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Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Greta Thunberg Among Hundreds From Gaza Aid Flotilla Deported by Israel
Israel intercepted the boats at sea and detained the participants for days before expelling them. Some of the activists say they were mistreated, which Israel denied.
By Ephrat Livni, Oct. 6, 2025
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, arriving at an airport in Athens on Monday after being deported from Israel. Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel on Monday deported the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and about 170 other participants in a flotilla that tried to deliver aid by sea to Gaza but was intercepted by the Israeli authorities, the foreign ministry said.
The widely publicized mission, involving dozens of boats and hundreds of activists, aimed to breach an Israeli blockade of Gaza, where hunger is widespread and a U.N.-backed panel of experts has declared that famine afflicts hundreds of thousands of people.
Israel, which has limited deliveries to the territory for almost two decades, has imposed stringent restrictions on the entry of food and other aid since the war there began two years ago. For more than two months earlier this year, it prevented any food from being brought in.
Flotilla participants say that Israeli forces illegally intercepted their boats last week in violation of maritime law and international humanitarian law. Israel says the activists violated a legal blockade.
Some who were arrested and then released over the weekend reported that they had been mistreated in Israeli custody. Israel’s foreign ministry denied the accusation in statements on Monday and over the weekend. “All the legal rights of the participants in this P.R. stunt were and will continue to be fully upheld,” the ministry said, accusing activists of spreading “fake news.”
There had been reports from activists and others over the weekend that Ms. Thunberg was mistreated. Ms. Thunberg confirmed those reports on Monday. She was among the participants deported to Greece and addressed crowds waiting for the activists upon their arrival in Athens.
“I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story,” she said, according to a video of her remarks posted by flotilla organizers.
Ms. Thunberg turned discussion to the plight of Palestinians. She accused Israel of committing genocide and attempting to erase a population before the world’s eyes. A United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza last month concluded that Israel was committing genocide, allegations that Israel has repeatedly rejected.
Those deported on Monday were sent to Greece and Slovakia, the Israeli foreign ministry said. “The deportees are citizens of Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the U.K., Serbia and the United States,” it said.
On Sunday, the ministry said that Israel had sent to Spain 29 flotilla participants from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. On Saturday, 137 people from the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Malaysia, Bahrain, Morocco, Switzerland, Tunisia, and Turkey were deported to Turkey, it said.
A livestream posted by the flotilla organizers showed crowds of what appeared to be hundreds of people waiting for the activists at the airport in Athens. “Free, free Palestine,” they chanted. The flotilla participants were greeted warmly by the crowds.
Miriam Azem, a spokeswoman for Adalah, a legal organization for Arab minority rights in Israel that is representing the flotilla participants, said in an interview on Sunday night that lawyers who met with activists were told they had been kept on their knees with their hands bound for many hours. They were held in overcrowded cells and denied adequate drinking water, she said, and some said they had also been denied food and critical medications in the initial days and were deliberately deprived of sleep.
Some flotilla participants were on a hunger strike while in custody, Ms. Azem and the group’s organizers have said.
Ms. Azem said that there had been numerous due process violations, with lawyers for the group not notified that hearings were taking place and activists denied access to counsel. She said that Israel’s process was “entirely illegal,” with activists forcibly taken to the country, then treated as having entered illegally and detained in a security prison. She spoke of “a cycle that is meant to intimidate and to deter.”
On Monday, Ms. Azem said that about 140 flotilla participants were still being detained, but said that the organization could confirm the number and that it was receiving little information from the Israeli authorities.
Relatives of some of the American participants on the flotilla — there were about 20 — met in Capitol Hill on Monday to press lawmakers for their release.
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, was drafting a letter to be sent on Monday afternoon to Secretary of State Marco Rubio inquiring about four Californians aboard the flotilla who were detained, along with other Americans.
The participants were on a “nonviolent mission to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza,” Mr. Khanna wrote, according to a draft of the letter shared with The New York Times. He called for more aid to enter Gaza in addition to protection of flotilla participants.
“The U.S. has an obligation to protect its citizens abroad and must act immediately.” Mr. Khanna wrote.
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2) In Israel, Two-Year Anniversary of Oct. 7 Attack Is Quiet but Inescapable
The somber milestone comes with peace talks underway, hostages from the Hamas-led attack still in Gaza, more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and Israel more isolated than ever.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 7, 2025
Israel marked the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack that began its longest war in subdued fashion on Tuesday, with new hopes of ending the conflict but with hostages still in captivity and its exhausted military adding to the death toll of Palestinians and to the destruction in Gaza.
The arrival of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, a national and religious holiday, shut down most businesses across Israel for the day. The government delayed official remembrances of the war’s traumatic first day until Oct. 16, after the end of the High Holiday season.
But Tuesday’s milestone was inescapable.
There were quiet gatherings at some of the kibbutzim near Gaza that suffered the most in the massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, and informal events drew participants throughout the country.
In the city of Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, about 20 runners in T-shirts with messages advocating the return of the hostages made their way early in the morning along a popular route surrounding the town, which is home to Nimrod Cohen, a soldier held hostage. Passing cars honked in solidarity.
Hundreds of Israelis came to Hostages Square in the center of Tel Aviv, silently meditating over art installations and memorials to those still captive and citizens killed on Oct. 7 or while in captivity. Israel believes that about 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of 28 others who died in captivity.
Ilana Yahav, 69, a therapist, said Oct. 7 had opened so many wounds that it was impossible to care for everyone who was suffering.
“If you were there, or someone in your family was there, or you only saw a video — it will be a lot of years of treatment,” she said.
Tzlil Sasson, 38, and her husband had driven from Lehavim, east of Gaza, with their three young children.
“It was important for us as parents to bring them here, to remember, and to pray,” she said. “Maybe, in a couple of days, the hostages will be free — we hope.”
In Kfar Aza, a tiny kibbutz less than two miles from Gaza where at least 62 neighbors were killed and 19 taken hostage, several dozen residents held a memorial that began with a moment of silence at 6:29 a.m. That was the moment on a Saturday morning when Hamas began launching thousands of rockets, overwhelming Israel’s air-defense system.
Under cover of that aerial onslaught was the main Hamas offensive: an invasion by thousands of assailants who swarmed across the fence separating Gaza from border towns and dozens of tiny agricultural communities. They killed residents in their homes, gunned young people down at a music festival and overran Israeli military bases.
All told, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 captives back to Gaza. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.
A shocked Israel mobilized to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians in the past two years, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry.
It has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure — and its landscape — to rubble, shrapnel and sand.
The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again. And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.
In Israel, the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages have bitterly divided society, exacerbating fissures that existed before the Oct. 7 attack.
Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war and passed up opportunities for a cease-fire even after the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership so that he could keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.
The prolonged conflict has forced reservists to serve multiple lengthy tours of duty, draining the economy and putting soldiers’ lives on hold, while inflaming longstanding resentment of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military service.
Israel’s conduct of the war, including the tremendous casualty count and gruesome images of children and others killed and maimed in Gaza, as well as statements by far-right allies of Mr. Netanyahu of their desire to depopulate and annex the territory, have prompted widespread allegations, including by a United Nations commission and Amnesty International, that Israel has committed genocide.
Israel denies this and insists that its military works to protect Palestinian civilians, including by warning them of its attacks. It also blames Hamas fighters for endangering civilians by fighting from the cover of hospitals, schools and other populated areas.
Outrage over the war has fueled a global rise in antisemitism and violence against Jews. That has included the killings of an elderly woman at a march in Boulder, Colo., to support the hostages; of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, D.C., outside a Jewish museum; and of two worshipers at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain promised to clamp down on antisemitism and faulted students for planning protests “on the anniversary of the atrocities” of Oct. 7.
“This is not who we are as a country,” he wrote in The Times of London. “It’s un-British to have so little respect for others.”
The prolonging of the war has also ratcheted up Israel’s isolation on the world stage. That was never clearer than in late September, when 10 countries, including traditional allies like Britain, Canada, France and Australia, recognized Palestinian statehood for the first time.
Hamas issued a statement Tuesday calling the Oct. 7 attack a “glorious crossing,” and a spokesman for the group, Fawzi Barhoum, described it as “heroic.” In remarks released on a Hamas social-media channel, Mr. Barhoum said the attack had “restored our national cause to its global position” and “stirred the conscience” of people worldwide to support the Palestinian cause.
Yet by some measures, Palestinian political aspirations appear farther out of reach than ever.
The Oct. 7 attacks caused the Israeli body politic to shift rightward, with many liberals who might have once belonged to the Israeli peace camp now feeling betrayed and saying they oppose a Palestinian state on Israel’s border.
On both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, the war seemed far from over on Tuesday.
Though Hamas is weakened and its arsenal depleted, after 7 a.m., rocket sirens sounded in Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli community on Gaza’s northern border, and the Israeli military said that a projectile had fallen in the area.
In Deir al-Balah, in Gaza, Israeli warplanes could be heard overhead at 1 a.m. and again after 5:30 a.m. As the sun rose, gunfire could be heard in the eastern part of the town, along with the blasts of occasional artillery rounds.
Ahmed al-Haddad, 51, a Gaza resident who said he, his wife and their four children had been displaced five times, said their suffering had surpassed what his grandparents had told him about the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when Palestinians were displaced in Israel’s war for independence.
“This war is the harshest, the most merciless,” he said. “It feels like history repeating itself, only harder.”
Back in Israel, a moment of silence in kibbutz Kfar Aza at 6:29 was anything but, as drones whined, helicopters flew overhead and explosions frequently ripped through the air.
Zion Regev, a municipal leader, read out an adapted version of the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. His voice dropped as he noted that “our Gali and Ziv” — two brothers from Kfar Aza still held hostage in Gaza — had yet to return home.
“Some say what happened is receding into the distance, but for me, it’s stronger than ever,” said Nitzan Kaner, 37. She said she was trapped for about 30 hours when militants attacked.
On Tuesday morning, she said she had experienced a sleepless night:
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what we went through.”
A few minutes away, hundreds of Israelis visited the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 300 people were killed. Signs bearing the faces of the victims are arranged in rows, like dancers at a rave.
Anat Magnezi held a poster with a photo of her son Amit, 22, who was killed, over her own face.
“I wish that all the world would see this and know what happened to us and that it is real,” she said. “But all the world is against us now.”
Roman Fourmann, whose stepdaughter Dana Petrenko, 23, was killed along with her boyfriend, stood with his family at a small memorial erected in their honor.
“It feels no different today than when it happened two years ago,” he said. “We go to work, we keep on living. But we can’t shake the feeling that it’s still Oct. 7.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Kfar Aza, Israel; Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot; Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
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3) We Tried to Reach Gazans We Interviewed Over Two Years of War
We kept wondering: Did they find their missing relatives? Were they even still alive? Here’s what happened to them.
By Vivian Yee, Lauren Leatherby, Samar Abu Elouf, Bilal Shbair, Iyad Abuheweila, Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 7, 2025
We’ve interviewed more than 700 people in Gaza over the past two years. Their stories stayed with us.
We kept wondering: Did they find their missing relatives? Are their homes standing? Did they bury their dead? Were they forced to flee again? Were they even still alive?
So we tried to find them again. This is what they said.
No single experience can fully contain the agony of Gaza, the near-obliteration of a society and a place.
Collectively, however, the people we spoke to over the past two years have helped us see how the war has crushed those who have lived it.
They told us about the raw wounds of their grief, their fear of the next airstrike, their dread of tomorrow. About the first time they fled home as Israeli bombs and shells fell closer, the first time they put up a makeshift tent, the second time, the third.
About their weakening bodies, their children crying for bread, their days searching for baby formula and lentils. About their hopes of being evacuated for medical treatment, of going back to school, of reuniting with their families.
We tried to get back in touch with many of them. Many did not respond. Some phone numbers no longer worked. Others had escaped Gaza. Some, we learned, had been killed.
Of the nearly 100 we reached, everyone lost something or someone: a family member, a friend, their home, hope.
I lost a sister, a brother, and nearly 40 relatives. That alone feels like more than enough grief for one lifetime.
Ismail al-Sheikh
First spoke to us in January 2025
Our lives are nothing but suffering on top of suffering. We’ve lost relatives and been scattered across tents.
Hanaa al-Najjar
First spoke to us in April 2024
When we spoke last summer to Samar al-Jaja and her nephews, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila, it had been 10 months since the brothers’ parents and baby sister had been killed in an airstrike.
Under their tent at a charity camp, they still held out hope that they would see their parents when they were allowed to go home to Gaza City.
But when they got home earlier this year, only their parents’ bedroom was still standing.
There was no one inside. The five of them stood there, numb.
“The kids said sadly, ‘We wish we were buried with them,’” Ms. al-Jaja, 32, said when we contacted her again recently.
They have never been able to mourn properly. The sweets that people in Gaza traditionally distribute on the anniversary of a death were too expensive to make, given the wartime price of flour and sugar.
They couldn’t even say a prayer at their parents’ graves. They do not know where they are.
“Even that closure has been taken from us,” she said.
She spoke to us from a half-destroyed building in Gaza City where she and her nephews were sheltering.
Days later, Israeli forces stormed the city, the latest operation in the two-year campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which began after the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Negotiators from Israel and Hamas began holding talks in Cairo on Monday about a possible swap of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. If they agree, the war could be one step closer to ending.
But as they wait to hear what will happen to them, Palestinians in Gaza must keep trying to survive.
Ms. al-Jaja and her nephews moved to another neighborhood to escape the offensive in Gaza City, then fled south. They paid nearly $4,000 to a truck driver to load half their belongings — it was “pay or risk death,” the driver told them, Ms. al-Jaja said.
After a 14-hour journey, they ended up back in the same charity camp they were living in last year. This time, they have no tent.
Almost everyone we spoke to has been displaced from homes or shelters multiple times. Many have no home to return to.
If, God forbid, an evacuation happens to my family, it would be the 10th time so far since the start of this war.
Nour Barda
First spoke to us in April 2024
We’ve been left with this choice: die in Gaza City or be displaced to the south. It makes you feel helpless rage and humiliation.
Montaser Bahja
First spoke to us in January 2025
Last October, when we wrote about Hammam Malaka and his wife, Najia Malaka, they had been separated for almost the entire war.
They had gotten stuck less than 20 miles apart after Israeli troops cut off northern Gaza from southern Gaza.
He was trapped in the south with Yamen, 6, and Sandy, 4. She was in the north with Seela, 3, Ashraf, the baby, and Mohammed, their newborn.
When we spoke to Mr. Malaka again recently, he said they had finally managed to reunite in January, during the brief cease-fire.
He told us how they found each other at what had been the border between north and south Gaza: “I switched on the flashlight of my old Nokia phone and began shouting into the dark — ‘Ashraf! Mohammed!’ — hoping she could hear me and find me more easily,” he said.
Then he saw her. “I ran and hugged her and our children with everything in me,” he said.
But their 3-year-old, Seela, was not there. She had been killed while they were apart.
After reuniting, the family returned home to Gaza City, but then were forced to flee south again.
Since Israel broke the cease-fire in March, their days have been spent in a perpetual struggle against hunger and danger, which Mr. Malaka said were like “endless waves crashing over us.”
Without work, he said, he has taken the risk of grabbing supplies from passing aid trucks or lining up at aid distribution points.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed searching for something to eat, according to aid officials.
Many people we spoke to told us about hunger: suffering from malnutrition, losing significant weight or going days at a time without food, even as they tried desperately to find it.
I lost 20 kilograms during the time of famine. There were times when I just collapsed and could not carry injured people and run for 100 meters to reach the ambulance.
Naseem Hassan
First spoke to us in October 2023
As a mother, all I think about is how to save one meal for tomorrow, how to bring water without quarrels in the long lines.
Yasmin al-Attar
First spoke to us in March 2025
Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, had managed to carve out a sliver of something like normal life when we first spoke to him last November.
He was managing a shawarma place in Deir al Balah, one of the few places where ordinary life went on amid the agony all around it.
In January, during the cease-fire, he moved home to Gaza City.
That was the last good thing that happened, he told us recently.
He lost his wife’s sister to an airstrike in June and his uncle to another strike in September. He has been displaced four times since January.
Since August, he has also been injured twice: once when an airstrike hit near his house, wounding him and his wife with shrapnel, and again when he was passing a Gaza City high-rise that was bombed.
“The hardest thing is living with the feeling that all you can do is wait for death,” he said.
He added: “Now I look at my children and wonder, will I see them alive in the months ahead? Will they be safe? And as a father, will I have the strength to protect them?”
He no longer sells shawarma to eager customers. Instead, he spends his days scrounging for food, clean water and cash to pay the astronomical prices at the markets.
There have been many days when all he could bring his family was bread with cheese and thyme.
“Daily life is another kind of war,” he said. “This is what life has been reduced to: moving from one danger to another, trying to feed my children, trying simply to survive.”
The anguish of just getting through the day came up again and again as we spoke to people about what it feels like to live through the war.
Even animals, if they were subjected to what we’ve lived through, couldn’t become accustomed to it. We are living through a catastrophe.
Fatma Edaama
First spoke to us in May 2024
I try to hold on to hope — to be the father who reassures his children, and the son who stands with his extended family. But fear and despair haunt us everywhere, as if this tragedy has no end.
Amir Ahmed
First spoke to us in October 2023
My daughter Batoul wakes up screaming day and night from the bombings or the sound of warplanes, suffering from severe terror.
Safaa Zyadah
First spoke to us in February 2024
Every night, I lie awake wondering if tomorrow will bring anything better, or if it’ll just add another layer of pain.
Mohammed Shubeir
First spoke to us in October 2024
Not everyone we tried to reach survived.
Some died, or were killed, after we first spoke to them.
In October 2024, when we talked to Mohamed Kilani, a lawyer in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, he was barely able to feed his twin 2-year-old daughters.
“We have been given one option only: that is to die,” he told us at the time.
Later, we saw social media posts from his family that mourned his death. When we reached his cousin, she said he had gone to look for food for his family and never returned.
After he disappeared, family members saw some photos of stray dogs eating corpses in northern Gaza, the cousin said. They thought they recognized his body among them.
Many people spoke about waiting — or wishing — for death.
I have nothing, no work, no food, no shelter, and no blankets. I wish I had been home when it was bombed so I could rest.
Bilal Assabti
First spoke to us in October 2023
I wish for a missile at any moment. It would strike us all together, so that it would be better than this life.
Ahmed al-Nems
First spoke to us in May 2025
Some people we spoke to were lucky: They managed to leave, whether by paying their way out, through their foreign passports or because they were evacuated for medical treatment.
But it is a tainted prize.
They all have loved ones in danger back in Gaza. And for all the safety of where they are now, it is not, in the end, home.
Niveen Foad is one of them. She was the only available caretaker for her 6-year-old cousin, Sarah Yusuf, who was badly injured in an airstrike. Israel allowed Ms. Foad, her three daughters and Sarah to be evacuated to Italy in February 2024.
Since we first spoke to her there, two more of her children have managed to join her in Bologna.
Sarah, the 6-year-old, is doing better after intensive medical treatment, and her parents and brother have also come to Italy.
Ms. Foad is learning Italian and training to be an assistant chef: moving forward.
Yet thoughts of what, and who, she left behind sit heavily in her mind.
“I feel like I betrayed my own country by leaving, but sometimes I also think that I deserve a chance in life,” she said. And her kids deserved that chance, she said.
“It’s a confusing and constant fight with myself,” she added.
On the bus home from buying fish recently, she thought of her father in Gaza, who loves fish.
“My tears poured down, thinking I can afford to buy food and eat, but they can barely get anything,” she said.
Italy is her present, she said. Gaza, she believes, is still her future.
She wants her daughters to continue their education in Italy. But for them to get married and settle in Italy — impossible, she said.
“Whatever happens, I’ll end up in Gaza,” she said. “Staying in Italy is just a temporary solution.”
We reached dozens of people who had been able to leave Gaza for places like Italy, Jordan and Egypt. Some, like Ms. Foad, were determined to go back. A few were less sure. Though physically safe, all are tormented by Gaza.
Guilt claws at them, and worry keeps them up at night.
I try to stay away from people and sit alone all the time because I am constantly thinking about my mother, my sister, and my two brothers who are still in Gaza.
Ruba Abu Jibba
First spoke to us in November 2024
If I were in Gaza it would have been easier for me, because my situation would be similar to that of the people around me, but the emptiness I live in now abroad is extremely exhausting.
Mohammed al-Aloul
First spoke to us in February 2024
When we first spoke to Maher Ghanem last year, his grief was fresh.
His wife had died from cancer weeks before. She had been prevented from leaving Gaza for treatment after Israeli forces seized a crucial border crossing out of the enclave.
He told us when we called him again recently that he had remarried — a traditional, arranged union — so he wouldn’t have to care for his seven children alone.
In September, he went to a graduation ceremony for one of his daughters, who had just nominally finished middle school. But it seemed absurd to Mr. Ghanem, he said.
Realistically, his children have had almost no schooling for the last two years.
His youngest son was in first grade when the war began. Now the child talks to his father about trying to make some money ferrying passengers on a donkey cart, Mr. Ghanem said.
“There isn’t a school for him to attend, anyway,” he said.
Mr. Ghanem, a former security officer with the Palestinian Authority, recalled attending joint Israeli-Palestinian meetings at a kibbutz in central Israel in the late 1990s.
The point was to discuss how to co-exist peacefully.
Those meetings, too, now seemed absurd.
“There isn’t a glimmer of hope left in Gaza,” he said. “Me, and everyone else I know, just wants to get out.”
Many of the people we spoke to wanted to leave Gaza.
Even if the war ended somehow, few still thought there was any future left for them in Gaza.
But I don’t want to die. I still want to grow up, become an architect, rebuild Gaza, become a football player in Palestine’s national team, and win the World Cup.
Mohamed Abu Rteinah
First spoke to us in February 2024
We don’t have a present or a future. The only hope we’re living with is to be able to leave. That is the only way we will give our kids a normal life.
Ehab Fasfous
First spoke to us in August 2025
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4) No, Trump Can’t Deploy Troops to Wherever He Wants
By Stephen I. Vladeck, Oct. 7, 2025
Mr. Vladeck is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
President Trump’s escalating efforts to deploy armed troops onto the streets of several American cities run by Democratic officials are raising a question courts have been all but completely able to avoid since the Constitution was drafted: Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive?
The text of the relevant statutes doesn’t answer that question. But our constitutional ideals, to say nothing of common sense, should — and the answer must be no.
Contrary to some Trump critics, the president’s actions in Washington and Los Angeles as well as the developing situations in Portland and Chicago are not tantamount to imposing martial law. That’s only when the military supplants civilian government, not when it supplements it. Indeed, if there were consensus among officials and citizens that civilian authorities could not adequately enforce the laws, there would likewise be consensus that Congress has given the president the power to use federal troops — whether regular or federalized National Guard personnel.
The problem instead is that many Americans don’t believe the president’s claims. We look at pictures and videos out of Portland and we don’t see “war-ravaged” anything. We look at news reports out of Chicago and see the principal violence coming from federal officers — not being directed toward them. To put the matter directly, there’s a factual dispute about whether resorting to the military is justified. As Judge Karin Immergut (a Trump appointee) put it sharply in the Portland case, in which she ruled over the weekend that there was no legal basis for sending in troops, the president is acting in a manner that is “untethered to the facts.”
The Constitution’s drafters were not averse to domestic use of the military. One of the immediate catalysts for the 1787 Constitutional Convention had been the embarrassing inability of the national government to respond to Shays’s Rebellion — a relatively modest uprising that began in Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1786. That episode exposed for all to see the impotence of the government created by the Articles of Confederation — and it highlighted the need for a stronger, centralized federal executive. To that end, one of the powers the new Constitution expressly gave to Congress was the power “to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.”
When Congress first codified that power in 1792, there was little debate about the insurrection or invasion parts. Lawmakers’ concerns focused on when troops could be used for law enforcement. Their response was to authorize such deployments only when local authorities were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws themselves — and only when a federal judge or Supreme Court justice agreed with the president’s determination that those circumstances were present. (The statute they passed is the precursor to what’s known today as the Insurrection Act.)
President George Washington followed those statutory requirements to the letter in 1794, when he used troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1795, Congress removed the requirement of ex ante judicial approval (perhaps believing that other presidents would be similarly scrupulous). But Congress still insisted on a series of procedural requirements and time limits for domestic uses of the military. The point wasn’t that the president’s determinations would be conclusive; it was that the president would be allowed to go first — and, where necessary, other institutions could push back.
Until this year, Congress’s 230-year-old choice had been borne out. Presidents of both parties have been especially careful to use the military domestically only in contexts in which there was a clear factual predicate, whether because local authorities were overwhelmed by riots or were refusing to enforce civil rights laws. Indeed, until this year, there was virtually no judicial precedent on the scope of these powers, because their factual limits had not been seriously tested.
The Trump administration has pushed the envelope in three different respects. First, in Washington the administration invoked the federal government’s unique control over the District of Columbia National Guard (and the Metropolitan Police Department) in response to claims about crime rates there that were belied by the Justice Department’s own statistics. In Los Angeles, the administration called out hundreds of Marines and federalized thousands of members of the California National Guard in response to dubious claims that local authorities were unable to keep order, especially in the face of anti-ICE protests. Now the administration’s attention has turned to Portland and to Chicago, near where there has been a long-running, peaceful protest around one of the most visible ICE facilities.
In the California, Oregon and Illinois cases, the administration is trying to walk a legal tightrope. It is invoking an obscure provision in Title 10 (the part of the U.S. Code that deals with the military) to federalize National Guard troops. But that provision authorizes federalization only when “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” And without a request from local officials, the president can use “regular forces” only if “unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”
On Monday, President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.” But the same reason he hasn’t invoked that statute yet should also doom his reliance on the more obscure National Guard authority.
Instead, the federal government is trying to use dubious factual claims about what’s true on the ground in these cities to justify federalizing National Guard troops both from within those states and from outside of them.
That is what we, and more important the courts, face: a factual dispute more than a legal one.
Typically, our constitutional system resolves these kinds of factual disputes through litigation. Neutral judges and juries hear legal arguments and factual testimony and decide for themselves what has, and what has not been, established. But the president’s advisers and supporters have spent the past few days arguing that this is not an appropriate role for the federal courts to play — because the president’s determinations in national security cases should be, and (they claim) historically have been, conclusive.
This, then, is the real legal test President Trump’s deployments raise: Can the courts meaningfully scrutinize the president’s claims, or must they blindly defer? To date, we’ve seen fairly aggressive pushback to the administration’s arguments from the courts — from Judge Charles Breyer in the Los Angeles case and from Judge Immergut in Portland.
The Supreme Court will no doubt have the last word. And the question is going to be whether the president can use a contrived crisis as a justification for sending troops into our cities. In other words, the issue is going to come down to who decides the facts when it comes to domestic use of the military. That question meant one thing when we had presidents who, for whatever reason, were constrained to acknowledge reality. It means something else altogether in an administration for which, to borrow from George Orwell, 2 + 2 = 5.
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5) Coal Is Unreliable, Expensive and Dirty. Trump Is Going All In.
By Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted, Oct. 7, 2025
Mr. Feaster and Mr. Wamsted are analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Nathan Howard/Reuters
The two-unit Cumberland coal plant in northwestern Tennessee, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States, capable of supplying electricity to as many as 1.4 million homes when it is running.
But lately, the plant has been failing right when customers need electricity the most.
In the middle of the heat wave that hit the eastern United States this June, one of the units tripped offline, forcing the T.V.A. to declare a power emergency and ask customers to cut back on electricity use. For consumers, this meant raising the temperature of their air-conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year.
Cumberland’s problems run so deep that the T.V.A. plans to retire the 52-year-old units in 2026 and 2028. It has warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that keeping the plant open any longer would require significant investment and create economic and reliability risks.
“Clean, beautiful coal” has become a mantra for the Trump administration. But it is neither clean nor beautiful. More to the point, it is neither economical nor reliable — central concerns for utilities and power producers across the country. In contrast, wind and solar energy and battery storage, which the administration actively opposes, are less expensive, more reliable and far better for the climate.
Most of the coal mined in the United States today fuels aging electric power plants such as Cumberland that are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. It’s why America gets just one-third as much electricity from coal as it did in 2007, when power production from coal peaked. Since then, large coal-fired plants have been steadily replaced by cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives. In 2025 alone, 23 units are scheduled to close or be converted to gas by utilities and other power producers. From 2026 to 2030, 109 more units are expected to stop burning coal, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where we work.
The Trump administration is betting that forcing coal plants to stay open, offering $625 million to upgrade plants, giving away coal on federal land, cutting pollution limits and opening more land to coal mining will spark a turnaround for coal-fired power generation. But while these measures could prolong the operating lives of some coal plants for a short period, they will not reverse the decline of an industry hurtling into economic and technological obsolescence.
Coal-fired power plants are essentially steam engines, a technology the railroads abandoned in the 1950s and ’60s. They are practically identical to the first coal-fired plant, built in 1882 by Thomas Edison to produce electricity in New York City.
But power technology and grid operations have evolved significantly over the past two decades, first by the rise of generation that has no fuel cost (wind and solar) and more recently by battery storage, which can send power to the grid as needed. Batteries in Texas now store power when demand is low and solar generation is high (think 10 a.m.) and then send that power back into the system when demand is high (around 7 p.m.).
This capability, which didn’t exist in the grid until recently, is sharply lowering spikes in power prices and reducing consumer costs. It’s also enabling even more low-cost renewables to be built and reducing the old approach of building expensive fossil-fueled plants dedicated to meeting periods of peak demand.
Coal plants, in contrast, cannot respond quickly to changes in grid demand. Many of them lose money across the day when power prices are low, since they cannot easily stop running in response to low demand.
While coal power struggles with high fuel, operation and maintenance costs, solar and battery storage costs are projected to continue falling while performance improves, further undercutting coal’s competitiveness.
Because the batteries large enough to store electricity for the grid are based on the same technology as batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, they benefit enormously from global investment and research. As a result, energy storage density, a key measure of performance, has been improving by 5 percent or more annually. Solar panels have also seen consistent increases in efficiency combined with falling costs.
Battery storage and solar have other key advantages that conventional power plants do not. Both can be built at nearly any size, from small residential units to large, high-power utility projects. They can also be built almost anywhere, helping utilities avoid costly transmission upgrades and other infrastructure investments.
These advantages have increasingly undercut the economics of coal generation. The problem has gotten so severe that many utilities, even in coal-friendly states, have converted or are planning to convert their existing coal plants to burn natural gas to keep them open and operating. Think about that for a minute: It is often cheaper and more reliable to retrofit a coal plant to burn gas than to keep operating it as is.
Gas is the preferred option for the T.V.A. saddled with the Cumberland coal plants. It is building a 1,450-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant as a replacement.
The Trump administration is likely to push the T.V.A. to continue operating the facility past its planned closure dates, regardless of the cost and reliability implications for consumers. The Department of Energy has already forced a Michigan utility to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant open — despite long-term, state-approved plans to close it in May — which cost $29 million in the first five weeks alone. Consumers, including many who are not even served by the utility, will ultimately be forced to pay for these actions.
These costly stopgap measures are largely performative. They will not prevent coal’s declining importance as an electricity generation resource. The alternatives are simply less expensive, more reliable and quicker to build.
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6) Live Updates: Trump Officials Head to Anxious Cities Fighting to Keep Out Troops
The Texas National Guard was preparing to deploy in the Chicago area this week. Officials there and in Portland, Ore., are trying to block the troops in court, as administration officials accused protesters of attacking federal agents.
By Anna Griffin, Mitch Smith, Robert Chiarito and Glenn Thrush, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Chicago and Washington. Oct. 7, 2025
Federal officials have said the National Guard was needed to protect ICE agents and buildings, including a processing facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, Ill. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Senior Trump administration officials were headed to Chicago and Portland, Ore., on Tuesday as the legal and rhetorical battles escalated over President Trump’s efforts to send out-of-state National Guard troops to both cities.
Hundreds of troops were expected to deploy in the Chicago area within the next 48 hours, according to officials. It would represent the latest in an extraordinary series of military incursions in American cities that serve as Democratic strongholds.
Illinois and Chicago officials have contested the deployment orders in court, calling them an unconstitutional “invasion.” Mr. Trump has also tried to send troops from Texas and California to Portland, Ore., but a federal judge has blocked those moves for now. A federal judge in Illinois declined to immediately take the action on Monday.
Mr. Trump has contended that major U.S. cities led by Democrats need the military to crack down on crime — which troops are generally barred from doing under federal law — and assist federal immigration agents as they attempt to carry out his mass deportation policies.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and other Democratic leaders have accused the president of conducting a campaign divorced from reality in an effort to punish political enemies, sow chaos and consolidate his power under martial law.
Here’s what we’re covering:
· Administration officials: Attorney General Pam Bondi said during testimony in Congress that Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, were “on their way to Chicago” along with the troops from Texas. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was traveling to Portland, Ore., on Tuesday. Local and state officials have suggested that such visits are designed to stir further outrage and provoke unrest.
· Approval and resistance: State leaders sparred over the president’s authority to send National Guard troops across state lines. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, defended the action, saying in an interview on Fox News that Democratic-led states “are refusing to enforce the law, and we have chaos.” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, has called the mobilization a blatant attempt by President Trump to assert unconstitutional powers.
· City leaders weigh in: A coalition of cities from across the country filed a legal brief late Monday supporting Oregon’s attempt to block National Guard soldiers from deploying in Portland. The brief also claimed that Mr. Trump plans to send troops to 19 more states. City leaders said they were “gravely concerned that any protest — real or perceived — within their borders will result in another unnecessary deployment of the military.”
· An act from 1807: Federal law generally prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations. But Mr. Trump said that he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act, enacted in 1807, to justify sending troops. That could allow the president to bypass court rulings that have blocked the deployments on other legal grounds.
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7) In a Toxic World, Pets Could Be Vital Health Watchdogs
A better understanding of how pollution affects pets could benefit humans and animals alike.
By Emily Anthes, Oct. 7, 2025
Tara Anand
On a frigid February night in 2023, a freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. For days, the train’s hazardous contents spilled into the surrounding soil, water and air. It was an environmental and public health catastrophe, and efforts are underway to monitor the long-term health effects on the people of East Palestine.
But one team of scientists is focused on a different group of local residents: the dogs. After the derailment, the researchers recruited dog owners in and around East Palestine, asking them to attach chemical-absorbing silicone tags to their pets’ collars.
The preliminary results, which have not yet been published, suggest that dogs living closest to the crash site were exposed to unusually high levels of certain chemicals. The researchers are now analyzing blood samples from the dogs to determine whether the chemicals may have triggered genetic changes associated with cancer.
“This is what we should be doing in the wake of any of these disasters,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute, who is leading the research. “The pets that live in our homes are being exposed to the same things we’re going to be exposed to.”
Our pets breathe the same air, drink the same water and often sleep in the same beds that we do. And yet, there is relatively little research on how environmental toxins and pollutants affect our animal companions.
That is an enormous missed opportunity, experts said. Our pets, they argued, are ideally situated to act as environmental health sentinels, helping scientists identify hazards that transcend species barriers. Understanding more about how pollution affects pets could ultimately yield insights that improve both animal and human health.
“I do like to use the analogy of the canary in the coal mine, with this one distinction, which is that canaries were sacrificial,” said Dr. Audrey Ruple, a veterinary epidemiologist at Virginia Tech. “Our dogs are not. We care deeply about our companion dogs and our companion animals.”
The air out there
In 2020, California experienced a record-setting wildfire season, one that often left the skies filled with smoke. On particularly bad days, Stephen Jarvis, a graduate student in the Bay Area, found himself with headaches, irritated eyes, shortness of breath and even chest pains.
He also noticed the effects in his partner’s asthmatic cat, Manolo. “On days when the air quality was worse, his symptoms would flare and he would have a hard time breathing,” Dr. Jarvis said.
Last week, Dr. Jarvis, now an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, published a paper suggesting that Manolo’s breathing problems were not a one-off. He and his colleagues reviewed five years of veterinary data from across Britain, alongside data on the levels of airborne fine particulate matter, which is one of the main pollutants in wildfire smoke and a well-known human health hazard.
When air pollution rose, so did the number of veterinary visits for cats and dogs, the researchers found. If the nation kept air pollution below the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization, it could prevent between 80,000 and 290,000 vet visits per year, they concluded. “That’s a lot of angst and a lot of money off the table for pet owners,” Dr. Jarvis said.
It’s a sobering finding, especially given the fact that climate change and intensifying wildfires are expected to make air quality worse in the coming decades.
“When we are considering how to protect ourselves from unhealthy air, we should also be thinking about our pets and wildlife,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at Cornell who studies the effects of smoke on wild animals.
Smoke inhalation can cause an array of respiratory problems in animals, including coughing and shortness of breath. Studies have also begun to link wildfire smoke to other health consequences, including eye infections and cellular stress in dogs and heart problems and blood clots in cats.
Birds are especially vulnerable because they are highly efficient breathers, extracting more oxygen from the air than mammals do. Unfortunately, Dr. Sanderfoot said, that means that they are also “processing higher concentrations of all of the nasty stuff” in polluted air. “They are more sensitive overall to air pollution than we are.”
Heavy burdens
Cats and dogs, which tend to spend a lot of time on or near the ground, could be at elevated risk from other chemical contaminants. Compared to humans, they may have more exposure to cancer-causing chemicals used in lawn care or the heavy metals, like lead, that tend to accumulate in household dust.
In 2014, when lead began leaching into the drinking water in Flint, Mich., there was reason to believe that pets were especially vulnerable. Unlike people, pets usually “subsist wholly” on tap water, said John Buchweitz, a veterinary toxicologist at Michigan State University.
After Dr. Buchweitz and his colleagues set up lead-screening clinics for local dogs, they found several animals whose results were of “extreme concern,” including three Australian shepherds all living in the same household. The dogs had been losing weight and behaving strangely, and all three had elevated lead levels in their blood.
Dr. Buchweitz was alarmed; he knew that the family living there also had young children. “I personally reached out, contacted the health department, and said ‘This house needs to be investigated,’” he recalled. Officials subsequently found that the drinking water at the home contained enough lead to pose a clear danger to both people and animals.
Known unknowns
Although a chemical spill, wildfire or water crisis can present an acute, immediate health risk, many environmental health hazards are harder to identify: Does regular, low-level exposure to a particular pollutant, for instance, increase someone’s lifetime cancer risk?
Pets have shorter lives than people, and are more likely to live them out in a single geographic location, making it easier for scientists to tease out some of these subtle effects. Plus, the devotion of pet owners helps facilitate data collection, experts said.
“People are worried about their pets,” said Dr. Karlsson, who leads Darwin’s Dogs, a large community science project that aims to identify the genetic and environmental contributors to canine health and behavior. “And as a scientist, that’s an opportunity. Because if people are concerned about it, then they’re going to help us with the work.”
Tens of thousands of American dog owners have enrolled their pets in Darwin’s Dogs and similar initiatives, including the Dog Aging Project and the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study. Among other data, these projects are collecting information on some of these dogs’ everyday exposure to chemicals, measuring the levels of herbicides in their urine, mailing out silicone, chemical-absorbing dog tags and asking owners to submit samples of their dogs’ drinking water.
To Dr. Ruple, who led the Dog Aging Project’s pilot studies with silicone tags and drinking water, the owners seemed more eager to participate than they would have been in research on their own environmental health risks. “I think that people are quite suspicious of science at this point in time,” she said. “But their love for their dogs overrides whatever distrust they might have.”
And the dogs, in turn, can give back, helping scientists identify chemicals that put both humans and animals at risk. After all, Dr. Ruple noted, the word “sentinel” refers to someone whose job is keeping watch. “That’s what we have always used dogs for,” she said. “Guardians of our livestock, guardians of our family, guardians of our homes.”
And in a toxic world, perhaps, guardians of our health.
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8) Israel Cannot Go On Winning Like This
By Mairav Zonszein, Oct. 7, 2025
Ms. Zonszein is the senior analyst on Israel with the International Crisis Group and a contributing Opinion writer. She wrote from Tel Aviv.
Elke Scholiers/Getty Images
In the aftermath of the Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, on Sept. 9, an unnamed Israeli official told Axios that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had so fallen “in love with being the regional bully that nobody can expect his next move.”
Indeed, Israel had demonstrated over the past two years both its unmatched intelligence capacity and its willingness to strike anywhere in the region — including, in Qatar’s case, a country that is not an enemy state, that is operating as a mediator and that also happens to be an ally of its biggest patron. What’s more, it was willing to do so amid negotiations aimed at ending the war in Gaza and bringing Israeli hostages home.
Since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has ostensibly been focused on re-establishing its security in the region, both by rebuilding its ability to deter adversaries and dismantling their military capabilities, but also by being willing to engage in perpetual war, a state of affairs that has transformed Israeli society and power dynamics in the Middle East. Israel has been brazen, unpredictable and, until the recent proposed cease-fire, all but unstoppable. In most arenas, it continued to use force without engaging in any viable diplomacy. The most notable example of this is, of course, Israel’s destruction of Gaza, which has made the strip largely unlivable, as some cabinet members openly intended.
Donald Trump’s proposal last month to end the war — which is essentially not a peace plan, but an ultimatum to Hamas — has the potential to bring about an end to the bloodshed and destruction of Gaza, the release of hostages and give everyone on the ground a chance to start healing. But its success relies on prolonged political engagement and sustained U.S. pressure on both Israel and Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu has embraced the Trump plan as a win. Yet the security gains his country has made are fragile or debatable, and its international isolation may deepen. Altering Israel’s bellicose character is not necessarily part of the equation.
All of this should concern Israelis. Even if the war ends, there will then need to be a moment of soul-searching about the collective society’s responsibility for the years of mass killing and displacement. Palestinians desperately need this war to end. But so do Israelis.
The liabilities of Israel’s security doctrine have become increasingly evident. It was ultimately the failed attack in Doha — striking the heart of the Gulf, where Israel has benefited from the continued shield of the Abraham Accords — that backfired, prompting concerted pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to meet Mr. Trump’s demand for an end to the war. The Netanyahu coalition’s recent push into Gaza City not only unfolded against the will of some in the Israeli military and most Israelis, it helped fuel a growing global consensus that Israel’s campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide. Israel’s diplomatic isolation — on full display at the United Nations last month as major Western nations recognized the State of Palestine and Mr. Netanyahu addressed a hall of largely empty seats — was making the country look more and more like a self-defeating, irrational actor than the regional hegemon it aspired to be.
Israel’s strategy has yielded some tactical wins. In Gaza, Israel has debilitated Hamas’s military strength. Its operations in Lebanon dealt a decisive blow to Hezbollah and — almost certainly unintentionally — contributed to the fall of another adversary, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. While Israel’s 12-day war in Iran arguably did not achieve Mr. Netanyahu’s goals of eliminating Tehran’s nuclear program and substantially weakening that regime, it did chip away at Iran’s offensive and defensive capabilities, and, maybe above all, showed that Israel and the United States are not afraid to strike deep inside the country.
But in each case, instead of building on its gains and moving toward peace as a practical resolution, Israel has doubled down on the path of war — even when that has worked against its own interests. As the U.S. envoy Tom Barrack recently pointed out, Hezbollah has “zero” incentive to give up its remaining arsenal when “Israel is attacking everybody.” When a U.S.-negotiated cease-fire in Gaza went into effect at the start of the year, Israel could have taken the opportunity to get the hostages back and achieve its goals of an improved regional security landscape. Instead, it broke the cease-fire and proceeded to cause widespread starvation among Palestinians in Gaza.
In Syria, after Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, Israel launched strikes to disable the country’s military capabilities and destroy suspected chemical weapons sites. Israeli soldiers took up positions inside the country and Israel’s military prevented the new government from asserting control in Druze areas. Even if these were temporary actions to serve Israeli security, it doesn’t explain why, amid reports that Israel and Syria were close to reaching a security agreement, Defense Minister Israel Katz apparently decided to mock his adversaries by posting a photo of himself alongside Israeli soldiers in an area Israel had invaded and occupied, writing, “Not moving from Mount Hermon.”
Usually, a victory might be understood as an endpoint, or at the very least a decisive outcome that does not require further action. In Israel, though, winning has seemed only to yield more rounds of warfare. Israel is not a victor, but a perpetual fighter.
Last month, Mr. Netanyahu delivered what has come to be known as his “super-Sparta” speech. Comparing the country to the ancient cities of Athens and Sparta, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated and that its economy and military will have to become more self-reliant. This was not a slip of the tongue: Just as he had conditioned Israelis to become accustomed to constant war, he was also working to normalize the country’s isolation.
It has become a political axiom in Israel that Mr. Netanyahu’s only strategy is political survival, that he’ll do anything to stay in power; that Israel’s forever war has all been a form of megalomania. But this isn’t the whole story.
It’s true that a majority of Israeli public and military have, for months, called for a deal to end the war. But none of the actions Israel has taken over the past two years would have been possible without a willing military, news media and society, including tens of thousands of reservists carrying out orders. It is not just that many Israelis have no problem with the idea of expelling Palestinians from Gaza, or are averse to Palestinian self-determination and a two-state solution. At the heart of it, many Israelis — whether out of conviction, fear or deference to those in power — seemed to believe that the way to security is to maintain dominance and crush everyone in their path.
Mr. Trump, for all of his bluster and self-interest, has tried to alter that equation.
Until the announcement of the new peace talks, which prompted the Israeli military to say it was shifting to a defensive posture in Gaza despite continued airstrikes, none of the growing diplomatic, economic or cultural pressure had influenced Israeli policy, nor made a significant impact on peoples’ daily lives. At the same time, a cease-fire, while long overdue, would be likely to ease growing international pressure on Israel to change its policies not just in Gaza but vis-à-vis the Palestinians writ large. And, for now, even if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, Israel will still be occupying territory in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and maintaining a military presence in Lebanon and Syria, beyond the already occupied and annexed Golan Heights.
Israelis will know true security only when it is felt by everyone around them, not one country, alone.
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9) THE GAZA I KNEW IS GONE
Text and visuals by Ghada Abdulfattah, Oct. 8, 2025
Ms. Abdulfattah is a writer who lives in Gaza.
People usually feel nostalgic for their homeland when they are far away. I feel a deep nostalgia for Gaza, even while I am still here. It’s not the kind of longing that comes from distance. It’s because I’m surrounded by what should feel familiar but everything feels uncanny, changed, almost unrecognizable and distorted.
I keep telling myself, “This is not Gaza.” The details are all wrong; nothing is the same. My nostalgia is not for a distant memory but for the very ground beneath my feet, for a Gaza that seems to have slipped away from me even as I live within its borders.
One morning last month I tiptoed out of my home in Deir al-Balah to get some fresh air. Our two-bedroom apartment is crowded — three families have been living here for the past year. Sixteen more family members arrived fleeing from shelling in recent weeks. I was careful not to wake my relatives, some of whom had arrived at night and spread out into every corner of the house.
Outside, the street was buried under tents: tents on the sidewalk, tents in the alley, swallowing up the medians and sometimes even the road itself. There are tents in the agricultural lands; some appear between the remaining date palm trees my city is named after. Hundreds of these trees surrounded our town before the war. A lot of them have burned down or been bulldozed by Israeli tanks.
Some people hadn’t pitched their tents yet. They had come from Gaza City, where the Israeli military is conducting a brutal assault, and arrived in the dark, deciding to wait for daylight to figure out where to put their tents — to figure out their lives. I despise this word: “kheima” in Arabic, “tent” in English. It has followed Palestinians for generations, like a shadow.
I still live in my house, though it is no longer a home. It has been hit with Israeli tank shells more times than I can count; four of those times we were inside. The “walls” are half the height of what they used to be, rebuilt with stone taken from the ruins of other people’s homes. I joke that one blue block came from that neighbor; my brother answers that an orange one came from another, whose home is now demolished. The stones stop short of the ceiling, so every whisper travels everywhere. There are no windows, only nylon fabric we recently stretched across the gaps for winter. No doors, just blankets.
I don’t know how this war appears to others. Living in Gaza, it’s a war of details. I think back to my first creative writing class, when the instructor told us: “Show, don’t tell. ‘God is in the details.’” I loved that rule. But the details of war are strange, and they are painful.
The details of my home — the blue and orange stones, the collapsed walls — make me feel guilty, but also grateful, because I have not yet been forced into a tent. That is what this war teaches us: Even suffering has a hierarchy, and even survival has a rank. A room with walls is better than a tent; a proper aid tent is better than a patchwork one stitched together from blankets, nylon, old jeans and empty flour sacks. A tent is better than nothing at all.
At the grocery store, I ran into one of my old teachers. She reminded me of two of my classmates who were killed in Israeli strikes. “Those kind girls are gone,” she said. Then she asked where I live now. “At home,” I told her, “though it’s destroyed.” She nodded. “Still better than a tent on the rubble.” The hierarchy determines how we speak, what we share and how we live with one another. I want people outside Gaza to understand these details.
A few weeks ago shells slammed into our building in the middle of the night. We woke to the thunderous sound of explosion. The rooms became heavy with debris and dust. My mind tried to bargain with itself: Where are we? What is this? For a second, it insisted: This isn’t war. I wanted to believe the lie.
Then I jumped. The darkness was suffocating, too thick to see, too thick to breathe. I found a flashlight and swept a path so my mother — who fell and fractured her hip last year — could be moved with her walker.
We stepped outside, counting faces and asking if everyone was OK. But there was no respite. Israeli drones and quadcopters hovered above, their engines buzzing like mechanical insects. The sky glowed with their lights through the dark night. We were afraid to stay outside. After a while, we went back in and cleaned until dawn, and then we cleaned again.
Two years of war have also created a hierarchy of feelings — a hierarchy of loss. We were lucky; only my sister-in-law’s nose was nicked. The next day I saw a friend who lost 47 members of his family from airstrikes in the first two months of the war — his parents before his eyes, four brothers, nephews and cousins. Gone. I kept quiet. What could I say to him? That a shell tore through my house and we all survived? How do you speak of cracked walls to someone who counts absent faces? My loss is walls; his is people. Survival can feel like a debt you can’t repay.
At night I rehearse the scenes of different airstrikes I’ve lived through and wonder: What if a shard from the missile blast had found me, taken my legs? Sometimes I tell myself it might be kinder to die whole than to live in pieces. Gaza feels like a city of amputees now. Almost every time I step outside, I meet another. Yesterday it was a man in a wheelchair set on a donkey cart.
Another day, at Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, I was filming and helping coordinate a photography assignment when a cardboard box slid out from behind the doors of the surgery ward. A name was written on the top. “Give it to the family,” a doctor told a cleaner, her face masked and her black veil tucked into her brown gown. I only realized what was inside when a woman took it into both of her arms. It was a leg that had just been amputated. Eight months later, I still remember the name on that box.
Since the war began, we ration everything: food, water, light. Now that the fuel is gone, we cook on a wood fire. Anything becomes kindling: broken pallets, torn blankets, old plastic sandals, empty cheese cartons, plastic jars. Now, when we make saj flatbread, we slide a teapot into the fire to use the heat from the flames twice. Most homes have the same setup: a big empty pickle or bean tin punched with air holes for a stove; a small bean can for a heater. All of us have burns on our hands and the black stain of smoke in our nails.
My nieces and nephews still go to makeshift schools. With pens, papers and pencils scarce — or when found, too expensive — they have to write in tight handwriting. My sister, who is a teacher, used to tell them to make their letters big and skip a line so the writing was clear. Now she can’t. The notebooks would get used up too quickly.
This war has altered everything in Gaza. It has changed not only our landscape but also our hearts, our minds and our souls. I sometimes look at people’s faces; they are yellow, pale and exhausted.
The war is insane — madness that seeps into the mind, into the body, into dreams. Sometimes I feel my thoughts unravel. I cannot fully grasp what is happening. I cannot imagine what will come next, or how it will come. Will I survive another night? Will I be alive to see the war’s final moment, if such a moment ever comes? We’ve seen countless plans. Many talks start, then fall apart just as quickly. I will believe in a cease-fire only when it passes through our door frame — when the drones go quiet, when the Israeli airstrikes stop.
For two years the Israeli war machine has continued its assault on the Gaza Strip. It rains destruction from the air and rolls destruction toward us on the ground. It even sends destruction from the sea. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been killed or injured, and countless more are dead under the rubble. Entire neighborhoods have vanished. So many homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, markets — the places that made up the daily rhythm of life in Gaza — are now rubble. The rhythm of our lives is now destruction, airstrikes, forced displacement, more airstrikes, people killed and then returning to ruins.
A friend who knows I speak with people outside Gaza asked me, “Do people outside know these details?” Because the details are how we measure our days.
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10) Arab Mediators Believe Hamas Could Be Open to Partially Disarming
People familiar with the mediators’ thinking say the militant group could compromise on a long-held red line, as long as President Trump can guarantee that Israel would not resume fighting.
By Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 8, 2025
Hamas members during a hostage handover in Khan Younis, Gaza, in February. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Some Arab mediators negotiating an end to the war in Gaza believe that they can convince Hamas to partially disarm, a step that has long been a red line for the militant group, according to three people familiar with the mediators’ thinking.
The people, two officials and a person close to the negotiators, who all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, said that Hamas could agree to hand over some of its weapons, as long as President Trump can guarantee Israel will not resume fighting.
Izzat al-Rishq, the Qatar-based director of Hamas’s media office, declined to comment in response to detailed questions about whether the group would be open to giving up any of its arms.
Indirect talks between Hamas and Israel in Egypt, which began this week, are largely focused on a possible exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Even if that deal is reached, the two sides have major disagreements, key among which is the fate of Hamas’s weapons.
Israel has consistently said that Hamas must give up its arms before the Gaza war can end. The militant group has long regarded that as tantamount to surrender, with armed struggle against Israel a crucial part of Hamas’s ideology. It remains unlikely that mediators would be able to convince Hamas as a whole to disarm, experts say.
“Hamas might be willing to give up some weapons, but they won’t go without them altogether,” said Adi Rotem, a retired Israeli intelligence officer who served on Israel’s Gaza war negotiating team until December 2024. “Weapons are a core part of Hamas’s DNA.”
Some within the group believe that it should refuse to give up its weapons, even if that comes at the price of a continued Israeli offensive in Gaza and the deaths of more Palestinians.
But others say Hamas now needs to be pragmatic. That some members appear open to considering a compromise on their weapons is an indication of how decimated the group has been over two years of an Israeli onslaught.
A Palestinian analyst close to Hamas’s leadership said the militant group might be willing to hand over a small number of its weapons, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel needed to project an image of victory to end the war.
That analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Hamas’s thinking, said the group might also commit to not using its weapons outside Gaza for years.
One of the people familiar with the mediators’ thinking said the group would likely claim to want to keep its small arms, if the war ended, so as to protect its members against reprisals by its Palestinian political rivals and other militias in Gaza.
The talks in Egypt have been taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh and on Wednesday, the Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff joined talks, along with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser on the region.
Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner were key architects of Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war, which was unveiled at the White House last week.
Also arriving at the talks were Ron Dermer, a close adviser to Mr. Netanyahu; the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani; and the head of Turkey’s intelligence agency, Ibrahim Kalin.
A senior Hamas official, Taher al-Nounou, said on Wednesday that negotiators for the group and for Israel had exchanged lists of which Palestinian prisoners would be released as part of an exchange deal for the hostages.
Mr. Trump’s proposal for ending the war stipulated the demilitarization of Gaza, including the destruction of all “military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities.” Israeli military officials say that much of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure remains intact, even after two years of war.
The plan said demilitarization should be supervised by independent monitors, which would include placing weapons “permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning.”
Mr. Trump said on Monday that Hamas was “agreeing to things that are very important,” without elaborating.
On Tuesday, Israelis and Palestinians marked two years since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in Gaza.
About 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the October 2023 attack, and 251 others were abducted, according to Israeli authorities. More than 65,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
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11) Israel Intercepts Another Activist Flotilla That Aimed to Break Gaza Blockade
It was the second attempt in as many weeks to breach the restrictions around the Gaza Strip. Neither have succeeded.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Oct. 8, 2025
One of the Global Sumud Flotilla’s boats in waters off Greece last week. Credit...Stefanos Rapanis/Reuters
Israeli military forces on Wednesday intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the naval blockade of Gaza, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and to a legal defense group representing the activists aboard.
Israel detained the more than 140 activists on the flotilla, according to Adalah, the legal defense group.
Israeli forces stopped the ships at about 4:30 a.m. local time some 120 nautical miles from Gaza, well into international waters, said Miriam Azem, a spokeswoman for Adalah. The activists were being taken to Israel for deportation, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.
The flotilla was the latest effort by pro-Palestinian activists to breach the Israeli sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. They call the measure an illegal collective punishment of Palestinian civilians. Israel has said it considers the blockade legitimate military action.
Last week, Israel detained more than 400 activists from around the world — including Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate campaigner — who had sought to reach the Gaza coast in dozens of ships. The detainees included about 20 Americans.
Israeli forces intercepted the ships, and most of the detained activists had been deported as of Wednesday, except for seven who remain in Israeli detention, said Ms. Azem, whose group also represents those activists.
Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, now in its third year, has prompted a surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment in many European countries and in the United States, where support for Israel has dropped precipitously.
Israel’s military campaign against Hamas has killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Hamas-led attack on Israeli on Oct. 7, 2023, that precipitated the war killed about 1,200 people and saw another 250 taken as hostages.
Palestinians in Gaza have endured a nightmarish two years of hunger, displacement and bombardment. United Nations officials and aid groups say that Israeli policies have led to widespread hunger and even pockets of famine in Gaza, a charge that Israel has denied.
After the widely publicized flotilla carrying Ms. Thunberg and the other activists was intercepted last week, protests broke out in Italy and in several other countries.
Ms. Azem, the Adalah spokeswoman, said that lawyers had met with detainees who said they had been kept on their knees with their hands bound for many hours, held in overcrowded cells and denied adequate drinking water.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry called the allegations of mistreatment “fake news.”
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12) Trump Fires Black Officials From an Overwhelmingly White Administration
Separately, in the administration’s first 200 days, only two of 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the most senior jobs in government were Black.
By Elisabeth Bumiller and Erica L. Green, Reporting from Washington, Oct. 8, 2025
Robert E. Primus was part of a series of firings of Black officials from high-profile positions in the Trump administration. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Robert E. Primus, the first Black board chairman of the federal regulator responsible for approving railroad mergers, at first thought there was something wrong with his work phone. When he couldn’t unlock it he switched to his personal phone, only to learn that President Trump had fired him by email, effective immediately.
“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Mr. Primus, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. In January, the Trump administration had put a Republican in his place as the chairman of the Surface Transportation Board, which Mr. Primus saw as the president’s prerogative. But he had been appointed to the independent board by Mr. Trump in his first term and expected to remain on it, as had been the longstanding practice.
Instead, he heard a White House spokesman say the day after his firing in August that he did not “align” with the president’s agenda. Mr. Primus, a longtime congressional staff member and former lobbyist on transportation and national security matters, was reminded, he said, of Mr. Trump’s widely condemned comment during the 2024 campaign that immigrants were taking “Black jobs.”
“Maybe he felt that this job was not intended for Blacks," said Mr. Primus, 55. He acknowledged he was speculating, he said, but “it’s legitimate speculation. Because if you look across the board, there is a pattern.”
Mr. Primus is part of a series of firings of Black officials from high-profile positions in an overwhelmingly white administration that has banished all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. And while there are no statistics on firings by race, an examination of the people Mr. Trump is appointing to fill those and other jobs shows a stark trend.
Of the president’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the administration’s most senior leadership roles in its first 200 days, ending on Aug. 7, only two, or 2 percent — Scott Turner, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Earl G. Matthews, the Defense Department’s general counsel — are Black.
Trump nominates few Black people to his administration
Senate-confirmed appointees by race and ethnicity at the 200-day mark in presidential administrations.
The statistics were compiled for the Brookings Institution by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who specializes in presidential personnel. The statistics track appointments to the 15 cabinet departments in the presidential line of succession: Treasury, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs.
“Trump seemed to be very proud to have ‘Blacks for Trump’ at all of his rallies and behind the podium, but not behind him in the cabinet meetings,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that tracks Black representation in government leadership, among other markers. The dearth of Black people at the top, he said, would result in “radical substantive policy changes” for African Americans.
“When we’re not in the room,” he said, “things don’t tend to go better for us.”
Mr. Trump’s highest-profile firing of a senior Black leader was in February, when he ousted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s senior military official. Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally remain in place as administrations change, regardless of the president’s party, and in 2020 Mr. Trump had nominated General Brown, a fighter pilot, to be the Air Force’s chief of staff. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously said that General Brown should be fired because of a “woke” focus on D.E.I. programs in the military and questioned whether he was promoted because of his race.
General Brown was replaced with a little-known Air Force general, Dan Caine.
The president has fired other Black officials, like Mr. Primus, from top jobs at government agencies and independent boards that typically serve multiple administrations.
Those terminated include Carla Hayden, the first African-American and the first woman to be the librarian of Congress; Gwynne A. Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board; and Alvin Brown, the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of his removal.
Willie L. Phillips, the first Black person to be the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stepped down from his position in April at the request of the White House. The president has since nominated David LaCerte to replace him.
Mr. Trump has tried to fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board of governors, but she has sued to stop him. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to allow Mr. Trump to immediately remove her and said it would review his efforts to oust her at oral arguments in January.
Mr. Primus, Mr. Brown and Ms. Wilcox have also filed lawsuits asking to be reinstated.
General Brown, Dr. Hayden and Mr. Phillips have been replaced by white men. A white man has been nominated to replace Mr. Brown, and two white men have been nominated to fill seats on the labor relations board after Ms. Wilcox was fired. Mr. Primus and Ms. Cook have not yet been replaced.
“You don’t need a very sophisticated analysis to read into what this means,” said Cathy Albisa, the former vice president at Race Forward, a nonprofit that promotes racial equity in government. Ms. Albisa now runs an organization, Branch4, supporting federal workers. “It is a resegregation of the work force, and an attack on the Black middle class.”
In the first Trump administration, there were fewer high-profile firings of Black workers. But there was only one Black official — Ben Carson, the housing secretary — among the 70 Senate-confirmed nominees to the major government departments in the first 200 days. (Dr. Carson returned to the administration last month as an adviser to the Agriculture Department.)
In the same 200-day period for previous presidents, according to Brookings, Black officials accounted for 21 percent of Senate-confirmed nominees under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., 13 percent under President Barack Obama and 8 percent under President George W. Bush.
Black Americans make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population.
A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, rejected criticism that Mr. Trump was undermining Black Americans. But he did not address the lack of diversity in appointments.
“President Trump pledged to build a government and economy that works for every American, and the administration is hard at work restoring the historic private-sector job, wage and economic growth that Americans, including Black Americans, enjoyed during his first term,” Mr. Desai said.
Mr. Trump informed Ms. Wilcox in a late-night email on Jan. 27 that she was being removed from her position on the labor relations board, effective immediately. No cause was given. It was the beginning of the administration’s test of the boundaries of the president’s power over independent agencies.
Ms. Wilcox, a Democrat and former union lawyer, was the first board member in its 90-year history to be removed by a president. A week before, in the very first hours of his administration, Mr. Trump had signed an executive order calling for an end to D.E.I. programs and the “termination of all discriminatory programs” in the government, including in federal employment practices.
“We had targets on our backs, no doubt about it, by virtue of the color of our skin,” Ms. Wilcox, 72, said in an interview. “But I did not get this job because of D.E.I. I got it because of my experience.”
Since then, she has fought her firing, calling it “unlawful and unprecedented.” In April, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could temporarily remove her while her challenge goes forward.
Ms. Wilcox was nominated to the board, which enforces laws protecting workers’ rights, in 2021 and 2023 by Mr. Biden, and she was confirmed twice by the Senate. Her second term was to end in August 2028.
As the first Black woman to serve on the labor relations board since its creation in 1935, “I didn’t get overwhelmed by the thought of it,” she said. Instead, “I embraced it.’’
At the time she was nominated, Ms. Wilcox was a senior partner at a labor law and employment law firm in New York. She had spent her career championing the rights of a diverse group of workers, starting in a legal services office where she represented young white women in domestic violence cases. Her clients inspired her to practice labor law, she said, a career she started in a regional office of the N.L.R.B.
Ms. Wilcox said she was not thinking about breaking racial barriers when she accepted the appointment, nor did race play a role in how she decided cases. “I made decisions based upon my application of the National Labor Relations Act to the facts presented in each case assigned,” she said.
She worried about the work that has halted as a result of her removal. Only one board member remains, and without a quorum of three, the board cannot resolve cases. American workers who are awaiting decisions on issues like reinstatements and back pay after being unlawfully terminated, suspended or laid off have had their lives hanging in the balance.
“I don’t know what the Supreme Court will decide,” Ms. Wilcox said. “But I had to fight this. Not just for me, but for working people, including those who have cases before the N.L.R.B., and to fight for the agency.”
Black workers, particularly Black women, have been hard hit by reductions in the federal work force overall. According to a New York Times tracker of Mr. Trump’s cuts, agencies where racial minorities and women were a majority of the work force, such as the Education Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, were targeted for the largest work force reductions or complete elimination. Black women made up nearly a quarter of the work force in agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, which also saw deep reductions, according to a Times analysis.
Frederick Gooding Jr., a historian and professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and the author of “American Dream Deferred: Black Federal Workers in Washington, D.C., 1941-1981,” said that the federal government was one of the first integrated workplaces in the country. It quickly became a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who now have a disproportionately large presence in parts of the work force.
“When we look at Black people in this country, their relationship with the federal government provides a window into this thing called the American dream,” Dr. Gooding said. “What is happening right now is shameful.”
‘Thank You for Your Service’
Dr. Hayden did not see her firing coming, either.
The librarian of Congress, who was appointed a decade ago by Mr. Obama as the 14th person in the role since its creation in 1802, was at her mother’s home in Baltimore on a Thursday evening in May.
“I was there a little early, like 6:30,” she told the author and producer Kwame Alexander in a conversation onstage at the annual convention of the American Library Association in June. “So a little happy hour. You know, TV’s on in her den, and I’m looking at the phones and stuff. And I see this text.”
Dr. Hayden, 73, who is now a senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, declined to be interviewed by The New York Times. But she spoke openly about her firing at the library association convention.
The text message, she told Mr. Alexander and the crowd, was two sentences, addressed casually to “Carla,” from someone she had never heard of. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” read the text from Trent M. Morse, the deputy director of White House personnel. “Thank you for your service.”
“I turned to my mom and said, ‘This is weird,’” Dr. Hayden told Mr. Alexander. At first she thought it wasn’t real, Dr. Hayden said, then turned to address the crowd.
“I’m among friends, right?” she said. (Dr. Hayden, who was the chief librarian in Baltimore for more than two decades, served as the library association’s president in 2003 and 2004.) She lowered her voice to a dramatic stage whisper.
“I’ve never been fired before,” she said.
Mr. Trump has appointed Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and his former lawyer, as the acting librarian of Congress.
The day after Dr. Hayden’s ouster, she learned from a briefing by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that her dismissal was the result of unspecified “concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of D.E.I.,” including allowing “inappropriate books in the library for children.”
The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, is the main research arm of Congress and also provides scholars access to its vast collections of presidential papers, manuscripts, films, maps, letters and photographs. It does not lend books to children or adults.
“I must say,” Dr. Hayden said wryly of Ms. Leavitt’s remark, “it has been interesting.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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13) Israel-Hamas Deal Paves Way for Gaza Cease-Fire
Israel said a truce would take effect on Friday and start a 72-hour window to exchange hostages and prisoners. President Trump said he might travel to the region this weekend.
David M. Halbfinger, Liam Stack, Aaron Boxerman, Adam Rasgon, John Yoon, Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Oct. 9, 2025
In Khan Younis on Thursday. In interviews with Palestinians across Gaza, many said that they were desperate for the war to end but were also cautious about what happens next. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Here’s the latest.
Israel and Hamas on Thursday were preparing for an exchange of hostages and prisoners after agreeing on the initial terms of a deal that could pave the way to a cease-fire in Gaza and bring relief to the families of Israeli hostages and to two million Palestinians in the territory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was convening his cabinet to sign off on the agreement. Shosh Bedrosian, a government spokeswoman, said that a full cease-fire in Gaza would go into effect 24 hours after the cabinet endorses the deal. After that, Hamas will have 72 hours to return “all of our hostages,” Ms. Bedrosian said.
Israeli forces will withdraw to an agreed-upon line in Gaza that will leave the Israeli military in control of about 53 percent of the territory, she added. The Israeli military said that it was preparing to lead the operation for the hostages’ return and to “transition to adjusted deployment lines soon.”
In return for all the surviving hostages, and the bodies of others, the agreement calls for Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
But the initial agreement addresses only a few of the 20 points in a plan Mr. Trump proposed last month, and some of the most difficult issues between Israel and Hamas appeared to have been left to a future phase of negotiations. Those include who would rule postwar Gaza and whether, to what degree and how Hamas would lay down its weapons.
Hamas called on Mr. Trump and others to compel Israel “to fully implement the agreement’s requirements and not allow it to evade or delay” carrying them out. Explosions and smoke rose from Gaza on Thursday morning, indicating that Israel’s military operations were continuing even as its government was meeting to approve the cease-fire.
Here’s what else to know:
· Details unclear: Officials didn’t elaborate on the specifics of the hostages-for-prisoners exchange or the lines to which Israeli forces would pull back. It was also uncertain that the agreement would translate into a permanent end to the war. One important sticking point is that Hamas has publicly rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that it disarm. Here’s what to know about the deal.
· Toll of war: The war in Gaza started in October 2023 when Hamas led an attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking about 250 hostages. The Israeli military has since killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry, and reduced the territory’s infrastructure to ruins.
· Risk for Hamas: In agreeing to a deal, Hamas is giving up much of the leverage it has with Israel. While the agreement achieves the release of Palestinian prisoners, there is no certainty it will lead to the end of the war and it provides for only a partial Israeli withdrawal. Read more ›
· Hope in Gaza: Palestinians in Gaza welcomed the announcement, but many had questions about what it will mean for them, their loved ones and their devastated communities. The situation had not changed in any material way on Thursday morning — food, water and medicine remained scarce and their cityscapes remained ruined — but there were reasons for hope. Read more ›
· Relief in Israel: Israel believes that about 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of 28 others who died in captivity. A sense of elation swept Israel on Thursday as news of the deal broke, and many rushed to the so-called Hostages Square in Tel Aviv to celebrate.
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14) Gazans welcome the deal, even as key questions remain.
By Liam Stack, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Tel Aviv; Haifa, Israel; and Gaza. Oct. 9, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza welcomed the announcement of a deal between Hamas and Israel overnight, but many have questions about what it will mean for them, for their loved ones and for their devastated communities.
The situation had not changed in any material way on Thursday — food, water and medicine remained scarce and their cityscapes are ruined — but there were reasons for hope.
“We still don’t understand anything,” said Awni Sami Abu Hasera, 36. He has been living in a shabby tent in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, since fleeing Gaza City, where an Israeli ground offensive destroyed his home and once thriving seafood business last month.
“We’re still waking up,” he said. “I don’t see a cease-fire yet.”
In interviews with Palestinians across Gaza, many said that the deal had stirred a mixture of relief, joy, disbelief and fear. They said that they were desperate for the war to end after the Israeli offensive against Hamas had destroyed much of the territory and killed tens of thousands.
But many added that they were wary of believing any announcement, saying that they had experienced false hopes and disappointment before.
It was also hard to fathom what the deal might mean for their families. For Mr. Abu Hasera, even if the fighting were to stop, staying in the ruined enclave did not seem like an option, he said.
“As soon as the borders open, I will take my family and leave, anywhere, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t describe to you what life in a tent and life in displacement really mean.”
Elsewhere in Gaza, others were also skeptical after two years of war.
Maher al-Alami, 53, was listening to the news on the radio with his daughter, Mais al-Reem, 3, when he spoke to The Times. His family has lost everything in the war, he said, and he was unsure what the deal could do for them now.
Mr. al-Alami made a comfortable living in real estate and had an apartment in Gaza City, but his neighborhood has been reduced to rubble, he said. His family fled Israeli military strikes 10 times and now lives in a tent in Az Zawayda.
“We’re here in a tent, and we’ll go back to Gaza City in a tent, too,” Mr. al-Alami said. “Same thing, same suffering. What have we gained from this war? Nothing but loss.”
Doaa Hamdouna, 39, said she had heard people in Az Zawayda celebrating the deal but could not bring herself to join them.
“I still don’t trust it,” said Ms. Hamdouna, a math teacher from Gaza City who fled Israeli military action five times during the war. “I’m mixed between wanting to believe it will last and fearing or worrying that it won’t, that we’ll never really stand in our neighborhoods in Gaza City again.”
Siham Abu Shawish, 33, a nursing student from Nuseirat, said she felt “a bit of relief, but not hope.”
“We’ve seen this before — news comes out, but nothing changes on the ground,” she noted. “We just want to retrieve what is left of our lives.”
Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, said that no new patients had arrived on Thursday morning as a result of Israeli attacks. But no matter what happens, he said, he expected Gaza’s severely strained hospitals to remain overwhelmed.
Dr. al-Farra said that the experience of earlier cease-fires in Gaza, which all eventually gave way to renewed fighting, had left him wary.
“We hope this is true and that the war has really stopped,” he said.
In Deir al Balah, Mohammed Fares, 25, had similar concerns. He said he was feeling a mix of both joy and fear. The deal seemed too good to be real, he added.
“I’m so happy and I’m thinking about returning to Gaza City, but I also worry that there will be another installment of the war,” said Mr. Fares, who fled the city for the relative safety of Deir al Balah earlier in the war.
But, like Mr. Abu Hasera, he said he thought that the future would contain no shortage of Palestinian suffering with “so many things totally ruined and destroyed.”
“It will take decades to make Gaza a humane place to live,” Mr. Fares said.
But some were more optimistic.
Mohammad al-Atrash, 36, said that he felt relief and gratitude “to all the countries that helped end the war,” even though it was not clear if the agreement reached overnight in Egypt would bring the conflict to a firm end.
Mr. al-Atrash said that he had nearly been killed twice in the war, which had destroyed normal life in Gaza for him and his family. His children had been out of school for two years, he said.
If the war were to end, he said, it “will ease much suffering.”
“God willing,” he added, “this announcement means it won’t return.”
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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15) Why Blowing Up Venezuelan Boats Won’t Stop the Flow of Drugs
By Samuel Granados, Genevieve Glatsky and Annie Correal, Oct. 9, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/09/world/americas/drug-trafficking-venezuela.html
Small and large smuggling routes.
The U.S. military has killed at least 21 people in recent strikes on small boats that it says were smuggling drugs off the coast of Venezuela.
President Trump justified the attacks by saying the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and vowing to “destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks.”
But Mr. Trump’s focus on Venezuela is at odds with reality: The vast majority of cocaine is produced and smuggled elsewhere in Latin America, according to data from the United States, Colombia and the United Nations. And Venezuela does not supply fentanyl at all, experts say.
Here is how those two drugs actually get to the United States.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the Caribbean was the main route for smugglers taking cocaine to the United States. Now, most of that traffic moves through the Pacific.
The Caribbean remains a pass-through point, however. And some countries in the region say that in response to an increased U.S. military presence on the water, some traffickers have started flying their product through the area.
But in recent years, top U.S. officials have rarely mentioned cocaine as a priority. Their focus has been on fentanyl, the drug tied to a national overdose crisis.
Venezuela plays essentially no role in the production or smuggling of fentanyl. The drug is almost entirely made in Mexico with chemicals imported from countries in Asia, including China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service.
Describing the boats destroyed by the U.S. military off the coast of Venezuela, Mr. Trump has said they carried enough drugs to kill tens of thousands of Americans. He did not specify what drugs.
Cocaine is sometimes mixed in with fentanyl, but when that happens, experts say, it mainly takes place after both drugs reach the United States.
Mexican cartels, including some designated as terrorist organizations by the United States, largely control how drugs like fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine cross the border. (The substances mostly come in by land, sometimes concealed in cars or trucks, not by sea.)
The Trump administration has pressed Mexico’s government to do more to stop drugs from entering U.S. territory, but former diplomats and regional analysts say that — American claims notwithstanding — the boat strikes off Venezuela appear to have a different aim.
Some suggest that they may instead be intended to put pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, or end his rule altogether. Trump officials have called him an illegitimate leader and accused him of running a cartel. He denies any involvement in drug trafficking.
Whatever effect the strikes have in Venezuela, these experts say they are unlikely to alter the flow of the deadly drugs fueling America’s crisis.
James Story, the American ambassador to Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, said even if the United States achieved limited success, traffickers would regroup.
And using military might to take out small trafficking boats, Mr. Story said, is like “using a blowtorch to cook an egg.”
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16) Colombia’s President Says Boat Bombed by U.S. Was Carrying Colombians
The Trump administration has said that it is attacking boats and killing their occupants because they are smuggling drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
By Julie Turkewitz and Robert Jimison, Oct. 8, 2025
Julie Turkewitz reported from Bogotá, Colombia and Washington, D.C.
President Gustavo Petro of Colombia at the United Nations General Assembly last month. Credit...Leonardo Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said on Wednesday that his government believed one of the boats recently bombed by the United States in its campaign against alleged drug traffickers had been carrying Colombian citizens.
“A new war zone has opened up: the Caribbean,” Mr. Petro wrote on X. “Signs show that the last boat bombed was Colombian, with Colombian citizens inside. I hope their families come forward and file a complaint.”
Mr. Petro did not provide further details.
The U.S. military has launched at least four lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean since early September, killing 21 people. The Trump administration has characterized its military buildup in the Caribbean Sea as targeting Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, whom the administration has accused of leading a terrorist organization that is flooding the United States with drugs.
This is the first time another country has claimed its citizens were killed in the attacks.
Most cocaine in the region originates in Colombia, according to the United Nations, while fentanyl, which causes far more overdose deaths, is produced in Mexico. Legal analysts have called the attacks on the boats illegal. And Mr. Maduro has claimed that the real goal of the campaign appears to be his ouster.
Two U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the sensitive matter publicly, also said that Colombians were aboard at least one of the boats recently destroyed by the United States.
Mr. Petro, a leftist leader who is nearing the end of his four-year term, has been a vocal critic of President Trump’s military campaign in the region.
Mr. Trump has said the people killed in recent attacks were drug traffickers, but has provided no evidence and has not given a clear legal basis to the public for the attacks. In the case of the first two boats, the Trump administration identified those killed as Venezuelans. It has not identified the nationalities of those killed in the other two attacks.
After Mr. Petro’s announcement, the White House denounced his remarks as “baseless” and “reprehensible” and sought to pressure the Colombian leader to issue a retraction, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about a security matter.
The official said that a retraction would allow the two nations to refocus on strengthening their relationship, an apparent acknowledgment that Mr. Petro’s statement risked straining bilateral ties between the United States and Colombia.
Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager contributed reporting from Washington.
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17) Can Satellites Stop an Avocado Addiction From Killing Mexican Forests?
A new program using satellite imagery seeks to raise pressure on avocado growers by getting support from American buyers.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Visuals by César Rodríguez, Oct. 9, 2025
Reporting from Mexico’s avocado belt, in Michoacán state, where budding efforts to stop illegal deforestation have emerged.
An avocado-growing area in Uruapan, Michoacán, being surveyed by the federal agency responsible for overseeing and enforcing environmental laws and regulations.
When word of a new plan to help save forests reached Juan Gabriel Pedraza, an Indigenous leader in Mexico’s avocado heartlands, he feared the worst.
“They’re going to screw us over,” he remembered thinking.
Rumors had spread that his town’s orchards could be blocked from the market, a devastating outcome for residents. Avocados had helped over a thousand families climb out of poverty. Forest loss was nothing new, having long ago transformed western Mexico, the world’s primary supplier of avocados.
Devouring that forest, for years, has been U.S. demand for the fruit.
Anyone trying to slow the deforestation, nearly all of it illegal, has faced a wall of opposition. Criminal groups, landowners, corrupt local officials and others have been involved in setting fires to clear land for new orchards, and reaping profits from them.
Now a new scheme, using satellite imagery and public pressure, has confronted industry giants and small growers alike with a choice.
They can stop expanding into recently cleared forests, ensuring their fruit remains eligible for the biggest U.S. buyers. Or they can deforest more land for cheap new orchards, risking being cut off from a $2.7 billion annual trade.
Mr. Pedraza said his town, the Purépecha community of Sicuicho, understood the bind between the wilderness and business better than most.
“The forest lives within us,” he said. “But protecting the forest is a lot of work, and takes a lot of money.”
‘The Big Brother Effect’
Americans’ appetite for avocados has made the industry extremely lucrative. It employs nearly 390,000 people across Mexico, and everyone wants their cut — including drug cartels that extort growers and clear forests, according to farmers and U.S. authorities.
“Everyone in this business is in it for the money, not the environment,” said Heriberto Padilla, the 36-year-old general director of Guardián Forestal, the nonprofit that developed the new monitoring system.
Mr. Padilla saw firsthand how, since the U.S. market opened to Mexican avocados in the 1990s, growers had razed the pine-oak forests around his mother’s hometown in the state of Michoacán.
“Experiencing all these abuses makes you very angry,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Well, how do we stop this?’”
Earlier proposals to stop the destruction have largely failed, bogged down by corruption, industry interests or lack of political will.
The new program stands apart, Mr. Padilla and his allies say, by using satellite imagery to assess deforestation and keep an up-to-date map of certified and flagged orchards, available for anyone to see.
They argue the risk of being publicly marked by the platform — showing American consumers who uses deforested land — can motivate better behavior. “Fear is what drives us,” Mr. Padilla said.
“It’s the Big Brother effect,” said Alberto Gómez-Tagle, a biologist who helped design the system. “I’m watching you.”
The program launched last year with help from Michoacán’s state government. But while officials sometimes inspect sites it flags, the system is operated by Guardián Forestal and independent auditors that double-check its findings.
To get certified, an orchard cannot use land deforested since 2018 or affected by wildfires since 2012. It also cannot face accusations of environmental harm or be inside a nature reserve.
When an orchard is flagged, the system blocks it from being used by allied packing houses. So far, Guardián Forestal has blocked nearly 2,200 avocado orchards of the 53,000 it has surveyed in Michoacán.
The program also certifies packing houses, which must exclusively take avocados from compliant orchards. After three strikes, houses lose their stamp of approval.
The system’s power also comes from a factor outside its control: external pressure from buyers and activists, including through the courts.
Independent of the nonprofit, the Organic Consumers Association, a U.S. advocacy group, last year sued four American importers that dominate the industry. The group accused them of making misleading sustainability claims as they sold avocados harvested from illegally deforested lands.
One of the lawsuits, involving the company West Pak, was settled in a confidential agreement. The other three remain unresolved.
“We are not utilizing or picking from any ranches identified or flagged by the Guardián Forestal platform,” Delanie Beeson, a senior manager at Mission Produce, one of the U.S. importers, said in an email.
West Pak and the other companies either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.
Nearly 30 packing houses are now certified, including the four American giants, in total accounting for about 84 percent of all Mexican avocado exports to the United States.
The system could offer lessons for others, said Daniel Wilkinson, a senior policy adviser at Climate Rights International.
“One of the most urgent challenges now, globally, is finding ways to clean up the agricultural supply chains driving deforestation,” he said. “Michoacán is providing a model of how to do it.”
‘We Didn’t Investigate’
Before the new program, packing houses only complied with pest-control criteria demanded by U.S. and Mexican authorities.
“We didn’t investigate who had cut down trees and who hadn’t,” said Maricarmen Villaseñor, who oversees harvest operations for Mexico’s largest house, Aztecavo.
Once American companies joined the certification program, a domino effect followed among Mexican suppliers. Aztecavo, which ships 2,000 tons to the United States every week, was one of them.
“Important customers from abroad are saying, ‘Hey, I don’t want you to bring me avocados from deforested areas,’” said José Antonio Villaseñor, the company’s founder and Ms. Villaseñor’s father.
“That is in the avocado industry’s best interest,” Ms. Villaseñor said, “because the climate is changing and the region will cease to be productive altogether.”
But while pressure from U.S. buyers proved persuasive to many, smaller growers, like those in Sicuicho, were outraged by the apparent threat to their livelihood.
In November, Mr. Pedraza and hundreds of other producers went to the state capital, Morelia, demanding answers. They found a handful of scared officials and Mr. Padilla, the nonprofit director.
First, Mr. Padilla explained he wasn’t with the government, allaying their fears of corruption and bureaucratic meddling. Then he outlined the new certification and showed them a map of their 1,200 orchards. All but one were free of recent forest loss.
He persuaded the growers to get 300 orchards certified, and to contribute about $90 per hectare to an environmental trust fund managed by a bank.
The group set their own condition: The money had to go back to Sicuicho to support its conservation efforts. The community will use some of those funds, Mr. Pedraza said, to buy a backhoe excavator to help restore degraded soil and build firebreaks.
‘Look at the Devastation’
Other figures remain critical of the program, including environmental activists who call it too lax and growers who call it onerous. Some inside the industry feel it’s unjust that such a program has power over major companies without giving them a say.
“We don’t have to have the last word, but we do have to be taken into account,” said Ernesto Enkerlin, a prominent ecologist and spokesman for Mexico’s powerful association of avocado exporters.
The association and the federal Mexican government are devising a rival certification program, part of an effort to make all agricultural exports deforestation-free by 2030. That mandatory plan, set to start next year, would ban exports from land deforested from 2025 onward and be regulated by the government, Mr. Enkerlin said. A spokeswoman with Mexico’s agriculture ministry said orchards would be inspected twice a year and algorithms would be used to identify possible deforestation.
But that effort, too, has its skeptics, including Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla of Michoacán, a supporter of the Guardián Forestal system.
“If you release a certification that only looks good on paper, then good for you,” he said. “But very soon it will become clear how weak it really is.”
Mandating new industry rules, he said, would spark intense resistance and a host of legal challenges. He attributed the success of the nonprofit’s program, in part, to the fact that it was driven by buyers.
“Its strength does not come from the state or the law,” Mr. Ramírez Bedolla added. “It comes from the end consumer.”
It’s too soon to say whether the program has helped slow deforestation, experts said. But it has had a chilling effect in some areas, said Julio Santoyo, an environmental activist. In Madero, where he lives, loggers no longer seem as eager as they once were to slash the forest for avocados.
“The hesitation is already noticeable,” he said.
Elsewhere, deforestation persists. Last month, a group of government inspectors arrived at a clearing, guided by a Guardián Forestal alert. Stumps and a few forgotten logs lay beside the glossy leaves of avocado plants.
“Just look at the devastation,” said Guillermo Naranjo, a federal environmental inspector in the state of Michoacán. A total of 126 trees, his men counted, had been felled for illegal avocados.
Moments later, his team hung a banner on a small warehouse with bright, red lettering: Closed.
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18) Bob Ross’s ‘Happy Little’ Paintings Will Be Auctioned
Thirty canvases, many created for viewers of Ross’s PBS series, “The Joy of Painting,” will be sold to benefit public television stations grappling with funding cuts.
By Sopan Deb, Oct. 9, 2025
Ross became a beloved pop culture figure through “The Joy Of Painting,” which ran for more than a decade beginning in 1983. Credit...Bob Ross Inc., via Associated Press
Whimsical clouds. Lush colors. An idyllic and relaxed landscape. All are hallmarks of a Bob Ross canvas.
Now 30 original paintings by the television host and artist, who died in 1995, will be available for sale beginning next month through the auction house Bonhams, Ross’s estate announced on Tuesday. The proceeds will benefit public television stations across the country that have been grappling with the Trump administration’s cancellation of $1.1 billion in funding for public media.
The idea came about a few months ago when Joan Kowalski, the president of Bob Ross Inc., saw that Bonhams sold two privately owned Ross paintings in August, one for $114,800 and another for $95,750. She decided to donate the 30 paintings to American Public Television, which syndicates programs, including Ross’s PBS Show, “The Joy of Painting,” to hundreds of public television channels across the country.
“It will motivate bidders because it will help public television,” Kowalski said in an interview. “The marriage of the two ideas came together and then I couldn’t let loose of it until I set it all in motion.”
Ross became a beloved pop culture figure through “The Joy Of Painting,” which ran for more than a decade beginning in 1983. Born in Daytona Beach, Fla., he dropped out of high school and discovered his love of painting while serving in the Air Force. Ross built an art empire on a simple concept: that anyone could be a painter using his “wet-on-wet” technique, in which paint is applied to a canvas that has been coated with a thin base layer of oil paint.
The show featured Ross, with dulcet tones, bushy hair and a buttoned shirt, teaching the audience how to paint, say, “a happy little cloud” in the sky. “The Joy Of Painting” was carried by hundreds of public television stations across the country.
“It will motivate bidders because it will help public television,” Kowalski said in an interview. “The marriage of the two ideas came together and then I couldn’t let loose of it until I set it all in motion.”
Ross became a beloved pop culture figure through “The Joy Of Painting,” which ran for more than a decade beginning in 1983. Born in Daytona Beach, Fla., he dropped out of high school and discovered his love of painting while serving in the Air Force. Ross built an art empire on a simple concept: that anyone could be a painter using his “wet-on-wet” technique, in which paint is applied to a canvas that has been coated with a thin base layer of oil paint.
The show featured Ross, with dulcet tones, bushy hair and a buttoned shirt, teaching the audience how to paint, say, “a happy little cloud” in the sky. “The Joy Of Painting” was carried by hundreds of public television stations across the country.
Ross’s cultural footprint only increased after his death, from lymphoma, at 52. His image and laid-back delivery gave rise to a legion of memes. “The Joy Of Painting” is still widely available on public television. Bob Ross Inc., the company that oversees the Ross empire, holds workshops with instructors trained in the Ross Method at the gallery Ross opened in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. The company has 20 employees, who also oversee a warehouse in Chantilly, Va., and distribute products branded with Ross’s likeness.
Robin Starr, the general manager of Bonhams in Massachusetts, said there had been a spike in interest in Ross in recent years. Bonhams has sold eight of his paintings at auction in the last five years, she said.
“During the pandemic, he really sort of came back into his own. People circled back to him,” Starr said, adding, “How do you not appreciate happy little trees?”
The 30 paintings will be the first large-scale auction of Ross’s original works, and the first time that pieces he created on “The Joy Of Painting” will be available for purchase. Kowalski estimated that there were about a thousand of Ross’s works remaining in the Virginia warehouse. (Kowalski’s parents, Walter and Annette Kowalski, were the previous stewards of Ross’s work dating to the early 1980s, as was Ross’s wife, Jane Ross, who died in 1992.)
“We have a fair number of paintings,” Kowalski said. “And the way that I chose them was to just find what I thought were the prettiest. It’s that easy.”
Most of the 30 paintings have been seen only on the air, when Ross painted them. The first three paintings will be auctioned on Nov. 11 at Bonhams in Los Angeles, while the remaining 27 works will be sold throughout next year at Bonhams locations in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
All the proceeds will go to American Public Television, which will disperse the money to broadcasters in need of relief. The Trump administration’s move to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for public broadcasting has put public radio and television stations at risk of going dark, particularly in rural areas.
“For a healthy democracy, you need healthy discourse,” said Jim Dunford, the chief executive officer of American Public Television. “You need information that you can trust, but you also need a place that celebrates and gathers community. And I think public television does all of that.”
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