Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
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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November 15, 2025, 11:00 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Church
1924 Cedar Street at Bonita
Berkeley, California
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) In Padma Lakshmi’s Kitchen, the Key Ingredient Is Immigration
The TV chef discusses her new cookbook, “Padma’s All American,” which sees immigrants at the heart of the nation’s cuisine.
By Julia Moskin, Nov. 10, 2025
Padma Lakshmi has broken out of the model-and-TV-host box, becoming a writer and advocate on food and immigration. Credit...Ye Fan for The New York Times
Being something of an outsider has been part of Padma Lakshmi’s identity for as long as she can remember.
Born in Chennai, India, in 1970, she is the only child of a courageous mother who left an arranged marriage and moved to New York City, supporting them both as an oncology nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Lakshmi stuck out in Roman Catholic school in Queens, in high school in suburban Los Angeles and as the first supermodel of South Asian descent.
Long before she hosted “Top Chef,” she found belonging in the kitchen. During summers in India, she followed her grandmother and aunties around and learned to make dosas and idli. As a (bored) working model, she cooked for colleagues on sets and shoots around the world, and published her first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” at age 27.
She has lived in the United States for 50 of her 55 years, and is a naturalized citizen. But during the first Trump administration, she suddenly felt like an outsider again. In 2017, she began working with the American Civil Liberties Union as an advocate for immigrants’ rights. She resigned from “Top Chef” in 2023.
Her new book, “Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes From Taste the Nation and Beyond,” was published last week. It began life as a cookbook proposal and became the scaffolding for the Hulu show “Taste the Nation,” for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2023. Through food, each episode tells the story of a specific American immigrant community, like the Thai war brides who moved to Las Vegas in the 1970s and the Cambodian refugees who have revitalized the abandoned downtown of Lowell, Mass. Those stories and dishes are remixed with recipes from Ms. Lakshmi’s home kitchen, so that green papaya salad sits near plum chaat, and Nigerian goat shares a page with Cantonese fried dumplings.
In an interview, which has been edited for length, she spoke about how food and advocacy have combined in her recent work:
How did you manage to go from hosting a reality competition to writing and producing a documentary series?
I was looking for something to do in my creative life that would incorporate the crash education I had gotten from immigrants in different parts of our country. I didn’t want to do a lifestyle show, which is what all the networks wanted. I wasn’t interested in trying to make something that’s fuzzy at the edges. I want it to be real, I want to dress like I really dress and talk like I really talk. Why is it that male chefs get to be swashbuckling on TV, and I have to be at home in the kitchen?
Is there any difference between “immigrant food” and “American food”?
If we just ate what was native to the United States, we’d be living on desert packrat and ramps. I’ve eaten those things, and they’re delicious, but we wouldn’t last 15 minutes if that was our only option. Even apple pie isn’t American: not the crust, not the filling, not the spices. American food has always stretched to make room for new foods, and we have to hold onto that. I hope that people will be curious enough about the book to open it and cook from it. And maybe if the food entices them, they may have more empathy and curiosity for the people making it.
What are your thoughts about the tension between adapting recipes to local tastes and ingredients (which immigrants have always done) and preserving the authenticity of food traditions?
Fusion food got a bad name from things like California Pizza Kitchen. Their tandoori chicken pizza is atrocious. But I’ve also had bulgogi pizza that was delicious. All these dishes I’m presenting are third-culture food, the result of the meeting of Indian and American, or Chinese and Nigerian, in a new place. Some of them are pretty similar to what you would get in those countries of origin. And some of them are different, like the Nigerian jollof rice made by my friend Precious — she grew up in Ohio, and puts dashi and sun-dried tomatoes in. It increases the umami! It’s delicious! But that’s not my culture, so I would try that in my own kitchen, but I wouldn’t put it in print.
Immigration has become an even more controversial issue than it was when you started this project during the first Trump administration. How does that land for you?
You know, my publishers didn’t want me to be so political, but that ship has sailed. It goes with having the title of “Padma’s All American.” Because I am American. I can’t believe that’s become a political statement, but I am. I love this country for what it gave me and my mom. But if you take away the immigrants, the country — the food system, the tech arena, Wall Street and medicine — will all come to a standstill. I’m floored, and I’m frightened for the first time. Will ICE come for naturalized citizens next? It no longer seems impossible.
Why are you producing another culinary competition show, “America’s Culinary Cup,” airing on CBS next year?
Because I got to be in charge, and I had a crew of 350 people, and I made it about the principles of good cooking, not about challenges. All the chefs are professionals, and they are teaching real restaurant skills, in a serious kitchen that looks like a three-Michelin-star kitchen. And we are giving away a million dollars. People come out of the woodwork to get a chance at that!
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2) ‘It Feels Like I’m in a Nightmare’: Inside the First Deportation Flight to Iran
For decades, Iranians fleeing persecution have found protection in the United States. But this fall, the Trump administration deported a planeload of people to Iran after making a deal with Tehran.
By Farnaz Fassihi and Hamed Aleaziz, Nov. 11, 2025
After an arduous journey from Iran to Turkey to Brazil to the U.S. border, Mehrdad Dalir was detained and then deported back to Iran, where he fears for his safety. The New York Times
In the hours before dawn one day in early October, Mehrdad Dalir found himself stranded at a bus station in Iran. He recalls feeling the heavy gaze of passers-by and shivering. He looked out of place, dressed in a prison outfit of sorts: gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, and a pair of blue plastic slippers.
About two days earlier, U.S. immigration authorities had taken Mr. Dalir from a detention facility inside an airport in Alexandria, La., and forced him aboard a plane to Iran as part of an unusual mass deportation to a country with a poor human rights record that the United States had bombed earlier this year in an effort to set back its nuclear program.
Mr. Dalir, 34, says he was shackled and handcuffed, and not given the chance to change out of the prison clothes he had worn during his time in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Once in Iran, he made his way by metro and bus from Tehran’s international airport to his hometown, Mashhad, in northeast Iran.
After borrowing a cellphone, Mr. Dalir delivered the news to family members still in Mashhad: The United States had sent him back to Iran. “Maman, come and get me,” he told his mother, and broke into a sob. A blue backpack contained all his belongings — a few clothing items, his passport, immigration cards, a cellphone with a dead battery and a $20 bill.
“It feels like I’m in a nightmare,” Mr. Dalir said in a three-hour telephone interview from Iran.
He acknowledged he had entered the United States illegally in April but said he thought he would have a powerful case for asylum because he has been critical of Islamic Shariah law and a political activist. He didn’t expect to be sent back to Iran.
“I did everything in my power to stop them, but the ICE officials didn’t care. They told me, ‘You are either getting on the plane on your own, or we will tie you and send you back.’”
On Sept. 29, the Trump administration deported a planeload of Iranians, including Mr. Dalir, to Iran after reaching an agreement with Tehran. The U.S.-chartered deportation flight was a first. In the past, Iranian deportees were placed individually on commercial flights to Iran. Organizing a plane to Tehran had taken months of negotiations between American and Iranian officials.
For decades, waves of Iranians fleeing persecution found protection in the United States, including many who were at first unauthorized but later gained asylum.
But President Trump has made mass deportation a cornerstone of his immigration policy and signed an executive order, which went into place on the first day of his administration, banning asylum for migrants who crossed the border illegally. The policy has since been partially blocked by a federal court. The Trump administration announced late last month that it was cutting the number of refugees that could enter the U.S. to a record low of 7,500.
And while, historically, migrants from countries difficult to deport to, like Iran and Venezuela, have languished in detention or lived freely in the United States, the Trump administration is pushing countries from across the globe to take back their own migrants.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the 54 Iranians deported on the flight had a final order of removal or an order granting voluntary departure and they were all given due process. Ms. McLaughlin said among the Iranians deported were “terrorists, human smugglers and suspected foreign agents.”
Ms. McLaughlin said of the 54 Iranians deported on the flight, 23 had ties to terrorism, seven were on the terror watch list and five others were associated with human trafficking networks. She provided the name of one man convicted of having ties to terrorist groups and two others who she said had committed fraud by uploading false and altered photos.
“The Trump administration remains committed to fulfilling the president’s promise to expeditiously, and with the highest standards, deport illegal aliens from the country, ” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.
Iran’s foreign ministry has said that more than 400 Iranians in the United States face deportation and that planning is underway for additional flights.
Mr. Dalir and at least eight other individuals fiercely resisted deportation, according to his and other deportees’ accounts. They repeatedly told American authorities that Iran would persecute them and that they feared for their lives. Among them were Christian converts, ethnic minorities and political dissidents.
This article is based on interviews with Mr. Dalir; another deportee who asked to be identified only by his initials, A.A., because he feared publishing his full name would lead to his arrest; members of each man’s family; U.S. lawyers representing some of the deportees; and three Iranians currently held in ICE detention who knew some of the passengers on the flight.
Neither Mr. Dalir nor A.A. were among those named by Homeland Security for having ties to terrorism or having committed fraud.
The New York Times also obtained the government records of both Mr. Dalir and A.A. and corroborated their accounts of detention and deportation with the information in the files. The Times also reviewed written statements gathered by Mr. Dalir’s father from seven other individuals on the flight who said they had been forcibly deported.
Ms. McLaughlin said that Mr. Dalir and A.A. had entered the U.S. illegally — and were quickly ordered deported. She said both men had been given the opportunity to make a case for their fears of removal from the United States. “Both men had due process, and all of their claims heard. They were found to not be valid and received final orders of removal,” said Ms. McLaughlin, who disputed some of Mr. Dalir’s account of his deportation to Iran.
Although Iran did not take either man into custody upon their arrival, Mr. Dalir and A.A. say they still face serious danger there.
“The current administration fails to prioritize deportees and ignores the grave risks to Iranians seeking asylum at our border,” said Ali Herischi, an immigration lawyer based in Washington, who represents A.A. and a woman Christian convert also deported on the flight. “Fleeing to the U.S. — seen as Iran’s enemy — puts them in peril of persecution back home.”
The road to America
Mr. Dalir’s journey as a refugee began in 2014 when, he said, he fled Iran with his father and younger twin brothers for Turkey. Hassan Dalir, their now 60-year-old father, was a schoolteacher who said he had been jailed and tortured for criticizing Islam and the government. His sons were also political activists, and, the father said, security agents threatened him and his family with violence and death.
In Turkey, the Dalirs registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to find a legal pathway for settling in a safe country. The U.N.H.C.R. recognized all four of them as refugees and called them “protected,” in documents reviewed by The Times.
But a combination of bad timing and shifting policies toward refugees tore the family apart. The U.N.H.C.R. referred the father and twin brothers, who at the time were teenagers, for resettlement in the United States but not Mr. Dalir, without explaining why. His case was instead referred to the government of Turkey, which discourages immigration to the country from the region and denied his asylum request. Officials ordered him to leave Turkey.
The younger brothers resettled two years ago in Raleigh, N.C., where they currently live and work at a Walmart. Mr. Dalir’s father was cleared for resettlement in the United States too, according to documents reviewed by The Times, but because of the time such cases can take, new hurdles — including a pause on refugee admissions — blocked his relocation from Turkey where he has only temporary status.
“Our life is a real tragedy, each one of us is broken. A family of six scattered in different places, and we can’t even go to see one another,” Mr. Dalir’s father said in an interview from Turkey. His wife and daughter remained in Iran, and the couple eventually divorced.
After Turkey rejected the younger Mr. Dalir, he said, he escaped to Greece, but was arrested and sent back to Turkey. He then set his eyes on the southern U.S. border. After trekking from Brazil to the Darién Gap to Mexico, in April he crossed into California, where he turned himself in to border patrol.
Mr. Dalir was transferred multiple times, from state to state, to different detention facilities. Though immigration authorities conducted a phone interview with him to assess his case, his appeal for protection was denied, and he was ordered deported.
In May he was taken to the Los Angeles airport and handed a ticket for a commercial flight to Iran — the only way ICE was able to deport people to Iran at the time. He refused to board and was returned to a detention facility in San Diego.
Inside detention in June, he staged a hunger strike. His records note that he skipped nine consecutive meals. He says he agreed to end the strike after the head of the detention facility told him he would try to help if he agreed to eat.
At one point, he begged officials to give him a second chance and review his case just so he could survive, government records show.
Over the next several months, Mr. Dalir’s lawyer and family frantically tried to get him another hearing. His brother Mehrzad Dalir, 28, corresponded with the office of one of his U.S. senators, Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, asking him to intervene.
Mr. Tillis’s office appeared sympathetic and engaged with the case and the family, according to correspondences and voice messages shared with The Times. Mr. Tillis’s office informed the family that it had followed up with U.N.H.C.R. and ICE, but ICE officials had refused to reconsider. Mr. Tillis’s office did not reply to requests for comment.
The Flight
Mr. Dalir said he and other Iranian detainees held in Louisiana realized their deportation was imminent when a representative from Iran’s government, Abolfazl Mehrabadi, the director of Iran’s interest section in Washington, showed up at the detention facility to meet with them.
“We worked with the Americans to facilitate the flight because our policy is that we don’t want a single Iranian citizen to suffer in detention,” Mr. Mehrabadi said in an interview. He said he had reassured the deportees that they would face no problems when they landed in Iran.
The flight was the next day.
In what he described as a last act of desperation, Mr. Dalir said he attempted suicide at the detention facility on the day of the flight. He cut his wrists with a shaving razor hidden in his sleeve. Authorities noticed the bleeding, he said, and rushed him to a clinic on site. He said he was then placed in solitary confinement until the plane was ready to take off.
The Homeland Security spokeswoman, Ms. McLaughlin, said that Mr. Dalir had not attempted suicide and had not been put in solitary confinement.
Mr. Dalir recalled panicking when the bus reached the tarmac at Alexandria’s airport and stopped at the foot of an airplane. He screamed, and, crying, he begged, “They will kill me in Iran. Please don’t send me back, please have mercy.”
When he refused to get on the plane, he said, several agents carried him up the steps to the aircraft and to his seat.
According to Mr. Dalir and the statements from other deportees, the departure was chaotic, and ICE agents were clashing with some individuals who refused to board. Ms. McLaughlin called accounts of violence by ICE agents “false.” Some deportees requested access to their belongings to discard documents — a Bible, a cross, proof of links to opposition groups — that could incriminate them in Iran.
When A.A. arrived in a separate bus, he said he looked out the window and saw Mr. Dalir being dragged to the plane. He says he staged his own resistance by locking himself in the bus and tying his hands to the seats. A group of ICE agents broke the door and dragged him out.
“You have to kill me first before sending me back,” A.A. who is part of an ethnic minority group in Iran, said he kept shouting.
His wife, Mina, gave birth two months ago in Tennessee to their first child — a son, whom A.A. has not yet met. She was pregnant when they crossed the border into the United States, and they were separated during detention. Mina, still wearing an ICE ankle bracelet, was released to the custody of a relative to give birth.
“My husband would never, ever leave willingly, because more than anything in the world he wants to see his son, and he wants to stay alive for him,” Mina said in an interview. She added she has been told she too faces deportation.
The flight to Iran took nearly 50 hours, with stops in Puerto Rico, Cairo and Doha. All the deportees were shackled and handcuffed for the duration of the flight to Doha. The Department of Homeland Security said the use of restraints during deportation flights is a longstanding protocol and “an essential measure” for safety of both the detainees and the officers accompanying them.
During the flight, A.A. said, he was shouting to others in Persian that they should collectively attempt a last act of resistance in Doha.
The plane landed at a remote military base where a second chartered plane, a Qatar Airlines aircraft, awaited them. Mr. Dalir, A.A. and about eight others staged a protest, laying down on the bus during the transfer. Qatari security agents radioed for more support forces and began beating the men and dragged them out of the bus, Mr. Dalir and A.A. said. Their shackles were removed but they remained in handcuffs until Tehran, they added.
“They used electric tasers to pacify me, and when that didn’t work they put me and another guy in straight jackets and tied us to our seats,” A.A. said.
The government of Qatar said it would not provide a comment on the record, but a Qatari official with knowledge of the flight said Qatar did not receive any requests for asylum and the transfer of detainees was handled in full accordance with international human rights standards and internal security protocols.
Fearful in Iran
A lineup of government officials and security agents in plainclothes was waiting for the deportees when they landed in Tehran.
“We were all so terrified, we didn’t know what they would do to us,” Mr. Dalir said. “Some of the agents were saying, ‘Welcome back to your home,’ it was surreal.”
Iranian officials handed them a two-page form that asked their names, local home address and phone numbers; the names and contact numbers of relatives in Iran; email addresses and WhatsApp numbers; the reason they left Iran; and a description of the route they took to enter the United States.
Mr. Dalir in Iran last month.The New York Times
Mr. Dalir said he and a handful of others were taken to a room where security agents questioned them further. They were told to be on notice to report for more questioning, and since then, intelligence agents have called several returnees, including Mr. Dalir and AA, instructing them to report for interrogations.
Iran’s state television broadcast short interviews with several of the voluntary deportees. A man who said he was a nurse said he went to America to seek better economic opportunities. “I was happy from the moment they told me, ‘You will be deported.’ The suffering would end,” he said without providing his name.
Fearing arrest, A.A. fled Iran a day after arriving at the advice of his lawyer, Mr. Herischi. He walked across the border to a neighboring country with the help of smugglers and is now in hiding.
Since returning, three of his fellow deportees, Mr. Dalir said, have had their passports confiscated and were told they were banned from leaving the country.
Mr. Dalir has been changing locations frequently. He said security agents have called his mother several times saying he should report for questioning to the local office of the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, but that he has so far ignored them. He said he wants to leave Iran but is exhausted from being on the run.
“Where would I even go?” he asked. “Which country would take me at this point?”
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3) There Is No Cease-Fire in the West Bank
By Mairav Zonszein, Nov. 11, 2025
Ms. Zonszein is a contributing writer for Opinion and the senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group.
Last week, military bulldozers demolished houses belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank. Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Oct. 10, the same day the cease-fire went into effect in Gaza, a group of Palestinians in the West Bank village of Beita set out to harvest their olives when they were assaulted by a group of Israelis. Twenty Palestinians were reported wounded, including two elderly men; one man was hospitalized with a bullet wound. Nine days later, a masked Israeli settler was filmed by an American journalist as he beat a 53-year-old Palestinian woman with a club in the village of Turmus Aya. She was knocked unconscious, and the video clip captured her as she fell to the ground under an olive tree. On Oct. 25, video footage showed a settler and soldiers assaulting a 65-year-old Palestinian man in Nahalin, near Bethlehem, in front of his family. On Nov. 8, Palestinian harvesters in Beita once again came under attack. Israeli activists who joined them to provide a protective presence were assaulted as well, including a 77-year-old art school principal, who suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone. Two Reuters employees were injured in the incident.
Most of the assailants have not been apprehended. The United Nations reported that this October — peak olive harvest season in the West Bank — saw the highest number of settler attacks in the area since it began documenting them in 2006. Over 260 attacks were recorded, an average of eight per day.
This is a serious acceleration of violence, but it is not new or isolated. Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead is a child. In the same period, over 3,000 Palestinians say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely because of Israeli settler violence. Another estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the northern West Bank by Israel Defense Force operations. In the past two years, Israel has erected nearly 1,000 barriers and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.
This is all part of the Israeli government’s explicit agenda of expanding and deepening its control over the West Bank. Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are clearly determined to formally annex the West Bank in order to preclude the establishment of a Palestinian state. (Mr. Netanyahu himself hedges on the issue.)
Most Israelis rarely think about the West Bank. Many are not aware of the daily violence and displacement of Palestinians and, as is the case with domestic coverage of the war in Gaza, Israeli mainstream media seldom show the reality on the ground. When they do, it is presented as the exception instead of what is clearly policy. The map Israelis see on nightly weather forecasts and the one used in most classrooms shows what is known as Greater Israel, an area of land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. On it, there is no demarcation of the pre-1967 borders, known as the Green Line, between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Though the Israeli miliary has occupied the West Bank since 1967, the term “occupation” rarely appears in Israeli media or public discourse.
For most Jewish Israelis, Israel and the occupied territories are seen as more and more geographically seamless. This shift has taken place over the past 25 years, in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace accords, the second intifada, the vanishing of the Israeli peace camp and, along with it, the long-held hope of land for peace deals and a two-state solution. The state’s institutionalization of control over land, resources and people beyond the Green Lineis only one piece of the way Israel has already effectively annexed the territory.
That process of backdoor annexation accelerated three years ago, when Bezalel Smotrich, a messianic settler ideologue, was granted as part of his party’s coalition agreement with Mr. Netanyahu the role of effective governor of the West Bank. Mr. Smotrich established a new government body called the Settlement Administration and assumed authority over everything defined as daily civilian affairs, including housing, planning and roads. In so doing, he transferred powers from the military officials ostensibly, since 1967, presiding over a temporary military occupation to civilians in government aligned with Mr. Smotrich’s vision of permanent Israeli sovereignty.
Mr. Smotrich has ratcheted up every aspect of Israeli control in the West Bank. On his watch, nearly 50,000 housing units in the settlements have been approved, including more than 25,000 this year alone, a massive increase over the previous years. He has facilitated expropriation of extensive swaths of territory in the West Bank, declaring these parcels Israeli state land. In three years Mr. Smotrich appropriated almost as many acres as Israel had seized in the three decades since the Oslo Accords. He legalized and funded settler outposts built illegally under Israeli law. He pushed Israeli authorities to approve construction in a part of the West Bank known as E1, an area east of Jerusalem that all previous U.S. administrations have warned Israel to leave alone, since building Israeli settlements there would bifurcate the West Bank and render Palestinian territorial contiguity even more difficult to imagine.
But perhaps Mr. Smotrich’s most ambitious plan is to change how the state registers land ownership in Area C of the West Bank, the 60 percent of the territory that has been under exclusive Israeli control since Oslo. The policy now places a much more stringent burden of proof of ownership on Palestinians, making it even easier for the Israeli government to take over land in the West Bank. Once done, that transfer is almost impossible for Palestinians to reverse.
That is why, when President Trump says annexation is off the table, it doesn’t mean much. In 2020, when Israel signed the Abraham Accords, the agreement not to formally annex the West Bank was used as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table. Israel can once again promise the global community it will not formally annex the West Bank, but it has visibly transformed the territory already. The sight of Palestinian shepherds, farmers and picnicking families, once common in the pastoral landscape of the Jordan Valley and areas between Jerusalem and Jericho, has become rare. It’s more common to see small groups of armed Israeli settlers watching over grazing sheep.
International focus on maintaining the cease-fire in Gaza is crucial, but the West Bank must not be disconnected from these efforts, or considered a closed case because of Mr. Trump’s theoretical red line on formal annexation. Recognizing Palestinian statehood, as more Western allies of Israel have done recently, and reasserting the imperative of a path to Palestinian statehood, as the U.N.’s New York Declaration in September outlined and the Trump peace plan gave a nominal nod to, are important steps, but sorely lacking in real impact.
A U.S., European or Arab policy that says no to formal annexation but does nothing to stop de facto annexation will be interpreted by Israel as an invitation to continue apace. Israel has made life in the West Bank increasingly unbearable for the approximately three million Palestinians living there. Such conditions are disastrous for Palestinians and dangerous for Israel.
If Palestinians believe there is no prospect for freedom or self-determination, their despair and frustration will only grow, as will Israel’s impulse to impose more and more repressive security measures. This could, at least for a while, pressure Palestinians to continue to endure their fate, or push those with the means to leave the West Bank. What’s more likely is that it will eventually lead — as it did on Oct. 7 — to an explosion of violence and thus potentially give Israel pretext to do in the West Bank what it has done in Gaza.
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4) Ban a Pro-Palestinian Group? The U.K. Government Thought Few Would Care.
Official advice provided to the government before its ban on Palestine Action underestimated the significant public protests that followed, records show.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, Nov. 11, 2025
A demonstration protesting the British government’s ban on Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian group, in Trafalgar Square in London last month. Under the ban, simply holding a placard in support of the group is a terrorism offense. Toby Melville/Reuters
The British government underestimated the public response to its ban of a pro-Palestinian protest group using terrorism legislation, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.
The document, a “community impact assessment” prepared by several government departments and police officials in March, provided official advice to ministers about the likely impact of outlawing Palestine Action, a protest group that has vandalized weapons factories and military equipment.
The group was banned as a terrorist organization in July, putting it in the same category as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group.
It was the first time in modern British history that a protest group that does not call for violence against people had been labeled a terrorist organization. The decision has fueled intense debate over the attitude of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government toward protest and free speech.
Since the ban, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for holding signs voicing support for the group, an action that is now a terrorism offense, and police officials say the protests have strained Britain’s criminal justice system. A further wave of demonstrations is planned across Britain next week.
The March assessment failed to anticipate the scale of protest, claiming that “much of the British public” would “remain largely unconcerned” by the ban and saying it would “likely be viewed positively by the majority of U.K. communities.” The report did note rising pro-Palestinian sentiment and concerns about free speech, but also asserted that the ban would “instill confidence” that terrorism laws were being applied consistently across all groups.
The British government is now fighting a costly court battle after a founder of Palestine Action started legal action calling the ban unlawful. A hearing in London’s High Court will take place this month.
Senior police officers have said the ban, which has caused the number of arrests made under terrorism laws to increase more than tenfold, had piled fresh demands on an “already stretched” counterterrorism system.
The assessment did warn that a ban could be “exploited by concerned actors” and become “a flashpoint” for criticism of the government. But it predicted the strongest opposition would come from “smaller communities,” mainly Muslims, who represent about 6 percent of the population in England and Wales.
Those arrested at protests against the ban have included teachers, priests, retirees, doctors and military veterans from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Palestine Action was declared a terrorist organization on July 5, days after activists broke into a military base and vandalized planes.
The group had used property damage, particularly spraying red paint, in protests mainly targeting the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and other companies it accused of links to the Gaza conflict.
The assessment obtained by The New York Times was a partly redacted version that was disclosed following a Court of Appeal hearing in September.
It noted that polling suggested “growing frustration with Israeli military actions” in Gaza, with a majority of Britons supporting ending arms exports to Israel, and said a ban may “inadvertently enhance” Palestine Action’s profile.
“Some may view PAG’s focus on Israeli military actions as being part of legitimate discourse and protest activity,” the document said. “It is highly likely that British people who hold strong views about civil liberties would oppose proscription as representing a creep of terrorism powers into the realm of free expression and protest.”
Despite that, the document did not predict any demonstrations except outside trials involving members of Palestine Action.
Since the ban came into effect, protests have been organized by a separate group called Defend Our Juries, where people have silently held signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
The law used to arrest protesters, Section 13 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, makes it a crime to wear, carry or display an object in circumstances that “arouse reasonable suspicion” that someone is a member or supporter of a proscribed organization, which can be punished with up to six months in prison.
Speaking at a news conference last week, Laurence Taylor, the head of U.K. Counter Terrorism Policing, said his officers were “already stretched” and listed enforcing the Palestine Action ban among issues creating “a lot of noise in the system that risks detracting counterterrorism policing from its core mission.”
In September, a senior officer from London’s Metropolitan Police said at a news conference that responding to the protests against the ban had already cost millions of pounds.
“We are responding to people committing offenses against the Terrorism Act,” said Ade Adelekan, a deputy assistant commissioner. “People have made an informed decision to come out and commit offenses. They leave us with no choice.”
Mr. Adelekan said the scale of the protests had diverted officers from their “core policing responsibilities.”
In a statement, the British government defended the ban, saying Palestine Action had “put the safety and security of the public at risk.”
“Decisions on proscription are not taken lightly,” it said. “They are informed by a robust evidence-based process, with contributions from a wide range of experts from across government, the police and the Security Service.”
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5) Israel Reopens Crossing Into Northern Gaza for Aid
The cease-fire with Hamas has blunted the hunger faced by Gazans during the war. But aid agencies say Israeli restrictions are still hobbling their work.
By Aaron Boxerman, Nov. 12, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza City on a truck carrying aid from the Zikim area in August. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel said on Wednesday that it had reopened the Zikim border crossing into northern Gaza, a longstanding request from aid organizations trying to bring more food, medicine and other relief into the devastated territory.
The truce between Israel and Hamas, which began in mid-October, has blunted the humanitarian crisis that has gripped Gaza for much of the two-year war. But aid workers say the needs are still enormous.
Since the cease-fire, most aid has gone through two major crossings into central and southern Gaza. Zikim, which channeled aid into the north, has been generally closed since September, when Israeli forces began a broad offensive into Gaza City.
Aid officials wanted Zikim opened to ferry more supplies into northern Gaza, which frequently had shortages during the war. This year, monitors backed by the United Nations said parts of northern Gaza were suffering from famine, a finding that Israel disputed.
Hundreds of trucks are now entering Gaza daily, although many are carrying commercial goods for sale rather than aid handouts. U.N. officials say they still face Israeli restrictions on what goods they can bring into Gaza.
Israel’s military campaign razed huge swaths of Gaza, leaving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in tents amid the rubble.
The cease-fire also carved Gaza in two for the time being, with Hamas controlling a pocket of territory along the coast and Israeli forces controlling a buffer zone in the other half. The enclave, already densely populated before the war, has become even more crowded, with the vast majority of residents hemmed into the half still controlled by Hamas.
“Living conditions in Gaza remain appalling,” Caroline Seguin, an official with the aid group Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement. “After being forcibly displaced repeatedly, many Palestinians are still living in makeshift tents and without access to running water and electricity, next to piles of rubbish and overflowing sewage.”
The World Bank has assessed the cost of rebuilding Gaza at more than $70 billion, and it is still unclear who might pay for it.
The United States has said funds for reconstruction will not go to the half of Gaza controlled by Hamas. Under a peace plan put forward by President Trump, the Palestinian militant group is supposed to lay down its arms, which it has shown little inclination to do so far.
For now, Israel says it is complying with the terms of the cease-fire by allowing hundreds of trucks of humanitarian aid into the enclave daily.
Under the truce’s stipulations, Israel committed to allowing about 600 trucks of supplies per day into Gaza, which include both aid shipments and commercial goods for sale. Israel also agreed to authorize the import of equipment to repair infrastructure damaged in the war, and to reopen Gaza’s border with Egypt, the Rafah crossing, to allow Palestinians to travel.
Over a month into the cease-fire, however, Israel has yet to reopen the Rafah crossing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said last month that Israel would consider reopening the crossing if Hamas followed through with returning the bodies of the remaining hostages in Gaza.
The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, according to the Israeli authorities. More than 200 others were seized as hostages and brought back to Gaza, touching off the two-year crisis.
Israel has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the war against Hamas, including thousands of children, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
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6) A Look Into the Early Days of Migrant Detentions at Guantánamo
Government employees distributed Bibles and prepared materials “commonly used in Hinduism, Sikhism and Rastafarianism,” according to emails.
By Carol Rosenberg, Nov. 12, 2025
U.S. forces put up a tent city near the airfield at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at the beginning of the year to house thousands of migrants who were designated for deportation. None were ever held there. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
An immigration service employee brought 200 pocket-size New Testaments. A chaplain found some Buddhist spiritual literature, just in case. A couple of detainees were given rosary beads.
These details about the migrant detention operation at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba were contained in emails among government employees as the Trump administration rushed to set up the site early this year.
The documents show how soldiers and civilian workers improvised to prepare for the foreign men who would suddenly find themselves held on the base as immigration detainees. They also reveal uncertainty about the size and scope of the operation; the Trump administration had initially ordered the Defense and Homeland Security Departments to establish sites that could accommodate up to 30,000 people, requiring tent cities.
Now in its 10th month, the detention site on the base never reached that capacity. The most migrants held there on a single day was 178, in February, all but one of whom were deported to Venezuela.
In all, a little over 700 men have been housed in two buildings on the base, a prison that once held Al Qaeda suspects and a dormitory-style detention site.
The emails, between employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the base and their supervisors back in the United States, span from February through the summer. They were obtained by American Oversight, a government watchdog group that sued in federal court using the Freedom of Information Act to get 84 pages of partly redacted records.
The correspondence includes a range of issues, such as establishing a training program for U.S. military security forces who were handling immigration detainees and arranging for the detainees to have access to recreation yards and phone calls.
Taken together, said Chioma Chukwu, American Oversight’s executive director, the documents show that the administration had “no plan, no foresight and no concern for the human cost of its own chaos.”
The names in them are covered up, but most of the exchanges appear to have been written by two temporary employees: a Spanish-speaking contractor with social-work skills and a chaplain, whose denomination is not disclosed.
The chaplain was on the scene by March after experiencing “some bureaucratic hiccups, including both arriving and departing the island.”
He collected spiritual literature and began making “pastoral visits” to the detainees, including to a man who was in isolation in May as a disciplinary measure for covering up the camera in his cell and for possessing a fork.
At the adjacent prison for the last 15 detainees of the war against terrorism, Army guards have routinely collected eating utensils after meals. The migrant detention operation under Homeland Security’s ICE operation was apparently doing the same.
The contractor’s weekly reports reflected the churn of immigration detainees, whom the records identify as “IAs,” Homeland Security-speak for illegal aliens.
In April, after about 20 men were brought on an ICE flight from Louisiana, the contractor visited both sites “to introduce myself and explain my roles and my capacity.” He told the detainees that he worked for ICE but that he was not an ICE officer.
In addition to the chaplain, psychologist and medical staff were there, the contractor said.
Health concerns had arisen by mid-May, when 69 men were being held as detainees. Four tested positive for Covid, including one who was in isolation on suicide watch. No additional details were given.
By then, the chaplain had sorted out some religious arrangements, the records show.
“Thus far, there have been no requests for religious diets as the population is homogenous,” a summary on April 25 stated. But the operation had a plan to accommodate kosher and halal dietary restrictions so “no one will be forced to eat any food which is prohibited.”
The pocket-size New Testaments that the ICE employee brought were donated by the chaplain’s office at the Krome detention center, an overcrowded site in South Florida that has been the object of congressional concern and frequent protests.
Two detainees at Guantánamo were given “breakaway rosaries,” which are designed so that they cannot be used to cause harm.
A summary from May described all detainees held in the previous month as “Hispanic speakers,” of whom 55 percent were Catholic and 35 percent were other Christians, with 10 percent reporting no religious affiliation.
But the chaplain was preparing for a more diverse influx, as he reports in his emails.
Purchase orders were placed for “basic religious items and materials commonly used in Hinduism, Sikhism and Rastafarianism.” The operation was also acquiring Bibles in “Creole, French, Hindi and Punjabi to accommodate the expected Christian population.”
A June 17 email entitled “Weekly Updates” from an unnamed contractor to recipients whose names are redacted said “the facility was having a hard time obtaining bodies” to detain there because “ICE and other agencies are having to vet them.”
The contractor added: “There was also a mention of no longer accepting Venezuelans, not sure why.”
ICE officials declined to comment on the difficulties described in the document, and would not confirm the pause in sending Venezuelan deportees to the site.
No ICE detainees were being held there this week. The last detainees, 18 men, were sent to Guatemala and El Salvador last month.
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7) Forty-Two Million People Are Enrolled in SNAP. Who Are They?
The shutdown brought the scale of the federal food aid program into focus and raised questions about how such a rich country could have so many people on nutrition assistance.
By David W. Chen, Nov. 12, 2025
"...even as the economy has recovered, if slowly, from the pandemic, the gap between wealthy and poor Americans has become more pronounced, and SNAP enrollment has not deviated much from its level of 41 million. Analysts have attributed the numbers in part to a weak job market, inflation, uncertainty over the economy and an uneven recovery that has enriched the top end of the economic spectrum while leaving the bottom end behind."
The SNAP program is the modern successor to the food stamp program, which dates to 1939. Credit...Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times
The longest government shutdown in U.S. history brought with it a brawl between President Trump and Democrats in Congress and in the states over food assistance and whether the Trump administration had the authority to cut it off.
So what is the food aid program known as SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program?
From food stamps to SNAP
SNAP, the nation’s biggest anti-hunger program, is funded federally but administered largely by state agencies. In a handful of states, county governments dispense benefits and monitor eligibility.
The program is now used by 42 million low-income people — one in eight Americans — to purchase groceries. People receive benefits electronically each month through an electronic benefits transfer, or E.B.T., card that functions much like a debit card.
The SNAP program is the modern successor to the food stamp program, which dates to 1939 and the New Deal. The name was changed in 2008 “to fight stigma,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Who is eligible?
Eligibility is based on income limits — typically 130 percent of the federal poverty level — and participants are subject to reporting rules and work requirements. In 2025, that 130 percent figure translates into $529 a week for a household of two, or $27,495 a year, according to federal guidelines. The eligibility cutoff is $41,795 for a family of four.
Overall, federal spending on SNAP totaled almost $100 billion in 2024. SNAP recipients receive $187 a month on average.
Who receives SNAP?
Nearly 90 percent of SNAP recipients are native-born American citizens, according to the latest data from the Agriculture Department, and 96 percent were citizens.
About 62 percent of SNAP participants are in families with children. About 40 percent of SNAP recipients are children under 18, and about 20 percent are over the age of 60.
The states with the highest percentages of SNAP recipients are New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Oregon.
Why have SNAP rolls stopped responding to good economic numbers?
In the past, enrollment in SNAP, and its costs, have usually aligned with unemployment and poverty rates. The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service has described SNAP as a “countercyclical” program that acts as an “automatic stabilizer to the economy,” meaning that the program is designed to expand during economic downturns and shrink when the economy heats up.
Going back decades, participation in SNAP usually varied between 7 percent and 11 percent of the population, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. That percentage rose significantly during the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, peaking at almost 19 percent in 2013, or more than 47 million people.
During the pandemic, under the first Trump administration, emergency legislation temporarily and partly suspended a longstanding requirement that “able-bodied” adult SNAP recipients without dependents work. The suspension ended in 2023, and the Biden administration agreed to add stricter work requirements to SNAP under a deal with Republican lawmakers in 2023.
Yet even as the economy has recovered, if slowly, from the pandemic, the gap between wealthy and poor Americans has become more pronounced, and SNAP enrollment has not deviated much from its level of 41 million. Analysts have attributed the numbers in part to a weak job market, inflation, uncertainty over the economy and an uneven recovery that has enriched the top end of the economic spectrum while leaving the bottom end behind.
The work requirement is about to get much tougher.
The 41 million figure is likely to shrink soon, but not necessarily because the economy will lift SNAP beneficiaries out of poverty. Instead, Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy law, which took effect on Nov. 1, will change a number of criteria affecting SNAP, according to federal guidance.
Starting this month, able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 64 must work at least 80 hours per month, or be involved in volunteering or an education or training program, to remain eligible for more than three months in a three-year period. The previous age limit was 54.
Caregivers of children have long had an exemption from work requirements, and children were defined as anyone under 18 in a SNAP recipient’s care. Under the new law, the exemption applies to people caring for children under 14. Homeless people, veterans and people under 24 who had aged out of foster care also used to be exempt. Now they are not.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the changes will force states to reduce or eliminate SNAP benefits, whether because people do not meet the new requirements or fail to provide the proper paperwork. As many as 2.4 million people are expected to fall out of the program because of the work requirements alone.
Can the president just cut off benefits in a shutdown?
The Trump administration raised pressure on Democrats to vote to reopen the government without the health care concessions they were demanding, in large part by cutting off SNAP benefits. After lower courts ruled that the administration would have to pay those benefits, the U.S.D.A. rushed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court rather than comply. The high court granted a reprieve, and most benefits remain suspended.
Groups challenging the Trump administration’s decision asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning to allow a lower court order to go into effect to force the government to give people their SNAP allotments. In a brief, the groups said that “people and families have now gone ten days without the help they need to afford food,” asserting that any further delays “would prolong that irreparable harm and add to the chaos the government has unleashed, with lasting impacts” on the food benefit program.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is handling the emergency application, and she had set a speedy briefing schedule in the case, giving the challengers until 8 a.m. Tuesday morning to respond. The courts could decide whether the administration’s actions were legal, but if the government reopens, administration lawyers could try to declare the case moot.
Abbie VanSickle contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
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8) Catholic Bishops Rebuke U.S. ‘Mass Deportation’ of Immigrants
In a rare statement, the bishops framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms. “We feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity,” they said.
By Elizabeth Dias, Nov. 12, 2025
Elizabeth Dias reported from Baltimore, where the Catholic bishops held their annual fall meeting.
At their annual meeting, Catholic bishops were largely united in their statement about the federal crackdown on illegal immigration. Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press
America’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement that framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms.
The statement, passed at the bishops’ annual conference in Baltimore, did not call out President Trump by name, but the context was clear. The bishops said they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity,” the statement said. “For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”
The bishops, who were often divided by American politics in the Pope Francis era, showed a united front in standing behind Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, who has spoken out for immigrants and urged U.S. bishops to do the same.
The statement, called a special message, is a rare pastoral document that the bishops can issue only at their annual meeting, in order to address pressing circumstances of the day.
The last time they issued one was in 2013, in opposition to the contraceptive coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama.
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9) China Looks Strong. Life Here Tells a Different Story.
By Helen Gao, Nov. 13, 2025
Ms. Gao is a freelance writer. She wrote from Beijing.
Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
Every Monday morning, the stirring strains of China’s national anthem stream into my Beijing apartment from the elementary school across the street. Young students in uniform stand in neat rows on a freshly turfed playground as the Chinese flag inches up a pole. Nearby streets are lined with flower pots, ginkgo trees and propaganda signs exhorting citizens to love their nation.
For much of my life that directive had felt superfluous. China’s economy boomed and we were proud of our country.
That pride is harder for many of us to summon today. Behind the orderliness of everyday life, a quiet desperation simmers. On social media and in private conversations, there is a common refrain: worry over joblessness, wage cuts and making ends meet.
Chinese people today live with a strange paradox.
Internationally, China looks strong. It is America’s only rival in terms of the power to shape the world. The recent meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, in which the leaders announced a trade-war truce, has fed this narrative — one that Beijing is only too happy to promote — a resilient nation united in the face of external challenges.
That muscular facade is punctured here in China, where despair about dimming economic and personal prospects is pervasive. This contrast between a confident state and its weary population is captured in a phrase Chinese people are using to describe their country: “wai qiang, zhong gan,” roughly translated as “outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.”
Many now feel the very state policies that have made China appear strong overseas are hurting them. They see a government more concerned with building global influence and dominating export markets than in addressing the challenges of their households. A state crackdown launched several years ago on the private sector is widely blamed for undermining middle-class livelihoods, even as financial resources are channeled into industries that the government deems more strategically important, such as electric vehicles, solar power and shipbuilding. Meanwhile, the global chokehold China has secured on the supply and processing of rare earth elements has caused air and soil pollution at home.
These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States. That sentiment is likely to grow. The latest five-year plan — the government’s blueprint of economic priorities — that was released last month makes clear it plans to double down on prioritizing national power over the common good.
In April, as the tariff war with the United States intensified, a People’s Daily editorial argued that Beijing can resist American bullying thanks to systemic advantages such as China’s ability to centralize resources and pour them into accomplishing national goals. The backlash on the Chinese internet was swift. While the government boasts, a viral social media post pointed out, everyday struggles like finding work, putting food on the table and educating children are “fraught with difficulty.” Winning the trade war with the United States means “preparing to sacrifice some of the people,” the author wrote. Censors soon blocked the post and others like it.
Years ago, Chinese people would have cheered a People’s Daily editorial like that out of the reflexive nationalism that the government has instilled for decades. That patriotism is nearly drowned out today by those who vent over the problems they face.
Youth unemployment is so high that last year the government changed its calculation methodology in a way that produced a lower number. Even the new figure remains alarmingly high. An estimated 200 million people get by in precarious careers in a gig economy. Consumers, many of whom have seen their net worth shrink in an intractable housing market crash, are cutting back on spending, trapping the economy in a deflationary spiral.
The sense of economic insecurity is leading people to forego marriage and starting families, worsening a national decline in population. Popular frustration also is sharpening the divide between the haves and the have-nots — hardening public resentment against those who are perceived as parlaying economic or political connections into opportunity while most people face dwindling prospects. And mental health problems are believed to be rising, as evidenced by a spate of indiscriminate stabbing sprees and other violent attacks in the past couple of years.
It seems clear that Beijing can no longer count on knee-jerk patriotism to underwrite its increasingly assertive stance abroad. In September, when the Chinese Communist Party staged a lavish military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, many people wondered aloud why that money wasn’t instead spent on addressing the difficulties of ordinary people.
The government recently began cracking down on social media content it considered “excessively pessimistic” — a clear sign it is concerned about this public unease undercutting its agenda. But suppressing criticism instead of addressing its causes will only deepen the disconnect with the people and strain the balancing act that the state has tried to strike between its foreign policy priorities and the domestic support it craves.
China has long thrived under an unspoken social contract: The Communist Party granted the people more freedom to improve their livelihoods in return for political obedience. To many Chinese, the government is no longer holding up its end of the bargain.
When Mr. Xi took power in 2012, he gave China’s people hope with his oft-repeated mantra “the Chinese Dream”: a pledge of shared prosperity through national strength. That phrase has been less prominent in government messaging in recent years.
The state might say that’s because much of its vision has become reality. More likely, the Communist Party understands that such rhetoric now rings hollow among a population that is watching its dreams fade.
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10) Family of Fisherman Killed in U.S. Military Strike Says It Wants Justice
Colombia was a top U.S. ally in Latin America until the Trump administration began deadly strikes in international waters. Now, one family wants justice.
By Simon Romero, Visuals by Federico Rios, Reporting from Santa Marta, Colombia, Nov. 13, 2025
One day in mid-September, Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman who, his family said, had long plied the Caribbean in search of marlin and tuna, called his teenage daughter. He told her he was going fishing, she said, and would return in a few days.
He never made it back.
The day after he left, on Sept. 15, his family, fellow fishermen and Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, say Mr. Carranza was killed in a U.S. military strike on his boat. The furor about what happened to him has ignited a feud over the huge U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and the legality of the deadly attacks on 20 vessels since September.
“I never thought I would lose my father in this way,” said Cheila Carranza, 14, this week, holding back tears as she gazed at a photo of him on her phone in her grandmother’s crowded home, where she lives in one room with her mother and two siblings.
As the death toll climbs from U.S. strikes on boats in waters near Latin America, tensions are increasing with Colombia, which had long been a top U.S. ally in the region. So far, 20 U.S. strikes have killed at least 80 people.
The attacks have enraged Mr. Petro, who accused the United States of murdering Mr. Carranza in one attack. President Trump responded by imposing sanctions on Mr. Petro and his family and moving to slash aid to the country. This week, Colombia suspended intelligence sharing with the United States until the Trump administration stops its strikes.
The Trump administration claims the attacks occurred on boats carrying illicit drugs that kill thousands of Americans. But many legal experts in the United States and elsewhere say the strikes violate international law because those killed, even if they had been suspected of committing any crimes, did not present an immediate threat.
Mangled bodies have begun washing up on the beaches of Trinidad and Tobago after U.S. strikes in the region. The only two known survivors of the strikes are not from Venezuela, but Colombia and Ecuador.
The Trump administration has called Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, the leader of a drug cartel and has privately said that the goal of the U.S. deployment, the largest in decades in Latin America, is to push the authoritarian leader from power.
The Trump administration has not provided evidence, aside from descriptions of intelligence assessments and declassified portions of video images, that any of the vessels it has destroyed were carrying drugs. At the same time, in Mr. Carranza’s case, there is no immediate ability to determine with certainty if he was simply a fisherman or had been involved in drug smuggling.
Mr. Petro, in a news conference last month, said Mr. Carranza was from a traditional fishing family, but “may have been involved very intermittently’’ with drugs.
Many fishermen in coastal and island communities, he said, become involved in drug transport because poverty leaves them few alternatives.
The strikes have left Mr. Carranza’s family reeling and grasping for answers, offering a rare glimpse into the strain the U.S. deployment can inflict on those left behind as the toll from the deadly attacks continues to climb. The family has hired an American lawyer, who said he was preparing a legal claim.
Katerine Hernández, the mother of three of Mr. Carranza’s children, disputed Mr. Trump’s claim that the strike that killed her former partner, along with two other people on the same boat, had targeted “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.”
“Alejandro had nothing to do with Venezuela; he spent his entire life here in Colombia,” said Ms. Hernández, 37, in an interview in Santa Marta, a sun-drenched city on Colombia’s northern coast where she met Mr. Carranza when she was 13.
Mr. Carranza, 42, also occasionally took jobs piloting boats for others in the waters around Santa Marta, his family and other fishermen said, raising the possibility that the boat he was in was transporting something illicit with or without his knowledge.
But Ms. Hernández said that Mr. Carranza had never been involved in smuggling drugs. “If he was some kind of narcoterrorist,” she said, “then why are we living in misery instead of a mansion?”
Despite separating several years ago, Ms. Hernández said, she and Mr. Carranza remained close. Until recently, she and the children had lived with his parents. While he rarely earned more than Colombia’s monthly minimum wage, about $382, she said, he always put food on the table for her and the children.
Now, Ms. Hernández said, they were subsisting on the kindness of relatives who themselves have next to nothing. She and the three children are living in her mother’s home in Gaira, a gritty area of Santa Marta not far from the city’s glistening beaches.
Dan Kovalik, an American lawyer hired by Mr. Carranza’s family, said that even if Mr. Carranza had been suspected of piloting a boat carrying illicit drugs, it would have been illegal to kill him.
“If the people on the boat were suspected of drug trafficking, they should have been arrested, not killed,” said Mr. Kovalik, who plans on filing suit in the United States and seeking damages for Mr. Carranza’s family.
The identities of the other two men aboard the boat remain unknown.
“This case is important from two points of view,” Mr. Kovalik added. “First, the family deserves compensation for the loss.”
“Second, we want this case to help stop these killings from taking place again,” Mr. Kovalik said. “This is murder, and it is destroying rule of law.”
Asked to respond to the assertions by Mr. Kovalik and Mr. Carranza’s family, the White House doubled down on its claims that the people killed in the Sept. 15 attack were “narcoterrorists.”
Since Mr. Carranza departed on the fishing trip two months ago, Ms. Hernández said, their lives have been shattered.
Before the U.S. strike, she said, she had already been unable to work after a motorcycle accident severely damaged her right leg — near the place on her ankle where she still has Mr. Carranza’s first name, tattooed.
The school fees for Zaira, their 17-year-old daughter, have gone unpaid, she said, while their son, Libiston, 11, was traumatized after another child showed him the video shared by Mr. Trump, apparently showing the father’s boat being blown to pieces.
Ms. Hernández said that some people had questioned whether Mr. Carranza had even been killed at all since his body has not been recovered. Others have tried to insinuate that he was involved in drug smuggling, she said, because of a previous brush with the law.
In a case from 2012, Mr. Carranza had taken part in a scheme to steal weapons that had been confiscated in legal proceedings, according to Colombian officials. Ms. Hernández and Adenis Manjarres, 30, Mr. Carranza’s first cousin, both said that Mr. Carranza had never been jailed in connection to the case. Colombian officials did not have more information on the disposition of the case.
Leonardo Vega, 40, a longtime friend of Mr. Carranza’s who is the leader of a fisherman’s association in Santa Marta, said he was certain that Mr. Carranza was killed in the Sept. 15 strike.
Upon seeing the attack on social media, Mr. Vega said that the type of boat in the video was precisely the kind used by fishermen from Santa Marta, in contrast to differently designed boats departing from Venezuela.
“I immediately thought, ‘He’s one of ours,’” said Mr. Vega. He added that the destroyed boat had two motors instead of the three or four used on boats typically used to smuggle drugs or other contraband.
Fishermen can be gone for a week or so, often sleeping in hammocks on deserted beaches, he said.
“But two months gone, no way,” Mr. Vega added. Looking at factors like the dates of Mr. Carranza’s departure and that of the U.S. attack, along with the boat seen in the video, he said he could come to only one conclusion: “Sadly, my friend is dead.”
Mr. Vega said Mr. Carranza had been well known for his easygoing personality among other fishermen in Santa Marta. He was known by the nickname “Coroncoro,” which refers to a small fish typically found in the area, and enjoyed drinking beer and playing pool.
Beyond what Mr. Carranza’s family is grappling with, the U.S. strikes have struck fear among Santa Marta’s fishermen, Mr. Vega said, and made them reluctant to do their work.
It is now tuna season, he said, usually one of the most lucrative times for fishermen to head out. But fear of what might await them there has virtually ground fishing to a standstill, he added.
Genevieve Glatsky and Simón Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
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11) Trump Turns to Affordability Message Amid Economic Frustration
The Trump administration is facing backlash from American consumers as higher costs from tariffs blunt wage gains.
By Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 14, 2025
With the prices of essential products such as groceries still rising and the cost of certain imports inflated because of President Trump’s tariffs, the White House faces a predicament. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Lower prices for coffee and fruit. A 50-year mortgage to reduce monthly home payments. Direct checks of $2,000 to many Americans. And a new willingness to welcome skilled foreign labor into the United States.
The Trump administration has begun floating a series of ideas over the past several weeks as it confronts the cold reality that its economic policies are not helping many Americans who continue to struggle with elevated prices and a sense of economic pessimism.
Last week’s elections made clear that affordability was top of mind for many Americans. Voters in New York propelled Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, to victory in the mayoral race. Democratic wins in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the high cost of living in those states.
Only 30 percent of voters believe President Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll. That was his lowest mark for any issue respondents were asked about. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump’s policies had improved the country’s economic conditions — less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.
In the wake of those results, the administration has begun rolling out new policies and recasting its economic messaging to try to show they are serious about combating the nation’s affordability crisis.
That includes a watering-down of some policies, such as tariffs, that the Trump administration insisted for months were not causing prices to rise for American consumers. The president is also planning to travel around the country to try to explain more clearly how his policies are helping Americans.
“We understand that people understand, as people look at their pocketbooks to go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said outside the White House on Thursday. He said that providing consumers with more purchasing power is “something that we’re going to fix, and we’re going to fix it right away.”
The new urgency over affordability comes ahead of looming midterm elections that could alter the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency if Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress.
The Trump administration contends that its policies have curbed inflation and boosted wages. However, the sticker shock from tariffs combined with high mortgage rates that have made homes more expensive have made consumers generally skittish. A survey of consumer sentiment published by the University of Michigan last month showed growing gloominess about personal finances and business conditions.
This week, Mr. Trump said that he “doesn’t want to hear about affordability” because the U.S. economy is so strong.
But in an acknowledgment that Americans are frustrated with high food prices, he said in an interview with Fox News that aired this week that he expected to lower tariffs on coffee and fruit. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed on Wednesday that relief would be coming in the form of “substantial announcements” that would lower prices for food that the United States does not widely produce.
Critics of the Trump administration noted that Mr. Trump appeared to be solving a problem that he had created through his policies.
“They have pursued an anti-affordability agenda for their time in office,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, who pointed to Mr. Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration restrictions. “If they reverse some of that, maybe costs will come down.”
Wage increases have been outpacing inflation in the United States this year, but not significantly enough for people to feel like they are better off. And a protracted government shutdown sowed panic among lower-income Americans whose food stamps became a political pawn in the standoff. Food banks across the United States reported a surge in customers, with local and national media outlets showing long lines of people waiting for groceries to feed their families.
In emphasizing affordability, the White House is grappling with the fact that its policies cannot please everyone. Last month, Mr. Trump suggested that the United States would begin importing more beef from Argentina in an attempt to bring down prices. That led to swift backlash from American cattle ranchers who said that such a move would undercut their profits.
Some Republicans expressed disappointment this week after Mr. Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News that he would support allowing more skilled foreign labor into the United States to train Americans to make high-tech products at new factories.
White House officials have also struggled to explain how they can claim that tariffs are not imposing additional costs on consumers but that removing or lowering them will lower costs.
The Trump administration is preparing to issue broad exemptions to certain tariffs to ease food prices, according to people briefed on the plans. The exemptions are expected to apply to the global tariffs Mr. Trump announced in April, including on products coming from countries that have not yet struck trade deals with the United States.
The Trump administration is promoting affordability on several other fronts. In a speech in New York this week, Mr. Bessent argued that curtailing federal spending was helping to keep borrowing costs lower for bank loans and home mortgages.
“Maintaining a robust Treasury market — and strengthening it even further — is essential to making America affordable again,” Mr. Bessent said. “The work we do here directly impacts affordability and quality of life out there.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bessent have also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to support the housing market. The Treasury secretary said last week that some sectors of the economy were already in a recession as he called on the central bank to cut rates more quickly.
With the housing market weighing heavily on the economy, Mr. Trump and his aides have been contemplating more creative ideas to lower monthly home expenses.
The president this week suggested that he was considering an expansion of the traditional 30-year mortgage to allow borrowers to take out home loans that could be repaid over 50 years. However, the idea was criticized because it would saddle consumers with more debt and interest costs.
William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said this week that his agency was “actively evaluating portable mortgages,” which would allow mortgage holders to purchase new homes at their existing interest rates. Although loans of shorter durations in other countries are portable, such a policy could be complicated in the United States because of the way home loans are bundled and sold as investments.
The White House is also focusing on ways to make Americans feel wealthier. Mr. Trump has pitched offering $2,000 checks to Americans that would be funded by tariff revenue — if Congress approved such a plan — and Mr. Bessent predicted this week that taxpayers would start to see benefits early next year from the tax cuts that Republicans passed over the summer.
But most of the policies that Mr. Trump’s team is considering would require cooperation from Congress or a broad reversal of his trade agenda. Analysts are skeptical that minor adjustments to his economic plan will have a meaningful impact on affordability.
“The Trump administration’s plans to lower tariffs on some high-profile consumer goods are important symbolic steps to address the affordability issue that voters are frustrated by,” said Owen Tedford, an analyst at Beacon Policy Advisers. “Still, it is uncertain how much they will actually affect voters’ pocketbooks and satisfy their desire for the president to do more about high prices.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration appears poised to continue its strategy of blaming the problems in the economy on the policies of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since Day 1, when he signed an array of executive orders to unleash American energy and slash costly regulations,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman. “The Trump administration will continue to implement and emphasize these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”
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12) A Bloody Month in the West Bank Olive Harvest Leads to the Death of a Boy
Palestinians see the violence, and its tolerance by right-wing Israeli officialdom, as part of a broader campaign to harass them and make life so unbearable that they will abandon their villages.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Beita in the West Bank, Nov. 14, 2025
Ayssam Ma’ala, a happy-go-lucky eighth grader, had just laid down tarps to gather ripe olives in the West Bank town of Beita. It was Oct. 11, the first Saturday of the harvest, traditionally a high point of the year.
The day before, his family had been driven from another grove by extremist settlers who attacked them, witnesses said, in what has become a common occurrence in the West Bank. So on Saturday, they chose what seemed a safer spot. No settlers were in sight. Ayssam, 13, told his mother to rest in the shade, that “he’d take care of everything.”
Israeli soldiers soon emerged from an army vehicle a few hundred yards away and began firing tear gas, witnesses said. Caught in a cloud of gas from three canisters, and unable to breathe, Ayssam collapsed.
After four weeks in a coma, Ayssam died on Tuesday. He became the first fatality in what has been a particularly violent olive harvest. Palestinians and activists — Palestinian, Israeli and Western — say bands of masked settlers have routinely assailed Palestinian villagers, activists lending their support and journalists there to bear witness. The attackers, they say, are emboldened by permissive law enforcement and by troops who seldom intervene to stop Jewish extremists.
The olive harvest has been central to the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for generations. A good crop can keep a family afloat financially for a year, and bringing it in once meant picnics, togetherness and cookouts among the trees.
The Israeli military insists that its soldiers are under orders to allow the harvest, but activists say that the military often sides with the settlers or even tries to disrupt the harvest itself. Israeli military leaders have come under heightened pressure to crack down on settler violence, with some commanders saying they need the government to authorize harsher measures.
In Beita, members of Ayssam’s family speculated that the violence of the day before had prompted soldiers to disperse them pre-emptively. A military spokeswoman said that the incident was under review.
Palestinians see the violence, and its tolerance by right-wing Israeli officialdom, as part of a broader campaign to harass them and make life so unbearable that they will eventually abandon their villages.
At the same time, Israeli settlements have cropped up at record speed on hilltops encroaching on villages across the West Bank.
The violence and land grabbing in the West Bank have only intensified since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which set off the war in Gaza.
Settler violence reached an all-time high in October, with 264 attacks, or about eight a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Palestinian Affairs, which began keeping records in 2006.
The office has counted 167 attacks on olive harvesters since Oct. 1, in which 151 Palestinians were injured, 83 of them by Israeli settlers and the rest by soldiers. It said the violence has affected more communities — and also more olive trees — than in the past six years.
In an attack caught on video and published in Israeli media, a woman harvesting olives in Turmus Aya, Afaf Abu Alia, 53, was beaten unconscious on Oct. 19 by a masked Israeli man wielding a club. On Sunday, the police arrested a suspect. Israeli media identified him as a 21-year-old resident of a nearby outpost.
A man trying to harvest olives in Kufr Qaddum, Hekmat Shtewei, 51, was chased to his car by settlers on Oct. 28, according to his brother-in-law, Abd Al-Rahman Shtewei, who said he found him bleeding in his car. He was beaten so badly that he suffered multiple fractures to his skull, jaw, ribs, arms and legs, and slipped into a coma, according to a hospital report. He awoke only on Tuesday, his brother-in-law said.
“What’s happening in the West Bank is a disgrace to humanity,” Abd Al-Rahman Shtewei said in an interview. “People here will not feel safe except in their graves.” The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment.
He lamented, too, that Palestinians could not fight back in defending themselves. “Legally, we would be the ones charged,” he said. “All we can do is keep showing up on our land.”
sraeli and Western activists who join the olive harvest and journalists who are there to document the attacks have also been assaulted.
Last weekend, Israeli activists joined villagers trying to harvest olives on a terraced hillside in Beita, when settlers began throwing rocks at them and beating some people with sticks. The injured included a Reuters photographer and her security adviser.
Oded Yedaya, 76, a photographer who runs an art school in Tel Aviv, was also wounded. He said he ran off to the side hoping to take pictures of the attackers but was chased down a steep hill by two of them and struck with at least two stones.
The first one hit him in the lower back. “I turned my head and yelled, ‘Criminals, leave me alone,’” he said in an interview.
The second stone knocked him out. He awoke covered in blood, his camera gone. He had a two-inch gash on his temple and a broken cheekbone.
Mr. Yedaya has attended olive harvests and political protests for many years and has been injured a few times. “This is the worst,” he said.
The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment.
Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli organizer of Zeitoun 2025, a coalition of groups supporting the olive harvest, said the Oct. 7 attacks and the Gaza war had fueled hatred and fear of the Palestinians on the part of many Israelis, distracted international attention from the West Bank and created among extremist settlers “a sense of entitlement, and of seizing the moment.”
“There’s a very, very strong sense of impunity, and lack of accountability,” Mr. Pollak said.
This year’s olive crop was already anemic, a result of drought last year, a spring heat wave and strong winds that blew many buds from the trees — reducing the economic incentive for people to go through with the harvest.
Some Palestinians tried to persist. But they say many of them have been prevented from getting to their trees, whether by armed settlers who menace them or by soldiers deployed to protect the settlers.
The military says its soldiers are under orders to ensure the harvest’s continuation without interference. It acknowledges that in some areas of conflict, access to groves is restricted to landowners only, “to prevent friction.”
But Palestinians and activists say that soldiers in the field routinely declare whole swaths of land, well outside the designated areas, as “closed military zones” — which makes entering them a crime — for no other purpose than stopping villagers from getting to their trees.
And getting to those trees is vital: Under Israeli law, farmlands that go uncultivated for several years can be seized permanently by the state, and often are.
Among the groups expressing solidarity with Palestinians trying to harvest olives is Rabbis for Human Rights, a liberal Jewish group that has sent volunteers to the West Bank dozens of times this fall.
On Oct. 28, two American women who tried to join up with the group in the West Bank village of Burin were arrested after soldiers said they had entered a closed military zone.
Leila Stillman-Utterback, 18, who was in Israel on a gap year after graduating from high school in Vermont, said she and the other American — both in Israel on tourist visas — were deported three days later and barred from returning to Israel for 10 years. In an interview, she said she felt a “sense of betrayal” but was fighting the ban in court because she felt “an imperative to be there.”
In Beita, Ayssam and his family had tried to harvest olives on the first Friday of the season, Oct. 10, his relatives — including his mother, brothers, and uncles — said. They were driven off by the attacking settlers from a new outpost called Mevaser Shalom — Hebrew for “harbinger of peace.”
The next day, Ayssam woke up saying he wanted to go olive picking again, his mother, Ghuroub Hamayel, said in an interview. An older brother argued against it, worried about another attack, but Ayssam insisted.
They chose an olive grove farther away from the outpost, hoping to be left alone, Ms. Hamayel said.
Eran Maoz, an Israeli activist who arrived with another group of olive pickers on the same hillside earlier that morning, said soldiers drove by a few times and observed the activity but took no action. He said the harvesters assumed they had permission to be where they were.
The family had barely arrived and gotten started when the soldiers returned. This time, they got out of their vehicle.
“We started packing up our stuff,” Ms. Hamayel said. “But that’s when they started shooting the gas.”
In a video recorded by Mr. Maoz that he shared with The New York Times, one of the villagers responded by yelling at the soldiers, “Don’t fire tear gas! You’re killing us here!”
A soldier answered over a bullhorn: “We don’t want to use tear gas. Go, get out of here, beat it.” But the soldiers continued to fire tear gas, Mr. Maoz said, and one of those volleys overcame Ayssam.
A hospital report obtained by The Times said that inhaling tear gas caused his heart to stop for several minutes and that he suffered from severe oxygen deficiency, requiring the use of a ventilator.
He was buried within hours of his death Tuesday night in a family plot not far from his home. The next morning, as other relatives remembered his smile, or his love of video games, or the way he once stared down Israeli soldiers who harassed him, his mother instead recalled her youngest child’s sweetness.
“He used to ask me, ‘Mom, do you love me like I love you?’” Ms. Hamayel said. “And I’d say yes.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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13) What ‘The American Revolution’ Says About Our Cultural Battles
In Ken Burns’s newest documentary, the war for independence was also a civil war. Amid a bitter fight over history, its timing feels urgent.
By James Poniewozik, Nov. 14, 2025
James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, has been writing about the connections between TV and politics since the 1990s. He last wrote about Ken Burns with the 2021 documentary “Hemingway.”
In the absence of available photography, “The American Revolution” uses art works like “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” by John Trumbull, as visual elements. Alamy, via American Revolution Film Project/Florentine Films
In 1990, Ken Burns established his reputation with an enormous PBS documentary about a civil war. Thirty-five years later, with “The American Revolution,” he’s made another one.
We may not be used to thinking of the fight for independence from Britain that way. But this sweeping and sneakily provocative six-part series, which begins on PBS on Nov. 16, says that we should.
“The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans,” the historian Alan Taylor says in the second episode. “It leaves out the reality that it was a civil war among Americans.”
Part of that division involved the bitter and often savage recriminations between pro-independence Americans and those loyal to Britain. But those were not the only Americans at battle. As “The American Revolution” emphasizes, the war was also often a struggle between American colonizers and Native Americans, between enslavers and the enslaved. Some Americans won their sovereignty and freedom. Others — particularly non-European Americans — lost it.
“The American Revolution” is not Burns’s most innovative film; its techniques and rhythms are familiar from “The Civil War” and its successors. It is not his most moving; that title likely goes to his 18-hour heartbreaker, “The Vietnam War.” But it is perhaps his best-timed, and not only because the country’s 250th anniversary is coming next year but also because Americans are again passionately and even violently divided, over matters including history itself.
It arrives as public broadcasting, along with its mission to speak to every part of America, has been perhaps mortally wounded. It comes in an era of political violence and cultural war over American history, with deeply divided camps claiming the mantle of 1776.
And it is dedicated to a belief that seems increasingly old-fashioned: that we share a common story and that people are willing to hear it, both the good and the bad. There was a time when Burns’s expansive tales of the past could draw a broad audience of Americans, whatever their differences in the present. Perhaps that too is now history.
ON THE SURFACE, “The American Revolution” — directed by Burns with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and written by his longtime collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward — is exactly what Burns’s past documentaries and your memories of grade-school history class would lead you to expect.
Peter Coyote’s familiar, soothing narration tells of a rebellion that was not guaranteed to succeed. It lays out the Enlightenment ideals that inspired America’s fledgling democracy. It builds tension through the patriots’ early military disasters, illustrating battles with red and blue arrows snaking across parchment-hued maps, from land to sea, city to frontier, Lexington to Yorktown.
As in “The Civil War,” Burns and company create the kinetic illusion of war footage, cutting between artworks and re-enactment images to the sound effects of cannon. There are long, ugly descriptions of bayonet warfare. The war it depicts is not the jolly enterprise of fifes and drums and men in powdered wigs but savage, sweaty butchery, often among neighbors.
Also as in “The Civil War,” Burns enlists a troupe of celebrities to voice historical figures and common people. George Washington (Josh Brolin) emerges as a complicated hero, a field general who made numerous tactical mistakes but who also had the singular personal magnetism and character to hold together exhausted troops and squabbling politicians.
So far, so History 101. But the film also makes clear quickly that there is more to this story. The introduction shifts from Thomas Paine (Matthew Rhys) urging resistance against tyranny to a description of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a Native American democracy that long preceded the United States. It weaves in the voices of enslaved Black Americans, who fought on both sides of the war. (Washington, the historian Christopher Leslie Brown says, worried that having them fight alongside white soldiers would undermine the institution of slavery.)
Over its 12 hours, “The American Revolution” takes two parallel tracks: the stories of white leaders who would eventually appear on dollar bills and in portrait galleries, and those of Americans of color, who were often used as pawns or had to choose which side of the war offered them the best chance at autonomy.
These multiple tracks, in the film’s telling, are part of the same larger story. The revolution was part of a worldwide war involving British colonies stretching to the Caribbean and Asia. And a big motive of the colonists, the film argues, was westward expansion into Native American lands beyond the Appalachians, which the British had forbidden (and in which Washington, among others, had financial interests).
The result is neither a glorification of the revolution nor a condemnation of the founding fathers. It’s just an attempt to bring in as many affected voices as possible, to situate “the most consequential revolution in history” in a global context, to make America’s founding story even bigger than you were originally taught.
THIS SHOULDN’T BE CONTROVERSIAL. It is simply history for grown-ups, which assumes that people can accept both that the revolution was a triumph for the idea of liberty and that the revolutionaries who fought it didn’t live up entirely to their beautiful words.
It is also the kind of story Burns has been telling for decades. “The Civil War” established an aesthetic style — the pans across old photos, the plangent fiddle music — as well as a people’s history approach that put the stories of foot soldiers and civilians on the same level as those of presidents and generals. The series drew some criticism, including that it was too sympathetic to Southern rationalizations for the war, but around 40 million Americans tuned in for a long-form history lesson whose most whiz-bang special effects were tintype photographs.
Burns’s approach hasn’t really changed much. There are some new tools, like 3D graphics, and some nods to the times. (“The Civil War” referred to “slaves”; “The American Revolution” talks about “enslaved people,” the preferred term among those who argue that it is dehumanizing to define people by their status as property.) You could imagine a timeline when “The American Revolution” would seem nothing more than an earnest, slightly dull prequel to “The Civil War.” But in our actual timeline, America, with a landmark birthday approaching, is in the midst of a pitched war over its own past. In this timeline, “The American Revolution” feels urgent, necessary and maybe even risky.
The second Trump administration has been purging cultural institutions of the barest whispers suggesting that the country’s history was anything but glorious triumph. The president has criticized the Smithsonian Institution for focusing on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was” and had its museums scrutinized for their “alignment with American ideals.”
His administration has ordered the renaming or review of military ships named for civil rights leaders and the restoration of military base names that honored Confederate generals. It has thrown out symbols of diversity and social progress in favor of celebrations of tradition and dominance. And the military parade that President Trump threw on his birthday, under the banner of the America250 semiquincentennial celebration, suggests he may cast next year’s anniversary in his own aggressive image.
When you control how people discuss the past, you control how they see the present and imagine the future. No wonder the country’s political movements have also fought to claim the legacy of ’76, from the Obama-era Tea Party to the current “No Kings” protests, whose anti-royalist branding is straight out of “Schoolhouse Rock.” The president has joined the war of symbolism too. On the day of massive demonstrations in October, the president shared a fake video of himself flying a military jet, wearing a golden crown and dumping excrement on the marchers.
“THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION” COULD be a teaching moment right now, a chance to find common ground, a reminder and warning about a volatile time when neighbors sought retribution against neighbors.
Though the film was in production for over eight years (around as long as the war for independence took to fight), it feels pointedly current. Sometimes the parallels are subtle. The film notes that Washington mandated smallpox inoculations for soldiers, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the editing room was unaware of the Covid vaccine battles. The resentments of frontier settlers over limits on expansion recall the grievances of modern rural politics.
Other similarities hit, as history often does, square on the nose. As the current administration sends the National Guard into cities over the objections of local officials, the film describes the British alienating Bostonians by sending an army — citing security concerns — to occupy the city. “Good God,” says the Rev. Andrew Eliot (voiced by Tom Hanks), “what can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty?”
And as the film describes the draft constitution’s balance of powers, the choice of emphasis is hard to ignore. “They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment,” Coyote says. “Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an ‘unprincipled’ man would ‘mount the hobby horse of popularity’ and ‘throw things into confusion.’” The script names no current names, but critics of President Trump have cited this quote for years.
Meanwhile, the return of Burns, one of PBS’s biggest non-Muppet stars, is a meta-testament to another current story — the war on public broadcasting. The funding credits of “The American Revolution” note that it was “made possible, in part, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” That organization announced plans to shut down next year, after Congress clawed back $1.1 billion in funding.
Burns has called the cuts “short sighted” but said he will personally be able to continue his work. He’s in the position to do that because of the support public TV provided him from early on. But Burns is 72. Who will support his successors? In a media environment that rewards flash, conflict and catering to ideological bubbles, what other network will tell Americans, all Americans, that they share a common set of facts, a common history and common challenges?
Of course “The American Revolution” does not address the public-broadcasting controversy or the continuing fights over public history in museums and universities, but it is an implicit part of those arguments. The series makes its case the way Burns’s whole body of work has: by trying to tell a full story and trusting, maybe with quaint optimism, that all kinds of Americans will want to hear it.
The series might well draw controversy pointing out the founders’ contradictions. But “The American Revolution” is also deeply patriotic. It gushes with love for America’s natural beauty, for its democracy and for its professed, if not always realized, ideals.
In its telling, the American story is one of always striving to get closer to those ideals — not of being perfect but of becoming more perfect. Its closing words are “The revolution is not over.” You can take that as a tribute to how the spirit of democracy endures. But watching the series in these times, I also hear an echo of the end of “The Civil War,” in which the historian Barbara Fields says: “The Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought. And regrettably, it can still be lost.”
As the historian Vincent Brown says in “The American Revolution,” you can admire how Thomas Jefferson articulated the cause of human freedom and recognize that he denied freedom to the humans he owned. “I think it’s incumbent on all of us to take those words from Jefferson and make them real in our own lives,” he says, “even if they weren’t real in his.”
Patriotism, “The American Revolution” argues by example, is not about hiding the stains of the past behind pretty oil paintings. It means loving your country enough to tell its whole story. Once upon a time, that mission might have seemed middlebrow and dull. Today, for better or worse, it is positively revolutionary.
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