dr. Dessler said he was driven to reply to the Trump administration report because he felt it made a mockery out of a fundamental and heavily scrutinized field of science.
By Tuesday morning, more than 2,300 comments had been submitted regarding the report. Among them was a submission from the American Meteorological Society, a premiere climate science organization, which outlined what it called “foundational flaws” in the report and called on the government to correct the findings.
Dr. Dessler’s 439-page report — nearly three times as long as the Energy Department’s — disputes each chapter of the agency’s findings. In many cases, the government’s version deploys a scientific “kernel of truth,” taken out of context, to make its arguments seem credible, he said.
For example, the Energy Department report states that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that helps plants grow, and therefore more gas would improve agricultural yields. The scientific review points out that the Energy Department report sidesteps the negative impacts of global warming on plant life, including extreme heat, drought, wildfires and floods.
In another instance, the Trump administration’s report cited two studies by Antonio Gasparrini, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to support its statement that deaths caused by cold weather exceed those caused by heat.
While that is true, Dr. Gasparrini said, the report ignores the fact that climate change is increasing heat-related deaths, and at a greater rate than it would prevent deaths from cold.
“I found the report very poor from a scientific perspective, with contradictory and unsupported statements,” he said.
Cyrus C. Taylor, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said a chart showing yearly average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations omitted key data and made misleading choices on a graph to make it seem as though levels had risen only slightly.
“It’s a graphical sleight of hand,” Dr. Taylor said.
The scientists found other errors as they reviewed the federal report, including misquoting an international climate report, using incorrect scientific definitions and oversimplifying and mixing up the results of multiple studies.
Pamela D. McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, reviewed a section of the Energy Department report that claimed technological advances and wealth would protect communities from the impacts of climate change. It noted, for example, that improvements to canals, levees and flood gates in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina helped protect against the storm surge from Hurricane Isaac in 2012.
Dr. McElwee, who called the report “absolute sloppiness,” said it failed to consider future scenarios and the cost of climate disasters. The section on risks from climate change cited a 2023 paper that does not exist — and included a link to a different paper that concluded that nations should address climate change because the consequences would be damaging.
The Trump administration’s report also highlighted the work of Kristie Ebi, a global health professor at the University of Washington, as proof that dietary supplements would help combat nutrient loss from plants in a warmer world. But Dr. Ebi said her research did not make that claim.
Jim Rossi, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who specializes in energy law, said the report was significantly flimsier than what would typically be used to support federal policies or reverse them.
“There’s nothing wrong with having dissenting viewpoints that differ from the mainstream involved in reports used for policy assessments,” Mr. Rossi said. But to reverse course on a policy decision, the evidence “ought to be at least as strong as the factual record and science that supported the decision in the first place,” he said.
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2) An Earthquake Killed Hundreds in Afghanistan
Rescue workers struggled to reach isolated areas in eastern Afghanistan after a magnitude 6.0 quake.
By Justin Porter, Sept. 2, 2025
People awaiting evacuation in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, yesterday. Credit...Hedayat Shah/Associated Press
Rescue workers yesterday scrambled to reach isolated, mountainous areas in eastern Afghanistan after a magnitude 6.0 earthquake killed more than 800 people and injured 2,500 others there. Afghan officials warned that the death toll would probably rise.
Recovery efforts were complicated by landslides that stranded villages, and only a handful of countries, including Iran, India, Japan and the E.U., offered relief assistance to the Taliban government.
Most of the destruction took place in the province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan, but hospitals were operational, the acting head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Afghanistan said. Here’s what else to know about the quake.
Humanitarian crises: The quake struck Afghanistan as it grapples with overlapping crises. More than half of the country’s 42 million people are in need of aid, according to the U.N. Aid organizations are bracing for a painful winter amid dwindling funds and the return of more than two million Afghans from neighboring Pakistan and Iran.
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3) Gaza Postwar Plan Envisions ‘Voluntary’ Relocation of Entire Population
Karen DeYoung and Cate Brown/The Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2025
An Israeli tank in Gaza. (photo: Larry Towell/Magnum)
The Trump administration and international partners are discussing proposals to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on the rubble of Gaza. One would establish U.S. control and pay Palestinians to leave.
A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump administration, modeled on President Donald Trump’s vow to “take over” the enclave, would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.
The 38-page prospectus seen by The Washington Post envisions at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls “voluntary” departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.
Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food.
The plan estimates that every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000, compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls “life support” services in the secure zones for those who stay.
Called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, the proposal was developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) now distributing food inside the enclave. Financial planning was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group.
People familiar with the trust planning and with administration deliberations over postwar Gaza spoke about the sensitive subject on the condition of anonymity. The White House referred questions to the State Department, which declined to comment. BCG has said that work on the trust plan was expressly not approved and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently fired.
On Wednesday, Trump held a White House meeting to discuss ideas for how to end the war, now approaching the two-year mark, and what comes next. Participants included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special presidential envoy Steve Witkoff; former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose views on Gaza’s future have been solicited by the administration; and Trump’ son-in-law Jared Kushner, who handled much of the president’s first-term initiatives on the Middle East and has extensive private interests in the region.
No readout of the meeting or policy decisions were announced, although Witkoff said the night before the gathering that the administration had “a very comprehensive plan.”
It’s not clear if the detailed and comprehensive GREAT Trust proposal is what Trump has in mind. But major elements of it, according to two people familiar with the planning, were specifically designed to make real the president’s vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Perhaps most appealing, it purports to require no U.S. government funding and offer significant profit to investors. Unlike the controversial and sometimes cash-strapped GHF, which uses armed private U.S. security contractors to distribute food in four southern Gaza locations, the trust plan “does not rely on donations,” the prospectus says. Instead, it would be financed by public and private-sector investment in what it calls “mega-projects,” from electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high-rise apartments.
Calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years, with ongoing “self-generating” revenue streams. Some elements of the proposal were first reported by the Financial Times.
“I believe [Trump] is going to have a bold decision” when the fighting ends, said one person familiar with internal administration deliberations. “There are multiple different variations where the U.S. government could go, depending … on what happens.”
Competing plans for Gaza
Proposals for the day after the war ends in Gaza have proliferated almost since the day it started on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
As Israel’s military response has systematically reduced the enclave to rubble — displacing hundreds of thousands, leaving more than 60,000 Palestinians dead and nearly half million facing what a global crisis monitor said was catastrophic hunger — think tanks, academics, international organizations, governments and individuals have proposed ways to rehabilitate and govern Gaza.
Early in the war, proposals surfaced in Israel to create Hamas-free zones or “bubbles” under Israeli military protection in Gaza where Palestinians could receive humanitarian aid and gradually govern themselves as the conflict came to an end.
In January, less than a week before Trump took office, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented the Biden administration’s postwar route to statehood. It called for an “interim administration” for Gaza, overseen by the United Nations with security provided by vetted Palestinians and unspecified “partner nations” that would eventually cede power to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have all laid out plans. At a March summit, Arab leaders endorsed the Egyptian proposal that outlines the formation of a government of Gaza technocrats and Palestinian Authority officials with funding from Persian Gulf states. In addition to the possibility of putting Arab peacekeepers on the ground, officials in Cairo have said that members of the largely disbanded Gaza police force are being trained in Egypt to provide security after Hamas is disarmed.
Both Israel and the United States — the only countries that have publicly talked about even temporarily relocating Gazans from Gaza — have rejected the Arab proposal.
American security contractors working for the GHF have also been in discussions with Israel and possible humanitarian partners over a plan in which they would clear Gaza of unexploded ordnance and debris, and secure zones in which Palestinians would live temporarily as part of a reconstruction plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never offered a clear vision for Gaza’s future beyond saying Hamas must be disarmed and all hostages returned. He has said Israel must retain security control of the enclave and rejected any future governance there by the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, as well as the prospect of Palestinian statehood.
Israel, which says its troops now control 75 percent of the enclave, has approved a new offensive to take over the rest.
Far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government have advocated permanent Israeli occupation. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the annexation and Israeli resettlement of Gaza, said at a Thursday news conference that “Israel must completely hold control of the entire Strip, forever. We will annex a security perimeter and open the gates of Gaza for voluntary immigration.”
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has said he intends to take over a Hamas-free Gaza but “we don’t want to keep it.”
Shopping for third-country hosts
Removing Palestinians from Gaza — through persuasion, compensation or force — has been a subject of debate in Israeli politics since Gaza was first wrested from Egyptian control and occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israeli settlers lived alongside Palestinians there until 2005, when a peace agreement mandated their departure. Full Israeli withdrawal led to a power struggle between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas, which successfully wrested control of Gaza after winning a parliamentary majority in a 2006 election — the last election held in the enclave.
That uncomfortable status quo held through numerous brief exchanges of fire between Israel and Hamas until the 2023 attack, when thousands of militants breached the Israeli security barrier that surrounds Gaza on all sides but its narrow southern border with Egypt, overrunning Israel Defense Forces bases and murdering civilians.
Israel, Netanyahu has said, is “talking to several countries” about taking relocated Gazans. Libya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Indonesia and Somaliland have been mentioned as potential options. All except Indonesia — which previously has said it would temporarily admit a few thousand Palestinians seeking work or medical treatment — are in Africa and in the midst of their own conflicts and civilian deprivation.
Libya is ruled by two rival governments that have frequently come to blows, and Ethiopia has seen sporadic civil war and conflict with its neighbors. Israel, which has restricted humanitarian assistance to Gaza, said this month that it would send medical aid and other supplies to South Sudan.
No country has recognized Somaliland, a former British protectorate that unilaterally declared its independence from war-torn Somalia in 1991. After its leaders offered a place for relocated Gazans in exchange for statehood recognition, Trump told reporters earlier this month that “we are looking into that right now.”
Trump outlines his vision
During his 2024 election campaign, Trump said that he would quickly stop the Gaza war. But when he returned to the theme as president, it was mostly to talk about how he would employ his property developer skills once the Gazans were gone.
“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” Trump told reporters while signing a raft of executive orders in the Oval Office two days after his inauguration. “It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way.” Gaza, he said, was “a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”
Two weeks later, at a White House news conference with Netanyahu, Trump said “the United States will take over the Gaza Strip.” Describing a “long-term ownership position,” he added that everyone he had spoken to about it “loves the idea.”
“I’ve studied this very closely over a lot of months, and I’ve seen it from every different angle,” Trump said. “I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so magnificent.”
Netanyahu, smiling at Trump’s side, called it a “bold vision,” and said that Israel and the United States had a “common strategy.”
Asked later that day in an interview with Fox News if Gaza’s Palestinian residents could return after reconstruction, Trump said, “No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing” elsewhere.
Within hours, Rubio and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back those remarks. Part of Trump’s “generous proposal” was that Palestinians would need somewhere to live “in the interim” while reconstruction took place, Rubio said. Leavitt insisted that “the president has made it clear that they need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza.”
Just a week later, Trump returned to the subject at an Oval Office session with a visibly disconcerted King Abdullah II of Jordan. “With the United States being in control of that piece of land,” he said, referring to Gaza, “you’re going to have stability in the Middle East for the first time. And the Palestinians, or the people that live now in Gaza, will be living beautifully in another location.”
Shortly after his February vow to take over Gaza, Trump reposted on his Truth Social account an AI-generated video of his vision. It begins with children picking through the rubble amid gun-toting militants, then quickly shifts to a wonderland of sparkling high-rises, pristine beaches and money falling from the sky. Trump and Netanyahu appear sunbathing on the Gaza shore, and a golden Trump statue lords benevolently over a clean and lively urban scene.
A catchy song provides the soundtrack. “Donald’s coming to set you free/ Bringing delight to all you see. No more tunnels, no more fear/ Trump Gaza is finally here.”
In the wake of Arab outrage and widespread charges that any forced removal would be a violation of international law, both Trump and Netanyahu more recently have stressed that any postwar relocation of Gazans would be voluntary and, if the Palestinians chose, temporary. In the meantime, Israel has moved to corral the Gaza population of about 2 million in a narrow strip of waterfront in the south while it prepares for its northern offensive in Gaza City.
The United Nations estimates that 90 percent of the housing in the enclave has been destroyed. The question of what to do about the population of Gaza while it is made habitable and who will govern it in the future are central, no matter what plan is adopted.
“The scale of destruction is massive and unlike anything we’ve seen before, even within the context of Gaza,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. “The urgency is extreme. The scale of the reconstruction project is extreme. And the political question is as unclear as ever.”
Redeveloping a new ‘Riviera’
Trump’s February vow to own and redevelop Gaza offered both a green light and a road map for the group of Israeli businessman, led by entrepreneurs Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American, and Liran Tancman, a former Israeli military intelligence officer. They had already handed off the GHF project to implementers and moved on to the postwar problem in consultation with international financial and humanitarian experts, and potential government and private investors, as well as some Palestinians, according to people familiar with the planning.
By spring, a Washington-based team from BCG, which had separately been hired to work with the primary U.S. contractor setting up the GHF food distribution program, was working on detailed planning and financial modeling for the GREAT Trust.
Eisenberg and Tancman declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the planning said that the prospectus was completed in April with only minimal change since then, but that there was plenty of room for tweaks.
“It’s not prescriptive, but is exploring what is possible,” the person said. “The people of Gaza need to be enabled to build something new, like the president said, and have a better life.”
Those familiar with the initiative in both Washington and Israel compared it to U.S. trusteeships of Pacific islands after World War II, and the postwar governance and economic roles played by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan and Secretary of State George C. Marshall in Germany.
While the Pacific trust territories were administered by the United States, the arrangement was approved by the United Nations, whose membership is unlikely to agree to a similar relationship with Gaza. But the trust planners maintain that under the customary international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for “as you possess under law”) and limits on Palestinian autonomy under the 1993 Oslo agreements, Israel has administrative control over the occupied territories and the power to give it away.
As outlined in the trust document, Israel would transfer “Administrative Authorities and Responsibilities in Gaza to the GREAT Trust under a U.S.-Israel bilateral agreement” that would “evolve” into a formal trusteeship. The outline foresees eventual investments by “Arab and other countries” that would turn the arrangement into a “multi-lateral institution.” Trump administration officials have dismissed as mere public rhetoric the insistence of Arab governments, particularly in the Persian Gulf, that they will only support a postwar plan leading to Palestinian statehood.
Israel would maintain “overarching rights to meet its security needs” during the first year of the plan, while nearly all internal security would be provided by unspecified “TCN” (third-country nationals) and “Western” private military contractors. Their role would gradually decrease over a decade as trained “local police” take over.
The trust would govern Gaza for a multiyear period it estimates will take 10 years “until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.”
The document makes no reference to eventual Palestinian statehood. The undefined Palestinian governing entity, it says, “will join the Abraham Accords,” Trump’s first-term negotiation that led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states. Trump has said he expects to expand that achievement before leaving office.
The plan talks of Gaza’s location “at the crossroads” of what will become a “pro-American” region, giving the United States access to energy resources and critical minerals, and serving as a logistics hub for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that was first announced during the Biden administration but derailed by the Israel-Gaza war.
Gaza’s reconstruction would start with the removal of massive amounts of debris and unexploded ordnance, along with the rebuilding of utilities and the electrical grid.
Initial costs would be financed using as collateral the 30 percent of Gaza land that planners have said is already “publicly” owned and would immediately belong to the trust. That is “the biggest and easiest. No need to ask anyone,” Tancman noted in the margin of one trust planning document seen by The Post. “I’m afraid to write that,” Eisenberg replied in a note, “because it could look like appropriation of land.”
Investor-financed “mega-projects” include paving a ring road and tram line around Gaza’s perimeter, which the planners flatteringly label the “MBS Highway,” after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose approval of such an initiative would go a long way toward regional acceptance. A modern north-south highway through Gaza’s center is named after United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. A new port and airport would be built in the far south, with direct land connections to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both publicly committed to the Egyptian proposal for Gaza and eventual Palestinian statehood, with no indication that they have agreed to any element of the trust plan.
The GREAT Trust also envisions a water desalination plant and solar array in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula that would provide Gaza with water and electricity. Gaza’s eastern border with Israel would be a “smart” industrial zone, including American electric vehicle companies and regional data centers to serve Israel and the Persian Gulf countries. Gaza’s western waterfront would be reserved for the “Gaza Trump Riviera,” boasting “world-class resorts” with the possibility of artificial islands similar to the palm-shaped ones built off the UAE city of Dubai.
In the center of the enclave, between the waterfront resorts and the industrial zone — which the plan projects would create a million jobs — apartment buildings of up to 20 stories would be constructed in six to eight “dynamic, modern and AI-powered smart planned cities.” The mixed-use areas would include “residences, commerce, light industry and other facilities, including clinics and hospitals, schools and more,” interspersed with “green areas, including agricultural land, parks and golf courses.”
Gazan families who remain, or leave and then return after residential areas are completed to exchange their land tokens, would be offered ownership of new 1,800-square-foot apartments the plan values at $75,000 each.
Adil Haque, a professor and expert on the law of armed conflict at Rutgers University, said that any plan in which Palestinians are prevented from returning to their homes, or inadequately supplied with food, medical care and shelter, would be unlawful — regardless of any cash incentive offered for departures.
Abu Mohamed, a 55-year-old father speaking over WhatsApp from Gaza on Saturday, said that despite the catastrophic situation, he would never leave. “I’m staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now,” he said. “But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland.”
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4) Trump Says U.S. Attacked Boat Carrying Venezuelan Gang Members, Killing 11
The vessel was transporting illegal narcotics through international waters to the United States, the president said.
By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, Edward Wong and Alan Feuer, Sept. 2, 2025
President Trump said on Tuesday that the United States had carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and killed 11 “terrorists,” the administration’s latest military escalation in Mr. Trump’s war against Venezuelan drug cartels that he has blamed for bringing fentanyl into the country.
Mr. Trump offered few specifics about the strike during his news conference on Tuesday, but later in the afternoon he posted more details on Truth Social.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Mr. Trump wrote. He said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”
No American troops were harmed in the operation, he said.
Mr. Trump’s post was accompanied by a video of what appeared to be a speedboat cutting through the water, with a number of people on board. An explosion then appears to blow it up.
A senior U.S. official said a Special Operations aircraft — either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone — carried out the attack on Tuesday morning against a four-engine speedboat loaded with drugs. U.S. surveillance aircraft and other sensors had been monitoring cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.
The strike is an astonishing departure from traditional drug interdiction efforts. In the past, U.S. authorities focused on seizing drugs and identifying suspects to build a criminal case. A second senior U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be more such attacks against cartel boats.
The action comes amid a major buildup of U.S. naval forces outside Venezuela’s waters. The administration has also stepped up belligerent rhetoric about fighting drug cartels and labeled Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, a terrorist cartel leader.
“The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the full might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they’re operating from, and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio before boarding a plane in Florida to head to Mexico.
In a deviation from Mr. Trump’s account, however, Mr. Rubio said that the vessel’s destination was probably Trinidad or another country in the Caribbean.
Mr. Trump signed a still-secret directive in July instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations. Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Mr. Maduro was its leader, while calling his government illegitimate.
Since then, the Pentagon has moved U.S. Navy assets, including warships, into the southern Caribbean Sea. In response, Mr. Maduro said that he was deploying 4.5 million militiamen around his country and vowed to “defend our seas, our skies and our lands” from any incursions.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused the Maduro government of having effectively turned Venezuela into a “narco-state” in an indictment that was unsealed in March 2020 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The indictment charged Mr. Maduro and some of his top aides — including Hugo Carvajal, then his chief of military intelligence — of being leaders of a sprawling drug trafficking organization known as the Cartel de los Soles, or the Cartel of the Suns.
Named for the sun insignia on the epaulets of Venezuelan generals, the cartel was first led by Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, according to prosecutors. Over the course of more than 20 years, prosecutors said, the cartel worked with guerrillas in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to ship tons of cocaine from clandestine airstrips, airports and seaports in Venezuela to U.S. soil. In doing so, the cartel not only made millions of dollars, but also weaponized cocaine “by flooding it into the United States to inflict its harmful and addictive effects on communities throughout this country,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Carvajal pleaded guilty to narco-terrorism conspiracy charges in June. But charges are still pending against Mr. Maduro and Diosdado Cabello Rondón, a leader of the Venezuelan legislature and a former vice president of the country.
Mr. Maduro has accused the Trump administration of building a false portrayal of him to try to force him from office. On Monday, he told reporters he “would constitutionally declare a republic in arms” if his country were attacked by U.S. forces deployed to the Caribbean, according to The Associated Press.
U.S. officials previously indicated that American guided-missile destroyers that had recently deployed to the region could target boats operated by drug cartels transporting fentanyl to the United States.
During remarks at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that “when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat.” He added that there were “a lot of drugs” on the vessel.
“And there’s more where that came from,” the president continued. He said that the drugs targeted on Tuesday “came out of Venezuela” and added that “we have a lot of drugs pouring into our country.”
In his social media post, he added: “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”
The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group — including the U.S.S. San Antonio, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima and the U.S.S. Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors — and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,200 Marines, recently arrived in the region, Defense Department officials said.
Several P-8 surveillance planes and at least one submarine have also deployed to the region, officials said.
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5) Fourteen Years After Japan’s Nuclear Disaster, People With Cancer Seek Answers
A survey has found hundreds of thyroid tumors, but Japanese officials say they are unrelated to the Fukushima meltdowns. Now they face a lawsuit.
By Martin Fackler, Reporting from Koriyama, Japan, Sept. 3, 2025
More than 1,000 tanks were built to hold water contaminated since the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, seen here in 2017. Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
She was in middle school in March 2011, when three reactors melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant about 40 miles from her home in northern Japan. Living outside the evacuation zone, she continued to go about her life, shopping and cycling to school.
Four years later, a screening found a malignant tumor in her thyroid, a gland in the neck that is known to be vulnerable to radioactive particles released during a nuclear accident. But when she got the diagnosis, a doctor told her immediately that the growth was unrelated to the disaster.
She wondered how the doctor could judge that without making further checks. (The young woman, now in her 20s, asked that her name not be used because she has faced intense social pressure not to speak out.)
Her question is one that has not been conclusively resolved 14 years after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the plant, leading to explosions at its reactor building that showered this region of northern Japan with radioactive particles.
A few weeks ago, the Fukushima Prefecture screening committee restated its conclusion that the triple meltdown has not caused long-term health effects. Many medical experts, including those at international agencies, have made similar findings. But there is skepticism from many residents and a minority of medical experts, who say the authorities haven’t done enough to prove their case.
The young woman from Fukushima has joined six other people with cancer in a lawsuit to seek compensation from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. The company says there’s no scientifically proven link between the cancers and radioactive particles released by the disaster. The next hearing will be held on Sept. 17, though a ruling is probably years away.
Much of the dispute has focused on the thyroid screening program, which has been the only large-scale, systematic effort to detect a major health effect from the disaster. The study found cancer rates that were many times higher than had been expected, but the meaning of that result has been fiercely contested. Medical experts on both sides agree that the question of whether or not the cancers are linked to the nuclear accident could be resolved by conducting a similarly large-scale screening elsewhere to serve as a comparison, but authorities have so far refused to do that.
“Without a base-line study, there is no way to conclude for sure whether or not these cancers are related to radiation,” said Kazuo Shimizu, a thyroid surgeon who served on a committee supervising the screening but resigned in 2017.
Lessons from Chernobyl
Started seven months after the meltdown, the Fukushima program is still underway. It has conducted several rounds of checks to monitor the thyroids of people who were children at the time of the accident. The focus was a lesson of the 1986 nuclear accident at the Soviet power plant in Chernobyl, which led to a proliferation of thyroid cancers in present-day Ukraine and Belarus.
When the results of the first round of screening were announced starting in 2015, they showed an unexpectedly large number of the cancers, which were thought to be rare in children. The number has continued to climb as five more rounds of screenings have been conducted. According to the most recent figures released last month, the screenings have found 357 cases of thyroid cancer in some 300,000 people, though one was later ruled to be benign.
With an additional 47 cases that have been diagnosed separately, a total of 403 people have been found to have developed thyroid cancers. This is some 25 times more than the doctors expected based on other studies elsewhere.
While the medical experts running the program agree these numbers were surprisingly high, they say the large number doesn’t reflect an outbreak of cancers, but rather the discovery with modern ultrasound equipment of cancers that would have been there anyway.
“What we discovered is that thyroid cancers are more common than we thought,” said Gen Suzuki, a former professor of radiation pathology who currently heads the committee of experts evaluating the screening results.
Dr. Suzuki said most of the cancers detected were a type that needed no treatment because they wouldn’t endanger health. As a result, they had simply gone undetected before.
Distrust of government
That conclusion of “over screening” has been endorsed by Japan’s national government and global health groups. These include the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, which in 2020 said that “the apparent detected excess of thyroid cancers is probably unrelated to radiation exposure.”
However, there is skepticism in Japan, where there has been deep-seated public mistrust in the official handling of the Fukushima disaster that goes back to the first days, when authorities hid the size of radiation releases. Prefectural officials have been criticized for stating at the outset that their screening program’s goal was “to put the public mind at ease” about radiation health risks, suggesting its conclusions were foregone.
Critics in the medical community say a closer scrutiny of the screening’s results show a possible link between the cancers and levels of radiation, as people who were children in towns around the Fukushima Daiichi plant have developed cancer at rates that are three times higher than those who lived furthest away.
Dr. Suzuki says this is just a random variation in the statistics. But the dispute points to a problem: It is impossible to determine the exact cause of an individual case of cancer. The best most researchers can do is say that radiation increases the chances of getting a tumor.
Medical experts say that by looking at thyroid cancer rates in another part of Japan, or among Fukushima residents who were not children at the time of the accident, it would be possible to determine whether the number detected by the current screening was high or not.
Medical authorities in three other prefectures made one effort to conduct such a survey, but it was halted after the testing of about 4,400 people found one with cancer. The Ministry of the Environment said that was enough to show a roughly similar rate as the Fukushima cancers, but medical experts called the number of people tested too small to serve as a statistically valid comparison.
“The Fukushima screening was almost 100 times larger,” said Dr. Shimizu, the thyroid surgeon.
Before he resigned from the committee, Dr. Shimizu faulted its conclusion that there was no link between the cancers and the nuclear disaster as premature. In an interview, he said the lack of a comparative study was a main reason for his view.
Social Pressure
Dr. Suzuki, whose term as head of the committee ended in July, agreed that a comparative study would give a definitive answer. However, he said many doctors nonetheless oppose a new large-scale screening because it would detect tumors and growths that have no health effects, leading to unnecessary surgeries to remove them.
Some health experts say a comparative study has been blocked for political reasons. Toshihide Tsuda, a leading critic of the Fukushima screening committee’s conclusions, says the nuclear industry has pressured the government into denying funding for such a survey.
“They don’t want to know the real answer,” said Mr. Tsuda, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Okayama University.
Others point to the Chernobyl incident. U.N. nuclear and health agencies said for years that there was no link between the accident in the former Soviet Union and the thyroid cancers later found in children living around it. It was only a decade later, after comparative studies showed the cancers appearing in post-Soviet republics to be unusual, that the agencies altered their stance.
Those diagnosed with cancer in the Fukushima study say local residents oppose any additional surveys because they would draw attention to the issue of radiation, which can hurt tourism and farming.
The young woman in Fukushima underwent surgery to remove the cancerous thyroid gland, but she developed health problems that included chronic colds and swelling in her legs. A bout of pneumonia drove her to quit her job at a Tokyo ad agency.
But her biggest source of suffering has been her inability to publicly tell her story for fear that she and her family will be attacked on social media. The children of Fukushima still feel blocked from saying that they suffer from cancer, she said.
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.
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6) Far-Right Israeli Minister Calls for West Bank to be Annexed
Bezalel Smotrich said Israel should take over most of the territory, partly in response to growing international moves to recognize a Palestinian state.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 3, 2025
A wall separates the Arab village of Al Eizariya, in the West Bank, near where the Israeli government plans to build a new neighborhood. Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images
The far-right Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called on Wednesday for the country to annex most of the occupied West Bank, where around three million Palestinians live, a move that would deepen Israel’s mounting international isolation.
Mr. Smotrich’s announcement came after a growing numbers of countries, including longstanding Israeli allies like Britain and France, said they would recognize a Palestinian state this month. They have also demanded an immediate end to the war in Gaza. Far from curbing Israeli hard-liners, however, the declarations have prompted them to double down.
On Wednesday, Mr. Smotrich said Israel should annex roughly 82 percent of the West Bank, and said this was the proper response to international moves to recognize a Palestinian state. He called it “a preventative step against the diplomatic assault that’s planned against us.”
“The main goal is to remove, once and for all, this idea of a Palestinian state,” he told reporters at a news conference in Jerusalem.
Mr. Smotrich provided few details about what his plan would mean for Palestinians living in Israeli-annexed areas.
Israel has long shied away from formally annexing the West Bank, partly because of concerns that it could spur a global backlash. It is unclear whether Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, supports Mr. Smotrich’s proposal.
But even the threat of annexing the West Bank appeared to inflame diplomatic tensions. The United Arab Emirates, which normalized ties with Israel five years ago, issued a rare warning following Mr. Smotrich’s announcement that annexation would constitute “a red line.”
Lana Nusseibeh, a senior Emirati official, said in a statement that the proposed move would “severely undermine the vision and spirit” of the Abraham Accords, an agreement signed in 2020 by four Arab states, including the U.A.E., to expand ties with Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu has since invested considerable effort into normalizing Israel’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which he hopes will form part of his legacy. Ms. Nusseibeh noted that annexing the West Bank would also end further “regional integration.”
Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when it seized the land from Jordan. Since then, the Israeli government has built a sprawling network of settlements there, populated by about half a million Jewish settlers, and further entrenched its control.
Palestinians hope the territory will form part of a future independent state. Mr. Netanyahu, as well as many other members of his government, opposes Palestinian statehood, arguing that it would present a security threat to Israel.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers some areas of the West Bank, said in a statement that Mr. Smotrich’s remarks were a “direct threat” to efforts to create a Palestinian state.
Mr. Smotrich, a longtime settler leader, suggested that Palestinians “would continue to run their own affairs” on a local level, but added that “the territory would be ours.”
Within its internationally recognized borders, Israel is a democracy where Palestinian and Arab citizens can vote in elections and sit in Parliament, although many say they still face discrimination as second-class citizens.
But in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinians live under Israeli military rule, which tightly controls their freedom of movement. They have no right to vote in Israel’s elections and are generally tried in Israeli military courts. The Palestinian Authority provides public services and coordinates closely with Israel on security.
Human rights groups argue that Israel’s two-tiered system of control in the West Bank is comparable to apartheid-era South Africa. Israel rejects that characterization.
Mr. Smotrich has long called for Israel to assert full control over the West Bank, without granting its Palestinian residents the right to vote in Israeli elections. Like many on the Israeli right, he avoids using the word annexation — which could imply that the territory was occupied — preferring instead to speak of Israeli sovereignty.
“I have no interest in allowing them to enjoy everything that the State of Israel has to offer. We did not establish this country to make our enemies prosper,” Mr. Smotrich told reporters.
Critics in Israel of Mr. Netanyahu's government fear that annexing the West Bank would further isolate the country, as it already faces mounting international condemnation over the war in Gaza.
More than 60,000 people have been killed there in Israel’s campaign against Hamas, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war began after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when some 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages.
Mr. Smotrich noted that Israel had recently authorized settlement construction in a sensitive area of the West Bank east of Jerusalem, known as E-1, with little practical consequences. Successive U.S. administrations had opposed building settlements there, fearing it would endanger the contiguity of a future Palestinian state.
“We did it and thank God nothing happened. That is exactly what will happen with sovereignty,” said Mr. Smotrich.
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7) After Trump Comments, Hamas Says It’s Ready for Deal on All Hostages
The Palestinian militant group has expressed similar positions in the past, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dismissed its statement as “spin” and “nothing new.”
By Adam Rasgon, Sept. 4, 2025
A rally in Jerusalem on Wednesday to call for the release of hostages still held in Gaza. Credit...Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Hamas has expressed readiness for a comprehensive deal to end the Gaza war and release all hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
While Hamas has made similar statements in the past, the militant group reiterated the position late on Wednesday after President Trump called on it to immediately release all of the living hostages still held in Gaza.
Hamas said it was ready to free them in exchange for an end to the war, the full withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza, the beginning of reconstruction and the opening of border crossings to bring everything that is needed into Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dismissed the statement as “spin” and “nothing new.” Mr. Netanyahu, too, has been advocating a comprehensive deal to end the war lately, but it has become clear that his interpretation of what that means is very different to that of Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu said that the war could end if Hamas agreed to conditions set by Israel’s security cabinet, including disarmament. Hamas has repeatedly rejected the demands to give up its arsenal.
Hamas’s statement and Mr. Netanyahu’s reaction were reminders of how deadlocked the two sides are over an agreement to end the war. While both have outlined road maps, their terms often appear to be irreconcilable.
Hamas wants an agreement that will enable it to retain some power in Gaza, which it has ruled for nearly two decades. Mr. Netanyahu is pressing for Hamas’s effective surrender through disarmament.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that if Hamas released 20 hostages, “things will change rapidly” in the war.
“IT WILL END!” he posted on social media.
The Israeli authorities say they believe that about 20 captives are still alive out of a total of 48 who remain in Gaza.
The Israeli military has been gearing up for a full-scale invasion of Gaza City, which Israeli officials have portrayed as one of Hamas’s last strongholds in Gaza.
If Hamas and Israel can agree to a temporary cease-fire or an end to the war, it could spare Gaza City residents from being uprooted to southern and central parts of the territory.
Before its statement on Wednesday, Hamas had said that it agreed to a proposal for a phased cease-fire deal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, two mediating countries. That plan would begin with a 60-day cease-fire during which the exchange of some Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners would take place alongside talks about ending the war permanently.
For much of the past year, Mr. Netanyahu had insisted on a phased cease-fire deal on the grounds that a comprehensive solution on Israel’s terms would be too hard to achieve quickly. A temporary cease-fire would also leave Israel the option of going back to fighting.
But about a month ago, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy for peace missions, said in a meeting with hostage families that Mr. Trump wanted to see all the living hostages released at once.
Around the same time, Mr. Netanyahu and his allies in the Israeli government started focusing their public statements on a comprehensive deal to end the war that releases all the hostages.
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8) How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart
The 2019 operation, greenlit by President Trump, sought a strategic edge. It left unarmed North Koreans dead.
By Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole, Sept. 5, 2025
Dave Philipps is a national correspondent for The New York Times, and Matthew Cole is a freelance journalist. Both have covered the military for more than 15 years.
President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had an erratic relationship. They met on Sentosa Island in Singapore in 2018. Doug Mills/The New York Times
A group of Navy SEALs emerged from the ink-black ocean on a winter night in early 2019 and crept to a rocky shore in North Korea. They were on a top secret mission so complex and consequential that everything had to go exactly right.
The objective was to plant an electronic device that would let the United States intercept the communications of North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-un, amid high-level nuclear talks with President Trump.
The mission had the potential to provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence. But it meant putting American commandos on North Korean soil — a move that, if detected, not only could sink negotiations but also could lead to a hostage crisis or an escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed foe.
It was so risky that it required the president’s direct approval.
For the operation, the military chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.
A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead.
The SEALs retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.
The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. The details remain classified and are being reported here for the first time. The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.
The White House declined to comment.
This account is based on interviews with two dozen people, including civilian government officials, members of the first Trump administration and current and former military personnel with knowledge of the mission. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the mission’s classified status.
Several of those people said they were discussing details about the mission because they were concerned that Special Operations failures are often hidden by government secrecy. If the public and policymakers become aware only of high-profile successes, such as the raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, they may underestimate the extreme risks that American forces undertake.
The military operation on North Korean soil, close to American military bases in South Korea and the Pacific region, also risked setting off a broader conflict with a hostile, nuclear-armed and highly militarized adversary.
The New York Times proceeds cautiously when reporting on classified military operations. The Times has withheld some sensitive information on the North Korea mission that could affect future Special Operations and intelligence-gathering missions.
It is unclear how much North Korea was able to discover about the mission. But the SEAL operation is one chapter in a decades-long effort by U.S. administrations to engage North Korea and constrain its nuclear weapons programs. Almost nothing the United States has tried — neither promises of closer relations nor the pressure of sanctions — has worked.
In 2019, Mr. Trump was making a personalized overture to Mr. Kim, in search of a breakthrough that had eluded prior presidents. But those talks collapsed, and North Korea’s nuclear program accelerated. The U.S. government estimates that North Korea now has roughly 50 nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the West Coast. Mr. Kim has pledged to keep expanding his nuclear program “exponentially” to deter what he calls U.S. provocations.
Blind Spots
The SEAL mission was intended to fix a strategic blind spot. For years, U.S. intelligence agencies had found it nearly impossible to recruit human sources and tap communications in North Korea’s insular authoritarian state.
Gaining insight into Mr. Kim’s thinking became a high priority when Mr. Trump first took office. The North Korean leader seemed increasingly unpredictable and dangerous, and his relationship with Mr. Trump had lurched erratically between letters of friendship and public threats of nuclear war.
In 2018, relations seemed to be moving toward peace. North Korea suspended nuclear and missile tests, and the two countries opened negotiations, but the United States still had little insight into Mr. Kim’s intentions.
Amid the uncertainty, U.S. intelligence agencies revealed to the White House that they had a fix for the intelligence problem: a newly developed electronic device that could intercept Mr. Kim’s communications.
The catch was that someone had to sneak in and plant it.
The job was given to SEAL Team 6 in 2018, military officials said.
Even for Team 6, the mission would be extraordinarily difficult. SEALs who were more used to quick raids in places like Afghanistan and Iraq would have to survive for hours in frigid seas, slip past security forces on land, perform a precise technical installation and then get out undetected.
Getting out undetected was vital. In Mr. Trump’s first term, top leaders in the Pentagon believed that even a small military action against North Korea could provoke catastrophic retaliation from an adversary with roughly 8,000 artillery pieces and rocket launchers aimed at the approximately 28,000 American troops in South Korea, and nuclear-capable missiles that could reach the United States.
But the SEALs believed they could pull off the mission because they had done something like it before.
In 2005, SEALs used a mini-sub to go ashore in North Korea and leave unnoticed, according to people familiar with the mission. The 2005 operation, carried out during the presidency of George W. Bush, has never before been reported publicly.
The SEALs were proposing to do it again. In the fall of 2018, while high-level talks with North Korea were underway, Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees Team 6, received approval from Mr. Trump to start preparing, military officials said. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s intent was to gain an immediate advantage during negotiations or if the focus was broader.
Joint Special Operations Command declined to comment.
The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale, that would motor silently to the shore.
The mini-subs were wet subs, which meant the SEALs would ride immersed in 40-degree ocean water for about two hours to reach the shore, using scuba gear and heated suits to survive.
Near the beach, the mini-subs would release a group of about eight SEALs who would swim to the target, install the device and then slip back into the sea.
But the team faced a serious limitation: It would be going in almost blind.
Typically, Special Operations forces have drones overhead during a mission, streaming high-definition video of the target, which SEALs on the ground and senior leaders in far-off command centers can use to direct the strike in real time. Often, they can even listen in on enemy communications.
But in North Korea, any drone would be spotted. The mission would have to rely on satellites in orbit and high-altitude spy planes in international airspace miles away that could provide only relatively low-definition still images, officials said.
Those images would arrive not in real time, but after a delay of several minutes at best. Even then, they could not be relayed to the mini-subs because a single encrypted transmission might give the mission away. Everything had to be done under a near blackout of communications.
If anything awaited the SEALs on shore, they might not know until it was too late.
The Operation Unravels
SEAL Team 6 practiced for months in U.S. waters and continued preparations into the first weeks of 2019. That February, Mr. Trump announced that he would meet Mr. Kim for a nuclear summit in Vietnam at the end of the month.
For the mission, SEAL Team 6 partnered with the Navy’s premier underwater team, SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1, which had been doing mini-sub espionage for years. The SEALs boarded the nuclear-powered submarine and headed for North Korea. When the submarine was in the open ocean, and about to enter a communications blackout, Mr. Trump gave the final go-ahead.
It is unclear what factors Mr. Trump weighed when approving the SEAL mission. Two of his top national security officials at that time — his national security adviser, John Bolton, and the acting defense secretary, Patrick M. Shanahan — declined to comment for this article.
The submarine neared the North Korean coast and launched two mini-subs, which motored to a spot about 100 yards from shore, in clear shallow water.
Mission planners had tried to compensate for having no live overhead video by spending months watching how people came and went in the area. They studied fishing patterns and chose a time when boat traffic would be scant. The intelligence suggested that if SEALs arrived silently in the right location in the dead of night in winter, they would be unlikely to encounter anyone.
The night was still and the sea was calm. As the mini-subs glided toward the target, their sensors suggested that the intelligence was correct. The shore appeared to be empty.
The mini-subs reached the spot where they were supposed to park on the sea floor. There, the team made what may have been the first of three small mistakes that seemed inconsequential at the time but may have doomed the mission.
In the darkness, the first mini-sub settled on the sea floor as planned, but the second overshot the mark and had to do a U-turn, officials said.
The plan called for the mini-subs to park facing the same way, but after the second sub doubled back, they were pointing in opposite directions. Time was limited, so the group decided to release the shore team and correct the parking issue later.
Sliding doors on the subs opened, and the SEALs — all gripping untraceable weapons loaded with untraceable ammunition — swam silently underwater to shore with the listening device.
Every few yards, the SEALs peeked above the black water to scan their surroundings. Everything seemed clear.
That might have been a second mistake. Bobbing in the darkness was a small boat. On board was a crew of North Koreans who were easy to miss because the sensors in the SEALs’ night-vision goggles were designed in part to detect heat, and the wet suits the Koreans wore were chilled by the cold seawater.
The SEALs reached shore thinking they were alone, and started to remove their diving gear. The target was only a few hundred yards away.
Back at the mini-subs, the pilots repositioned the sub that was facing the wrong way. With the sliding cockpit doors open for visibility and communication, a pilot revved the electric motor and brought the sub around.
That was probably a third mistake. Some SEALs speculated afterward in briefings that the motor’s wake might have caught the attention of the North Korean boat. And if the boat crew heard a splash and turned to look, they might have seen light from the subs’ open cockpits glowing in the dark water.
The boat started moving toward the mini-subs. The North Koreans were shining flashlights and talking as if they had noticed something.
Some of the mini-sub pilots told officials in debriefings afterward that from their vantage point, looking up through the clear water, the boat still seemed to be a safe distance away and they had doubted that the mini-subs had been spotted. But the SEALs at the shore saw it differently. In the dark, featureless sea, the boat to them seemed to be practically on top of the mini-subs.
With communications blacked out, there was no way for the shore team to confer with the mini-subs. Lights from the boat swept over the water. The SEALs didn’t know if they were seeing a security patrol on the hunt for them or a simple fishing crew oblivious to the high-stakes mission unfolding around them.
A man from the North Korean boat splashed into the sea.
If the shore team got into trouble, the nuclear-powered sub had a group of SEAL reinforcements standing by with inflatable speedboats. Farther offshore, stealth rotary aircraft were positioned on U.S. Navy ships with even more Special Operations troops, ready to sweep in if needed.
The SEALs faced a critical decision, but there was no way to discuss the next move. The mission commander was miles away on the big submarine. With no drones and a communications blackout, many of the technological advantages that the SEALs normally relied on had been stripped away, leaving a handful of men in wet neoprene, unsure of what to do.
As the shore team watched the North Korean in the water, the senior enlisted SEAL at the shore chose a course of action. He wordlessly centered his rifle and fired. The other SEALs instinctively did the same.
Compromise and Escape
If the SEALs were unsure whether the mission had been compromised before they fired, they had no doubt afterward. The plan required the SEALs to abort immediately if they encountered anyone. North Korean security forces could be coming. There was no time to plant the device.
The shore team swam to the boat to make sure that all of the North Koreans were dead. They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water.
Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink.
The SEALs swam back to the mini-subs and sent a distress signal. Believing the SEALs were in imminent danger of capture, the big nuclear submarine maneuvered into shallow water close to the shore, taking a significant risk to pick them up. It then sped toward the open ocean.
All the U.S. military personnel escaped unharmed.
Immediately afterward, U.S. spy satellites detected a surge of North Korean military activity in the area, U.S. officials said. North Korea did not make any public statements about the deaths, and U.S. officials said it was unclear whether the North Koreans ever pieced together what had happened and who was responsible.
The nuclear summit in Vietnam went ahead as planned at the end of February 2019, but the talks quickly ended with no deal.
By May, North Korea had resumed missile tests.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim met once more that June in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. It made for dramatic television, with Mr. Trump even stepping across into North Korea. But the brief meeting yielded little more than a handshake.
In the months that followed, North Korea fired more missiles than in any previous year, including some capable of reaching the United States. Since then, the United States estimates, North Korea has amassed 50 nuclear warheads and material to produce about 40 more.
Uneven Track Record
The aborted SEAL mission prompted a series of military reviews during Mr. Trump’s first term. They found that the killing of civilians was justified under the rules of engagement, and that the mission was undone by a collision of unfortunate occurrences that could not have been foreseen or avoided. The findings were classified.
The Trump administration never told leaders of key committees in Congress that oversee military and intelligence activities about the operation or the findings, government officials said. In doing so, the Trump administration may have violated federal law, said Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who served in national security positions under former President George W. Bush.
Mr. Waxman said the law has gray areas that give presidents some leeway on what they tell Congress. But on more consequential missions, the burden leans more toward notification.
“The point is to ensure that Congress isn’t kept in the dark when major stuff is going on,” Mr. Waxman said. “This is exactly the kind of thing that would normally be briefed to the committees and something the committees would expect to be told about.”
Many of the people involved in the mission were later promoted.
But the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission, because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy.
Elite Special Operations units are regularly assigned some of the most difficult and dangerous tasks. Over the years, the SEALs have had a number of major successes, including hits on terrorist leaders, high-profile rescues of hostages and the takedown of bin Laden, that have built an almost superhuman public image.
But among some in the military who have worked with them, the SEALs have a reputation for devising overly bold and complex missions that go badly. Team 6’s debut mission, which was part of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, is a case in point.
The plan was to parachute into the sea, race to the coast in speedboats and plant beacons to guide assault forces to the island’s airport. But the SEALs’ plane took off late; they jumped at night and landed in stormy conditions, weighed down by heavy gear. Four SEALs drowned, and the rest swamped their speedboats.
The airfield was later seized by Army Rangers who parachuted directly onto the airfield.
Since then, SEALs have mounted other complex and daring missions that unraveled, in Panama, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. During a rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2010, Team 6 SEALs accidentally killed a hostage they were trying to rescue with a grenade and then misled superiors about how she had died.
In part because of this track record, President Barack Obama curtailed Special Operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight, reserving complex commando raids for extraordinary situations like hostage rescues.
The first Trump administration reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions. A few days after taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump skipped over much of the established deliberative process to greenlight a Team 6 raid on a village in Yemen. That mission left 30 villagers and a SEAL dead and destroyed a $75 million stealth aircraft.
When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. succeeded Mr. Trump, the gravity of the North Korea mission attracted renewed scrutiny. Mr. Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, ordered an independent investigation, conducted by the lieutenant general in charge of the Army inspector general’s office.
In 2021, the Biden administration briefed key members of Congress on the findings, a former government official said.
Those findings remain classified.
Julian E. Barnes, Adam Entous and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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9) The Return of the ‘War Department’ Is More Than Nostalgia. It’s a Message.
President Trump and his defense secretary say they want to return to the era when America won wars. They largely ignore the greatest accomplishment of the past 80 years: avoiding superpower conflict.
By David E. Sanger, Sept. 5, 2025
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and frequently writes on superpower competition and conflict, the subject of his latest book.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,” President Trump said. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
When President Harry S. Truman signed the law creating the Defense Department from the remnants of the War Department in August 1949, Joseph Stalin was 16 days from proving the Soviets could detonate a nuclear weapon, and Mao Zedong was less than two months from declaring the creation of the People’s Republic of China.
It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was intended to reflect an era in which deterrence was critical — because war, if it broke out among the superpowers, could be planet-ending. For decades, the odds of avoiding that nuclear exchange, or direct superpower conflict, seemed slim at best. So to many historians, the greatest accomplishment of the Cold War is that it largely stayed cold, despite wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and arms races that followed.
All of which makes President Trump’s planned executive order on Friday seeking to restore the Pentagon to its old name — the War Department — more than just a throwback, a restoration of tough-guy nomenclature. At a moment when deterrence is more critical than ever — in cyberspace, outer space and a world where Russia and China are celebrating an uneasy partnership to challenge American pre-eminence — Mr. Trump argues that the answer is to go back to the good old days.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,” he told reporters two weeks ago. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
To anyone who has watched the revolution sweeping the country’s national security institutions over the past seven months, the president’s order came as no surprise.
“In a way it makes perfect sense: This administration is simply taking us back to that period before the Truman era,” said Douglas Lute, a career Army officer who played key roles in the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations and served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO. “It has disassembled the processes, institutions and the norms that were established after World War II.
“More substantive than the name change is what they have done,” he said, citing the doubts of American allies that the United States would come to their defense and Mr. Trump’s gyrations in dealing with Russia. “Once that trust that serves as the glue of the alliance structure is eroded, we’ll pay a very high price to get it back, if we can recover it at all.”
Certainly in recent months Mr. Trump has shown less interest in building deterrence than he has in investing in new weaponry. He has dismantled broad swaths of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, because its mission of defending against foreign and domestic cyberattacks included securing election systems. He even ordered the Justice Department to investigate the agency’s chief during the 2020 elections, for his declaration that it was one of the most secure in history, contradicting his insistence that it was rigged to elect Joseph R. Biden.
Mr. Trump fired the four-star general heading both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, part of a broader purge of apolitical military officers who were appointed in the Biden era. Morale among senior officers is suffering, as they wonder whether it is worth pursuing top command positions if a declaration from a MAGA influencer that they are secretly members of the so-called deep state is all it takes to end a three-decade-long career.
Mr. Trump’s one big investment in defense is the Golden Dome, his plan to build a coast-to-coast missile defense. But to America’s adversaries, the system, involving weapons in space, looks as much like offense as defense.
When it comes to renaming the department, no one is more enthusiastic than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. If Mr. Trump gets his way, will get the title of secretary of war — the president has already called him that in public — joining a long line that started with Henry Knox, for whom Fort Knox is named.
“We won World War I, and we won World War II, not with the Department of Defense, but with a War Department,” Mr. Hegseth said on Fox News on Wednesday. “As the president has said, we’re not just defense, we’re offense.”
“We think words and names and titles matter,” he concluded. Clearly he does: It is Mr. Hegseth who talks repeatedly about bringing “lethality” and a “warrior ethos” back to the American military. When he arrived at the Pentagon, one of his first moves was to ban the oft-used phrase in the building that “our diversity is our strength.” (“The single dumbest phrase in our military history,” he told the troops.)
But words matter to other nations as well, allies and adversaries alike. And this change in name, assuming Congress is willing to rewrite the Truman-era laws, plays right into the narrative that Russia and China propagate about the United States.
In their telling, all of America’s talk about being a peace-loving, law-abiding international player is thin cover for a country that truly just wants to strike at any target it regards as a threat. To bolster their cases, their state-controlled commentators point to Mr. Trump’s unilateral decisions to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June or sink an open skiff of alleged drug runners, killing 11 people off the coast of Venezuela.
“This is a backward-looking decision,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the former U.S. ambassador to China who spent decades as a foreign service officer, including ambassador to NATO. “It plays into China’s narrative in its unrelenting contest for global influence with the U.S. Beijing will brand this unfairly as evidence the U.S. is a threat to the international order and China is a defender of the peace.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth may be granting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a similar opportunity. Long before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Putin insisted the “root causes” of his determination to restore some of the old boundaries of the Russian empire included the American-led drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders in the 1990s. The West’s response has always been that NATO’s presence is entirely defensive.
But the United States undercuts that case when it insists that it’s tired of playing defense, as the president and the defense secretary have insisted repeatedly in recent weeks. To them, the restoration of a War Department heralds the fact that there is a new sheriff in town, with a new way of looking at the use of force.
At one level, of course, what Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth are doing is little more than rebranding — a concept the president knows well, as he renamed real estate projects in hopes that by sounding better, they would sell better. The mission of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines does not change. Nor does the combination of defensive and offensive missions at the units sitting on the cutting edge of new technology, such as the United States Cyber Command or Mr. Trump’s beloved Space Command.
But at another level, renaming the world’s most powerful military force — the trillion-dollar defense budget (perhaps better called the war budget) is roughly three times larger than China’s — will be seen as part of the continuum of the Trump revolution.
In that world, American soft power is out, and hard power is celebrated. Shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, silencing the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and cutting billions of dollars in foreign aid in the State Department budget sent a message: The United States is out of the democracy-promotion business, and out of the benevolent-nation business.
Mr. Trump and his aides have made it abundantly clear they view soft power as no form of power at all. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week celebrated giving up one of his four government titles — administrator of U.S.A.I.D. — to Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Mr. Rubio wrote. “Congrats, Russ.”
As Mr. Rubio’s comments made clear, those programs — once considered vital to attracting the world to American values — rank somewhere between unaffordable charity and wastefulness, disconnected from American interests.
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10) Elon Musk Could Become First Trillionaire Under New Tesla Pay Plan
Tesla’s board unveiled a compensation package for the chief executive that could be worth $900 billion if he meets ambitious targets.
By Jack Ewing and Peter Eavis, Sept. 5, 2025
Tesla’s board on Friday proposed a pay package that could make its chief executive, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire as long as he meets a series of very ambitious corporate goals.
Mr. Musk, already the world’s richest person, would have to increase Tesla’s stock market value eightfold over the next decade to collect the full value of the package, according to a securities filing.
All the compensation would be in the form of Tesla shares. The package, which must be approved by the company’s shareholders, is expected to be put to a vote at an annual meeting on Nov. 6.
Mr. Musk has a net worth of more than $400 billion, according to Forbes. The new pay could add around $900 billion to that fortune if he succeeds in raising Tesla’s stock market value to $8.5 trillion from about $1.1 trillion today. It would be by far the richest compensation of any executive in corporate history. And it could leave him owning nearly 29 percent of Tesla, an extraordinary level of control for a chief executive.
Mr. Musk would have to remain at Tesla for at least seven and a half years to cash in any of the shares, and 10 years to earn the full amount. He would also have to meet various very ambitious operational milestones, including overseeing the commercial deployment of one million autonomous taxis, one million robots and a more than 24-fold increase in profit.
Hitting many of those targets could be extremely hard. Many other companies around the world are racing to perfect self-driving cars and robots.
“Retaining and incentivizing Elon is fundamental to Tesla achieving these goals and becoming the most valuable company in history,” Robyn Denholm, chair of the Tesla board, and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, a director on the board, said in a letter to shareholders.
The lavish pay plan will almost surely be criticized by some shareholders for excessively rewarding Mr. Musk. Some investors have said the chief executive has performed poorly in recent years and engaged in behavior that has damaged the company. The package will increase the already intense scrutiny of Mr. Musk, who is regarded as a genius by his acolytes and a dangerous oligarch by his critics.Tesla’s sales and profit have slumped over the last year as Mr. Musk has become immersed in right-wing politics. He worked for several months in the Trump administration, offending many liberal electric-vehicle buyers.
While exercising significant control over Tesla, Mr. Musk spends a lot of time overseeing other business interests. Among them are SpaceX, a rocket company, and xAI, an artificial intelligence venture that owns the social media site X.
The plan announced Friday does not place restrictions on how much time he spends on other ventures or his political activities.
The compensation plan mirrors one from 2018 that awarded Mr. Musk millions of Tesla shares if he met goals that seemed far-fetched at the time. He achieved the milestones, but a Delaware judge struck down that pay package after shareholders claimed that it was excessive and contended that the company’s board had not properly informed investors about the package. Tesla has appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
The documents that Tesla filed Friday contain measures that would replace Mr. Musk’s compensation from the 2018 plan if the company’s appeal of the Delaware case is unsuccessful. Tesla said Friday awarding that compensation package would require it to record an expense of at least $56 billion on its financial statements based on the recent share price.
If shareholders approve the latest pay package, dissident investors would have more difficulty challenging it. This year, Tesla moved its corporate domicile from Delaware to Texas, where state law makes it harder for shareholders to sue companies in which they have only a small stake.
Tesla pioneered the market for electric cars, but has fallen behind the Chinese carmakers BYD and Geely in the number of cars sold globally, and is in danger of being overtaken by Volkswagen, according to figures compiled by SNE Research, a South Korean firm.
Some analysts blame Mr. Musk for the decline, saying he squandered resources developing the Cybertruck pickup, which has sold poorly, rather than new models with broader appeal. Chinese carmakers and established manufacturers like General Motors and Hyundai have introduced dozens of electric cars that increasingly make Tesla’s main products, the Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle, look dated.
Mr. Musk has played down the importance of car sales, saying Tesla’s future is in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and humanoid robots. The compensation plan calls for Tesla to have sold a total of 20 million cars by 2035, from eight million today. That implies the company would need to sell only 1.2 million a year, far fewer than it sold last year.
On Monday, the company unveiled what it called its Master Plan IV, which said the company would be at the forefront of an age of “sustainable abundance” when power will come from the sun, people will travel in self-driving cars and robots will take over menial tasks.
“Today we are on the cusp of a revolutionary period primed for unprecedented growth,” the plan, published on X, said.
In their letter to shareholders, Ms. Denholm and Ms. Wilson-Thompson said, “Elon’s singular vision is vital to navigating this critical inflection point.”
But they also hinted at a future without Mr. Musk, saying he would work with the board on “development of a framework for long-term C.E.O. succession.” And the filing said Mr. Musk had to develop a succession “framework” to earn a portion of the new stock award.
According to the compensation plan, Mr. Musk would be eligible to receive 35 million shares if Tesla’s Wall Street value hit $2 trillion. He would receive additional shares if Tesla’s value increased until it reached $8.5 trillion. The plan is structured so that Mr. Musk would profit from gains in the share price only from $334, the closing price on Wednesday.
For Mr. Musk to collect the full award, Tesla’s operating profit will have to rise to $400 billion, from $17 billion last year.
Although Mr. Musk would not be allowed to sell any of the shares for years, he will immediately be able to exercise their votes in shareholder meetings, increasing his control of the company. If he collects all the shares, and does not sell any, his stake in Tesla would rise from 13 percent now to about 29 percent. Taxes could reduce that amount.
Mr. Musk had threatened to leave the company if he didn’t get a much bigger share of the company. He “raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence,” the board said.
There is a little doubt that the goals are ambitious. Tesla would have to become twice as valuable as Nvidia, the maker of chips for artificial intelligence and currently the world’s most valuable public company.
Mr. Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, who is a member of the Tesla board, recused themselves from the decision on whether to approve the pay package, Ms. Denholm and Ms. Wilson-Thompson said. But Tesla said in its regulatory filing Friday that Texas law and stock market rules allowed both Musks to vote on the compensation package during the November shareholder vote.
Boards typically determine executive compensation by comparing pay of other corporate leaders in similar industries. Benchmarking in Mr. Musk’s case would be “irrelevant,” Tesla’s board said.
“Chief executive officers at other comparably large companies are not being presented with performance goals comparable in scope, degree or complexity to those being asked of Mr. Musk,” the board said.
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11) Why Hamas Refuses to Give Up
Analysts say that despite its vast losses in Gaza, Hamas believes it can hold out for a deal that ensures its survival.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Sept. 5, 2025
Israel has killed thousands of Hamas’s fighters, taken out most of its senior military command and destroyed much of its arsenal and underground tunnel network.
The country’s relentless military campaign has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, cities have been reduced to rubble, and people have struggled daily to find enough food, water and electricity.
And yet Hamas has refused to surrender. The group wants to secure its future in Gaza, but its unwillingness to give up to Israel and disarm is also rooted in its ideology.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in Gaza, the group’s leaders have acknowledged that the resulting Israeli counterattack has caused enormous destruction. But they have said it is a “price” Palestinians must pay for their ultimate freedom.
In interviews, some Hamas leaders have said that the group’s calculation was less about defeating Israel on the battlefield, and more about drawing the government into an intractable conflict, one that isolates it diplomatically and undermines its international support. Eventually, they say, Israel will be compelled to realize that its policies toward Palestinians are not sustainable.
“Surrender, as Israel and America are calling for it, is not in Hamas’s dictionary,” said Khaled al-Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar who has written books about the group.
Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, said recently that if he cannot get what he described as an honorable deal to end the war with Israel, then the conflict would become a war of liberation or the group would face “martyrdom,” according to a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official familiar with Mr. al-Haddad’s thinking.
What Hamas considers to be an “honorable deal” is an agreement that could lead to the end of the war and enable the group to continue wielding power in Gaza.
Hamas has previously agreed to temporary cease-fires with Israel in part to provide relief to people in Gaza. But it has firmly rejected ending the war on terms set by Israel, which has demanded the group disarm and send its leaders into exile, and has shown a willingness to tolerate the ongoing suffering of civilians in pursuit of the deal that it wants.
There are no suggestions that Hamas’s position is shifting. This week, it released a statement reiterating that it was ready to accept a deal that would see the release of all remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners, an end to the war and a withdrawal of Israeli forces.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas by force or dismantle it through negotiation, and has rebuffed any deal on the end of the conflict that would leave the group intact.
Civilians in Gaza have paid the highest price for the continuation of the war.
“Have Hamas’s weapons stopped Israel from killing us?” said Abdullah Shehab, 32, who has been staying at his sister’s home in Gaza City since he was forced to leave his hometown, Jabaliya, at the end of May. “Have they stopped Israel from invading our cities? The only thing Hamas’s weapons have done is given Israel a justification to continue the massacres.”
During the October attack, some 1,200 people were killed and about 250 others were abducted, according to Israeli authorities. While Hamas has celebrated the attack, more than 60,000 people in Gaza have been killed in the ensuing war, said the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The seemingly irreconcilable positions of Hamas and Israel on how to end the war suggest that the fighting will continue until one side is forced to compromise.
And Hamas believes that Israel will eventually come to terms with an agreement that does not require the group to give in, Palestinian political analysts say.
“They know that the continuation of the war is very costly, but they’re hopeful that they’ll get a deal they can live with, if they remain patient and steadfast,” said Esmat Mansour, a Palestinian analyst who spent years in Israeli prisons with several top Hamas leaders.
“They see the internal and external pressure on Israel to end the war and they know that Israel can’t free the captives without them,” he added. “So they’re saying to themselves, ‘Why should we surrender when we can get something better?’”
Still, Mr. Mansour said, Hamas may conclude that to maintain some power it needs to make difficult concessions, like suspending military recruitment and training and putting its weapons in storage, potentially overseen by a third party.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, said the group needed “an exit” from the war. “The problem is Israel has closed all the exits,” he said.
Hamas, at least publicly, has refused to entertain discussions about abandoning its weapons or sending its commanders into exile. Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, framed the group’s refusal to surrender as safeguarding Palestinians.
“We’re dealing with an extremist government that carried out massacres at the expense of our people and that is still plotting the killing, slaughter and expulsion of our people,” he said in a text message. “We can’t stop defending ourselves and our people in light of the impotence of the international community and the clear American complicity.”
“Without a clear political agreement that protects the Palestinian people and its land, the resistance will continue its fight,” Mr. Badran added.
Another Hamas official, Taher El-Nounou, recently suggested that the war could ultimately turn in Hamas’s favor, a result that appears unlikely given Israel’s military advantage. Asked on Russia Today’s Arabic-language channel whether carrying out the 2023 attack had been the right decision, he said nobody could judge the results of the war while it was still ongoing.
“Before the Normandy landing, Germany was occupying almost all of Europe,” he said, referring to a costly but decisive battle during World War II. “After that landing, the situation changed.”
Residents of Gaza are facing the reality that the war could drag on into a third year. Though outraged by Israel’s continued bombing campaign, many are also frustrated with Hamas.
Conceding defeat, Mr. Shehab, the displaced man in Gaza City, said, would be the least Hamas could do to take responsibility for “the catastrophic error” of the October 2023 attack — one that “caused plunder greater than the Nakba of 1948,” the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians after Israel’s founding.
But he had little hope Hamas would agree to step aside. “We’re trapped,” he said. “Honestly, the only real difference between Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages is we’re above ground and they’re below.”
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12) Israel Steps Up Attacks on Gaza City Ahead of a Planned Wider Offensive
The Israeli military destroyed a landmark building after saying it had taken control of almost half of the city, where hundreds of thousands of civilians are sheltering amid a worsening humanitarian crisis.
By Liam Stack, Photographs by Saher Alghorra, Sept. 5, 2025, Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv and Saher Alghorra reported from Gaza City
An Israeli strike hit the Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City on Friday. The Israeli military said Hamas used the building for intelligence-gathering, but Hamas denied the accusation.
Israel expanded its preparations for a full-scale assault on Gaza City on Friday and targeted a prominent local landmark, a day after a military spokesman said it was in control of almost half the city.
A broad evacuation order has yet to be issued for the city, where hundreds of thousands of people are believed to be sheltering in ruined buildings and tents.
But on Friday, Israel warned people to leave a high-rise building in Gaza City shortly before it destroyed it in a military strike. It was unclear how many people had been killed or injured.
Announcing the evacuation order on social media, Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, said: “The gates of Hell are being unlocked in Gaza City.” After the strike, Mr. Katz posted a video of the tower collapsing along with the words: “We started.”
Israel said the building had been used by Hamas for military and intelligence-gathering activities.
Hamas denied the accusation and said Israel had targeted “residential towers densely populated by displaced persons.”
Last month, Israel announced that it planned to expand its military offensive in Gaza City, which Israeli officials have portrayed as one of Hamas’s last strongholds in Gaza.
Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, a military spokesman, said on Thursday that Israeli forces had taken control of 40 percent of the city and were active in the neighborhoods of Zeitoun, Sheikh Radwan and Shuja’iyya.
The military has already carried out widespread destruction in parts of Gaza City in recent weeks. Israeli forces have turned large parts of Zeitoun, a once bustling urban neighborhood, into a barren wasteland, according to satellite images reviewed by The New York Times.
On Friday, the strike on the Gaza City high-rise caused the building to collapse in a pillar of dark smoke, according to a video from the scene published by Reuters. The video also showed a large tent encampment around the tall tower.
In recent days, residents of Gaza City have described nights punctuated by Israeli airstrikes and shelling. Large crowds of people have been fleeing to what they hope are safer neighborhoods.
The prospect of a full-scale offensive on the city would likely exacerbate a humanitarian crisis for the hundreds of thousands of civilians sheltering there. Many of them have fled Israeli bombardment in other parts of Gaza multiple times since the war began 22 months ago, crisscrossing territory to escape attacks, and are now struggling to find food and clean water.
The war began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, in which roughly 1,200 were killed and 250 more taken hostage. Since then, the Israeli military response has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than half of those killed have been women, children and the elderly, according to local health officials.
The war has destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and parts of the territory are suffering from famine, according to a U.N.-backed group of food experts.
Elham Shamali, 47, who taught at Al-Azhar University before the war, said she fled Gaza City’s Senaa neighborhood with her family two weeks ago when Israeli strikes and shelling came close to their home.
Since then, Ms. Shamali said, they have been staying in Sheikh Radwan, where their neighbor’s home was hit by an airstrike a few days ago. “The building was badly damaged and seven were killed,” she said. “I saw the dead bodies and knew the people, they were our neighbors.”
Ms. Shamali said she and her family planned to flee again, this time to the Tal Al Hawa neighborhood in the west of the city.
Israel’s planned take over of Gaza City has been criticized by the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, who say any large-scale operation could imperil their loved ones further. Those concerns were renewed on Friday when Hamas released a video of two hostages, Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said in the video that it was filmed on Aug. 28 and that he and other hostages were being held in Gaza City. Israeli officials have said they believe roughly 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza.
Rights groups and international law experts say that hostage videos are made under duress, and that the statements in them are usually coerced.
In a post on social media, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, called the release of the video “psychological terrorism intended to stop us from pursuing the action in Gaza.”
Abu Bakr Bashir and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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13) ICE Agents Are Wearing Masks. Is That Un-American?
The long, strange story of masking and law enforcement.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Sept. 5, 2025
Photo illustration by Alex Merto
One of the defining images of President Trump’s second term so far has been security officers in masks. Whether detaining a Turkish student on the street in Boston, raiding Home Depot parking lots in Los Angeles or, now, arresting immigrants on the streets of the capital, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in tactical gear and with their faces obscured have become a strange new national pageant.
The Homeland Security Department says that in an era of extreme polarization and rising political violence, masks are necessary. “ICE officers wear a mask because they’ve been doxxed by the thousands,” Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, told my colleagues at “The Daily.” “Their families have been doxxed. ICE officers’ pictures show up on trees and telephone poles. Death threats are sky-high.” Masking, the argument goes, is simply the practical response.
Lawmakers in liberal states say the practice should be banned, and this summer, Democratic elected officials in California, New York and Pennsylvania proposed laws to do just that. At the end of July, Virginia’s Democratic senators introduced a bill to ban the use of masks nationally. The issue also got the attention of a federal judge, who, in a ruling on Tuesday against Mr. Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles, noted disapprovingly that the armed forces’ identity “was often obscured by protective armor.”
As I watched all of this, I found myself wondering about masking by law enforcement and whether it has a history in the United States. Something about it seemed at once familiar and foreign. That’s because I associate the practice with Russia.
In the summer of 2000, when President Vladimir Putin had just taken office, I was living in Moscow and working as a reporter. At the time, the first battle lines were being drawn between the new president and the powerful oligarchs he hoped to tame. Russians began to see raids by government forces on oligarchs and their properties. Men in masks conducted them. They became so ubiquitous that people began referring to them sardonically as Maski Show, or mask shows, after a popular television show involving mask-wearing clowns.
The United States is not Russia. But as I search for ways to understand what is happening in my country today, I am looking to the places I’ve been before. In Russia in the 2000s, I thought of masking as a peculiar feature of a wobbly post-Soviet state. Over time it became clear that it was a harbinger of a new era.
The Power and the Danger
Masks became a feature of America’s fiercely polarized political life during the Covid pandemic. Mask requirements enraged conservatives, who saw them as an effort by the government to boss them around on flimsy science. Concerns about the virus’s spread subsided, but the debate seemed to have unlocked something in the American psyche about the power — and danger — of masks.
Over the past several years, states and counties began passing laws against masking that applied to protesters in demonstrations, reasoning that they would be more likely to do something illegal if law enforcement couldn’t see their faces.
Some of those laws echoed statutes passed in the 1940s and 1950s by states and cities that were trying to control the Ku Klux Klan, said Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Even though Klan chapters were often “shot through with members of the police,” Mr. Mickey said, those officers, who showed their faces during the day, wore masks when doing the work of the Klan at night.
There are good reasons vigilantes wear masks and police officers don’t. Policing experts argue that masking by law enforcement is wrong because officers are public servants and are supposed to be accountable to the public. Hiding behind a mask makes that harder. Yes, officers’ jobs can be dangerous, but being publicly identifiable goes along with having the right to wield a deadly weapon on behalf of the state.
In recent years in the United States, trends in law enforcement were moving in the opposite direction. Many police departments now use body cameras and require that the officer’s badge, with name and number, be visible.
Michael German, a retired F.B.I. agent who is now a fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said that even when he worked undercover, “the period of secrecy ended when charges were brought and I had to defend what I had done in that undercover capacity.”
Masking provides leeway for abuse, he said. People tend to be more scrupulous and vigilant when they can be personally held accountable for their actions. A mask allows more latitude for sloppiness or shortcuts — a punch or a kick, for example.
No one I interviewed could think of an example of American law enforcement masking. Jules Epstein, a law professor at Temple University who worked for decades as a criminal defense lawyer and death penalty litigator, said that in his more than 45 years of practice, he had never seen the police wear masks, including in high-profile gang cases.
‘Without Question a Bad Sign’
Outside the United States, masking by law enforcement has a long history. When it happens, it tends to be in countries with weak central governments, sometimes ones that are fighting insurgencies or drug cartels or, for that matter, political opponents.
In Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, the government worked with paramilitary groups — forces on the side of the government but not directly employed by it — that often wore masks. They operated at the margins of the law, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, and over time, courts and special tribunals have documented abuses they perpetrated. In Colombia, the state was up against a well-equipped and deadly foe: drug cartels. Anyone obstructing them had reason to fear for their lives. Judges wore masks to avoid reprisal killings, a practice that became known as “judges without faces.”
Law enforcement officers in Mexico sometimes mask, too, Mr. Isacson said, in areas where drug cartels have a strong presence.
In Peru, government forces often wore masks in their war against Shining Path guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who has studied Latin America and written about democratic decline. In areas where Shining Path was strongest, police officers were afraid of reprisals by the guerrillas but also of becoming pariahs in their own communities for abuses they themselves committed, he said.
More recently, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of government forces using masks in Venezuela during the repression that followed the country’s tainted presidential election last year. And in the Philippines, victims of Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign report that the people doing the killing were sometimes masked.
“The use of masks,” Mr. Levitsky said, “is without question a bad sign.”
And it is extremely rare in functional democracies. “I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves,” Mr. Levitsky said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Stronger, more confident regimes rarely mask. Totalitarian states that have established control over their populations tend to avoid moves that would stir dissent. Masking can draw attention to the fact that the government is up to something it wants to hide, or that it is not powerful enough to protect its own forces. In short, it’s a bad look.
In China, the security forces do not wear masks, said Lynette Ong, a China scholar and professor at the University of Toronto. But something else happens. In her book, “Outsourcing Repression,” Ms. Ong explains that China’s everyday security policing force draws from ordinary people mobilized from the street and paid a daily rate or hired on a contract. The state does not formally employ them, and when they are caught harming someone, the government can plausibly say it was not responsible. China may be authoritarian, she said, but public officials can be held accountable for abuse. They can be fired, for example, if their forces are caught on camera beating people up.
Masks are rare in Iran, too, though they are occasionally used in drug and organized crime operations, said Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who is now an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He said that when he was arrested in 2005, no one, not even his interrogators, wore masks.
“The people who interrogated me, they wanted me to see their faces,” Mr. Memarian said.
The reason was that the government wanted to show that what it was doing was legitimate. They also arrested him discreetly, “without a splash,” Mr. Memarian said. A number of armed men came to his building, but his neighbors had no idea it was happening. They kept it low-key so as not to draw the attention of regime critics.
“Once a mask is involved,” he said, “people understand it as a sign of weakness, that the government has something to hide.”
The Show
In Russia in the early 2000s, Mr. Putin wasn’t trying to hide anything. On the contrary: He was putting on a show that he wanted everyone to see. Russia’s central government had been plagued by weakness throughout the 1990s, with the oligarchs running official agencies and having their way with the state. The Maski Shows were efforts by this new leader to turn the tables.
One of the most famous episodes took place a few days after Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May 2000. Armed men in military fatigues and masks showed up at one of the offices that belonged to the oligarch who had founded the first independent television network, NTV.
Yevgeny Kiselyov, then the director of the channel and its main anchor, remembers being struck by the over-the-top nature of the force. “They were carrying out their operation as if this building was full of heavily armed terrorists,” he said in an interview. In reality, it was middle-aged women working in accounting.
The television station was eventually taken over by the state, and Mr. Kiselyov now lives outside Russia. He said the meaning of the raid was clear even then. It was a public message, not just to that station and its owner, but to anyone who opposed Mr. Putin. “It was an act of intimidation,” he said. “It was saying, ‘We are now in power, and we are going after you.’”
The Trump administration seems to be sending the same message with ICE, except in this case, the targets are not oligarchs, but immigrants and the businesses who employ them.
But there are other audiences. Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who helped oversee border security in the George W. Bush administration, said he believes the performance is aimed at would-be migrants around the world. Former President Joe Biden, “no matter what he did, could not change the view of the world that the border was open,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “I knew it was going to take someone who was going to create some heartache, and that they’d have to be very tough and create some fear to change the circumstances.”
And then there’s the domestic audience. Polling suggests that many Americans don’t like Mr. Trump’s tactics around deportations, at least when it comes to immigrants who have not committed violent crimes. But some Americans do approve of it, perhaps drawn to its dark spectacle. The immigrant detention center in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is now tied up in court battles, has its own merch. Americans pose for selfies by the center’s new highway sign and post them on social media. In early August, Indiana announced a partnership with the Homeland Security Department to build the “Speedway Slammer,” its answer to Alligator Alcatraz. A few weeks later, Nebraska announced plans for the “Cornhusker Clink.”
Mr. Levitsky called the highly visible, almost ostentatious use of masks “a performance but with real-world consequences.” “MAGA seems to get something out of playing authoritarian,” he said. “There’s an element of cosplay to it.”
Perhaps the most important audience of all is the agency itself — and its potential recruits. ICE says it wants to hire 10,000 new agents at a time when hiring law enforcement officers has been hard. It got a multibillion-dollar cash infusion from Congress in July. Masking could serve to reassure reluctant applicants, who are worried for their safety or about being judged by people they know, but also to attract more exuberant ones, who see masking as subversive and fun.
In August, the Homeland Security Department posted on social media an image in the style of the TV show “South Park” that showed a caravan of cartoon figures riding in ICE cars. Their faces were all covered from the nose down. At the top of the post was a link: JOIN.ICE.GOV.
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14) South Koreans Swept Up in Immigration Raid at Hyundai E.V. Plant in Georgia
They were among nearly 500 workers apprehended at a construction site for a South Korean battery maker, officials said. The episode prompted diplomatic concern in Seoul.
By John Yoon and Jenny Gross, John Yoon reported from Seoul, Sept. 5, 2025
The Hyundai plant in Ellabell, Ga., in March. Credit...Mike Stewart/Associated Press
Immigration authorities arrested hundreds of workers for a major South Korean battery maker at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, U.S. officials said Friday, calling it the largest ever Homeland Security enforcement operation at a single location.
Agents on Thursday arrested 475 people, most of whom are South Korean citizens, at a construction site for an electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Ga., near Savannah, Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security investigations for Georgia, said at a news conference.
He said that the workers arrested were in the United States illegally or were working unlawfully. No criminal charges would be announced on Friday, he said, adding that investigators were still determining employment details for those arrested, some of whom worked for subcontractors.
“This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians and Americans, ensuring a level playing field for businesses that comply with the law, safeguarding the integrity of our economy and protecting workers from exploitation,” Mr. Schrank said.
Most of those arrested were held at the Folkston detention facility on Thursday night and would be moved based on their individual circumstances, he said. One person arrested was treated at the scene for overheating, and one agent suffered a “minor laceration,” but there were no major injuries, he added.
The battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, which co-owns the plant with Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement that employees of both companies, including executives, had been taken into custody.
Hyundai said in a statement that none of those detained were Hyundai employees, as far as the company was aware.
“We are closely monitoring the situation and working to understand the specific circumstances,” Hyundai said on Friday.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry confirmed on Friday that South Koreans were among those in custody, without saying how many. Mr. Schrank told reporters at the plant on Thursday that some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents had been detained initially and were being released.
The agencies involved in the operation included the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the F.B.I., according to the Atlanta division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which also participated.
The operation, part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, caused diplomatic alarm in South Korea. Just over a week earlier, Mr. Trump hosted President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at the White House, where the South Korean leader pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the United States, including in battery manufacturing.
The lithium-ion battery plant, which predated Mr. Lee’s pledge, was expected to start operating next year. It is the kind of large-scale, job-creating investment that the United States has pushed for from South Korea and other nations.
The Ellabell site is part of one of Georgia’s largest manufacturing plants. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has promoted the $7.6 billion Hyundai E.V. factory there as the largest economic development project in state history.
The immigration operation brought construction to a halt at the battery plant, known as HL-GA Battery Company. A spokeswoman, Mary Beth Kennedy, said in a statement that the plant was cooperating with the authorities.
South Korean Embassy and consular officials were sent to the site from Washington and Atlanta, Lee Jaewoong, a spokesman for South Korea’s Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference earlier on Friday. He expressed concern that South Koreans had been detained.
“The economic activities of our investment companies and the rights and interests of our citizens must not be unjustly violated during U.S. law enforcement proceedings,” he said.
LG Energy Solution said that it was working with the South Korean government to get its employees, as well as Hyundai’s, released.
Neal E. Boudette contributed reporting from Detroit.
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15) Chicago Could Be a Powder Keg
By Robert A. Pape, Sept. 5, 2025
Dr. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years.
With Department of Homeland Security agents preparing to assemble in Chicago for an expected crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the Trump administration is starting down a dangerous road. Its incursion into Chicago may begin with pursuing undocumented immigrants, but with its threat to also deploy National Guard troops or active-duty military to combat crime more broadly in the city — over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois — the administration risks provoking large-scale civil unrest.
I have studied democracies’ military occupations of regions within their national borders, focusing on cases that existed in or started after 1980: Britain and Northern Ireland, Spain and the Basques and others. These occupations occurred for a range of reasons, and often started out suppressing violence, but they ended up provoking or exacerbating widespread civil unrest, political violence and terrorism.
There are, of course, many ways in which a de facto military occupation of Chicago would differ from these cases, but the general lessons I’ve learned remain applicable: Occupying forces rarely, if ever, call their activities an occupation, but they are widely perceived as such by the local population. Occupation often lasts longer than expected and leads to involvement beyond its original stated purpose. Protests happen. Suppression of protests happens. The occupying forces must withdraw in disgrace or double down in hopes of pacifying the uprising. Things usually escalate.
This kind of exercise of military force, regardless of the legitimacy of its aims, inevitably intrudes on the political rights and economic livelihoods of ordinary people. Even if an occupation starts out with apparent success, it typically leads to chaos and generates defiance in the local community.
There is reason to worry that Chicago is poised to head down a broadly similar path.
For one thing, many of its residents oppose the presence of federal forces. In June and July my research center, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, conducted a representative survey of more than 1,100 residents of Chicago to gauge their attitudes on federal military deployment to U.S. cities. Sixty percent said they did not “approve of the way President Trump is handling immigration enforcement, including deportations.” Twenty-eight percent said they “would attend a protest against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, even if it became violent.” Thirty percent agreed that “immigrants targeted by the Trump administration for deportation are justified in using force to defend themselves.” Thirty-seven percent agreed that “the use of force is justified to remove Donald Trump from the presidency.”
In a city that has more than 2.5 million residents, those percentages represent significant numbers of people willing to endorse or participate in violent resistance.
In addition, to achieve the administration’s stated objective of drastically and lastingly reducing illegal immigration and other crime, a deployment of federal forces would have to be very large and last many months. Consider that there are, by some estimates, nearly 200,000 undocumented immigrants in Chicago. It takes time and effort to deport people: Across the United States, by August, federal forces were deporting not even 1,500 undocumented immigrants a day. So removing just the 71,000 people with pending cases in immigration court who reside in Cook County (for which Chicago is the county seat) would be an enormous undertaking, requiring many thousands of agents and taking many months — and involving invasive operations throughout the city.
Suppressing crime more broadly in a lasting way would, of course, require even more resources and time and be similarly invasive. The longer federal forces stay and the more expansive their operations, the more the local community will perceive a loss of political power to determine its future. This perception would be exacerbated in Chicago because of the approaching state elections in 2026, which many perceive Mr. Trump as trying to influence through these actions. Note, for example, that Mr. Trump spoke of the need to “liberate” Chicago in a fund-raising email on Wednesday.
This is a Chicago story, but it is also a national story. If the administration proceeds as expected, Chicago will be the third major American city governed by members of Mr. Trump’s political opposition to be subjected this year to the presence of military force, after Los Angeles in June and Washington last month. Other blue cities and states may reasonably fear that they will be next. Mr. Trump is threatening to radicalize our nation’s politics in a way not seen in our lifetimes.
It is not too late. The federal government can still reverse course, limiting its policing efforts in Chicago to illegal immigration, limiting its deportations to convicted criminals and working with — not independently of — local law enforcement. I fervently hope Mr. Trump reconsiders.
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16) What I Got Wrong About D.E.I.
By Eugenia Cheng, Sept. 5, 2025
Dr. Cheng is the scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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As a woman in the male-dominated field of mathematics, I once opposed targeted efforts to help women succeed — what we now call diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are currently facing fierce backlash. I wanted to be judged on the merit of my mathematics alone.
When I was admitted to the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate in math in 1994, I felt that I was a part of a clear minority. I struggled to keep up with some of the men in my class, many of whom had gone to elite boys’ schools where they had intense preparation. Yet I would progress to a Ph.D. and a career as a research mathematician.
As my career has advanced, what I’ve learned is that D.E.I. initiatives helped others see value in my abilities and experience that would have been missed otherwise. And it was through the lens of math that I came to understand this.
Math is not just a way of calculating numerical answers; it is a way of thinking, using clear definitions for concepts and rigorous logic to organize our thoughts and back up our assertions. Numbers can tell us about representation, but they often don’t tell the full story. The percentage of female math graduates in the United States has improved to around 42 percent; however, still less than 18 percent of university professors in mathematics are women. A 50-50 gender split might seem like equality, but not if it was achieved by lowering standards to let more women in. We need to be more careful than that. The nuance found in mathematics can show us a clearer understanding of how to think about equality.
Math is famous for its equations, but equations are more subtle than they first appear. A simple equation like 4 + 1 = 1 + 4 shows not just that two values are equal but also that there are two subtly different ways of adding the same numbers to produce the same result. A similar approach applies to more advanced and complicated forms of math, such as the study of shapes or paths through space. We make choices about how to determine equality.
This is relevant to how we evaluate what people have achieved and make predictions about how well they will do. We can get some insight into how we should make these evaluations from a mathematical field called metric spaces.
A metric is a way of measuring the distance between two points but not necessarily physical distance; it could be how much time it takes with traffic as a factor or how much energy will be expended, depending on whether you’re going uphill or downhill. A distance cannot be measured based on the position of a single point. It requires the effort of measuring the distance between two points. This may sound redundant, but it’s an important clarification: Metrics can be measured only by taking into account the starting point and ending point, as well as relevant features of the journey — the whole story.
When we evaluate people, we could do the same. Instead of looking at just what they have achieved, we could also look at where they started and be clearer about how we are measuring the metaphorical distance they have come and whether we are taking into account the support they had or the obstructions they faced.
If we are selecting sprinters for a track team, we might look at their best times for the 100-meter dash. But if someone had, for some reason, only ever run races uphill or against the wind, it would make sense to take that into account and not compare that runner’s times to others’ directly. We would be treating those people differently but only because their paths were different; really we’d be evaluating their paths fairly relative to their contexts.
Other forms of achievement are not as straightforward to measure, but the idea is analogous. If someone achieved a certain SAT score after months of tutoring and someone else earned the same score having never seen an SAT before, it would be reasonable to be more impressed with the latter result and think that the second test taker has more potential. We should think of D.E.I. efforts as the best versions of this and aim to design systems that can measure the fuller picture of someone’s professional journey, not just the current result.
It took me a long time to realize that when I began my career, I had probably worked much harder than I might have if I had had a different identity. I had to work against people telling me I would never be able to succeed. When I attended conferences, I dealt with inappropriate behavior from men senior to me. I had to find my way in my career having no mentors who looked at all like me. I am grateful for the support of some senior mathematicians, and I now realize that it wasn’t extra help because I was a woman; it was help in overcoming the extra obstructions I faced as a woman.
It shouldn’t be called sexist to help people overcome sexism, and it shouldn’t be called racist to help people overcome racism, but if we give this help too crudely, then we leave ourselves open to these criticisms. Math teaches us that D.E.I. initiatives should be about carefully defining the metrics we use to measure how far people have come and thus how far they have the potential to go. They should be about uncovering when some people are constantly running uphill or against the wind, which can inform us how to give everyone an equal tailwind and an equal opportunity to succeed.
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