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”
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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.
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) US Department of Agriculture says no food aid benefits will be issued next month
By Jasper Ward, October 26, 2025
A man loads his cart with groceries and toilet paper at the Community Table food pantry, weeks into the continuing U.S. government shutdown, in Arvada, Colorado, U.S. October 22, 2025. REUTERS/Mark Makela Purchase Licensing Rights
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Saturday that food benefits under one of the country's biggest social assistance programs will not be issued next month amid the ongoing federal government shutdown.
The shutdown is now in its 25th day, with Republicans and Democrats in Congress remaining at an impasse over how to fund and reopen the federal government.
"Bottom line, the well has run dry," the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a post on its website. "At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01."
More than 41 million depend on the monthly payments, according to the USDA. In some states, like New Mexico, dependence on the program is as high as 21% of residents, it said.
The agency's announcement came after more than 200 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday called on USDA to draw on its emergency reserves to fund November food benefits.
However, according to a memo seen by Reuters, the department indicated that it would not do so.
Governors in Louisiana and Virginia declared states of emergencies this week to make funds available to help with hunger relief in anticipation of SNAP benefits not being issued next month.
Reporting by Jasper Ward; Editing by Sonali Paul
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2) How Politics Is Changing the Way History Is Taught
History lessons are being wiped from the internet, and California is retreating from ethnic studies, as education swings away from curriculums that are seen as too progressive.
By Dana Goldstein, Oct. 27, 2025
In the Trump era, history and civics education are under a microscope.
Several major curriculum publishers have withdrawn products from the market, while others have found that teachers are shying away from lessons that were once uncontroversial, on topics as basic as constitutional limits on executive power.
California, the nation’s largest Democratic-led state, has passed a law restricting what teachers can say in the classroom, and has walked back an effort to require high school students to take classes in ethnic studies.
To supporters of these changes, they are a necessary corrective to what they see as a leftward tilt in the education establishment. But these developments have also set off alarms among free speech advocates, as the Trump administration pushes to punish speech it dislikes and to impose its patriotic vision of American history on schools.
Adam Laats, a historian of education at Binghamton University, noted that school curriculum had been restricted before, notably during the Red Scares of the last century. But the current political pressure is unique, he said: “Never before has this kind of fervor from the right owned the Oval Office.”
As recently as last year, many social studies teachers reported success in withstanding political pressure. Now, there is growing evidence that the landscape is shifting. In a September poll, more than half of the teachers who responded said that political pressure had caused them to modify their curriculums or classroom discussions, a sharp increase from March.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has led the push for changes in education, said President Trump’s return to office accelerated a cultural shift that was already underway. Over the last five years, more than 20 states have passed laws restricting classroom discussions on race, gender and American history.
“Even center-left Democrats are starting to pull away from left-wing ideologies they had endorsed a few years before,” he said. “The reason for this is quite simple. America has a center-right culture and the gap between the public and these elite ideologies became a political liability.”
Lesson Plans Are Disappearing
This spring, as Brown University was under intense pressure from the Trump administration, it shuttered Choices, the university’s 30-year-old high school social studies curriculum, overseen by its history department.
Choices reached one million students annually, and was especially popular in advanced courses and at independent private schools. The program was known for bringing college-level concepts into high schools and for lesson plans that were rich in primary sources, on topics from the American Revolution to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
After the start of the Israel-Hamas War in 2023 and the rise of the pro-Palestinian campus protest movement — which was heavily active at Brown — Choices was scrutinized by advocacy groups supportive of Israel. Critics argued that a unit on the Middle East fed antisemitism by focusing on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and downplaying Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.
Now Choices materials have largely been wiped from the internet.
When Choices units were withdrawn from the market, teachers and students lost access to a broad range of lessons.Choices Program
Brown had been reconsidering Choices since the summer of 2024 for budgetary reasons. The final decision to shutter the program was made this past spring, as Brown faced a potential federal funding freeze. The White House eventually moved to withhold $510 million in grants, accusing Brown of allowing antisemitism to fester during campus protests. (The university has since made a deal with the government to restore its funding.)
Brian Clark, a Brown spokesman, said the closure of Choices was based “exclusively” on the program’s financial outlook, and had nothing to do with debates over its content or pressure from the White House. He acknowledged in an email, however, that the market for Choices materials had weakened, in part because of “recent pressures to eliminate curricula that consider race, gender, colonialism, etc.”
Brown decided not to allow other publishers to acquire Choices lesson plans, according to internal communications reviewed by The New York Times. It also declined to maintain the Choices archives on the university’s website, and refused to allow the program’s staff to distribute over $200,000 worth of lesson plans that had already been printed.
Doing so would have created “legal and financial exposure,” Mr. Clark said.
High school teachers, worried about losing access to materials that they relied on for years, have used social media to circulate some Choices units.
Another group that has withdrawn curriculum is the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that historically focused on antisemitism and a broad range of other civil rights issues, while also strongly supporting Israel. The A.D.L.’s educational resources reach more than 1.6 million students annually, according to Todd Gutnick, a spokesman for the group.
Over the past two years, the A.D.L. has removed dozens of lesson plans from its website, according to a review of archived web content. Some were about transgender identity, sexism against women who have run for president and sexist tropes in video games.
The deleted lessons also included several that dealt with police violence against Black men, one on microaggressions, and a lesson on Frederick Douglass and voting rights.
In a written statement, Mr. Gutnick said that some of the lessons had been retired and others were “temporarily removed” for revisions.
A statement on the A.D.L.’s website says the group is choosing to focus its educational resources on antisemitism, the Holocaust and Jewish identity. “While we are no longer hosting many of our broader anti-bias resources, we remain deeply committed to fostering inclusive school communities,” it states.
Last year, the group phased out a 40-year-old program for schools called A World of Difference Institute, which sought to “actively challenge prejudice, stereotyping and all forms of discrimination.”
The A.D.L. continues to offer No Place for Hate, an anti-bullying curriculum that includes material on identity-based bias.
Teachers Are Avoiding Basic Civics
The organization iCivics was founded by Sandra Day O’Connor, the former Supreme Court justice, to provide free, nonpartisan curriculum materials. The group estimates that its lessons reach about nine million students annually.
This fall, though, staff members noted a significant decline — up to 28 percent — in the number of page views recorded for some popular lessons, including those dealing with separation of powers, consent of the governed and other constitutional principles.
iCivics does not yet have a full picture of why this is happening.
But Emma Humphries, the group’s chief education officer, said that in her travels across the country to train teachers, many have said they were fearful of having classroom discussions veer into politically fraught territory — like questions from students about why Mr. Trump appeared to be violating constitutional norms.
Social studies teachers typically receive much less training from their school districts than teachers of English and math, the subjects covered by state tests. As a result, some teachers may have had little guidance on how to tackle controversial topics.
Further complicating matters, many teachers work in states that have adopted broadly written laws that limit what can be said in the classroom.
iCivics offers training in how to teach students about American government without walking into political minefields, including by using primary sources like the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings. Dr. Humphries said teachers should explain to students that questions like the limits of presidential power have been debated for centuries, and that presidents from all parties have tried to stretch the limits to increase their authority.
“The concern is that teachers will avoid certain topics altogether, or just revert to boring pedagogy, like reading the textbook the district approved,” she said. “That is not a good way to teach. The kids deserve better than that, and our democracy deserves better.”
A Democratic-Led State Shifts Right
California was once a leader in adopting a left-leaning approach to social studies. In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring all high school students to take a course in ethnic studies, an activist discipline that focuses on the histories and cultures of Latinos, Black Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Ethnic studies lessons often criticize settler colonialism, naming Israel as the prime contemporary example.
Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise attendance and grades for students who are at risk of dropping out.
But after some Jewish groups mounted a legal and political fight against ethnic studies — saying its critiques of Israel were fostering antisemitism — the consensus around the state’s mandate unraveled. This spring, Mr. Newsom presented and signed a budget that did not include funding for the classes. Districts are not currently required to offer the course, according to the state board of education.
In some school systems that are continuing to offer ethnic studies, there are new restrictions. San Francisco teachers must use a single textbook that does not discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Supplemental materials must be approved by administrators.
Mr. Newsom signed two bills this month that were intended to prevent antisemitism and other forms of discrimination in schools. The laws establish a state office to handle complaints, and require teachers to abstain from “advocacy, opinion, bias or partisanship” in the classroom.
Teachers’ unions, the American Civil Liberties Union and Muslim groups raised concerns about the potential for chilled speech and increased litigation. But the bills passed unanimously in the heavily Democratic legislature.
Mr. Rufo, the conservative activist, argued that the new laws do not threaten free speech, noting that public-school teachers do not have a legal right to academic freedom in their classrooms.
Kairi Hand, a 15-year-old sophomore at Burton Academic High School in San Francisco, said ethnic studies had been a favorite course. Israel was not a focus in her class, she recalled. What stayed with her, she said, were lessons on the Chinese Exclusion Act and the way in which the Disney movie “Pocahontas” differed from the true history of English encounters with Indigenous Americans.
She also understood why the class was controversial. “There is a lot of controversy going on in the whole world. Especially,” she said, “things taught in schools.”
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3) Diphtheria, a Once Vanquished Killer of Children, Is Resurgent
A Somali hospital ward packed with gasping children shows how war, climate and mistrust of vaccines is fueling the disease’s return.
By Stephanie Nolen, Reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia, Oct. 27, 2025
Dr. Mohamud Omar, a pediatrician examining a child’s tonsils in the diphtheria ward of Demartino Public Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, last month. Brian Otieno for The New York Times
Qurraisha Mukhtar’s two youngest children fell sick in early September, with a fever, cough and short gasping breaths. Their throats turned white, their necks swelled. She asked a healer in the neighborhood for a remedy, but 1-year-old Salman’s struggle for air grew much worse one night and he died. The next day, Hassan, 2, began to choke, and he died, too.
Ms. Mukhtar, who lives with her family in a stick-and-tin shack on the edge of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, could not sit and grieve, because two more of her children began to show signs of the same illness. She and her husband appealed to friends and relatives and scraped together the money to take them to a hospital in a three-wheeled taxi.
At Demartino Hospital in the center of the city, she was directed to a new building erected during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. These days, it has been repurposed to respond to an old foe: diphtheria, a horrific and vaccine-preventable disease, which is infecting thousands of children and some adults too.
Diphtheria is caused by a bacteria that produces a powerful toxin that kills cells, usually in the throat and tonsils, creating a thick, gray membrane of dead tissue that can grow large enough to block the airway and cause suffocation. It is particularly dangerous in young children with small airways. If caught early, it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, but if not, cases can swiftly turn fatal.
It is among the diseases that were relics of prevaccine days but have resurged in recent years, with mass displacement driven by climate change and war. The disruptions in routine immunization that came with Covid and its stress on global health systems, and the rise in vaccine hesitancy, have fueled their spread.
There are large diphtheria outbreaks now in Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Chad — countries with civil wars or large populations of refugees where vaccination coverage is low, surveillance is weak and frail health systems leave children undiagnosed or treated too late.
Diphtheria was once a major killer of children in the United States and other industrialized countries, but cases began to drop with the introduction of a diphtheria vaccine in the 1940s, and by the 1970s, the disease had become rare. There was just one case a year reported in the United States in the two decades after 1996, and only a handful since.
The disease was vanishing from developing countries, too, at the beginning of the 21st century. But cases began to resurge about 15 years ago. Venezuela had a major outbreak, when its once-strong public health system fell apart during years of political instability. Bangladesh had one, beginning in 2017, mostly among Rohingya refugees packed into crowded camps. There have been nearly 30,000 reported cases in Nigeria in the last two years, mostly in the country’s north, where vaccination coverage is lower.
There have also been cases in Europe in recent years, usually among young people who emigrated from Syria or Afghanistan and were not immunized.
In the United States, the few cases have been associated with travelers. However American vaccination rates have declined slowly but steadily for the last five years; 92 percent of kindergarten students nationally had full coverage with diphtheria vaccination in the 2024-25 school year, down from 95 percent in 2020. Achieving broad immunity requires at least 85 percent coverage.
A child is typically vaccinated against diphtheria with a five-in-one combination vaccine given at 6, 10 and 14 weeks of age. If a child doesn’t get all three shots, protection is limited — and that’s often the problem for displaced and struggling families such as Ms. Mukhtar’s.
Katy Clark, an expert in diphtheria with Gavi, the international organization that helps low-income countries procure vaccines, said that as many as one in four children with diphtheria might die of the infection in countries where diagnostic and treatment options were limited. The fatality rate is closer to one in 20 in health systems with more resources, she said.
Somalia is the first country to apply to Gavi for new funding to give children diphtheria boosters — shots delivered to children in their second year of life, then between 4 and 7 years old and 9 to 15 years old — in areas where the outbreak has seemed most severe.
“We didn’t even have a diphtheria support modality, because we didn’t need one,” Ms. Clark said. “And now we have to build out a whole new process to help countries respond.”
Somalia’s current diphtheria outbreak has grown steadily since it began in 2023, with more than 2,000 cases reported across the country so far this year (although surveillance and reporting are both very weak, and Ms. Clark said this was most likely a significant undercount).
“The guiding principle of my work is ‘go there.’ I want to hear directly from the people who are affected by disease, or lack of access to a new drug. I’ve been writing about global health for 30 years and have reported from more than 80 countries.”
At Demartino Hospital in Mogadishu, nearly 1,000 patients have been admitted to the diphtheria ward this year, compared with 49 in 2024. Eighty percent of them are children.
A health system already undermined by decades of civil war has been further hampered by the loss of much of the assistance that came from the U.S. government, cut by the Trump administration. Diphtheria and other infectious diseases are surging as more children become critically malnourished amid a sharp drop in food aid.
Ms. Mukhtar and her family were displaced from Baidoa, in southern Somalia, by years of brutal drought. A family member in the city let them build their shack on his land.
She said that her 12 children had been vaccinated with at least some of their shots; she took them to health centers when they were small. But she had a lot of children to keep track of, and she cannot read, so she was not able to track their immunizations too closely.
The two children she brought to the hospital, a 3-year-old daughter and a severely malnourished 10-year-old son, recovered from their diphtheria infections. But Ms. Mukhtar incurred about $200 in costs for their tests and medications (the hospital operates on a “cost-recovery” basis; Somalia’s health ministry provides just a fraction of the funds it needs to operate).
In the large ward at Demartino, every one of the 34 beds was full, and some held a couple of children. Dr. Mohamud Omar, a pediatrician, made rounds monitoring their airways, making sure that the lumpy obstructions in their throats did not threaten their ability to breathe. He ordered supplemental oxygen for a few of them. Exhausted parents slumped at the end of the beds; many had four or five infected children to shuttle between.
Three of Amina Hassan’s children were admitted to the diphtheria ward in mid-September. The oldest and youngest of them improved after a few days, but her 4-year-old daughter still needed oxygen, and had proved to be allergic to the antibiotics that usually treat diphtheria. The hospital sometimes has access to the antitoxin that can neutralize the infection and is used in emergency treatment in high-income countries — but it often runs short, said Dr. Abdirahim Omar Amin, the hospital’s director.
Ms. Hassan said the children were not vaccinated: she wanted to have them immunized, she said, but when the oldest of her six children received the tuberculosis vaccine at birth, the injection site became infected, and after that her husband refused to allow the children to receive any shots.
She sat in a hospital bed with her 4-year-old in her lap and her 1-year-old, whose neck was still badly swollen, slumped against her back. “After this I am going to try to convince him to get them vaccinations, and I think he will agree,” she said of her husband.
Across the aisle from Ms. Hassan, Hawa Mahmoud was sitting between two beds that held three of her children. She was waiting for their father to arrive with three more, who had developed symptoms at home. The sickness has afflicted many students in her older children’s school in recent weeks, Ms. Mahmoud said. Now six of her seven children were infected; so far, the oldest had no signs, but she wasn’t optimistic. “They’re coming, one after the other,” she said.
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4) U.S. Assessment of Israeli Shooting of Journalist Divided American Officials
A U.S. colonel has gone public with his concern that official findings about the 2022 killing of a Palestinian American reporter were soft-pedaled to appease Israel.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, Oct. 27, 2025
After Shireen Abu Akleh, a celebrated Palestinian American journalist, was fatally shot in the West Bank in 2022, the State Department delivered an equivocal assessment.
While shots fired from Israeli military positions were “likely responsible,” it said, American officials “found no reason to believe that this was intentional.” The shooting, it said, was “the result of tragic circumstances.”
That statement outraged Palestinians and many others, who saw it as the latest instance of the Israeli military dodging accountability for Palestinian deaths. The United States never again publicly weighed in on Ms. Abu Akleh’s killing.
But the U.S. officials who closely examined the shooting were deeply divided over the Biden administration’s public conclusions, with some officials convinced that the shooting was intentional, according to five current and former U.S. officials who worked on the case.
There has been no conclusive evidence that the shooter knew he was targeting a journalist. Still, based on the circumstances of the shooting and the available evidence, these officials believed that the Israeli soldier must have been aware he was doing so. Other officials assigned to review the case, however, supported the U.S. government’s far more cautious assessment, the officials said.
One of those who opposed the Biden administration’s conclusion was Col. Steve Gabavics, a career military policeman with 30 years’ experience, including as the commandant of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. At the time of the shooting, he was an official at the Office of the United States Security Coordinator. That office, which facilitates cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security services, conducted the U.S. review of the shooting.
After Colonel Gabavics retired from the military in January, he went public — first in a documentary, and now in an interview with The New York Times — with his concerns that the U.S. government had soft-pedaled the office’s findings to appease the Israeli government.
He aired his views in a documentary released in May by Zeteo News, a left-leaning online news outlet, that publicly identified for the first time the Israeli soldier who shot Ms. Abu Akleh. But Colonel Gabavics was not named in the documentary; he is now speaking out openly for the first time.
Though the question of whether the shooting was intentional ignited disagreement within the office as a whole, the two officials who clashed most sharply over the shooting were Colonel Gabavics and his then-boss, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, according to Colonel Gabavics and several other former officials involved in the examination.
That conflict culminated in Colonel Gabavics being sidelined from the U.S. review, the officials said. Colonel Gabavics said General Fenzel also threatened to dismiss him.
The four officials who spoke to The New York Times about the case — besides Colonel Gabavics — did so on the condition of anonymity because they remain employed by the government or military and are not permitted to speak publicly.
Colonel Gabavics was chief of staff to General Fenzel, who led the U.S. Security Coordinator liaison office at the time and helped draft the July 4, 2022, State Department statement attributing the shooting to “tragic circumstances.”
Colonel Gabavics said in an interview that he and his colleagues “were just flabbergasted that this is what they put out.”
That the U.S. government avoided calling it intentional, he said, “continued to be on my conscience nonstop.”
“The favoritism is always toward the Israelis. Very little of that goes to the Palestinians,” he said of his experience working in the office.
But General Fenzel was adamant that there was not enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the fog of war had led to an accidental killing, according to two of the officials.
“Ultimately, I had to make judgments based on the full set of facts and information available to me,” General Fenzel said in a statement to The New York Times. “I stand by the integrity of our work and remain confident that we reached the right conclusions.”
The four officials said they believed Colonel Gabavics was acting out of concern for what he saw as the truth.
For General Fenzel’s part, some officials said one factor that may have played into his thinking was a desire to preserve his office’s working relationship with the Israeli military, which had previously stopped cooperating when displeased.
Two of the officials, including one who served at the liaison office at the time of the shooting and a second who was working on Palestinian issues, said General Fenzel had sought to maintain the relationship while also pushing the Israeli military for reforms.
Examining the Shooting
The office where both General Fenzel and Colonel Gabavics worked, now known as the Office of the Security Coordinator, found itself examining the shooting after Israeli and Palestinian officials, who carried out their own independent investigations, refused to cooperate on a joint inquiry.
The F.B.I. initially declined to investigate because, according to Colonel Gabavics, it said it had not been requested to do so by Israel. With the Biden administration under pressure from lawmakers, the F.B.I. eventually opened its own investigation in November 2022. Nearly three years later, however, it has not released any findings, nor said when it might do so.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Biden administration assigned General Fenzel’s team — which is not an investigative agency — to assess the case and write a report on the evidence.
To analyze the trajectory of the bullets, Colonel Gabavics and other colleagues were sent to examine the scene on the day Ms. Abu Akleh was killed, the colonel and other officials who worked on the review said.
A key part that the U.S. office played in the investigations was to take custody of the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh and hand it to Israeli government ballistics experts for testing in the presence of the American officials, including General Fenzel. The Israeli experts also examined an Israeli Army rifle that the Israelis said a soldier had used to fire in Ms. Abu Akleh’s direction.
The 2022 State Department statement said that extensive damage to the bullet made it hard to draw a definitive conclusion about which gun it was fired from.
The U.S. team also reviewed the separate Israeli and Palestinian investigations into the killing, but it did not conduct interviews with witnesses or perform its own tests.
Colonel Gabavics described himself as the lead U.S. investigator on the case. Three others who worked on it, however, said that while he played a key role, he was not assigned to come up with a final judgment. That responsibility fell to General Fenzel.
Colonel Gabavics said he and others on the team agreed that the Israeli soldier who shot Ms. Abu Akleh must have known that he was shooting at a journalist, though they did not believe that the shooter was targeting Ms. Abu Akleh specifically.
Colonel Gabavics said he concluded the shooting was deliberate based on several factors:
Records of Israeli military radio traffic on the morning before the shooting showed that soldiers were aware of journalists in the area, he said. And there had been no gunfire coming from the journalists’ direction that might make the Israeli soldiers likely to shoot toward them in self-defense, he said.
There was an Israeli military vehicle down the road from Ms. Abu Akleh that morning. A sniper watching the road from inside the vehicle would have been able to see the journalists clearly, Colonel Gabavics said.
When he visited the scene of the shooting hours after it occurred, he said, his colleagues, wearing blue vests similar to Ms. Abu Akleh’s navy-blue protective vest marked “Press,” positioned themselves where she had fallen. They were visible to him from where the shooter’s vehicle had been, he said.
Colonel Gabavics said that the precision of the shots, hitting Ms. Abu Akleh’s head and a carob tree near her, did not suggest an uncontrolled spray of gunfire. That, together with the fact that the shooter fired first at Ms. Abu Akleh’s producer, then at her, then at a passerby who tried to help, indicated to him the shooting was deliberate, he said.
An investigation into the shooting by The New York Times in 2022 found that 16 shots were fired from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier from an elite unit.
For the shooting to be accidental, “the most absurd thing in the world” would have had to happen, he said. “The individual popped out of the truck, just was randomly shooting, and happened to have really well-aimed shots and never looked down the scope. Which wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
His assessment matched that of Palestinian officials. Israel, for its part, said that Ms. Abu Akleh was hit by either an Israeli soldier or a Palestinian gunman firing indiscriminately during clashes with Israeli soldiers, and insisted its soldiers would not intentionally hurt a journalist. Evidence reviewed by The Times for its investigation, however, showed that there were no armed Palestinians near Ms. Abu Akleh when she and her colleagues came under fire.
Colonel Gabavics said he shared his findings orally with General Fenzel and also wrote them into a draft of the office’s report on the shooting.
But General Fenzel disagreed, and shared his assessment with the State Department, which publicly deemed the shooting unintentional.
The office still had to finish its report on the shooting, however, and that became the focus of the internal tug of war.
Colonel Gabavics and three of the former officials at the office said he repeatedly inserted stronger language into the draft, which General Fenzel repeatedly deleted. Eventually, the general ordered his chief of staff off the case, the colonel said.
General Fenzel declined to comment on Colonel Gabavics’s assertions.
Colonel Gabavics continues to believe there had been a miscarriage of justice.
“This was the one that probably bothered me the most” of any case in his career, he said. “Because we had everything there.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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5) ICE Detains British Media Commentator
Sami Hamdi, who often speaks against Israel, was in the United States on a speaking tour. The Department of Homeland Security said his visa had been revoked.
By Claire Moses, Oct. 27, 2025
Sami Hamdi, a British commentator, at the Convention for Palestine in Illinois last November. The U.S. government has said he will be deported. Credit...Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu, via Getty Images
Sami Hamdi, a British political commentator and critic of Israel, was detained by immigration enforcement officers in the United States and will be removed, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Sunday.
“This individual’s visa was revoked and he is in ICE custody pending removal,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Mr. Hamdi appeared to be the latest person to have an American visa revoked over political speech. Other cases have raised questions about First Amendment protections.
Mr. Hamdi is the managing director of the International Interest, an organization that “advises on geopolitical environments and risks across the globe,” according to its website. He has appeared as a commentator on the British television news channel Sky News and other outlets.
He had been on a speaking tour in the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. He attended the organization’s annual gala on Friday night in Sacramento and was scheduled to speak at a gala in Florida on Sunday night.
Mr. Hamdi was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday morning, according to CAIR, which called for his release. Mr. Hamdi is based in London, according to his LinkedIn account.
CAIR said in a statement that Mr. Hamdi had been detained “because he dared to criticize the Israeli government’s genocide” while on his speaking tour. It called the action “a blatant affront to free speech.”
CAIR has long been controversial in Washington, presenting itself as a champion of civil rights for Muslims in an era of Islamophobia yet regularly pilloried by many, especially on the political right, as an apologist for extremism.
“Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country,” Ms. McLaughlin said in the social media post on Sunday.
Earlier this fall, judges rebuked Secretary of State Marco Rubio for taking similar actions against other pro-Palestinian activists. A judge in Massachusetts last month ruled that the Trump administration had used the threat of deportation to systematically silence noncitizens in academia who protested in support of Palestinians. He said the government had violated the First Amendment as part of a broader strategy to stamp out campus activism.
On its X account, the State Department reposted Ms. McLaughlin’s announcement about Mr. Hamdi and added: “We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans. We continue to revoke the visas of persons engaged in such activity.”
In August, the Trump administration said it had paused approvals of visitor visas for people from Gaza, including young children who arrived with serious medical conditions. That move came after an intense lobbying campaign by the right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who called the incoming flights a “national security threat.”
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6) Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too
Anti-vaccine sentiment is spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some owners hesitant to vaccinate their pets, even for fatal diseases like rabies.
By Emily Anthes and Teddy Rosenbluth, Oct. 27, 2025
A 2-year-old miniature dachshund named Dallas receiving leptospirosis and bordetella vaccines at the Wildflower Veterinary Hospital in Brighton, Colo. Jimena Peck for The New York Times
In the four years since she opened her own veterinary practice, Dr. Kelly McGuire has seen her fair share of heartbreaking cases.
There was the dog whose kidneys shut down after it contracted leptospirosis, a bacterial disease often carried by rodents. Several of her canine patients had come down with such severe cases of parvovirus that they died after “sloughing their guts to the point of dehydration and malnutrition,” said Dr. McGuire, who owns Wildflower Veterinary Hospital in Brighton, Colo. And, after she was unable to rule out rabies, she had been forced to euthanize a 20-week-old puppy that was having seizures.
The deaths were wrenching, especially because they were preventable: Those pets would likely have survived had they received all their recommended vaccines.
For most of her career, vaccination was a routine, unremarkable part of Dr. McGuire’s work as a small animal veterinarian. But after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she found herself having long, sometimes adversarial discussions with pet owners about the safety and necessity of vaccines. Clients accused her of pushing the vaccines to line her own pockets. And, increasingly, pet owners insisted on spacing out shots or refused vaccines altogether, including for deadly and incurable viruses like rabies.
“I actually had someone scream and yell at us and storm out because we required rabies vaccines for her cats,” Dr. McGuire said, adding that the owner had accused her of trying to “kill her cats with vaccines.”
Over the last several years, the anti-vaccine movement has gained ground in the United States, fueled, in part, by the politicization of the Covid-19 vaccines and the increasing power of vaccine critics like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Childhood vaccination rates have fallen. Once vanquished diseases, like measles, have come storming back. And vaccine mandates are under fire: Last month, Florida announced plans to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren.
But antipathy toward vaccines is also spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some people hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
“I talk to thousands of veterinarians every year across the country, and the majority are seeing this kind of issue,” said Dr. Richard Ford, an emeritus professor at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine who helped write the national vaccine guidelines for cats and dogs.
The phenomenon has clear parallels to the anti-vaccine movement in human medicine and could, experts fear, lead the nation down a familiar path, resulting in a loosening of animal vaccination laws, a decline in pet vaccination rates and a resurgence of infectious diseases that pose a risk to both pets and people.
“Are we going to start undoing mandates for rabies vaccinations?” said Simon Haeder, a health services and policy researcher at the Ohio State University who has studied veterinary vaccine hesitancy. “We’re kind of at a pivotal time here.”
Rising reluctance
There is little solid data on vaccination rates in American pets, but several recent studies suggest that a significant share of owners have concerns about vaccination.
In a 2023 survey, 52 percent of pet owners expressed some uncertainty about the safety, efficacy or importance of pet vaccination. Another survey, published the following year, estimated that 22 percent of dog owners and 26 percent of cat owners could be classified as vaccine hesitant.
Veterinary vaccine hesitancy, like its human counterpart, existed before the Covid-19 pandemic and has been driven by a variety of factors, including an increasing distrust of institutions and authority and the rise of social media.
But the pandemic supercharged anti-vaccine sentiment, experts agreed, further eroding trust in science and making vaccination a more political and salient issue.
“The way that people feel about the Covid-19 vaccine has changed the way they feel about all vaccines, including vaccines for their pets,” said Matt Motta, a health policy expert at Boston University who has studied public attitudes toward both human and animal vaccines.
Researchers have documented clear associations between the two; one study, in Brazil, reported that pet owners who had not been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 themselves were more likely to have unvaccinated pets.
This spillover is not entirely surprising in a society where many people view their pets as full-fledged family members. “It makes perfect sense to me that they generalize from human vaccines to pet vaccines and come up with the same conclusions,” said Lori Kogan, a professor who studies human-animal interactions at Colorado State University.
Pet parallels
Veterinary medicine has also attracted its own crop of anti-vaccine influencers, who sow doubt about vaccines. In some cases, the fears are being fueled by the same organizations at the forefront of the human movement, including Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Mr. Kennedy. It recently published a book about what it called the “tremendous harm” caused by annual vaccines in pets.
Indeed, vaccine-hesitant pet owners express some of the same concerns that have become hallmarks of the human anti-vax movement. Some worry that pets receive too many vaccinations, believe that it’s better for pets to get immunity from the disease itself than from a vaccine, and express concern that vaccines could lead to cognitive and behavioral changes in their pets, including conditions like autism.
“It is out there — the concept of ‘pawtism,’” said Dr. Brennen McKenzie, a California-based veterinarian who runs SkeptVet, a blog about evidence-based veterinary medicine.
The concept has no scientific basis: The idea that vaccines cause autism in people has been repeatedly debunked, and autism is a diagnosis that does not exist in other species.
Still, concerns about vaccine safety and frequency are not entirely unfounded. Early formulations of the leptospirosis vaccine were associated with a higher risk of serious allergic reactions than other vaccines were, especially in small dogs. And in cats, shots can lead to injection-site sarcomas, a rare form of cancer.
But such serious side effects were never common, and the risks have fallen further in recent years, as vaccines were reformulated and vaccination protocols refined, experts said.
Vaccination guidelines, which once called for annual boosters of many vaccines, have also evolved as it became clear that some shots provided longer-lasting immunity. Today, many boosters are given every three years.
“There’s been a lot of change in vaccine practices in the last 20 years, which I think demonstrates that we’re always trying to come up with better, safer, more effective practices,” Dr. McKenzie said.
Overall, experts said, vaccine-hesitant owners tend to overestimate the risks of the vaccines and underestimate the risks of infectious disease. Part of the challenge for veterinarians mirrors a problem faced by pediatricians: Vaccination has been so effective that many pet owners don’t think of diseases like rabies and parvovirus as serious threats.
In fact, there are so many similarities between the pet and human anti-vaccine movements that Dr. McGuire belongs to a group of veterinarians and pediatricians who share stories and advice for handling the growing hesitancy.
“We do talk about how tired we get of having the same conversation over and over and over,” she said. “We’re just trying to save people’s dogs and cats.”
Disease risks
There is no centralized database of pet vaccination rates in the United States, and it remains unclear whether they have fallen in recent years. “We have a real data issue,” said Dr. Audrey Ruple, a veterinary epidemiologist at Virginia Tech. But, she said, “we will definitely know when disease starts to break through.”
Declining pet vaccination rates would not be a threat to animal health alone; several vaccine-preventable illnesses, including leptospirosis and rabies, can spread from pets to people. “Dogs are sharing our beds with us now,” said Dr. Steve Weinrauch, chief veterinary officer at Trupanion, a pet insurance company. “They’re kissing our children’s faces.”
Indeed, before health agencies launched mass-vaccination campaigns for pets in the mid-20th century, bites from rabid dogs caused most human rabies cases in the United States.
Most states require dogs to get rabies vaccines, but not all states do, and some mandates are stricter than others. With vaccine antipathy on the rise, Dr. Motta worries that officials may see a political advantage in rolling back these requirements.
“As we’ve seen very much over the past couple of months, health policy is dynamic,” Dr. Motta said. “It is subject to political motivations and orientations. It is a reflection of public opinion.”
Dr. Ford said he was encouraging vets to to get ahead of the problem: If they have learned anything from what has unfolded in human public health, it’s that dismissing concerns about vaccines does not make those concerns go away.
“There’s this mentality among some physicians and veterinarians to say, Get over it, just get the vaccine,” he said. “We’re trying to convince veterinarians to take these concerns seriously.”
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7) Hunger and Cold Loom as Shutdown Imperils Funding for Antipoverty Programs
Within days, tens of millions of low-income Americans may lose assistance for food, child care and utilities if the federal government remains shut down.
By Linda Qiu and Eileen Sulliva, Reporting from Washington, Published Oct. 27, 2025, Updated Oct. 28, 2025
Hannah Mann and her family in New Jersey rely on federal food subsidies for groceries and utilities, initiatives that could run out of funding in days. Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
For Hannah Mann, a mother of three who lives in Merchantville, N.J., the government shutdown is not an abstract political fight.
Her family relies on federal food subsidies for groceries, including specialty formula for her newborn, who was born five weeks early, as well as a program that helps alleviate the cost of utility bills for low-income Americans. Those initiatives could run out of federal funding in days.
“These are expenses that we cannot cover,” Ms. Mann said. The preemie formula alone is $50 a can. She said she was trying to eat more so she could produce more breast milk, but without food subsidies, that will be difficult as soon as next week. “It’s like a domino effect,” she said.
As the shutdown nears the one-month mark, the lapse in federal funding is a looming crisis for vulnerable Americans who depend on government assistance for basic needs like groceries and heating.
For 42 million people who rely on SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, it means the loss of grocery assistance when food banks are already stretched thin. For the 6.7 million women and children who participate in the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, or WIC, there is uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will find stopgap funds to keep the program going after this week.
For nearly six million households that rely on a program that helps low-income Americans pay for energy costs, it means facing expensive heating bills and the possibility of utility shut-offs in the winter. And for many of the more than 65,000 children and families enrolled in 140 Head Start early-education programs across the country that depend on immediate federal funding, it means finding new child care options as early as next week.
“What we’re doing is layering these losses on the most vulnerable in our society,” said Laura Justice, an expert in early-childhood cognitive development at Ohio State University. “These are families who, because they live in lower-income households, they’re already dealing with exacerbated stress in their daily lives.”
The mounting impacts on the poorest Americans come as President Trump has used unorthodox methods to cover the salaries of active-duty military and federal law enforcement officials during the shutdown. While the administration dipped into customs revenue to fund WIC through October, officials said on Friday that they could not legally use existing contingency funding for SNAP.
Some families that send their children to Head Start programs are already scrambling for backup. The funding lapse is set to first hit 140 Head Start programs that do not have money beyond October, said Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director of the National Head Start Association. (There are 1,600 Head Start programs nationally, and the majority are able to continue operating for now because they receive funding at different times during the year.)
In Tallahassee, Fla., the Head Start program at the Capital Area Community Action Agency warned parents on Oct. 17 that they would need to find child care alternatives by Oct. 27 because the school was out of funds. The staff worked for free last week to give families time to make other plans.
Quintina Chukes, a social worker, said she had no idea what she was going to do with her 5-year-old daughter, Jayla, who she said has thrived in the program.
“She’s learning now,” Ms. Chukes, a single mother of four, including two young children, said of her daughter. “When I pick her up, she’s singing in the car.”
The program got a temporary reprieve thanks to an infusion of public and private funds the school was able to cobble together, said Nina Self, the interim chief executive officer of the Capital Area Community Action Agency, which includes the Head Start program. As of Tuesday, it will reopen — but it is not clear how many weeks it will last without federal funding, she said.
“Let’s just get our Congress moving so we can get back to business,” Ms. Self said.
Low-income older Americans are also facing shutdown-related challenges.
About 6.5 million low-income adults age 60 and older rely on SNAP. And the layoffs of federal employees earlier this year have made it even harder for them to get through to a service representative at the Social Security Administration, said Cynthia Walker, the benefits coordinator for Benjamin Rose, a Cleveland-based nonprofit that assists aging adults. Many are in need of help with benefit verification, which service centers stopped doing when the funding lapsed. Without these documents, seniors can be at risk of losing housing subsidies.
And as the weather turns colder, millions of families may not be able to count on the federal heating subsidy program to heat their homes. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program offsets the cost of high utility bills for low-income households. About 20 states are relying on leftover funding from the last fiscal year to sign up eligible households for heating assistance for the winter. But at least two, Utah and Wyoming, have already warned residents that they are no longer accepting new applications.
While states typically begin distributing heating assistance in November or December, that is unlikely to happen this year even if the shutdown ends before the end of the month. The federal office that distributes the money has been hit with broad staff cuts as a result of Mr. Trump’s downsizing of the federal work force, said Mark Wolfe, the executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which works with states to secure funding from the program.
“This program is essential, but what happens now?” Mr. Wolfe said. “It’s not just the shutdown, but you’re learning in real time what happens when you eviscerate the federal bureaucracy.”
Relying on the federal government for basic needs is stressful enough, said Ms. Justice, the Ohio State professor. But the uncertainty around whether the programs will be available in a week — and for how long — can create a level of stress that might make some people want to give up, she said.
“These are benefits that provide that lowest level of food, shelter, warmth,” she said. “We’re wiping out that level of security for an individual.”
Barbie Anderson, a mother of three in rural New Hampshire, has been participating in WIC since she was pregnant with her first child, who is now 9.
Though Ms. Anderson and her husband both work full time, her family lives paycheck to paycheck and monthly WIC benefits — $23 for produce and vouchers for dairy and eggs — help her make ends meet, she said. Without those benefits, Ms. Anderson anticipates forgoing more expensive items like milk and fresh oranges, her toddler’s favorite snack, and visiting food pantries.
Congress, she said, is hurting working families like hers that have few federal programs to turn to, but make barely more than the income limits for other safety-net programs like SNAP.
“We need this money,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for Congress to listen to us little people. It’s such a hard situation. Are they actually going to listen?”
Many antipoverty programs, including WIC, were already in the cross hairs of Republicans in Washington before the shutdown began. Mr. Trump’s expansive domestic policy law that passed this summer cut SNAP funding by $186 billion over the next decade, in part by tightening eligibility and reducing benefits. Mr. Trump’s budget request, released in May, called for eliminating all funding for the home energy program and cutting more than $1 billion from WIC.
Food banks across the country, which were already reporting an increase in need, are now bracing for a surge in demand as states have warned about the looming funding shortfall for SNAP and other programs.
Within two days of Pennsylvania’s warning SNAP recipients that November benefits might be unavailable, calls to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank’s hotline doubled. On one recent day, a line of people waiting for food snaked around the building before the doors even opened, said Colleen Young, the food bank’s director for government affairs.
“This is becoming a crisis already, and we haven’t even gotten to the point where the benefits haven’t been paid,” Ms. Young said.
The shutdown is compounding the challenges faced by the Share Food Program, a hunger relief organization in Philadelphia that already saw cuts to its federal funding, said George Matysik, the program’s executive director.
Food banks are familiar with crises caused by natural disasters, he noted.
“But we’ve never had to train for a crisis of our own federal government’s creation,” he said.
A handful of states have announced some sort of temporary reprieve. California said it would deploy its National Guard to support food distribution and provide $80 million to local food banks. Virginia declared a state of emergency, allowing it to use state funds to provide SNAP benefits for residents.
But the shutdown is already affecting benefits and application processing in many other states.
At least two, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, have said they cannot provide SNAP benefits to residents who were approved after Oct. 15.
DoorDash, the app-based food delivery company, said it would deliver one million free meals through food banks and waive fees for 300,000 grocery orders made by SNAP recipients.
Ms. Mann, the mother of three in South Jersey, said she and her husband, who has been out of work for a year, were turning to gig work to help pay some bills — taking seasonal shifts at an Amazon warehouse and cleaning houses. Her family faces losing $900 a month in benefits if Congress does not agree on a funding plan, and additional resources in her community already appear overburdened.
“Republicans have been working for, what, two weeks out of the last three months?” Ms. Mann said. “You guys are not working while we’re literally down here fighting over scraps.”
Vicky Díaz-Camacho contributed reporting from Philadelphia.
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8) Tear Gas Can Be Dangerous. The Rules on How to Use It Vary.
The repeated use of tear gas by federal immigration officers in Chicago has renewed a debate about how chemical irritants should be used by law enforcement personnel.
By Mitch Smith, Oct. 28, 2025
Federal agents carrying out President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration have repeatedly clashed with protesters and bystanders across the Chicago area in recent weeks. Sometimes, the agents have used tear gas, drawing criticism and bringing new attention to the chemical irritant that has been used by American law enforcement officers for decades.
Generally, police officials say tear gas can help bring unruly crowds under control without hand-to-hand violence between officers and demonstrators, and with a lower risk of serious injury. But the chemicals can also have serious health effects, and police agencies have often been accused of using tear gas without justification or without giving sufficient warnings.
Here’s what you should know about tear gas:
Tear gas has been used for decades.
Tear gas is a generic term referring to several chemicals that cause people to experience burning and excessive tearing in their eyes, along with other symptoms.
The use of tear gas in military conflicts is banned under international treaties, but the chemicals have been used for decades in domestic policing in the United States and other countries.
During protests in the United States, law enforcement officers sometimes fire canisters containing tear gas toward a crowd with the goal of dispersing the people who have gathered.
The use of tear gas carries health risks.
The short-term effects of tear gas exposure are often intensely painful. But in most cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, symptoms resolve 15 to 30 minutes after a person moves away from the source of the gas and gets cleaned off.
Severe outcomes are possible, though, including lung damage, blindness, chemical burns and respiratory problems.
Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency physician and a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, said the amount of tear gas used and the way it is deployed help shape how the body responds.
“Like any poison, it’s a dose effect,” said Dr. Haar, who has studied the effects of tear gas and has criticized how it is often used by law enforcement officials. “If you have very little, you probably have much less impact. When you’re exposed to lots — either over time, chronically, or a lot in a short time — those effects are worse and more dangerous.”
Tear gas also can also harm bystanders and others who might not have been part of whatever threat the police perceived, Dr. Haar said.
“You’re not really targeting an individual,” she said. “You’re throwing canisters that aerosolize the chemical, the poison, all over that space.”
It can be an alternative to other methods of crowd control.
Police officials say tear gas can be a safer alternative to other tactics when officers are facing a threatening crowd. Tear gas is generally considered less dangerous to protesters and police officers than direct confrontations with batons or police dogs. And it generally causes fewer serious injuries than rubber bullets or other projectiles.
Brian Higgins, a former police chief in New Jersey, said using chemical irritants allowed police officers to disperse a crowd without resorting to the sorts of tactics shown in “those pictures you would see from the ’50s and ’60s with a dog biting a guy, or a cop on a horse hitting somebody.”
Mr. Higgins, who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said using “any irritant, any gas, is not your first choice, or should not be,” except for in rare circumstances. And he said police officers should issue verbal warnings and assess the situation to determine whether using tear gas is necessary and safe.
“It depends on the crowd — it depends on the setup, where people are,” said Mr. Higgins, who said he had made decisions about when to use tear gas during his policing career in Bergen County, N.J. “You don’t want to use irritants in an area where the irritant can’t disperse quickly.”
There is no universally accepted set of best practices.
There is no single set of rules for how tear gas is used in the United States, leaving a patchwork of regulations that can vary from state to state and agency to agency. Officers sometimes rely on instructions from tear gas manufacturers on how to deploy the chemicals.
Some police departments publish detailed “use of force” guidelines that outline when and how chemical irritants can be used. The Illinois State Police, for instance, says troopers can use tear gas only after issuing a warning and giving people a chance to disperse, unless giving that warning would pose a risk of death or great bodily harm.
In Chicago, a federal judge has placed temporary limits on how federal agents can use tear gas in the immigration operation that began in early September. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit, including protesters and journalists, have argued that the agents have used tear gas indiscriminately and without warning. The federal government has defended its tactics and argued that tear gas has been limited to instances when agents were facing an immediate threat.
Many jurisdictions revisited their rules on tear gas after widespread protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and some congressional Democrats pushed for stricter rules on how federal agents use tear gas. During those demonstrations in the summer of 2020, officers in some cities were accused of using tear gas without justification.
“While such irritants can help de-escalate violence, their growing use in nonviolent situations for crowd control or curfew enforcement should cause significant concern,” Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said in 2021 when he introduced legislation that called for new limits on tear gas use by federal law enforcement agencies. His bill did not pass.
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9) More Food Reaches Gaza, but It’s Still Not Enough
Aid to the devastated territory has increased since the cease-fire took effect and prices have fallen. But many trucks going into Gaza are bringing food and commercial goods to sell that most people cannot afford.
By Liam Stack, Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 28, 2025
Produce for sale in Deir al-Balah on Sunday.
Hundreds of trucks enter Gaza daily now. Some carry aid from international organizations. Others bring donations from foreign governments. But relief workers say most of what is going in appears to be commercial goods bound for markets.
While there is no question that aid flows have increased since the cease-fire began two weeks ago, many residents say they cannot afford to buy the food that is for sale.
“Most of the trucks are of a commercial nature, and after two years of this war, most Gazans are unable to purchase items from the markets,” said Bahaa Zaqout, a spokesman for the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. “The prices of the items that are entering are very expensive.”
Gaza resident Rami Abu Moleg, 45, said his family had eaten chicken for the first time in eight months on Friday, but only because his brother-in-law had paid for it. The price of chicken has dropped dramatically since the cease-fire, from about $33 per pound to about $12, he added.
“This is still expensive for me, but at least it went down,” said Mr. Abu Moleg, who drove a taxi before the war. “Everything in the market entered Gaza for the traders. It was not aid.”
The war in Gaza began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, during which roughly 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage. Since then Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. It also created an immense humanitarian crisis.
The war destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure and economy. It shut down schools and knocked out the electrical grid. It has devastated health care and deprived people of clean water and adequate food. In August, a U.N.-backed panel declared famine in and around Gaza City, and the following month a separate U.N. commission accused Israel of committing genocide.
Israel has denied that there is famine in Gaza, saying the panel used flawed methodology, and has also denied the genocide allegations.
The cease-fire has eased the distress to some degree, allowing more aid to move in.
Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman in Gaza for UNICEF, said the U.N. Children’s Fund had doubled the number of aid pallets it brings in each day since the cease-fire began. That still fell well short of the needs.
“It is not enough,” she said. “We want to get even more than that. We have the capacity to bring in higher volumes of aid.”
The cease-fire called for 600 trucks in total to enter Gaza daily, including those affiliated with aid groups, government donations and commercial trucks from the private sector.
On some days, more than 600 trucks enter, according to U.S. and U.N. officials. But only some carry aid.
According to U.N. data, which does not account for goods donated directly by countries or commercial trucks, the daily number of trucks from aid groups has never passed 200 during the truce.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that controls the flow of aid into Gaza, has declined to provide a daily tally since the cease-fire began. A COGAT statement on Friday said “hundreds of trucks carrying food, water, fuel, gas, medicines, medical equipment, tents and shelter supplies enter the Gaza Strip every day.”
A number of Gaza residents told The New York Times that they see a wider range of goods in local markets than they had seen throughout the war and that prices are falling after a wartime spike in inflation. But some of what is available in markets is not highly nutritious, and much of it is unaffordable.
Mr. Zaqout said he had been frustrated to see Israel “allowing merchants to bring in items like biscuits, chocolate and soda” at a time when many suffer from hunger and malnutrition.
“We need lifesaving items,” he said.
The rejuvenation of the private sector is an important part of recovering from the war's devastation and addressing people’s needs, said Shaina Low, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
“But we need to make sure the commercial is not coming in at the expense of aid or in lieu of aid,” she said. The challenge now is “a combination of things entering that do not meet people’s needs, and the things that do enter being unaffordable,” she added.
“Many of the things entering on the commercial trucks are not of nutritional value,” she said. “If you have malnourished people, they need protein and fresh fruit and vegetables, not chocolate.”
A COGAT spokesman said Sunday that Israel has not restricted the entrance of “high-energy food products” suitable for addressing Gaza’s health needs, and that relative luxuries like chocolate should not be viewed as replacing other goods.
On Friday, the U.N. humanitarian office outlined the ways that aid had expanded since the cease-fire began on Oct. 10.
It said aid groups had established 20 new nutrition centers and 20 mobile health teams in Gaza, and distributed more than one million hot meals each day. They have also delivered 32,000 jars of baby food and enough therapeutic food to treat more than 1,200 children suffering from acute malnutrition.
The World Food Program has brought in 750 metric tons of food each day, said Antoine Renard, its director for the Palestinian territories. But he said their goal had been 2,000 metric tons.
One of the biggest problems facing Gaza is a lack of clean drinking water, aid workers said.
On Friday, the United Nations said it had brought in goods to help people in the short term, including 140 water tanks and thousands of buckets and jerrycans to carry that water home.
But what is really needed are extensive repairs to the devastated water and sewage treatment system. That requires items that Israel has not been willing to let into Gaza, saying it fears they could be used for militant activities.
Those materials include spare parts for damaged machines, generators to operate those machines, construction materials to repair facilities, pipes to send water through, and chemicals to treat water, said Ms. Ingram.
Data from last week illustrates the challenge of determining how much aid is getting into Gaza.
Information provided by U.S. officials showed that 784 trucks entered Gaza on Wednesday, Oct. 22. U.N. data from the same day showed 199 of the trucks were affiliated with humanitarian groups. But there were no breakdowns available on how many trucks entered with aid provided by governments or with commercial goods.
Aid groups said part of the problem is a new Israeli registration system that requires them to identify their Gazan employees. Israel says the measure is meant to keep suspected Hamas members from handling aid, but some groups have declined to provide the information out of fear it could endanger their staff.
On Thursday, a group of 41 international organizations, including Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, said Israeli authorities had denied their requests to bring aid into Gaza 99 times since the cease-fire began.
In most cases, the aid groups said they were told their request was denied because they were not authorized to deliver aid under the new system, even though many had worked in Gaza for decades. That meant roughly $50 million of supplies had gone undelivered, including tents, food, clothing, bedding and hygiene supplies, they said.
COGAT said if the groups wished to deliver those goods, they should complete the registration process.
Abu Bakr Bashir, Edward Wong, Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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10) Israel Conducts First Airstrike in West Bank in Months and Kills 3
A militant group allied with Hamas confirmed the deaths, which were part of an increase in fighting in the Palestinian territory during a surge of settler violence.
By Liam Stack and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Tel Aviv and Ramallah, Oct. 28, 2025
A firefighter at the scene of an Israeli strike near Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Tuesday. Raneen Sawafta/Reuters
The Israeli military said it had killed three militants near the West Bank town of Jenin on Tuesday. The attacks included an airstrike that local security officials said was the first on the Palestinian territory in months.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally, confirmed the deaths in a statement, saying “sniper fire and aerial bombardment” had killed the men but not whether they had been members of the group. Hamas said two of the men had been fighters in its armed wing.
The strike in the Israeli-occupied West Bank came amid continuing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians since a cease-fire three weeks ago in the Gaza Strip. The agreement has been strained by repeated flare-ups of violence and difficulties in the exchange of deceased captives between Israel and Hamas.
And the West Bank has experienced record levels of Israeli settler violence, which were on the rise before the war in Gaza but have since become common.
There were conflicting accounts of Tuesday’s strike, which Israel described as a counterterrorism operation. Israel said its military had killed the men in a cave near the village of Kafr Qud, while Palestinian Islamic Jihad said the strike hit a house in a residential area.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy between the two accounts. Security officials from the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, said it was the first airstrike on the territory since Feb. 8.
Anas Oweis, the head of the local council in Kafr Qud, said villagers were awakened shortly before dawn by the sound of gunfire from a hilly olive orchard. He said the fighting lasted for hours and was punctuated by two loud explosions at around 5 a.m.
After the fighting ended, Mr. Oweis said, local residents “found blood stains on the ground” and a destroyed car.
The West Bank and East Jerusalem are home to roughly three million Palestinians and about 700,000 Jewish settlers, who live in settlements that most of the international community considers illegal.
During the first half of this year, extremist settlers carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and their property, or an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That is the highest monthly average since the U.N. started collecting such records in 2006.
The Israeli government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, has increasingly sought to entrench its control of the West Bank since the war in Gaza began.
Political allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have urged him to annex part of all of the territory, but this month the Trump administration made it clear that it opposed annexation.
Gabby Sobelman contributing reporting.
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11) In a Looming Nuclear Arms Race, Aging Los Alamos Faces a Major Test
The lab where Oppenheimer developed the atomic bomb is the linchpin in the United States’ effort to modernize its nuclear weapons. Yet the site has contended with contamination incidents, work disruptions and old infrastructure.
By Alicia Inez Guzmán, Oct. 28, 2025
Alicia Inez Guzmán is reporting on nuclear weapons production in New Mexico as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, on an isolated mesa in New Mexico, dates back to the Manhattan Project. Nina Riggio for The New York Times
In a sprawling building atop a mesa in New Mexico, workers labor around the clock to fulfill a vital mission: producing America’s nuclear bomb cores.
The effort is uniquely challenging. Technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory must handle hazardous plutonium to create the grapefruit-size cores, known as pits. They do so in a nearly 50-year-old building under renovation to address aging infrastructure and equipment breakdowns that have at times disrupted operations or spread radioactive contamination, The New York Times found.
Now, the laboratory is under increasing pressure to meet the federal government’s ambitions to upgrade the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The $1.7 trillion project includes everything from revitalizing missile silos burrowed deep in five states, to producing new warheads that contain the pits, to arming new land-based missiles, bomber jets and submarines.
But the overall modernization effort is years behind schedule, with costs ballooning by the billions, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In 2018, Congress charged Los Alamos with making an annual quota of 30 pits by 2026, but by last year it had produced just one approved for the nuclear stockpile. (Officials have not disclosed whether more have been made since then.)
That pace has put the lab — and especially the building called Plutonium Facility 4, or PF-4 — under scrutiny by Trump administration officials.
In August, James Danly, the deputy secretary of the Energy Department, ordered a study of the leadership and procedures involved in pit production and related projects at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. That facility was also designated to produce pits but is unlikely to begin before 2032, according to federal officials.
“I have become increasingly concerned about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s ability to consistently deliver on nuclear weapons production capabilities needed to support the national defense of the United States,” Mr. Danly wrote to the agency’s acting administrator. The N.N.S.A., an agency within the Energy Department, maintains the nuclear stockpile and is overseeing the renewal project.
In response to questions from The Times last month, a spokeswoman for the N.N.S.A., the Energy Department and the national laboratory said: “We are fully committed to strengthening the nation’s nuclear deterrent and ensuring the long-term national security of the United States. This commitment includes accelerating our plutonium pit production” at Los Alamos and completing the South Carolina facility, “which are critical for a safe, secure and effective nuclear stockpile.”
To ramp up, PF-4 is undergoing dozens of infrastructure projects. But some major systems in “poor condition” will require repairs and replacements over the next 25 years, a 2020 Energy Department report said.
Complicating the renovation is not only the presence of radioactive materials, every gram of which must be closely tracked, but also contamination. Beyond the sealed steel workstations, called glove boxes, where workers handle plutonium and other nuclear materials, contamination has been found in pipes, unused laboratory rooms, ceilings, a stairway, ladders and basement floors. Those findings have been documented in federal and state reports and weekly inspection records from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal watchdog group. The Times also interviewed 30 nuclear experts and current and former employees.
Replacing glove boxes is going slowly, for example, because decontaminating and removing the old models can take weeks for each one. Fifteen water leaks — including one that flooded part of the basement with 4,700 gallons of water and required extensive cleanup — have been reported since 2018. Three spread radioactive particles into nearby spaces, safety inspectors noted.
Systems for transporting plutonium — an overhead trolley and the only freight elevator — have also had outages, so workers have had to manually move nuclear material, which can increase safety risks. Hand-carrying nuclear waste in a stairwell spread contamination and reduced productivity, an inspector reported. The workaround for the elevator put “an extra burden on personnel,” according to a July email from Timothy Bolen, a top weapons production official at the lab.
Since 2018, the lab’s overall work force has grown by 50 percent to nearly 18,000. About 1,000 people in the plant handle nuclear material or perform construction work. Those in the building at the same time have more than doubled, causing congestion in certain areas. A federal report called the increased activity a “very high risk.”
Choreographing dual renovation and production work is intricate. “The best analogy I can come up with is that we are overhauling and upgrading a plane during flight with a load of passengers on board,” Mark Davis, the lab’s deputy operations director, once described the effort.
Terry Wallace, the laboratory’s former director, put it this way in a recent interview: “How do we keep this part going while we upgrade this part and make no mistake? Well, you still have high-hazard material there, so you have to do it extremely carefully, extremely thoughtfully.”
The United States created its stockpile decades ago as a deterrent to nuclear war. Like the U.S., China, Russia, North Korea and other nations are upgrading or enlarging their arsenals amid rising global tensions over nuclear threats. Of the nine countries known to have such arms, the U.S. ranks second, with about 3,700, just behind Russia’s 4,300, according to estimates by nuclear weapons researchers.
America’s modernization effort began under President Obama, when Republican senators agreed to endorse a hallmark arms-reduction treaty with Russia, but only if the U.S. updated its nuclear weapons complex. The project accelerated during the first Trump administration when Congress pushed to resume pit production, a capability mostly phased out after the Cold War.
Los Alamos became a stopgap solution because the Rocky Flats Plant, in Colorado, which had produced pits for decades, was officially shut down in 1992 for environmental violations. The Savannah River Site was also tapped to make pits, but retrofitting a facility there into a production hub has been repeatedly delayed.
Until then, it all comes down to Los Alamos.
“Is it the best place to do it?” Mr. Wallace, the former director, asked. “Well, it’s the only place.”
The Pit Factory
The laboratory, where J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw efforts to develop the world’s first atomic bombs, spreads across 40 square miles in northern New Mexico. It is circumscribed by federally protected forests and archaeological sites, the towns of Los Alamos and White Rock and the San Ildefonso Pueblo, home to a Native American tribe.
The lab has to guard against perils inside and outside its buildings. Much of the property is blocked off to the public. Canyons plunge on either side of PF-4, or the plant, as workers call it. Around it are security checkpoints, armed guards and armored vehicles with mounted turrets.
Three wildfires whipped through the area in recent decades. One in 2000 burned 7,600 acres of lab property, damaging or destroying 100 structures. Since 2020, New Mexico has designated Los Alamos County as a high wildfire risk, which the lab says it mitigates through tree thinning and careful monitoring.
Because the region is home to multiple faults, the plant and some equipment have been buttressed against earthquakes. But the safety board, which advises Congress and the Energy Department, has repeatedly questioned whether the building could contain the plutonium and keep it from endangering the public if a quake triggered a fire. The facility does not have the highest-graded ventilation system.
When PF-4 opened in 1978, it was a state-of-the-art building dedicated to research, not production. Its age is now a liability, an Energy Department report said. As the nation’s sole facility for plutonium surveillance, research and manufacturing, the building, the document warned, is “a single point risk of failure for the majority of defense-related and non-defense plutonium missions within the United States.”
PF-4 also performs special tasks done nowhere else. It assesses America’s stockpile of plutonium pits, most made in the 1980s, to ensure they haven’t degraded and will work as designed. It dilutes the nation’s surplus plutonium for disposal and creates power sources for NASA’s space rovers, using a different form of plutonium from the kind in weapons.
The plant also produced a small run of plutonium pits left unfinished when Rocky Flats shuttered. But in 2011 a worker lined up eight rods of plutonium side by side for a photo, a configuration that could have set off a dangerous radiation pulse.
That incident prompted an exodus of frustrated safety experts at the lab, which led to a production shutdown in 2013 that lasted until 2017. That year, Los Alamos was the only nuclear site given a failing rating in an Energy Department report card. Since resuming plutonium operations, the lab’s safety record now ranks “good.”
When Congress designated Los Alamos as a pit production site in 2018, the plant became the linchpin in a sprawling nuclear complex. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, designed the pits and the new W87-1 nuclear warhead, the first in decades. A Kansas City, Mo., site is making some components of the warhead, which is intended to arm Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, being produced by Northrop Grumman.
Because the U.S. stopped making new plutonium in 1992, workers now salvage the metal from the pits of retired weapons, held at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
After impurities are removed at PF-4, the material is combined with another metal to create an alloy. Workers heat and cast the alloy into hollow half-spheres, or hemishells, which they weld together and smooth. If the pit were uniformly compressed by explosives in a warhead, a nuclear blast would result.
Refining the pit-making process for a new design has taken years of testing and development, said the lab’s director, Thomas Mason, at a town hall in January. There is “rigorous quality assurance that goes into making sure that the pits we produce meet the needs,” he said.
The N.N.S.A. gave production efforts at the lab an “excellent” rating last year, and Los Alamos says it will meet its annual 30-pit quota by 2028.
A Series of Breakdowns
At the plant, workers wear protective clothing and gear. Monitors detect radiation, and everyone inside the building must wear a badge that tracks cumulative external exposure. When exiting the plant, employees pass through full-body scanners to check for radioactive particles.
While the Energy Department provides reports for all exposed workers at Los Alamos every year, it does not break down how many were at the plant. When plutonium enters the body through inhalation, an open wound or ingestion, it can circulate for decades, potentially causing cancer and other diseases. At least eight plant workers since 2018, seven of whom were handling heat source plutonium for NASA, had confirmed cases of bodily intake, according to safety reports.
Renovation activities have also spread contamination in the building at least a dozen times in recent years, including work on an industrial waste pipe in August last year when radioactive particles were found on a pipefitter’s equipment, nearby flooring and scaffolding. This August, workers spread high levels of contamination in the basement, where bags of radioactive equipment had been improperly disposed and were leaking oil.
While the federal government owns the lab, a private contractor, Triad National Security, led by Battelle, a scientific nonprofit that runs seven other national labs, has managed Los Alamos in affiliation with the University of California and Texas A&M since 2018.
Among its biggest projects is removing approximately 90 old glove boxes and installing new versions fortified against earthquakes. The effort won’t be finished until the 2030s, a Government Accountability Office report said in 2023. The stainless steel chambers can weigh as much as four tons and are connected to other boxes, supply and waste systems. Before removing the boxes, workers wipe them down with decontaminants, enclose them in tents and cut them out for disposal.
Water leaks or spills near nuclear materials can also pose hazards, spreading contamination or in, rare cases, setting off a harmful burst of radiation.
In March last year, water from an overflowing decontamination shower spread radioactive particles in adjacent rooms and the basement. In July 2021, 200 gallons of water poured through the ventilation system into an inactive glove box, then spilled onto floors and eventually into the basement, dispersing contaminants.
The July leak was among four safety incidents that led the N.N.S.A. to withhold $1.5 million from Triad’s contract in 2021 because of “a significant lack of attention or carelessness,” the agency said. Triad routinely “focuses on human errors,” the agency added, “rather than on the conditions that make those errors more likely.”
The plant’s trolley system, which inspectors describe as a “critical piece of infrastructure,” has broken down at least three times since 2018. The system involves buckets that travel overhead on a mechanized clothesline through a metal channel, transporting plutonium and other materials and waste across the plant.
Buckets have sometimes tipped over, spilling contents inside the channel. The cable on which they travel has also snapped. There were monthlong outages in June 2020 and May 2024, and to keep pit production moving, workers had to manually bag nuclear material. This year, the buckets were redesigned and some electrical components upgraded.
The ventilation system has also shut down at times because of outdated parts, according to federal reports. In 2022, the safety board said that shutdowns and repairs caused serious work disruptions. While the safety board has recommended making significant enhancements to the ventilation system, the N.N.S.A. instead opted for more limited upgrades, citing taxpayer costs and other priorities.
In coming months, it is unclear how much outside safety scrutiny Triad and other lab contractors may face. The bipartisan Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which oversees on-site inspectors at Los Alamos and five other facilities, now has only one member instead of the requisite five.
Meanwhile, lab officials have signaled that they intend to increase productivity at the plant. “It can’t be down for any reason,” John Benner, then a weapons production manager, said last year.
In an email to The Times, a spokesman for the safety board wrote that it was factoring the “increased tempo of operations” into its “robust safety oversight.” But if a quorum isn’t restored, the board “cannot elevate its safety concerns” to the Energy Department in “a binding way,” he said. Whether the Trump administration will appoint new members remains uncertain.
The New Brinkmanship
Soon after returning to the White House this year, President Trump said there was no reason to build new nuclear weapons, adding that countries were spending “a lot of money” on them that could be put to better use. While addressing the United Nations In September, he spoke of the need to stop developing them. ”If we ever use them,” he went on, “the world literally might come to an end.”
Later that month, before a gathering of military leaders, he boasted how America had “newer” and “better” nuclear weapons than other nations — a bit premature, since none of the U.S. next-generation arms are yet operational. Russia never lost its ability to produce plutonium pits, and China is estimated to have doubled its arsenal since 2020.
The rising nuclear brinkmanship has raised alarms among weapons control experts, scientists and prominent global figures including the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres.
Uncertainty surrounding the New START treaty, the last remaining arms control accord between the U.S. and Russia, is adding to their concerns. Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin have recently expressed interest in extending it for one more year, after it expires in February 2026, but that would not bind any other countries.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pressing on with the modernization.
“We’ve built one in the last 25 years,” the energy secretary, Chris Wright, said of pit-making efforts in an interview with Fox News in March, “and we’ll build more than 100 during the Trump administration.”
When Mr. Danly, the deputy secretary, announced the inquiry into pit production at Los Alamos and Savannah River, he set a deadline of 120 days for its findings, due in early December. “Delaying the restoration of this capability could result in significant cost increases and risks to national security,” he wrote.
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12) U.S. Military Kills 14 More People Accused of Smuggling Drugs on Boats
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the three strikes hit four boats in international waters and that there had been one survivor.
By Helene Cooper, Oct. 28, 2025
Marines unloading from an Osprey aircraft in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, last month as part of a military buildup in the region aimed at drug cartels. Credit...Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Trump administration launched another round of deadly strikes on vessel it accused of smuggling drugs, killing 14 people in four boats on Monday in its growing military campaign off the Central and South American coasts, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday.
Mr. Hegseth said that the strikes — three of them — took place in international waters and that there had been one survivor. They bring the overall death toll to 57 in the campaign, which began in September. Mr. Hegseth said that Mexican search and rescue authorities had “accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue,” but did not release further details.
“The four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and carrying narcotics,” Mr. Hegseth said in a post on social media announcing the strikes and accompanied by a video. He said eight men were on the boats in the first, four men were on the boat in the second strike and three men were on the boat that was struck third.
He did not provide geographic details beyond saying the strikes took place in the eastern Pacific. After launching a series of strikes in the Caribbean near the coast of Venezuela, the Trump administration has more recently directing the U.S. military to strike boats in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Colombia.
Mr. Hegseth in his social media post compared the strikes against the boat cartels to America’s wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past 24 years.
“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” he said.
A broad range of outside experts 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 armed hostilities. But the Trump administration has asserted that the president has the power to “determine,” without any authorization from Congress, that drug cartels and those who work for them are enemy combatants.
Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that each destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.”
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