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Israeli Consulate in SF
Friday, October 24, 2025
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
456 Montgomery St,
San Francisco
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November 15, 2025, 11:00 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Church
1924 Cedar Street at Bonita
Berkeley, California
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) The Robots Fueling Amazon’s Automation
Meet Sparrow, Cardinal and Proteus. They’re the robots that, step by step, are replacing human workers in the company’s warehouses.
By Karen Weise, Oct. 21, 2025
Karen Weise reported from Shreveport, La., and has covered Amazon since 2018. She welcomes tips at nytimes.com/tips.
Amazon hired the founding team of the A.I. company Covariant. Its robotic arm is shown here in a photo last year. Balazs Gardi for The New York Times
Amazon is building robots that do everything from moving individual shirts and bottles of soap to neatly stacking packages for the shipping dock. Amazon executives hope these robots will help the company avoid hiring hundreds of thousands of employees in the coming years.
Here’s a rundown of what Amazon is doing to automate its facilities, and previously unreported plans for what’s ahead.
How Amazon Got Its Start With Robotics
In 2012, Amazon bought the robot maker Kiva, which made squat, circular robots that could lift a stack of goods and take it to a worker.
Since then, Amazon has categorized all its operations into six types of automation: movement, manipulation, sorting, storage, identification and packing, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, said in an interview last fall. “We want to have a world-class capability in each of those,” he said.
This approach tries to address a central tension in developing robotics, between creating a system that can do many things but is harder to develop and creating one that has a narrower focus but is more likely to succeed.
The company has developed robots that tackle particular challenges. That includes Greek-named updates to Kiva, like Hercules, which moves heavy carts, and Pegasus, which shuttles and sorts packed orders. There is also a flock of robotic arms, including Robin and Sparrow, that manipulate items and packages.
The Robots Amazon Is Using Now
Several years ago, Amazon began rethinking how its primary warehouses operated. The single biggest change was overhauling how Amazon stored and moved items.
In the old system, Amazon stored products in towers of cubbies that had a fabric front; workers put a hand into the cubby and fished around for the desired product.
In the new system, called Sequoia, those cubbies have been replaced with plastic bins that robotically slide in and out of a frame. Products can move around the warehouse in those bins, and using computer vision, Amazon can look into the bins from overhead to identify items. Then robotic arms move the items with suction cups.
“We thought that change could be a simplifier in allowing the robots around the system to be more effective and allow us to take away a part of the process in a way that could actually lead to safer outcomes and to more efficient output,” said Udit Madan, Amazon’s head of operations.
At Amazon’s most advanced warehouse, in Shreveport, La., employees touch products at just a few stages, such as taking them out of shipping boxes and placing them in bins.
After that, the Sparrow robotic arm looks into a bin of items, picks the one it wants and puts it in another bin. The robotic arm called Robin places packed packages on a small robot called Pegasus, which shuttles packages to drop down specific chutes depending on where they will be shipped. Beneath that chute, a beefy, tall robotic arm called Cardinal grabs sealed boxes and stacks them into carts.
“As the packages come down into the chutes, Cardinal is able to pick those boxes, lift it, and play Tetris very nicely” to fit the boxes in the carts, said Abhishek Gowrishankar, who runs the Shreveport facility.
A tortoise-looking robot named Proteus slides under those carts and autonomously carries them to shipping docks. When it navigates around workers, its lights form a smile.
There are other smaller advancements. Different machines pack items into boxes and envelopes, depending on the customer order. One blows air to keep the sides of a paper envelope apart so a worker can easily slide in an item. And the first new address labeler in two decades has an arm that moves in different directions to place the labels on 3,000 packages an hour.
What’s Ahead for Amazon’s Robots
For now, the Sparrow arm is used for consolidating inventory between the bins. But internal documents viewed by The New York Times show that Amazon has tested arms to pick inventory for individual customer orders, one of the key tasks currently done by workers.
A process known as “decanting” — cutting open boxes, unpacking products and getting them into bins — has remained stubbornly manual.
So far, robotic decanting prototypes have not kept pace with the rest of the automated systems. People are needed to ensure that the inventory isn’t damaged, or that it matches the expected shipment. For now, workers at the Shreveport facility stand at an updated station that uses computer vision to detect which bin a product is placed in, requiring fewer steps.
In the smaller facilities that Amazon uses for same-day deliveries, it has experimented with a system called Jupiter to store and robotically retrieve a lot of inventory. But Amazon is still years away from what internal documents describe as the goal of “near lights-out automation” at those buildings.
Executives have been focusing on everyday products, like deodorant and groceries, which customers buy more of when they are delivered quickly. Those products are housed at ultrafast facilities that are already highly efficient because they are geographically close to customers. But because these are low-margin items, cutting costs to fulfill the orders and being able to store more inventory in the buildings are critical.
And Amazon has only begun to integrate this next generation of artificial intelligence into its systems. The company paid $400 million a year ago to hire the founding team and license the technology of Covariant, a start-up developing A.I. systems that act like a robot’s “brain.”
Mr. Madan said the team had already improved the vision models of the Sparrow system, letting the arm better understand what is in a bin, which item to grasp and where to best place it in another bin.
Those advanced systems are part of Amazon’s experiments to create a new generation of robotic arms, called Bluejay and Starling, that can manipulate items and packages in a broader range of tasks and in different types of buildings.
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2) Nations Hesitate to Send Troops to Gaza, Fearing Clashes With Hamas
The Trump peace plan calls for an international security force in the Gaza Strip, but countries that might send troops are wary of danger, an unclear mission and being seen as occupiers.
By Adam Rasgon, Michael D. Shear, David M. Halbfinger, Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer, Oct. 21, 2025
Adam Rasgon, David Halbfinger, Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer reported from Jerusalem. Michael Shear reported from London.
A member of Hamas during the handover of Israeli hostages in Deir al-Balah in Gaza this month. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The fragile cease-fire in Gaza that came into force last week rests on some key assumptions: that Hamas militants give up their weapons and that an international troop presence keep the peace as Israel withdraws its military from the enclave.
But the countries that might make up that force are skittish about committing soldiers who could potentially come into direct conflict with Hamas while it is still an armed group, diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations say.
President Trump’s 20-point plan, which led to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, envisioned the immediate deployment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The idea was for the international corps to secure areas where Israeli troops have withdrawn, prevent munitions from entering the territory, facilitate the distribution of aid and train a Palestinian police force.
The creation and deployment of an international force in Gaza could determine whether the current cease-fire has a chance to evolve into a lasting agreement, and whether Israelis and Palestinians move toward the broader aim of a durable peace.
Diplomats and other officials from several countries who are familiar with the situation say there has been little progress on when the force might be assembled because of confusion over the force’s mission, which appears to be the most serious stumbling block.
Representatives from several countries seen as likely participants have said privately that they will not commit troops until there is more clarity about what the force will be expected to do once it arrives in Gaza, according to two diplomats briefed on the discussions in recent days.
Their main concern is that their troops should not be expected to fight Hamas militants, some of whom remain heavily armed, on Israel’s behalf. For several of the countries, that prospect alone would be reason enough to back out, the officials said.
Some of the countries have also indicated in private discussions that they do not want their troops to be in the centers of Gaza’s cities, because of the danger posed there by Hamas and its tunnel networks, according to discussions with people familiar with the talks.
All of the people spoke on condition of anonymity, and insisted that the reluctant countries not be identified, to discuss the sensitive discussions.
An eruption of violence in Gaza on Sunday underscored those concerns. An attack by Palestinian militants in Israeli-held territory killed two Israeli soldiers, according to the Israeli military. Israel responded with a punishing bombardment of what it described as Hamas installations, which killed 45 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties.
Under the Biden administration, preliminary efforts were made to form a force including personnel from Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Italy, according to Jamie Rubin, who served as an adviser to Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state at the time, and helped develop a plan for postwar governance in Gaza.
Recent discussions have included Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey and Azerbaijan, according to two diplomats.
Mediators who negotiated the current cease-fire are eager to get an international force into Gaza quickly to stabilize the area before Hamas consolidates its power in the roughly half of Gaza that Israel has ceded so far.
A Turkish government statement stated that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had said Turkey would join a task force that it described as overseeing the cease-fire. It was unclear whether he was referring directly to the stabilization force. Some in Israel’s leadership are likely to be skeptical about Turkey playing a leading role in Gaza given that Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly condemned Israel during the past two years.
President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia said during a speech at the United Nations last month that his country was ready to deploy 20,000 or more troops to “help secure peace in Gaza” and other war zones.
Uncertainty about who would be responsible for security in Gaza could leave parts of the enclave without any military presence to counter Hamas for weeks, if not months. The situation has produced some difficult contradictions as diplomats try to move forward with plans for the region.
Without such a force and government, diplomats said, Gaza could be left with Hamas as the only governing authority. Moreover, Israel’s military is unlikely to withdraw further — a key inducement for Hamas to accept the Trump plan — until an international force is ready to take its place.
Much depends, however, on whether Hamas gives up its weapons — which its leaders have been reluctant to do thus far.
Asked about how Hamas would disarm, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and one of the architects of the cease-fire told CBS’s 60 Minutes last week: “So in order for that to occur, we need to create the international stabilization force and then the international stabilization force needs to create a local Palestinian government.”
Analysts say Arab states would be unlikely to deploy soldiers in Gaza if they feared they could be drawn into clashes with armed Hamas gunmen resisting their presence, and also if their participation was not connected to a pathway to Palestinian statehood — which Israel’s government opposes.
“Getting militarily involved in Gaza is politically risky for Arab countries,” said Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on Palestinian affairs and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Middle East-focused think tank in Washington. “They don’t want to come in and be seen as doing Israel’s dirty work. So they need a Palestinian invitation and the U.N. Security Council mandate.”
He added, “They also don’t want their contribution to be merely coming to secure a cease-fire that doesn’t lead to ending the Israeli occupation.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has suggested that Israel would act to disarm Hamas “the hard way” if the Palestinian militants refused to do so on their own.
The idea of an international peacekeeping force in Gaza has been under discussion since soon after Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel began its two-year military response. Various proposals from France, the United States and others have suggested that such a force would be needed quickly after the fighting between Israel and Hamas ended.
Discussions are also underway about the establishment of a separate, Palestinian police force that might operate in the urban areas of Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority, which runs a large police force in the West Bank, would seem a natural candidate, except for the opposition of Israel. Mr. Netanyahu, who has long sought to prevent both the West Bank and Gaza from winding up under the control of the same Palestinian entity, has firmly rejected any meaningful involvement of the authority in Gaza. When his cabinet outlined its terms for ending the war in August, it included an explicit statement that the Palestinian Authority would not govern Gaza.
And even Palestinian officials say that the authority’s reassertion of control in Gaza — from which it was ejected by Hamas in a 2007 civil war — would likely require careful planning and further training for its security forces.
Mohammad Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, told reporters on Thursday that Egypt and Jordan were providing training to some of the authority’s officers and that the authority would “gradually operate” in Gaza after the war.
But asked when that might happen, he did not provide a timeline.
“War did stop but a lot of arrangements still are not in place,” Mr. Mustafa conceded at a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah, “on governance, on security, on logistics.”
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3) In First Six Months, Cost of Weather Catastrophes Escalated at a Record Pace
The Trump administration stopped updating a database tracking the costs of the country’s worst disasters. A group of scientists has revived it.
By Scott Dance, Oct. 22, 2025
Sifting for belongings after a tornado blew through Plantersville, Ala., in March. That tornado outbreak caused $10.6 billion in damage, one of this year’s costliest disasters. Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times
The Trump administration this year stopped updating a federal database that tracked the cost of extreme weather and informed an annual list of hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage.
But the cost of such catastrophes continues to escalate at a record pace. That’s according to a revived version of the database released Wednesday by the nonprofit group Climate Central.
Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, it found. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year, the researchers found.
The tally comes as President Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. And there are signs that is already happening. The administration has created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November.
More than half of the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January, which nearly doubled the record for fire damage, adjusted for inflation, said Adam Smith, the senior climate impacts scientist at Climate Central.
Mr. Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years as a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. He left the agency in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980.
He is continuing the work at Climate Central, using the same methodology — and plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data.
“This data set was simply too important to stop being updated,” Mr. Smith said.
A NOAA spokeswoman, Kim Doster, said the agency ”appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound, unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation.”
The information is used by the insurance industry, policymakers and researchers to understand and plan for a future in which — just as in the present — storms, floods, fires and other hazards are becoming more frequent, intense and damaging. The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 years, the data show.
That is not entirely a function of changes in weather extremes. As more people and businesses move into areas that are prone to floods and wildfire, more property is vulnerable to damage.
Mr. Smith said that while those factors might complicate the analysis, there is a common explanation for disaster data trends: “The rise in damage relates to human activities.”
Climate change, the result of humans’ burning of fossil fuels, is linked to an increase in some types of extreme weather. Warm oceans are allowing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly. Warm air is capable of carrying heavier amounts of moisture, which is raining down faster and causing extreme flooding. And heat and droughts are drying out vegetation, creating fuel for wildfires.
Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate change’s effects on communities, said the database serves as a powerful signal of both changing weather extremes and “decision making that is costing us a lot of money.”
The billion dollar disaster list “has been one of the most effective bridges to the public communicating the increasing costs of disasters,” Mr. Rumbach said. “It’s a really powerful tool for communicating to the public this trend we see.”
Damage from the Los Angeles wildfires exceeded $60 billion, the Climate Central report found. That was nearly twice as costly as fires that burned through Northern California, including the town of Paradise, in 2018.
Severe storms — which brought tornadoes, hail and floods to much of the country — accounted for the rest of the nationwide damage, which totaled $101.4 billion between January and June, according to the database. A tornado outbreak that struck the central and southern United States from March 14 to 16 caused $10.6 billion in damage.
Mr. Smith said Climate Central plans to update the database in January with all of the 2025 data. Researchers are already evaluating one candidate for potential inclusion on the list: the July 4 floods that struck central Texas, killing at least 136 people.
At the same time, it has been an unexpectedly quiet Atlantic hurricane season. If the United States makes it past November without landfall by a tropical storm or hurricane, it may mean a relative break from an otherwise harrowing stretch: Four of the five most costly disaster seasons have occurred since 2017, Mr. Smith.
The fifth? It was 2005, a year of historic damage from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
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4) Coffee Production May Be Imperiled as Forests Are Destroyed for More Crops
A new report by an industry watchdog adds to growing scientific consensus that as forests are felled to make way for coffee farms, rainfall decreases and crops are more likely to fail.
By Ephrat Livni, Oct. 22, 2025
Every day, we drink more than two billion cups of coffee worldwide, by some estimates, and demand keeps rising.
To grow beans to quench this thirst, ever more forests have been felled globally for farming. But in an ecological and agricultural irony, the more forests are destroyed to grow coffee, the more the crop’s long-term prospects are jeopardized by changing rains, according to a new report by Coffee Watch, a nonprofit industry watchdog.
The group, whose findings were published on Wednesday, mapped deforestation in Brazil’s southeastern coffee belt and compared it to rainfall changes and crop failures in the same region. It found that as companies destroyed local forests to make way for plantations, rainfall in those areas decreased, which led to crop failures and lower yields and, ultimately, higher prices for consumers.
“The ecologically destructive way we grow coffee is going to result in us not having coffee,” said Etelle Higonnet, the group’s director.
“Deforestation for coffee cultivation is killing the rains, which is killing the coffee,” she said in a phone interview. If the trend continues, she added, farmers will produce fewer crops even as more forests are destroyed to accommodate more farmland.
The report argues that clearing forests to meet demand for coffee will exacerbate rainfall patterns that are already shrinking yields for farmers. (Coffee production is at risk because the crop is highly sensitive to rain patterns and not very resilient to drought.)
The report’s conclusions align with findings by Brazilian scientists published in Nature Communications last month. The study found that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest had led to about a 75 percent decrease in rainfall there.
The growing data show that deforestation affects rainfall and other growing conditions, which were previously difficult to quantify without advanced mapping and analytical tools.
The new research comes as Brazil and other coffee-producing countries are fighting with the European Union about a law that would force them to provide information about whether coffee sold in the bloc had been grown on recently deforested land.
Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer, with an environment uniquely suited to cultivation. But conditions in the main southeastern growing regions that have helped coffee thrive there — like reliable, timely rains and fertile soil — have degraded with deforestation, the reports states, and the forest felling continues.
According to Coffee Watch, a 2014 drought in Brazil was a turning point, when rain shortages became practically annual. Since then, when rain has fallen, the timing is often misaligned with the needs of finicky coffee crops. Simultaneously, as these moisture deficits continue, the soil dries, further undermining growth, the report concludes.
Last year, intense drought in Brazil contributed to shortages and wild spikes in global coffee prices, foreshadowing trouble ahead. Though the Brazilian government has made strides in reducing deforestation in some areas in recent years, a much more severe pricing crisis could be brewing if the annual rain cycles collapse. By 2050, extreme prices could be the norm as much of Brazil’s coffee belt becomes less fruitful, Coffee Watch predicted.
Still, deforestation for agricultural expansion is not at all unique to Brazil, and coffee growing is not the most problematic agricultural activity. Cattle ranching and soy farming are behind much of the forest felling in Brazil and elsewhere.
Forests absorb carbon and help regulate the global climate, but high demand for major commodities, like coffee, has driven deforestation worldwide. In 2023, the European Union adopted a law that would compel industry players in cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee and rubber to prove that their products do not come from recently deforested land.
To maintain access to the European market, which consumes more coffee than any country or bloc in the world, farmers in major growing and exporting nations like Vietnam and Ethiopia are preparing to provide geolocation data about the provenance of their crops.
Brazil has opposed the legislation. Last year it pushed for delays, writing to the European Commission. the executive arm of the European Union, that it is “a unilateral and punitive instrument that disregards national laws,” conflicts with principles of sovereignty, discriminates against countries with forest resources and raises production and export costs.
Instead, it proposed a change to the economics behind deforestation and to establish a fund to pay developing countries a fee for protecting forests. Next month, Brazil will host the annual United Nations climate conference in the Amazon and attempt to advance its environmental vision amid shifting political winds and growing evidence that conducting business as usual is not a long-term option.
Last month, the European Commission called for a delay in putting the deforestation law into effect, saying the system is not ready technically.
But on Tuesday, the commission announced scaled-back requirements instead of a full delay, with rules beginning at staggered times for big and small companies. The proposal, the commission noted, still needs approval from the European Parliament.
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5) U.S. Strikes Boat in Pacific, Expanding Operation Against Drug Running Suspects
It was the eighth known strike, and the first outside of the Caribbean, in the Trump administration’s campaign against what it says are boats carrying drugs bound for the United States.
By Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage, Reporting from Washington, Oct. 22, 2025
U.S. troops riding an amphibious supply vehicle during a training exercise in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, last week. The military has been expanding its presence in the Caribbean region. Credit...Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters
The U.S. military attacked another vessel that the government suspected was carrying drugs, but for the first time struck a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia rather than in the Caribbean Sea, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
The strike, on late Tuesday, killed two or three people on the boat, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
This was the eighth known strike that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted since Sept. 2, when the military, on President Trump’s orders, began killing people aboard boats believed to be smuggling drugs as if they were enemy combatants in a war rather than criminal suspects.
The administration has previously acknowledged seven strikes, which it said have killed 32 people. It has not yet announced the latest strike, which was earlier reported by CBS News.
The Trump administration’s policy of attacking suspected drug runners began with a focus on Venezuela. Officials are also weighing whether to intensify an effort to remove Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020 and whom the Trump team calls a cartel leader.
But in the interim, the boat attacks have increasingly encompassed Colombia, which is a far greater source of narcotics smuggled to the United States than Venezuela. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has said several strikes had killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Mr. Trump has said he was cutting off foreign aid to Colombia in response.
The Trump administration has said that each of the seven previous attacks were in international waters and that the passengers were members of drug cartels that the State Department had designated terrorist organizations.
Many of those designations, which the administration itself made in the months leading up to the campaign, are contested because drug cartels are motivated by the pursuit of illicit profits, while terrorists, by definition, are motivated by religious or ideological goals.
The administration has also said intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers’ identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence.
U.S. officials on Wednesday did not immediately identify any specific group for the boat it struck off the Colombian coast.
A broad range of outside legal specialists in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even criminal suspects — who are not directly participating in hostilities.
The White House has said the strikes are legal as a matter of self-defense and because Mr. Trump has “determined” that the country is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels that his team has deemed to be terrorists.
It has not publicly offered a legal theory that explains how to bridge the gap between trafficking an illicit product and organized armed attacks. It has pointed to the fact that around 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year. But the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico.
South America is instead a source of cocaine. Much of the world’s supply of that drug is produced by three countries there — especially Colombia, which has coastlines in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The majority of the cocaine smuggled into the United States moves through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, U.S. data shows. But the Trump administration has mostly focused its rhetoric on Venezuela, which only has a coast on the Caribbean. Mr. Trump described initial boat strikes as having killed Venezuelans and members of a Venezuelan gang.
But the strikes are causing larger turmoil in the region, and increasingly affecting Colombia.
Mr. Petro of Colombia has said two strikes, one on Sept. 15 and one on Oct. 3, had killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Relatives of a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago said he and a neighbor were killed in an Oct. 14 attack.
Citizens of Colombia and yet another country, Ecuador, were survived an Oct. 16 strike on a semi-submersible vessel, which Mr. Trump later said killed two people. The Navy rescued two survivors and the administration repatriated them, with Mr. Trump saying both would be detained and prosecuted.
However, prosecutors in Ecuador declined to charge that man, and instead released him on the grounds that there was no accusation he had committed a crime inside Ecuadorean territory.
By contrast, the other survivor has been hospitalized in Colombia with brain trauma and is breathing on a ventilator, Armando Benedetti, Colombia’s minister of the interior, said in a social media post on Saturday night. When he returns to consciousness, Mr. Benedetti also said, he would be “processed by the justice system for drug trafficking.”
In the seventh strike, on Oct. 17, the military killed three men the Trump administration accused of smuggling drugs for a Marxist insurgent group in Colombia known as the E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997.
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6) ‘Brother Wang,’ Accused of Being Drug Cartel Fixer, Is Arrested in Cuba
Zhi Dong Zhang, who escaped house arrest in Mexico this summer, is accused of supplying cartels with fentanyl from China, smuggling and money laundering millions under the alias “Brother Wang.”
By Paulina Villegas, Reporting from Mexico City, Oct. 23, 2025
He linked some of Mexico’s most powerful cartels with drugmaking chemicals from China, officials say, and smuggled cocaine and fentanyl across the U.S. border by land and air.
He ran stash houses packed with drugs throughout the United States, according to court documents, and laundered millions in cash using dozens of bank accounts.
And he slipped from house arrest — through a hole in the wall, one senior Mexican official said — while under the watch of Mexico’s National Guard, setting off an international manhunt that ended with the announcement this week that he had been arrested in Cuba.
The U.S. and Mexican authorities have accused the man, a Chinese national named Zhi Dong Zhang, of being a major cartel broker with aliases including “Brother Wang,” and a leader of a criminal network linking China, the Americas and Europe. His detention in Cuba was announced late Wednesday by Mexico’s Security Ministry, which said that he had been detained along with two others, a Mexican and a Chinese national.
The ministry’s statement did not name Mr. Zhang but clearly described his case — from his arrest in October 2024, when Mexican police and military forces swept into one of Mexico City’s busiest neighborhoods, to his escape from house arrest this summer.
His escape, recalling embarrassing prison breaks of notorious criminals, raised host of difficult questions for Mexican officials about security lapses and potential corruption. It also came at a particularly sensitive moment in U.S.-Mexican relations, with the Trump administration putting intense pressure on Mexico to do more against drug cartels.
Mexico has responded by delivering dozens of suspects to the United States, cracking down on a powerful cartel and tightening cooperation with U.S. officials on crime.
After his arrest last year, Mr. Zhang seemed bound for extradition to the United States, where he faces drug trafficking charges, with Mexican officials saying the extradition process was close to being finalized when he slipped out of house arrest.
Mr. Zhang was initially held in a maximum-security prison. But a judge then placed him under house arrest — a decision that President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico called “outrageous,” after his escape.
“How is it possible that even as the attorney general’s office appealed to the Judicial Council, stressing the importance of keeping this person in custody, the judge went ahead and granted his release?” Ms. Sheinbaum said in a news conference.
Mr. Zhang executed the escape itself by digging a hole through the wall of the house where he was being held, slipping into an adjoining residence, according to the senior Mexican official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive criminal case.
Mr. Zhang fled first to Cuba, the official said, explaining that he is then thought to have tried to enter Russia with fake documents, but was detained and sent back to Cuba.
The security ministry said that it learned he was in Cuba after international authorities were alerted about the manhunt and the Cuban and Mexican governments exchanged information.
Mexican officials say they are speaking with their Cuban counterparts about his possible deportation or extradition to Mexico.
American and Mexican officials have accused Mr. Zhang of being a major player in the drug trade, with links to Mexico’s largest cartels and operations that include drug production, smuggling and money laundering.
Mr. Zhang was “an important manager of international money laundering,” Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, said not long after his first arrest. Mr. Zhang, he said, was “also responsible for making connections between cartels for transporting fentanyl from China to Central America, South America, Europe and the United States.”
He also helped lead a drug organization that crisscrossed the United States — including in Georgia, California, Illinois and New York — according to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent’s affidavit filed in a U.S. federal court in Georgia this summer.
That filing accused him of leading a vast drug-trafficking and money-laundering network that moved cocaine and fentanyl from Mexico into several U.S. cities.
That network, court documents said, had operated in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas since at least 2016, smuggling in large quantities of cocaine and fentanyl for distribution across the United States and channeling the profits back to Mexico.
Mr. Zhang coordinated the smuggling and oversaw the distribution, the court documents said, managing stash houses where cash proceeds were collected, counted, and deposited into U.S. bank accounts he controlled.
An investigation found about 150 companies and 170 bank accounts connected to Mr. Zhang’s organization, the court documents said, with about $20 million deposited in accounts it controlled in 2020 and 2021.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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7) What Happened in Gaza Might Be Even Worse Than We Think
By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Oct. 23, 2025
Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
For many Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in Gaza. After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.
Their defense is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run health ministry, must be an exaggeration to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.
Yet now is a time of reckoning. After two years of relentless violence, a fragile and uncertain cease-fire has settled over Gaza, bringing joyous scenes of Israeli captives reuniting with their families and of Palestinian prisoners returning home after years of detention. But that must be set against the apocalyptic reality survivors face: a moonscape of total devastation and unfathomable loss. Today there is a chance, if we want it, to begin to discover the true cost of this war. We might find that it’s even worse than we thought.
First, let’s talk about the numbers. In Gaza, the dead — at least 68,229 people, by the latest count — have been tallied by the Ministry of Health, which is, like other government services in the enclave, run by Hamas. This has stirred skepticism, to say the least. But experts in counting war dead told me that the ministry’s accounting has been unusually rigorous. It includes not just individual names of people confirmed to have died because of the war but also their ages, their sex and, crucially, easily validated identification numbers.
“The Ministry of Health, we know, for various reasons, is really conservative actually in putting people on the list,” Michael Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has studied the toll of war for decades, told me. There is, he said, a remarkable level of transparency. “The information is incomparably better than what we know about recent conflicts in Tigray, Sudan, South Sudan.”
In fact, for all the tally’s trustworthiness, many experts suspect it to be a significant undercount. Spagat and a group of researchers undertook a 2,000-household survey in Gaza that suggested that the official figures were likely to be undercounting the number of people killed in the war by roughly 39 percent.
The fatality figures, though, do not distinguish between fighters and civilians. This fact provides another claim: that most of those killed are Hamas fighters and so legitimate targets. But Spagat’s survey confirms another aspect of the death figures: The majority of those killed — some 56 percent — were women, children and the elderly.
“In a typical conflict, it would be even more military-age males than what you’re seeing here,” Spagat told me. “The percentage of women, children and elderly is unusually high.” One need only look at the shattered remnants of Gaza to know that Israel’s relentless barrage of bombs and missiles, far from being precision-targeted at fighters, fell on young and old, men and women, with equal force.
But the careful counting of the dead reveals only part of the war’s human cost. In many recent conflicts — in Darfur, Tigray, Congo and Yemen — as many or more die of hunger and disease as by violence. These are called indirect deaths, and they are often calculated by measuring the rates of death before and after the fighting began. Including these deaths is important, experts told me, because leaving them out obscures the true cost of war.
I saw this myself in Darfur in the mid-2000s, where deadly attacks by the Janjaweed militias were just the beginning of the misery. Villagers would be forced to flee their homes and packed into squalid makeshift camps. Aid would take weeks or months to reach them. Children under 5, pregnant women, the disabled and the elderly would be among the first to die — not from bullets or bombs but from the conditions created by violence.
In Congo in 2006, I spent several days at a hospital in the eastern part of the country, documenting the indirect toll of the war’s aftermath on children. I watched as a toddler named Amuri drew his last, gasping breaths, succumbing to measles, a disease easily prevented by routine immunizations and treatable with access to modern medicine. He was just one of many children I watched that week die preventable deaths.
These high rates of indirect death are common in remote regions of vast, impoverished nations where populations are widely dispersed and aid struggles to reach them. Gaza is different. It is small — roughly the size of Detroit — and easily accessible by land. Before the war it had one of the highest rates of humanitarian aid per capita in the world, and its people were far healthier on average than populations in other conflict zones. High levels of childhood vaccination protected young children from communicable diseases, such as polio.
This should have meant that indirect deaths would be a smaller share of the total than in other wars. And for much of the conflict, it was. But Israel’s decision to sharply limit and sometimes entirely block aid to Gaza pushed the enclave into famine this year. Its health infrastructure was shattered and most of its two million inhabitants were forced to flee, often multiple times, and made to live in unsanitary, exposed conditions. We cannot yet know how much damage that has caused.
The hope is that the cease-fire will allow things to get better. Yet in some ways, this anxious period could be quite deadly for people in Gaza. With so much devastation, many who return to their homes will find nothing but rubble. There is every reason to expect that Israel will seek to use the flow of humanitarian aid — food, water, electricity, medical supplies and workers — as leverage in complex negotiations over the future of Gaza.
Under the terms of the cease-fire, which has already been sorely tested, 600 trucks of aid were supposed to enter Gaza daily. But since the fighting stopped, according to the United Nations, fewer than 100 trucks have arrived on average every day. Gazans are destitute. “I’d be very surprised if there’s anything less than 50,000 nontrauma deaths,” Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and one of the world’s leading experts on famine, told me.
If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years. It already is, in proportional terms, deadlier than the wars in Yemen, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine. And it will be impossible to hide from reality: Gaza’s small size, accessibility and aid infrastructure forbid it. Compared with other conflicts, the death toll — both direct and indirect — can be determined with unusual precision.
That will make what happened harder to play down or deny, but it won’t be impossible. In a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, Jared Kushner described the ruins of Gaza from a recent visit with the Israeli military. “It looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area,” he said. Asked if he thought it was genocide, he responded immediately: “No.” His negotiating partner, Steve Witkoff, jumped in. “No, no, there was a war being fought.”
The rubble tells one story; the people who created it tell another. The reckoning will be in deciding which story we choose to believe.
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8) Fear and Anger Fill New York’s Canal Street After Immigration Raid
The famous shopping strip, usually teeming with street vendors, turned quiet a day after federal agents descended.
By Ana Ley and Olivia Bensimon, Oct. 23, 2025
Federal immigration agents staged a raid on Tuesday in the Canal Street area of New York City and detained nine men who were accused of being in the United States illegally. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
On a normal day, Canal Street in Lower Manhattan brims with licensed and unlicensed street vendors peddling purses, watches, sweatshirts and all manner of tchotchkes.
Wednesday was not a normal day. The strip had turned quiet. Most of the vendors were gone. Tourists had been asking where they were, some shopkeepers said.
A day earlier, more than 50 federal agents had descended on a stretch of the street that is famous for the African men and Chinese women who illegally sell bootleg luxury merchandise to tourists.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday that its agents had arrested nine men accused of living in the United States illegally. The men, mostly from West Africa and some with prior arrests, were targeted in an operation “focused on criminal activity relating to selling counterfeit goods,” the department said. The agents also arrested four protesters.
People across New York City appeared on edge after the raid, seemingly bracing for the activation of President Trump’s threat to deploy military personnel and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to New York City, which he often casts as lawless and dangerous. Mr. Trump has already moved to send troops to other Democratic-led cities — Chicago, Washington, Memphis, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
On Wednesday evening, the depth of the anger over the raid was evident as several hundred demonstrators rallied at 26 Federal Plaza, the New York City headquarters of ICE. Lifting placards and their voices, the demonstrators chanted, “Vendor power!”
The demonstrators marched north from Foley Square to Canal Street, filling about five blocks as they walked, before turning onto Broadway. One woman climbed on a police car in front of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse.
“It’s important to be here,” said Philip Clay, 45, an English tutor and visual artist from Queens who was demonstrating. “No ICE.”
Earlier, Bethany Li, the executive director of a civil rights organization, said that many people in and around Chinatown felt afraid but ready to resist. Her organization, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is blocks from where the raid took place.
“People have been scared by the fact that the federal government is coming in and harming and threatening residents in immigrant neighborhoods,” Ms. Li said. “But then I think there’s also this mood of defiance. It’s like: ‘No, ICE can’t come in and terrorize our communities in this way. Not in New York.’”
Some vendors who lingered on Wednesday condemned the raid as demeaning and racist.
“How many white people pass here?” said Mohamed Touré, 46. “All of them have papers? No.”
Mr. Touré said he was stopped by federal officers on Tuesday afternoon and asked for his papers. “We need a little bit of respect, too,” he said, adding that agents were going up only to Black vendors.
The Department of Homeland Security sent a tweet Wednesday hailing the raid. “Everyone does not, in fact, like counterfeit products being sold. Nor do they like violent illegal aliens,” the agency’s tweet said.
Earlier in the day, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, had defended the raid during an interview on Fox News and promised an increase in arrests.
In New York City, elected officials and human rights advocates denounced Tuesday’s sweep.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she had launched an online portal to collect photos and videos of ICE officials to determine whether they were breaking the law during enforcement actions.
For generations, Canal Street has been a gathering point for merchants of Asian descent, especially those from China. But when migrants began to arrive in New York City by the tens of thousands three years ago under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., West African vendors flocked to the area to sell their wares.
Andrew B. Wolf, an assistant professor of global labor and work at Cornell University who researches street vending, said that it is common for ethnic groups to specialize in certain industries after the first arrivals gain a foothold and begin to channel in newcomers.
“There’s the one person actually making money in the community, and then the other people come,” Mr. Wolf said.
He noted that the Police Department regularly conducts operations in the neighborhood, arresting vendors and confiscating their property. He said that the city’s real estate, retail and restaurant groups had lobbied to make it difficult for vendors to get licenses, making them a frequent target of law enforcement.
Police officers raided the Canal Street area in August 2023, focusing on Wooster and Lispenard Streets. They arrested eight vendors, seizing millions of dollars in merchandise. In January, they conducted another sting, arresting several vendors and recovering suitcases and black trash bags filled with watches and other goods.
Residents said that they were used to seeing police officers — not federal agents — arresting vendors.
“This is definitely not normal,” said Barrett Maguire, 64, a building superintendent in TriBeCa. Mr. Maguire has walked down Canal Street since the 1980s, encountering sellers hawking fake designer bags and sunglasses.
Jean-Claude and Aurore Csont, visiting New York on their honeymoon from Toulouse, France, were in a double-decker tourist bus that had rumbled along Canal Street days before the raid. They saw the street teeming with vendors, their wares displayed on sheets and in little carts.
“They have to live, you know,” Mr. Csont said. “They’re not really bothering anyone.”
Ms. Csont said that they had seen vendors like them in Rome and Paris, and she viewed them as “part of the charm.”
Jack Tchen, a historian who studies New York’s Chinatown, said that the raid had paralyzed activity in a part of the city where Chinese immigrants had worked for decades to build a home. Mr. Tchen said that the raid followed a pattern of discrimination against people of Chinese descent in America.
“Anti-Chinese attitudes have been in this country for a long time,” said Mr. Tchen, whose work focuses on what he describes as antiracist and anti-colonialist stories. “Whereas, oftentimes Chinese-made goods were very welcomed. The elites — you know, porcelain, silks, furniture — and cheap stuff — fortune cookies. Everything has been has been readily consumed in the American commercial culture.”
Though street vendors have sometimes irritated shopkeepers because they block doorsteps and create a crowded environment, they also can bring in more business. Some competitors lamented their absence.
“There’s nobody out here,” said Awa Ngam, who has been selling sweatshirts and T-shirts with a license at Canal and Lafayette Streets for more than a decade and who has seen West African vendors there for years. “I don’t like it today.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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