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) 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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2) 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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3) In Utah, Trump’s Vision for Homelessness Begins to Take Shape
State officials promise large-scale involuntary addiction and mental health treatment at Salt Lake City’s edge. Critics see “a prison, or a warehouse.”
By Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle, Photographs by Kim Raff, Oct. 29, 2025
Ellen Barry, who covers mental health, reported from Salt Lake City. Jason DeParle, who writes about poverty, reported from Washington.
A conceptual rendering provided by the Utah Office of Homeless Services of a complex that state planners have said will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets. Credit...Utah Office of Homeless Services
To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.
State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.
They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.
With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.
“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”
While the Utah effort began before Mr. Trump’s return to office, it mirrors his pledge to move the homeless from urban cores to “tent cities” with services. And it accelerated after Mr. Trump issued an executive order in July, calling for strict camping bans and expanded power to involuntarily treat homeless people.
Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, quickly praised Mr. Trump’s order and told Utah planners to follow it.
Critics of the new plan say that confining people to a site on the city’s outskirts threatens civil liberties and warn that the promised services may not materialize. The efforts coincide with deep cuts to Medicaid, which could thwart the project’s financing.
“I’m super anxious about it,” said Jen Plumb, a physician and Democratic state senator who calls the promise of high-quality medical care “pie in the sky.”
Utah already has a severe shortage of psychiatric beds, she noted. The legislature is unlikely to fund hundreds of new beds, she said, and even if it did, there is no work force to staff them.
Without enormous new spending, she said, the center could function less as a treatment facility than “a prison or a warehouse.”
The emerging portrait of the Utah center, scheduled to open in 2027, brings to life a vow that Mr. Trump made two years ago in an extraordinary campaign video.
Accusing homeless people of turning great cities into “unsanitary nightmares,” he pledged “to use every tool, lever and authority to get the homeless off our streets.” He said the administration would “open up large parcels of inexpensive land” where “dangerously deranged” people “can be relocated and their problems identified.”
Much about Utah’s plans remain unclear, including the details of involuntary treatment, what a proposal calls “work-conditioned housing” and whether the residents will sleep in buildings or tents. But supporters call it a model.
“Utah is a harbinger of the future,” said Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, a conservative policy group that has pushed for the changes in Utah and at the federal level.
Contain and treat
The national push for stern measures follows a decade in which unsheltered homelessness grew nearly 60 percent, according to federal data — a result of factors that include spiking rents and untreated mental illness and substance abuse.
As tent clusters and open-air drug use rose, so did calls for encampment bans. The move for stricter measures gained momentum last year after the Supreme Court ruled that authorities could ban camping even in places that lacked shelter space.
Although Utah seems the clearest example of what Mr. Trump has in mind, other communities have used threats of arrest to move homeless people to designated areas.
As New Orleans prepared for this year’s Super Bowl, state police moved more than 120 people from downtown to a distant warehouse hastily converted for three months into a shelter.
San Diego enforces a camping ban punishable by arrest while designating two tent sites with a total of 800 beds as an alternative to the street. But a recent lawsuit faults the sites for “inhumane” conditions, including rats, mold, and risks of fires and floods.
In Las Vegas, a $200 million homeless campus is under construction, with half of the money coming from the casino industry amid concerns that homelessness depresses tourism. It promises 900 beds across 26 acres with intensive services, and coincides with new prohibitions on sleeping in public, punishable by up to 10 days in jail.
Utah’s plan is novel in that combines elements of a homeless shelter and a psychiatric hospital, sharply expanding involuntary treatment. Critics say it accelerates a disturbing shift toward coercion.
And moving marginalized people to government camps, they say, is an idea with a long and shameful history.
“It’s what they did in World War II in Japanese detention camps,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a Washington advocacy group. “This reads similar to rounding up Jews or other people the Nazis didn’t like.”
Asked in the confirmation process if he supported “relocation camps” for homeless people, Scott Turner, the housing secretary, did not reject the idea. “Our current approach to addressing homelessness is badly broken,” he wrote.
Utah’s pivot is especially radical. It was once a leader in Housing First, an approach to homelessness that prioritizes permanent housing and offers treatment on a voluntary basis.
Housing First has been the standard approach nationally for more than a decade, with studies showing it is effective in keeping people housed. But it is expensive and slow, and there is less evidence that it improves health outcomes.
The Utah plan returns to an earlier “treatment first” model that conditions aid on sobriety or compliance with psychiatric treatment. Celebrated by conservatives, such programs offer the hope of healing, but risk excluding people who cannot or will not comply.
‘The business of souls’
As the planning for the facility got underway last year, the Republican-dominated legislature replaced the state’s homelessness planning board, which included many nonprofit providers, with a smaller body dominated by political appointees and business figures. It is led by Mr. Shumway, a Salt Lake City management consultant appointed to the role by Mr. Cox.
In an interview at his Salt Lake City office, Mr. Shumway, 53, toggled between the language of the boardroom and the pulpit. He said a “management consulting approach” would make homeless services more efficient (“we nerd out on things like Six Sigma and lean process re-engineering”), measuring individual progress through a system of behavioral targets he calls “the pathway to human thriving.”
“Allowing people to remain on the streets originates from the purest of intentions and may be the most inhumane thing we could possibly do,” he said.
As Mr. Shumway describes it, nearly two-thirds of the 1,300 homeless people potentially sent to the site could be there for involuntary treatment. About 400 beds would be set aside for psychiatric treatment. Another 400 beds would provide substance abuse treatment “as an alternative to jail,” he said, with entry and exit “not voluntary.”
Asked how people would enter the facility, he said law enforcement “rescue teams” would identify homeless people in the city and offer them a choice. “So we can take you to court, and you can go to jail,” he said. “We don’t want to do that. We have a resource-rich alternative.”
The plan shifts the state’s focus away from housing and toward rehabilitation and moral development. “Success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity,” Mr. Shumway said. “We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.”
“We can’t brick-and-mortar our way out of this,” he said.
Mr. Shumway’s vision would require expanding civil commitment, the process by which a person can be forced to accept mental health treatment. Under Utah’s current law, a judge must find that an individual is dangerous or gravely disabled, and patients have the right to an attorney and to cross-examine witnesses.
Lowering the standard for civil commitment, as Mr. Trump called for in his executive order, would require state legislative action. No such action has been initiated in Utah, though Mr. Shumway said “the mechanics are being researched.”
Mr. Shumway allowed that planning was at an early stage, and many questions remained: What would happen to people who did not comply with the campus’s sobriety or treatment mandates? Would people who wished to leave be free to do so? Could sobriety requirements result in people losing subsidized housing and returning to homelessness?
“You’re looking for granularity in a blue-sky conversation,” Mr. Shumway said. He said he had presented the plans to federal officials and “got very positive signals.”
Kasey Lovett, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said officials were aware of the Utah plan and were “encouraged” by its direction. Mr. Cox did not respond to an interview request.
But many Salt Lake City service providers expressed anxiety about the plan. The proposed site is near the airport, in a remote spot where pasture is gradually giving way to industrial warehouses. The nearest public bus stop is about two miles away, an hour’s walk over stretches of road that have no sidewalks.
“What makes you think anybody’s going to stay there?” said Dr. Plumb, the Democratic state senator. “Oh, excuse me — they don’t have the right to leave. That’s what is going to make them stay there.”
Among the biggest outstanding questions about the project is how to pay for it. Mr. Shumway has estimated $75 million in construction costs, followed by yearly operating costs of $34 million. Some of the costs might be trimmed by offering mental health care on an outpatient basis, through a federal clinic Mr. Shumway hopes to locate there.
He has also proposed redirecting about $17 million in federal homelessness grants now overseen by community groups and largely used for housing.
“If you start fiddling with that money, you’re going to be pulling people out of housing into homelessness,” Josh Romney, son of the Republican former Senator Mitt Romney and the chair of Shelter the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that owns the city’s existing shelters, warned the services board last month.
Some critics also see a conflict of interest in Mr. Shumway’s role as a government adviser and his firm’s promotion of software used in data collection and case management for homeless people. The services board has recommended that the software, called Know-by-Name, be adopted statewide.
Bill Tibbitts, who helps run a Utah food pantry called the Crossroads Urban Center, sent a letter to the governor and legislators this month highlighting the issue. “When he advocates for this use of taxpayer dollars, he is not a disinterested party,” the letter said.
Mr. Shumway called accusations of a conflict of interest “wholly inaccurate.” He said his firm had “a thriving homeless services consulting practice” that contracts with many cities and states. But the Know-By-Name system “is owned by a not-for-profit, is 100 percent funded by philanthropic donations, and has been developed solely for the state’s benefit.” No private entity is profiting, he said.
Opposition to the planned site has been muted in this deeply red state, with the exception of neighboring landowners worried about crime and property values.
Nichole Solt, 46, owns three acres on the edge of the site, with four show horses and fields of hay and alfalfa. Recalling how she fell in love with the wild spot where her sons ride bikes and fish, Ms. Solt began to cry.
“They tell me there’s going to be all this security, but the reality is they’re going to be in my backyard,” she said.
Few of the homeless people who were recently gathered in Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park had heard of the planned campus. Some said they saw an advantage to removing services from downtown neighborhoods where drug markets proliferate.
“How do you stay clean when you’re surrounded by people you’ve been dirty with?” said Randy Zumwalt, 63.
Elizabeth Lowe, 36, had spread out a picnic blanket and was paging through a book about tarot readings. She said she had been living outside, on and off, for 15 years, and that friction with city dwellers had never been worse.
She was as weary of being stared at as they were weary of seeing her, she said. She said she wouldn’t mind living outside the city.
But when shown a rendering of the site, she was skeptical. “OK, so straight up, this reminds me of a concentration camp,” she said. “Trying to get all the homeless in one area by the airport. I mean — would we be able to leave of our own free will?”
Certainly, the plan has captured the imagination of the governor.
At a homeless services conference in Salt Lake City this month, Mr. Cox singled out the planned campus as “one of the most significant steps forward in decades here in our state.” He called on his audience — a roomful of case managers and social workers — to “lean in and meet this moment with us.”
“This is more than a facility,” he said. “It is a statement of who we are as a state.”
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4) Israeli Strikes in Gaza Kill at Least 100, Local Health Officials Say
After what appeared to be the deadliest day since a truce deal was agreed on this month, Israel said the cease-fire had resumed.
By Liam Stack, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 29, 2025
Dr. Dania Al-Deeb embraced the body of her 4-year-old daughter in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Wednesday. She said their home had been bombed. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israeli strikes killed at least 100 people across Gaza overnight, local health officials said, in what appeared to be the deadliest day since Israel and Hamas agreed on a cease-fire three weeks ago.
The strikes began late Tuesday after the Israeli government accused Hamas of violating the truce by failing to return the bodies of dead captives and by attacking Israeli forces in Rafah, southern Gaza. The Israeli military said one of its soldiers, Master Sgt. Yona Efraim, had been killed in the Rafah attack.
On Wednesday, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said “dozens of Hamas commanders” had been killed in strikes overnight. The military said the cease-fire resumed at 10 a.m. local time.
Health officials in Gaza said the Israeli strikes had killed at least 100 people in the enclave and injured around 250 more.
Munir al-Bursh, director general of Gaza’s health ministry, whose data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, said 35 children were among those killed. He said hospitals in the enclave “are still facing a severe shortage of resources and a significant lack of medicines.”
Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency rescue service also said that at least 100 people had been killed.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he supported Israel’s strikes in Gaza, saying Israel “should hit back” when its soldiers were killed. But he said that “nothing is going to jeopardize” the cease-fire, which is based on a peace plan he proposed last month.
“Hamas is a very small part of peace in the Middle East, and they have to behave,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One during a trip to South Korea. He added, “If they’re not good, they’re going to be terminated.”
In a statement, Hamas accused Israel of seeking to undermine the cease-fire and criticized the U.S. administration.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza on Wednesday, a New York Times reporter saw women weeping over the bodies of children. Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, an official there, said the hospital had received the bodies of 21 people killed in the strikes, including 13 children.
The strikes came after a week of escalating tensions over delays to the exchange of deceased captives between Israel and Hamas, a key plank of the fragile cease-fire deal that went into effect this month.
Tensions boiled over on Tuesday when gunmen in Gaza attacked a group of soldiers in Rafah, southern Gaza. The military said that militants had opened fire on Israeli troops who were dismantling a Hamas tunnel in an area under Israeli military control in eastern Gaza.
Also on Tuesday, the Israeli military released a drone video that it said showed that Hamas was trying “to create a false impression” about its efforts to locate deceased captives.
Hamas denied involvement in the Rafah attack. It has insisted it is acting in good faith to locate and return the remains of people it took from Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war.
The drone footage showed what the Israeli military said were Hamas members faking the discovery of a deceased captive as observers from the Red Cross watched. The aid group said its staff was unaware that a body had been moved before their arrival. “It is unacceptable that a fake recovery was staged,” the Red Cross said in a statement.
When asked about the video on Tuesday, Hamas referred The Times to an earlier statement that accused Israel of creating false pretexts for military action.
After the Israeli government announced its decision to strike Gaza, David Mencer, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, cited both the shooting and the events depicted in the video as violations of the cease-fire.
Gabby Sobelman, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad Abu Bakr Bashir and Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.
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15) How Will I Feed My Family Now?
By Elizabeth Austin, Oct. 29, 2025
Ms. Austin is working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom.
Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times
Every Saturday morning at the Wrightstown Farmers Market in Bucks County, Pa., I approach the information tent with my floral-patterned SNAP benefits card in hand. I swipe my card, enter my PIN, and thanks to a donor-funded program, my $60 in SNAP benefits becomes about $80 in purchasing power.
Within minutes, I’m walking away with thick card stock Market Bucks for purchasing locally grown Kirby cucumbers, fresh sourdough bread and pints of yogurt made from the milk of grass-fed cows — foods that would normally strain my monthly grocery budget.
Barring an end to the government shutdown, SNAP benefits will not be paid out in November, leaving tens of millions of recipients wondering how they’re going to afford food next month. My own remaining SNAP balance — $149.57 — was supposed to help carry my family until Nov. 9. Now, it will have to stretch indefinitely.
My relationship with SNAP — short for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps — started more than a decade ago, and illustrates the complex realities of food assistance that policy debates often miss. In 2012, I was the mother of two children under 3 years old. That year, their father disappeared from our lives without warning, leaving me with no way to feed them or myself. To survive, I applied for SNAP.
Doing so required that I prove my poverty in triplicate to an exhausted, overwhelmed case worker, but, eventually, we were granted $383 a month to spend on food. Each time I pulled my benefits card out of my wallet at the grocery store checkout, it was as if a blanket of shame lay over my shoulders; I worried the cashier and the other customers were judging me for needing help.
I stretched those dollars as far as they would go, but this barely covered boxes of generic pasta and sauce, bulk rice, day-old breads and pastries, and bags of bruised or wilting produce marked down for quick sale. I was keeping my children fed, but not in the healthful way I desired.
My farmers market didn’t accept SNAP then. Still, I loved going every Saturday morning, sometimes managing to save $20 from other parts of my budget for food I couldn’t easily find at the grocery store: ramps, Jimmy Nardello peppers, crusty domes of sourdough bread.
The market soon became more than shopping for us. My children would stop by the butterfly tent pop-ups from the nearby nature center or the craft table to paint rocks into strawberries. For our small family navigating a difficult transition, that Saturday morning ritual became a way to connect with other people during a time when we needed that sense of belonging.
After I landed a full-time job at a medical technology company, my salary disqualified me from SNAP benefits — but only just. I continued setting aside money for the farmers market each week and I built relationships with farmers who watched my children grow into teenagers.
At the end of 2023, after my daughter had survived a nearly three-year fight with cancer, I lost my job. I applied for SNAP benefits again. By then, my farmers market had invested in an electronic system, and I’ve been able to use my benefits to continue shopping there. Unable to find another full-time position in a punishing job market, I’ve stayed on SNAP while freelancing, which lifts the enormous stress of reliably feeding my family during an uncertain time.
Conversations around SNAP benefits are often fraught, dominated by the simplistic refrain that recipients should “get a job.” My experience illustrates why this response misses the mark. It took me time to find a job when I first needed SNAP, when I was raising two small children alone. I had that job when the challenges of working through my daughter’s cancer diagnosis ultimately cost me my position. I have a job now as a freelancer, building my career back one contract at a time.
But our government is making the tired “get a job” refrain into policy. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included an estimated $186 billion cut to SNAP benefits through 2034, which could drastically reduce or eliminate monthly benefits for millions. These expected cuts, now compounded by a government shutdown holding food assistance hostage, will devastate families. And for what? Political brinkmanship that treats the most basic human need as a negotiating chip.
Some Americans seem to believe that they should be able to dictate the food choices of families that need food assistance. I’ve often heard expressions of surprise from other customers while I was spending my Market Bucks. Last summer, a man watched me exchange $10 in Market Bucks for a half peck of peaches. “What’s that? How do I get some of those?” he asked. When I explained the SNAP exchange program, his face twisted in shock. “You’re using food stamps at the farmers market?”
I thought, briefly, of hurling one of the stall’s heirloom tomatoes at his head. SNAP recipients face an impossible bind: When our shopping carts contain ultraprocessed foods, we’re accused of wasting taxpayer money on junk. When we choose to purchase healthier foods — the very foods nutrition experts and public health officials tell us we should be eating — we’re accused of living too well and of not really needing help.
I do plenty of my shopping at Aldi, Trader Joe’s and Costco, where I buy pantry staples and purchase in bulk. I’m fanatical about meal planning and eliminating food waste. When I shop at the farmers market, I track sales and use every extra scrap; a single chicken can feed my family for at least four dinners, from a whole roasted bird to chicken salad to stock for soup. Around me, a dozen eggs run $3.50 to $7 at grocery stores, and $5 at a farm stand. Even when I’m paying slightly more for an item, I’m compensating in other areas to make it work.
The real issue isn’t how SNAP recipients manage their grocery budget; it’s how this country views people who receive government support. If no food choice is acceptable — if both the Pop-Tarts and the organic butter are cause for judgment — then the problem isn’t SNAP recipients’ shopping decisions.
Why shouldn’t SNAP recipients be able to shop at a farmers market? The implicit assumption is that government assistance should come with restrictions not just on how much you can spend, but on the quality of what you’re allowed to eat, as if the luxury of fresh, locally grown peaches is something that only the wealthy deserve.I aim to one day not need SNAP benefits, but while I do, I’m grateful for them. For families like mine, the stakes are clear: The question is not only whether fresh, local food can be accessible, but whether political will exists to maintain programs making any food assistance available at all. Right now, with my remaining $149.57 and no idea when the next payment will arrive, the answer feels painfully uncertain.
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6) Hurricane Melissa Has Arrived in Cuba
The storm hit Jamaica as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever.
By Lauren Jackson and Evan Gorelick, We are writers for The Morning, Oct. 29, 2025
Hurricane Melissa is twisting across Cuba, its eye passing over the long, thin island’s eastern shores. Cubans are huddled in the dark, many far from home. The country evacuated about 750,000 people, who are now searching for safety as winds whip and land slides in the fierce rain. Cuba’s president said it would be a “very difficult night.”
As dawn arrives in the Caribbean, the damage will become clearer. Yesterday, the storm’s center sliced through Jamaica, where boats washed ashore, roofs blew away and trees splintered under 185 m.p.h. winds. Officials reported catastrophic damage. Most people there are cut off from the internet and major airports are closed.
Melissa lost some of its strength as it crossed Jamaica, and it is now propelled by 115 m.p.h. winds. While hurricanes often pick up speed and strength over water, they can slow when they meet the resistance of land, trees and towns. The storm is crossing “rugged terrain” in Cuba, officials said, and it is expected to continue to slow as it moves north. Melissa’s rain is also reaching Haiti, parts of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos.
What happened?
Melissa is one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record — stronger than Katrina, which pummeled New Orleans in 2005 — and the most powerful ever to hit Jamaica. On the map of the storm, its angry red center seemed to consume the entire outline of the island.
The full scale of the damage is difficult to know. The storm knocked power and cut communications for much of Jamaica, making it hard for officials to assess the extent of the destruction. It also complicated our reporting. Yesterday, during The Times’s daily news meeting, our top editor asked for an update on the storm. An international editor replied that our reporter on the ground had lost signal. “We’re hoping to hear from him soon,” she added.
A few hours later, our team did hear from Jovan Johnson, who was in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. He sent us this update late last night:
Several of us who camped out in our newsroom tried to step outside Tuesday, but we just couldn’t conquer the howling wind. Power grew unstable, phone calls dropped easily. Then came images of despair — damaged hospitals, schools, homes. I saw a clip of the roof of my former high school lifted to the sky. I went into Tuesday’s dark night without power, worried about the scale of the destruction that Wednesday will unveil.
Photos and videos emerging on social media have begun to document the damage, showing damaged cars and debris. Parts of Jamaica are “under water,” a disaster-response leader said in an afternoon news conference. Flooding and storm surges damaged at least three hospitals, and local response teams said the country’s health care system was having “one of its most severe crises in recent memory.” Jamaica’s prime minister declared the country a disaster area.
We’ll get a clearer sense of the damage in Cuba, too, later this morning. You can follow updates here.
A displacement disaster
The storm has forced many people from their homes, as officials repeatedly warned residents to find safe cover.
In Jamaica, only 15,000 people had entered the country’s 800 shelters by yesterday afternoon. The country has a population of nearly three million. But in Cuba, hundreds of thousands of people left their homes. Some boarded crowded buses, while others packed a few belongings into plastic bags and hiked up muddy mountains, searching for safety.
Today, Melissa threatens to overwhelm Cuba’s fragile infrastructure. Before the storm, the nation had already been battling a deepening economic crisis and frequent blackouts. The storm has plunged much of the country into darkness, with power failures reported in the east, according to the national electricity company.
It’s a disaster that leaders in the Caribbean have been warning for years could be coming. Melissa was strengthened by Caribbean water temperatures far warmer than usual, a sign of climate change’s burden on small island countries. “It has become a tired adage, but nonetheless true. The world’s poorest countries will suffer the most from climate change despite being least responsible for it,” our colleagues Max Bearak and Lisa Friedman write.
What is next
Budget cuts and reduced donations will limit the amount of food that aid agencies like the World Food Program can provide to people facing hunger, contaminated water and disease outbreaks. The U.N. stored disaster aid in Barbados before hurricane season and is looking to deliver it to Jamaica when airports reopen.
Still, Trump said the U.S. was prepared to help Jamaica. “On a humanitarian basis, we have to, so we’re watching it closely,” he said.
Melissa is expected to remain an intensely destructive force in the coming days as it passes through the Caribbean, while bypassing the United States.
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7) Obamacare Prices Become Public, Highlighting Big Increases
The government website now shows consumers how much their health insurance costs will increase next year, as Congress remains at an impasse over the plans’ subsidies.
By Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, Oct. 29, 2025
The reporters have been covering the Obamacare markets since the beginning of the federal health insurance program in 2014.
On Saturday, Americans can begin selecting their Obamacare plans for next year. Until then, the public prices are available for a so-called window shopping period. Credit...Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York Times
The Trump administration has released a preview of the available plans sold through Obamacare marketplaces in 30 states, giving Americans who buy their own health insurance a first look at just how much prices would go up.
Insurers have increased rates significantly for next year — an average of about 30 percent in the states where the federal government manages markets, and an average of 17 percent in states that run their own markets, according to a new analysis from KFF, the health research group.
But most of the more than 20 million Americans covered by the Affordable Care Act don’t currently pay the full price of their insurance, because they qualify for income-based tax credits that help make the plans affordable. That financial assistance has been in place since the federal A.C.A. marketplaces opened in 2014, and became even more generous in 2021, when Congress increased the aid. The extra help is scheduled to expire next year unless Congress acts.
The looming expiration of those subsidies has been a key sticking point in congressional wrangling over the government shutdown, which has lasted nearly a month. Democrats have demanded an extension of the subsidies as a condition of supporting legislation funding the entire government. Republican leaders say they will not discuss the issue until the government is reopened.
The higher prices reflect a mix of factors, many tied to rising drug and hospital costs in the health care system itself. But insurance companies also raised prices for Obamacare plans because of concerns that the expiring subsidies would discourage younger, healthier customers from staying enrolled.
Sue Monahan, a former university administrator in Oregon who is now retired, is one of the many Americans who faces a steep increase if the enhanced subsidies are allowed to expire. Ms. Monahan, 61, paid $439 a month for her coverage in 2025 after receiving a federal tax credit that covers roughly half of the premiums for her plan. When she went to shop for next year’s plan, she learned that the monthly cost would jump to $1,059 for the same plan with an annual deductible of $7,100.
Ms. Monahan said that as a former kidney donor, going without insurance is not an option. “It’s not there for what you foresee; it’s there for the unexpected expensive events,” she said.
On Saturday, Americans can begin selecting their plans for next year at the website healthcare.gov. The public prices became available on late Tuesday at that site for a so-called window-shopping period.
Insurers and health policy analysts say Saturday is a key deadline for action, because they worry that some consumers may decide to drop their insurance altogether when they see the higher costs, even if Congress later renews the subsidies. But congressional leadership does not appear to be close to any deal to extend the funding.
Insurance executives told people they should sign up, although many people wait until the last minute to enroll. If people’s choice of plan changes because Congress extends the subsidies, they can still pick a different plan during the open enrollment period, which currently extends to mid-December for a plan that starts in January 2026.
The intersection of the expiring subsidies and rising prices will hit a sliver of the market very hard. Any single person who earns more than about $64,000 a year will lose access to any financial help. For older customers in expensive markets, that will mean the difference between paying a few hundred dollars a month for insurance and paying $1,000 or more.
Fewer than 10 percent of Obamacare enrollees are currently in this income category. Most of them are entrepreneurs, ranchers or farmers; employees of small businesses; or early retirees like Ms. Monahan.
A much larger share, about half of the people insured under the A.C.A. have incomes close to the poverty level. Those people have been paying nothing toward their premiums under the current funding system and will see costs go up by around $25 to $85 a month. For those individuals, these amounts can be a large financial strain.
“The group that is most price sensitive are younger and healthier consumers who might think they don’t need coverage,” said David Merritt, a spokesman for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents state Blue Cross plans. “That leaves older and sicker consumers in the marketplace, and that obviously complicates how they are covered and at what cost.”
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8) Living in a Tinderbox
and How to Organize Our Way Out of It
By Bonnie Weinstein, Nov./Dec. 2025
A demonstration of over 80,000 labor union members and individuals against the Belgium government’s proposed austerity measures in Brussels on October 14, 2025.
We are living in volatile times. The United States has the biggest war budget in the world by a long shot. But maintaining this premier military position comes at a great cost to the overwhelming majority here, and across the world.
Countries are spending ever more on their military while imposing drastic austerity measures on workers to pay for it all.
Yet, in the belly of the world’s biggest military beast the failure of the labor bureaucracy to break its partnership with the capitalist class has played a major role in convincing us that the only way we can fight back against their wars and austerity is to vote for whichever capitalist politician promises to throw us a bone. Once we vote for them, their obligation to us disappears into oblivion until the next election.
Meanwhile, the U.S./Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the brutal treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants, the erosion of our democratic and human rights, and the continued assault on our living standards through increased austerity measures continues at break-neck speed.
Yet resistance is growing here and in countries around the world. Masses of working people everywhere are realizing that we have the right to defend ourselves against these attacks on our freedoms and our livelihoods that force us to pay for capitalism’s wars over resources and territorial rule—wars that serve the rich—that we spill our blood for.
The wealthy ruling elite do not sacrifice their lives on the battlefield—they sacrifice our lives.
Solidarity is power
What is sorely lacking today is a unified and democratically-organized resistance among workers that is totally independent of capitalist parties and their bosses—the kind of movement that can bring all non-capitalist sectors of our society together to combat the hardships we are enduring in order to pay for capitalism’s wars of oppression and exploitation.
War is how capitalism maintains its power over us. Our labor pours wealth into the coffers of the rich by funneling our tax dollars into the U.S. weapons-manufacturing industry and into the pockets of the war profiteers.
And all the while, they keep us in perpetual debt and on the brink of poverty with no way up the ladder but winning the lottery.
The working class, in general, has very few organizations of our own. Overall, only 9.9 percent of workers in the U.S. are represented by unions. Of those 9.9 percent, the rate for private-sector union workers is 5.9 percent. The rate for public sector workers is significantly higher at 32.2 percent.1
Currently, in the political realm, our only alternatives are to choose between two major capitalist parties, the Democrats or the Republicans—both controlled and financed by the wealthy elite who frequently donate funds to both parties to cover all their bases.
Building a movement against capitalist war and austerity
While we seem to be living in a very complex, contradictory and confusing world, humanity’s fundamental interests—food, shelter, healthcare, education—are the same for everyone. But the structure of capitalist production for private profit as opposed to human needs—condemns the masses everywhere to poverty and bestows untold wealth on the capitalist class. That is the basic nature and current state of capitalism’s descent into barbarism today.
Workers must fight for every penny we earn—and it still doesn’t cover all of our living costs. All over the world labor leaders who are in partnership with the bosses are negotiating—not for a bigger piece of the pie—but to hold onto the meager crumb of it that we have now. And soon, the likes of Elon Musk will become the first trillionaire on the planet!2
Worker’s power lies in solidarity
Capitalism is a class system consisting of a tiny, wealthy elite that rules over everyone else—the overwhelming majority of humanity. That’s why we need our own organizations independent of capitalists and organized to defend our own interests—the fundamental, democratic right of the majority to own and control the wealth we create through our labor.
Turning things right-side-up—on the side of the working class
We need organizations that are for socialism—workers’ organizations that will stand on the side of the oppressed everywhere.
History matters
In 1905, the workers’ revolutionary struggle against the autocratic rule of Russian Tsar Nicholas II was triggered by the “Bloody Sunday” massacre on January 22, 1905, when imperial troops fired upon peaceful, unarmed workers protesting the poverty and unemployment they had been enduring for years. This led to massive strikes and peasant uprisings against the autocracy of the Tsar.
Widespread demonstrations and strikes spread all over the empire and were brutally repressed by the tsar’s troops. In June 1905, sailors on the battleship Potemkin undertook a mutiny, and in October, a strike by railway workers turned into a general strike in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
The striking urban workers established councils, including the inaugural St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. From then on, profoundly democratic workers’ councils spread like wildfire in workplaces, in workers’ communities and in the countryside, and eventually led to the 1917 Russian revolution that finally abolished the monarchy for good.
For the first time in history, the working class, through the democratically-structured workers’ councils, became the governing body—a “dictatorship of the proletariat”—the first socialist form of government under the democratic control of the working class. Over 100 years later, these events from history serves as a potent example for today’s working class.
The formation of similar structures in today’s world is essential to the survival of humanity.
Only the mass organization of working people and our allies in direct opposition to, and dedicated to the overthrow of, capitalism and the establishment of socialism worldwide will save us from capitalist annihilation and the destruction of the entire planet. (Read Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed, and The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky. Learning from history is essential to the victory of today’s struggle for human freedom and dignity.)
Organizing the working class
There are three basic workers’ organizations that can unite us into a power strong enough to end the dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor—and establish the rule of the majority—the masses of workers and our allies:
The United Front
Our power is in our numbers. The United Front is how we can maximize that power by organizing democratically structured, broad-based alliances of different groups, organizations and individuals to come together to achieve our immediate and very urgent goals:
To stop the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and to demand that the U.S., Israel, the UK and all those countries that have supplied weapons and money to carry out this genocide, pay for the reconstruction of Palestine under the democratic control and supervision of the Palestinian people themselves.
To force an end to Israeli apartheid and, instead, support the creation of a democratic, secular Palestine from the river to the sea—including the right of return—with equal rights for all.
To organize massive resistance to, and defense against, ICE raids, with the goal of dismantling ICE altogether.
To end deportations and bring back all those deported and ripped apart from their families. We stand in solidarity of all migrants because there is no such thing as an “illegal” human being.
To organize against the assaults on our democratic rights—the right to protest and build defense committees to protect us from police and military violence at our schools, communities and workplaces. We stand in solidarity for our democratic right to free speech and assembly, and to build organizations in our own defense and under our own democratic control.
There are a myriad of other issues effecting the overwhelming masses of humanity at the hands of the capitalist dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor—the right to a sustainable environment, a woman’s right to control our own bodies, LGBTQ+ and Trans rights, prisoner’s rights, and more.
We need to build broad coalitions in support of all these rights.
Democratic principles
Each of these coalitions must be profoundly democratic—one person one vote—and open to everyone who agrees with the issues no matter who they are, and no matter whether they may differ on other issues. This assures the greatest number people united together to achieve the goals of each coalition.
United front coalitions are also a training ground for building a united movement of the working class to end capitalism and build socialism everywhere—to save all life on earth.
The Labor Party—a party of the working class that will advance the cause of all workers
The first, most important components of a Labor Party are that it fights for the betterment of all workers—for housing, healthcare, education, safe and healthy food—and against capitalist war, oppression and austerity.
In order to be effective, it must be completely independent of the existing capitalist parties. It, too, must be profoundly democratic and under the control of the majority of the membership. And it must appeal to the entire working class—including all those united-front, independent coalitions in the defense of workers’ democratic rights mentioned above.
It also has to challenge the allegiance of the current labor bureaucracy who are in partnership with the bosses. We must demand they abandon their ongoing support of the two capitalist parties or be voted out of office. We need a new labor leadership dedicated to taking on the bosses and building an independent fighting force for all workers’ rights—we need a Labor Party.
The vanguard party
We currently live in a dictatorship ruled by the capitalist class—a tiny minority that profits from war, racism, sexism—pitting people against each other so that we blame each other for our suffering—instead of from the true cause of it—capitalism.
The ruling-class’s dictatorship over the means of production and the private ownership of the vast profits produced by our labor relegates our lives to a constant struggle for survival.
The vanguard party must be a profoundly democratically structured party of the most conscious and disciplined workers and our allies.
The ranks of a vanguard party must be able to put aside some of our differences in order to lead the masses into a movement strong and united enough to overthrow capitalism and bring the working class into control of society—the economy, the state and the government. It is the kind of workers’ organization that can actually be powerful enough to establish the democratic dictatorship of the overwhelming majority of humanity—a worker-controlled organization strong enough and united enough to build a socialist society based upon the production for human needs and wants of all, and not the profits of the tiny few—a socialist society based on freedom, equality and justice for all.
The vanguard party may seem more out of reach than the United Front and the Labor Party at this time but is an urgent prerequisite for their ultimate success.
1https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+people+belong+to+unions+in+the+US+in+2025
2 “Elon Musk Buys $1 Billion in Tesla Stock as Board Defends His Pay”
Tesla’s chief executive bought the stock after the company’s board proposed paying him nearly $1 trillion if he achieves certain performance goals.
By Kailyn Rhone, Sept. 15, 2025, New Yori Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/business/elon-musk-buys-tesla-shares.html
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9) The Doctor Who Hates Medicine
By Rachael Bedard, Oct. 30, 2025
Dr. Bedard is a geriatrician, a palliative care doctor and a writer.
The confirmation hearing for Dr. Casey Means was delayed on Thursday. Reports suggest Dr. Means is in labor.
Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, graduated from the Stanford School of Medicine but abandoned her residency before completion, and has spent the past half-dozen years as a wellness influencer and tech company founder. She says she left medicine when she realized she was training to treat the complications of illness rather than the root causes.
“With a wall full of awards and honors for my clinical and research performance,” she writes in her book, “Good Energy,” “I walked out of the hospital and embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick.”
As the nation’s top doctor, the surgeon general is meant to be a trusted voice guiding Americans on matters concerning their health, bolstered by professional credentials and experience. Dr. Means, whose Senate hearings for the position were supposed to begin on Thursday, is a strange choice for the job. She is simultaneously boastful of her academic accomplishments and insistent on their uselessness. She references graduating at the top of her class at Stanford to establish her authority, only to then use that authority to argue that Stanford and institutions like it are fundamentally corrupt. She is an anti-expert expert, the doctor who believes doctors make people sicker. Her biography is typical of the leaders Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has elevated. In his eyes, this paradoxical relationship to expertise is exactly what qualifies her for the job.
“‘Trust the experts’ is not a feature of science or democracy; it’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism” is a maxim often repeated by Mr. Kennedy. Thus far, his efforts to oust the experts has more closely resembled regime change than democratization. Rather than attempt some novel way to honor diversity of opinion, Mr. Kennedy has simply shut one establishment out while creating another. He has installed a new ruling class at the Department of Health and Human Services and vested it with the authority to determine what ought to count as fact.
When faced with the possibility of dissent from within his ranks, he fires people, as he did with Dr. Susan Monarez, whom he appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only to dismiss her when she told him she would not approve his handpicked advisory committee’s recommended changes to the vaccine schedule.
His new establishment — including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration and others — nonetheless leans heavily on signifiers of conventional prestige for legitimacy. When reporters and scientists questioned the Trump administration’s recent effort to link Tylenol and autism, administration leaders and defenders emphasized that one of the studies they relied on was conducted by a dean at Harvard (who, it turned out, had been paid to testify in lawsuits against the makers of Tylenol).
In a chapter in her book titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor,” Dr. Means writes that “when it comes to preventing and managing chronic disease, you should not trust the medical system” (emphasis hers). She believes Americans need to lean into lifestyle changes to stop the chronic disease epidemic: whole-food diets free of added sugar and seed oils, frequent exercise, consistent sleep, decreased exposure to toxins. Should she be confirmed, her interest in “metabolic health” — how the body turns fuel into energy — is likely to be a significant focus of her work.
Dr. Means is right to criticize conventional medicine for demonstrating insufficient curiosity about the roles that diet and environmental factors play in making us sick. I dispute, however, her claims about the precise relationship between healthy habits and cell function. “Our modern diets and lifestyles are synergistically ravaging our mitochondria” is a characteristically berserk, science-ish statement intended to suggest Dr. Means is speaking in the realm of fact rather than hypothesis.
Above all, I reject Dr. Means’s insistence that modern medicine has no role to play in preventing, managing and helping reverse chronic disease. It’s rigid, dogmatic and untrue. It also strikes me as deeply counterproductive.
Dr. Means could build a big, diverse tent filled with people eager to tackle her stated priority: the relationship between the food system, the American diet, metabolism and chronic illness. Instead, her intense anti-medicine skepticism forecloses meaningful discourse with people who do not entirely agree with her.
That’s too bad, because an approach that challenged mainstream theories without insisting on their essential rottenness might gain a lot of purchase. There are countless examples of paradigm shifts in medicine pushed by rebels who believed the field was thinking about things the wrong way. Expert culture within health care actually can be confronted with its arrogance, and forced to change. It happens a lot; it’s how the field evolves.
One recent evolution is of special relevance to both Dr. Means and me. She opens her book with the story of her mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. A few chapters later, Dr. Means describes an interaction her family had with oncologists who recommended her mother consider treatments that might extend her life by a few months, but could also introduce new complications or even hasten her death. The Means family, in accordance with their mother’s wishes, opted to forgo those treatments and instead take her home to spend their final days together.
Dr. Means was, of course, deeply affected by this event. She took the entire episode as evidence that the health care system was essentially broken.
I am a palliative care doctor. I work with patients with serious illness who, like the Means family, must make difficult decisions based on what matters most to them. Dr. Means, who trained later in medicine than I did, would have known that palliative care exists for the purpose of supporting families like hers. Palliative care is only decades old, but it has transformed the culture of medicine by insisting that there are concerns beyond shrinking tumors that should inform treatment plans, such as patients’ suffering and agency around what happens to their bodies.
This change happened because of pressures from within medicine and outside it. It has been, to borrow Mr. Kennedy’s ideals, both scientific and democratic. There are plenty of other stories of how science and medicine have changed in the face of new ideas. A surgeon general or health secretary who cared sincerely about challenging a “trust the experts” paradigm might look at this recent history and take interest in it. Make America Healthy Again thinking, a focus on metabolic health, alternative approaches to tackling high blood pressure and diabetes: There’s room for all of it alongside our current disease treatments.
Each surgeon general gets to decide her or his own agenda and how to communicate it to the American people. The most recent surgeon general highlighted such unconventional topics as loneliness and parental burnout. The role is something of a doctor-influencer in chief, and it is well suited to disrupters with big ideas. At this moment, when trust in public health and science is falling, we need disruption. We need leadership with new ideas and the humility to know that Americans hold diverse perspectives on how they want to take care of their bodies.
Dr. Means is not that leader. She and Mr. Kennedy do not intend to democratize science; they want to replace what they describe as one set of orthodoxies with another, with the fervor of manifest destiny crossed with a revenge plot. Their ascent signals that the experts in charge have been switched out for contrarians and dropouts, who continue to trumpet their credentials even as they seek to dismantle the system that awarded them.
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10) What Comes After War, Political Division and Painful Family Feuds
Left-wing Jews are wrestling with thorny questions: What will American Jewish communities look like now? And how will they think about Israel?
By Emma Goldberg, Oct. 30, 2025
Emma Goldberg spent time with parent-child duos, friend groups, rabbis and communities that are wrestling with their views on Israel and American Jewish identity.
From left, Natasha Westheimer, Simone Zimmerman and Liya Rechtman. The three became friends while living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now none of them identify as Zionists. Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
For Leah Robbins, growing up in rural Florida meant that Saturday morning synagogue services were followed by lunch at Bono’s Pit Bar-B-Q.
Ms. Robbins lived mostly around non-Jews, so her family members were proud and precise about the way they expressed their Jewish identity. To her parents, part of being Jewish meant donating to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and encouraging Ms. Robbins when she chose to sing the Israeli national anthem while her classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
But during college and in the years after, as Ms. Robbins met friends who challenged her understanding of Israel’s history, its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and its conduct in wars in Gaza, her beliefs about Israel shifted far from those of her Zionist upbringing. She now argues that young Jews who are critical of Israel, like herself, need to build new communities — new spiritual congregations, new schools — that don’t emphasize Zionism.
Watching with flooding relief and trepidation the news of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, as well as the hostage and prisoner releases, she has asked herself, “When we’re on the other side of this devastation, what’s going to be left of Judaism if the Jewish left isn’t building it right now?”
For years, there had been a sticky and prevailing narrative about the role left-wing Jews played in the broader Jewish community, according to some Jewish leaders and rabbis. The story went like this: young progressive Jews might push their communities to be more critical of Israel, but as they became older they would send their children to the same Jewish day schools they had attended, where those children would sing pioneer songs and eat falafel on Israeli independence day.
In other words, young Jews who criticized Israel would simply come to accept the organizations and institutions they grew up in — or, maybe, leave them.
But that is not what is happening today, at least in some Jewish families.
Across scattered corners of the United States are glimpses of how much progressive Jewish communities have grown or gained wider recognition over the last two years, especially those that don’t identify as Zionist.
Ms. Robbins is raising money with the goal of starting a “diasporist” Jewish day school in Boston, one that puts its emphasis on Judaism outside Israel and teaches Israel’s history with a non-Zionist approach. Three Jewish friends who met in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and now live in Brooklyn, recently went door knocking for a Muslim mayoral candidate who pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he steps foot in New York.
A rabbi in Chicago gathered 400 families for high holiday services in a congregation that is pro-Palestinian and won’t raise the Israeli flag. Most of these groups acknowledge the horror of the attacks by Hamas militants on Oct 7. 2023; they also condemn the Israeli government’s response and the war in Gaza, as well as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that long predated the war.
In nearly two dozen interviews in recent weeks, it is clear that young people — some proudly Zionist, some pro-Israel but critical of its government, some anti-Zionist, some uncertain — are wrestling with thorny questions: What will American Jewish communities look like in the future, and how will they think about Israel?
Institutional leaders recognize the uncertainty swirling around this. “Your responsibility as a Jewish leader is to be concerned about the people within your movement,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who leads the largest movement of American Jewry, the Reform movement. “We’re at a critical moment. I don’t think at this moment we have a clear sense of where it’s going.”
This critical moment, since Oct. 7, 2023, has been a painful one for so many, prompting questions within families and communities about morality, safety and identity. What was already a stark generational divide on Israel in the American Jewish community has deepened. Pew polling released in 2024 found that younger Jews expressed more negative feelings toward Israel than older Jews did. A Washington Post poll last month found that 56 percent of Jewish Americans felt an emotional attachment to Israel, but that figure fell to 36 percent among those ages 18 to 34.
The number of dues-paying members in IfNotNow, an American Jewish group that opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, has grown more than 500 percent since Oct. 7, 2023, reaching over 6,000 people. Rabbis for Ceasefire, which formed after Oct. 7, now has some 430 rabbis. Jewish Voice for Peace said it increased its annual budget from $5 million to $9 million and its chapters from 45 to more than 100 in the past two years.
In absolute numbers, these communities are small, though fast expanding. Arielle Angel, the editor in chief of the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, called for more of these groups in a recent editorial. “We need new Jewish institutions,” she wrote.
The views of these left-wing Jews could keep shifting, Mr. Jacobs said. “If this war is in fact ending, what is the possibility that there could be in the coming months a new government in Israel, a reconnecting of young Jews who had been confused or pained by the war?” he added.
A majority of Jews remain emotionally and politically attached to Israel and to supporting its continued existence as a Jewish state. American Jews also support “Israel’s actions in Gaza” in greater shares than overall Americans do, according to Washington Post and Gallup polling.
But in interviews, some younger Jews say they’ve become increasingly unwilling to join or attend synagogues, schools, camps and nonprofits that don’t share their views on the recent war in Gaza.
“Four in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed a genocide,” said Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, citing Washington Post polling. “There’s a disconnect between that number, and the view of American Jewish institutions, where even the most liberal places have leaders that have refrained from calling this a genocide. People who feel committed to Jewish life have no choice but to create new Jewish communities.”
That is what Ms. Robbins is doing in trying to start a Jewish day school that doesn’t put Zionism at the core of its Jewish belief system. The school will be called Achvat Olam, meaning universal solidarity, and she plans for it to open in the fall of 2029. “There is a real hunger to save the soul of Judaism,” she said, “and see it decoupled from nationalism.”
Breaking Tradition
In September, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a progressive New York-based organizing group, filled a Sunset Park sports center for its gala, the Mazals, with some 1,000 attendees. Dressed in a high-low mix of sequins and clogs, attendees bumped into childhood friends from summer camp, while a speaker shouted, “Mazel tov and free Palestine!”
Milling around the crowd were three women who had all, at one point, felt strongly enough about their connection to Israel, and responsibility for its actions, that they went to live there. They became friends while living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now, none of them identify as Zionists.
One of them is Simone Zimmerman, 34, a longtime left-wing Jewish activist, who is the co-founder of IfNotNow and focus of the 2023 film “Israelism.” That documentary tells the story of how Ms. Zimmerman came to question her support for Israel, starting when she was a student at Berkeley.
“There is a broad network of people, that I see myself as part of, who have intimacy with Israeli culture and who have my left-wing politics and my understanding of the stakes,” Ms. Rechtman, said.Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
Her friend Liya Rechtman, 33, grew up in Brooklyn and spent her teenage years signing up for every pro-Israel activity she could find. She did a weeklong training program affiliated with the Israel Defense Forces and recruited college classmates to Birthright Israel, which provides young Jews with all-expenses paid trips there. Ms. Rechtman said she grew more critical of Israel while living there in 2016 and 2017, especially seeing the violent attacks that Palestinians in the West Bank faced from settlers.
She visited Germany shortly after Oct. 7, participating in a Jewish leadership program, and told the room she felt ashamed to be Jewish because of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
There was an audible gasp. “It was upsetting for some people to hear that,” Ms. Rechtman recalled.
Natasha Westheimer, 35, was the last of the trio to leave Israel, remaining until well after the start of the war. Ms. Westheimer said she broke her hand when Israeli soldiers cracked down on an anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank in 2021. Over time, she grew more concerned about going to these demonstrations, as the risks rose and advocacy opportunities shrank— but she also didn’t feel comfortable living there without joining activism and civil disobedience led by her Palestinian neighbors. She moved back to the United States in 2024.
Ms. Westheimer was struck by just how many anti-occupation activists she met in Israel had since become anti-Zionist activists living in New York.
Ms. Rechtman echoed this. “There is a broad network of people,” she said, “that I see myself as part of, who have intimacy with Israeli culture and who have my left-wing politics and my understanding of the stakes.”
No Middle Ground
The author Benjamin Moser has been at the New York Public Library, in recent months, writing a book about anti-Zionist Jews. His research traces the opposition these rabbis, lawyers, poets and scholars have faced, from Britain to Brazil and Amsterdam to Houston.
“My book tells a pretty unbroken story from the 19th century to the present,” said Mr. Moser, “Of anti-Zionist Jews being exiled and killed, being fired from their jobs, families splitting up.”
Parts of that are what Jewish groups on the left are still experiencing, even as their numbers grow. Lex Rofeberg, 34, a non-Zionist rabbi who lives in Providence, R.I., was targeted by Canary Mission, a group that says it exposes critics of Israel, for his political views. When he was invited to speak at a Reform synagogue in Milwaukee, his hometown, his mother, Ruth Lebed, was surprised to hear “through the grapevine” that some locals were uncomfortable with Mr. Rofeberg’s visit.
When she posted in a Facebook group about his involvement with the film “Israelism,” which explores anti-Zionism, online acquaintances blocked her.
“There are people out there who think that his views on Israel make him antisemitic,” said Ms. Lebed, 67. “Which is ridiculous. The guy is a rabbi.”
An anti-Zionist rabbi in the Chicago area, Brant Rosen, 62, said he was thrown out of his local rabbinical network because of his beliefs. He left the congregation in Evanston, where he had worked for 16 years, because of tensions within the community about his activism. Mr. Rosen decided to start his own anti-Zionist congregation, called Tzedek Chicago (Tzedek means justice in Hebrew), which has more than doubled in size since the Israel-Hamas War began, growing to more than 400 dues-paying households.
Mr. Rosen has felt, since the start of the recent war, that Jews who support and oppose Israel’s policies cannot be together in communities.. “I think the middle ground has become untenable,” he said.
Still, there are many organizations on the Jewish left that identify as Zionist and want to make space for people who are profoundly, wholeheartedly critical of Israel.
“You have a lot of young people saying, ‘This is important to me, but it’s not, as I’ve been told, a simple yes or no, do I support Israel or not?’” said Hadar Susskind, chief executive of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist group.
Young people he talks to say they care about Israel but are also deeply opposed to the current government.
“So many people, were taught that it’s ‘You support Israel, period,’” he continued. “Many people are not willing to have that be the end of the discussion.”
Generation to Generation
Vivian Russell, 17, was walking in Park Slope in September when she bumped into Ms. Rechtman, Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Westheimer canvassing with Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. She stopped to introduce herself.
Ms. Russell, a high school student who lives in Washington Heights, told them that she found herself at odds with her public school classmates during conversations about the Israel-Hamas War. She didn’t agree with the Jewish Student Union at her school, so she joined the Muslim Student Union instead.
Back uptown in Washington Heights, two days before the recent Oct. 7 anniversary, Ms. Russell sat with her mother, Dara Herman. Ms. Russell calls herself an anti-Zionist. Ms. Herman, 52, is “more sympathetic to Israel’s plight.”
Their exchanges echo those of so many Jewish families, whose group chats and Sabbath tables have become more tense since 2023.
“If I have kids, I’ll be raising my kids Jewish and celebrating Jewish holidays and stuff,” said Ms. Russell, as she sat with her mother at a neighborhood coffee shop. “But I don’t think that I’ll tell them, ‘Oh Israel is the place of our people.’”
Her mother replied: “But how do you square that with the ancient history that I’ve been taught — that Jews were from Israel, that all those years we wandered in the desert and then finally came back to Israel. Is all of that false?”
“That was many, many years ago!” her daughter said.
“I’m only one generation from the Holocaust,” Ms. Herman said. “It feels very real to me that less than 100 years ago there were millions of Jews being killed and those who survived needed somewhere to go.”
But Ms. Herman, watching her daughter’s evolution, realizes that the Jewish community is transforming as it absorbs a new generation.
It also seems possible, some activists say, that those groups will recede and the new groups that a younger generation on the left is building — like the school Ms. Robbins hopes to start or Mr. Rosen’s congregation — will become some form of establishment.
Ms. Russell, whose father is Irish American, declared that she felt confident in the set of ideas about Judaism she wanted to pass on to her future children.
“I’ll teach them about how my people — both Jews and Irish people — have been rebels,” Ms. Russell said. “Both are a group of people that have struggled, and cared about each other, and cared about freedom.”
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