NOVEMBER 29th DAY OF ACTION
All out for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People!
Since the ceasefire announcement, Israel has massacred hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, attacked the West Bank, and continued its abuse, torture and killing of Palestinian prisoners. A two-way arms embargo is our movement’s unchanged demand, the only guarantee of ending Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and systematic theft of our land.
We will continue confronting Zionism and holding those in power to account for as long as it takes. The struggle continues this November 29 — we’ll see you on the streets!
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Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
(the subscription is free of charge)
Dear reader,
Over the last month, World-Outlook and its sister publication in Spanish Panorama-Mundial have published unique coverage of U.S. and world events.
This includes the three-part interview with Cuban historian and writer Ernesto Limia Díaz, ‘Cuba Is the Moral and Political Compass of the World.’ A related article by Mark Satinoff, World Votes with Cuba to Demand an End to U.S. Blockade, included information on the campaign to send medical aid to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and was shared widely by the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Committee and other Cuba solidarity groups.
A number of readers sent their appreciation for Cathleen Gutekanst’s article Chicago Residents Fight ICE Abductions, Deportations, which provided a compelling, eyewitness account of this example of working-class resistance to the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants. Some readers shared it widely on social media platforms.
The news analysis Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream also generated interest. It is part of World-Outlook’s consistent analysis of the danger of the rise of incipient fascism that Trumpism has posed for the working class and its allies in the U.S. and the world.
Most recently, another article by Mark Satinoff, ‘From Ceasefire to a Just Peace’ in Israel and Occupied Territories, was promoted by Friends of Standing Together (FOST NY/NJ) on the group’s website. Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed — the two Standing Together leaders featured at the November 12 event in Brooklyn, New York, that Mark’s article covered — and Israelis for Peace sent their thanks to Mark for his accurate reporting.
This is a small sample of the news coverage and political analysis World-Outlook offers.
We ask you to use this information to try to convince at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, friends, fellow students, neighbors, or relatives to subscribe to World-Outlook. As you know, the subscription is free of charge. Increasing World-Outlook’s subscription base will widen the site’s reach. It will also provide new impetus to improve our coverage. Comments and reactions from subscribers, or initiatives from readers to cover events in their areas, often result in unexpectedly invaluable articles or opinion columns clarifying important political questions.
Feel free to share this letter, or part of its contents, with those you are asking to subscribe. And keep World-Outlookinformed about the reactions you get from potential new readers.
In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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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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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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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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) I’m a Marine Biologist. This Is How I Talk to Whales.
By David Gruber, Nov. 23, 2025
Dr. Gruber is a marine biologist and the head of Project CETI.
The bottom sperm whale is wearing a Project CETI Digital Bioacoustics Sensor. Patrick Dykstra
One afternoon in January 2024, off the island of Dominica in the Atlantic Ocean, a sperm whale named Pinchy and I drifted calmly at the surface of the water, examining each other.
After several minutes, Pinchy took a long breath, pointed her head downward and slowly began her descent into the ocean. As her 40-foot-long silhouette disappeared, I considered the distances in our worlds. We are both mammals whose time underwater relies on borrowed breaths of air from the surface. But Pinchy had a life that existed a mile underwater; while I lived in a metropolis where buildings stretched toward the sky. I wondered what Pinchy might tell me if I could understand what she was saying.
As a marine biologist studying how whales communicate, my dream is to one day answer that question. My team and I have been able to discern that sperm whales have their own alphabet and that this alphabet seems to be pillared by their own version of vowels. I’ve learned that humans are far from the only species intelligent and complex enough to develop a form of language and culture. At a time when living in a technology-fueled civilization may make us humans feel more distant from the natural world, this discovery helps me feel more connected to it.
Paradoxically, that’s been made possible thanks to the use of technology itself, especially artificial intelligence. What I’ve come to know is that technology and nature do not exist in a zero-sum universe where the ascendance of one side is the downfall of the other. Instead, these tools can give humans an opportunity to feel more tethered to the flora and fauna that surround us.
That revelation has been many years in the making. I’ve spent my career designing technologies that are meant to see and hear from the perspectives of marine creatures, which led me to sperm whales. They are capable of making some of the loudest and most complex sounds in the animal kingdom. When socializing, they emit a series of clicks, called codas.
Several years ago, A.I. technologies like large language models (the systems that power tools like ChatGPT) began to demonstrate an ability to predict word patterns and formulate new sentences on their own. I started to connect with computer science colleagues who wondered if these models could be applied to sperm whale codas. The whale biologist Shane Gero, who has been studying sperm whale families for two decades in the eastern Caribbean, had an annotated sperm whale data set featuring thousands of codas. In a pilot study we ran, A.I. that was fed the data was able to accurately predict the type of coda, the whale’s vocal clan and the individual whale with over 90 percent accuracy.
We then realized it might be possible to use A.I. to study even larger swaths of whale codas, find patterns within the vocal data, and eventually translate what whales were saying to each other.
This gave rise to Project CETI (Cetacean Transition Initiative), a 50-plus person team of marine biologists, A.I. experts, roboticists, linguists, cryptographers and more working to listen to and decode the communication of sperm whales.
This month we published a study that showed sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do. Later this year we will release Whale Acoustics Model, a novel A.I. system that translates any audio into sperm whale vocalizations — allowing humans to potentially experience, for the first time, what it might be like to interact with a whale in its own language. And we’re developing the first blueprints for how we could evaluate whale communication translations, dismantling barriers between whale and human communication and opening the door to interspecies communication.
Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.
Imagine if we truly understand complex whale communication and can extend our term “language” to them. Such breakthroughs would not only rewrite biology textbooks, but also fundamentally redefine what it means to be human and pave the way to instituting new protections for whales, the ocean and beyond.
Many conservationists perceive technology as a force of extraction and destruction, while many technologists see nature as something to be modeled or optimized. I believe these worlds are not at odds, and when aligned carefully, technology holds the potential to deepen humans’ connection to nature.
This is especially the case when weighing the rise of A.I. There are legitimate concerns about bias, privacy and the automation of human creativity. The idea that machines might take over has long dominated our cultural lexicon. Used carelessly, A.I. could reinforce old hierarchies, treating both people and animals as data points. It could accelerate ecological harm under the guise of progress.
But if used with humility and care, A.I. can become a bridge that reconnects us to the natural world. Just as Copernicus revealed that Earth was not the center of the cosmos, we hope our work could mark a similar shift — a recognition that we are not the only beings with rich internal and communal lives. To me, this is the real potential promise of A.I.: not to make us faster or more efficient, but to make us wiser.
David Gruber is the founder and head of Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and National Geographic Society program. He is a distinguished professor of biology and environmental science at Baruch College, and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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2) Fact-Checking Trump’s Latest Claims on Affordability
The president has made misleading statements about the cost of a Thanksgiving meal, breakfast and gasoline and about prices in general.
By Linda Qiu, Nov. 23, 2025
Data from the Agriculture Department conflicts with President Trump’s statements about the cost of turkey. Credit...Casey Steffens for The New York Times
Ahead of Thanksgiving and amid frustration among American consumers over affordability, President Trump has recently insisted, often wrongly, that prices and costs were coming down.
“I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down,” he said at an event billed as the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Monday.
But that was false. Overall prices have increased under Mr. Trump, with the Consumer Price Index up 3 percent in September over the same time last year.
“President Trump is just getting started implementing the policies that created historic economic prosperity in his first term, and Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Here is a fact check of some of the president’s recent claims.
What Was Said
“Walmart just announced that the cost of their standard Thanksgiving meal is reduced by 25 percent this year from last year.”
— in a speech at an investment forum on Wednesday
This is misleading. While it is true that Walmart announced that this year’s Thanksgiving meal — its annual basket of items for a holiday spread — would cost 25 percent less than last year’s, the contents of this year’s basket were considerably different.
Walmart, which began offering the basket in 2022, said in a news release last year that its Thanksgiving meal then included 29 items, which totaled about $55. This year’s basket included 22 items, totaling just under $40 — a decrease of about 25 percent.
The baskets also included different items, different brands and different sizes. For example, the 2024 basket included a frozen turkey weighing between 10 and 16 pounds at a cost of $0.88 per pound, while the 2025 basket includes a 13.5-pound turkey at a cost of $0.97 per pound. The 2025 basket does not include nine of the 2024 items, but added four new items. And among items in both years’ baskets, fried onions and mushroom soup came in smaller amounts this year.
The 29 items in Walmart’s 2024 basket cost $49 on Nov. 21, before tax and including current special deals. That’s 7 percent lower than last year. (Prices for items may vary by location and date; FactCheck.org recreated the basket on Nov. 12 at a cost of $51.)
The American Farm Bureau, which has tracked prices since the 1980s, estimated that the cost of a Thanksgiving meal is down 5 percent from last year, marking the third consecutive year with a decline since a record high in 2022.
What Was Said
“According to the U.S.D.A., turkey is down, think of that, 33 percent.”
— in the Wednesday speech
False. It’s not clear what Mr. Trump was referring to, but the Agriculture Department’s data shows that the cost of turkey has risen, not declined.
For the week ending on Nov. 21, the most recent available data, a fresh young hen cost $1.66 per pound wholesale and a frozen hen $1.68 per pound wholesale. Those prices are up from $1.18 per pound for fresh turkey and $0.98 per pound for frozen turkey in the week ending Nov. 15, 2024.
A recent report from Purdue University estimated that wholesale turkey prices had surged by 75 percent since last year, driven by avian flu outbreaks. But, the report noted, retailer discounts may cause greater variation in prices at the grocery store. In fact, inexpensive turkeys are often used as an enticement known as “loss leaders.”
The Farm Bureau survey estimated that the price of a 16-pound turkey was $25.67 in 2024, compared with $21.50 this year, about a 16 percent decline.
What Was Said
“Gasoline is way down. I think you’ll be seeing $2 gasoline, but we’re now at $2.50, $2.45, some are lower than that. It was $4.50, $5, $6, $3.50, $3.75 under Biden.”
— in a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday
This is exaggerated. The average price of gas hit a record high in June 2022, at $5 a gallon, before declining. And while gas prices have decreased slightly since Mr. Trump took office this year, he is overstating the decline and understating the prices under his administration.
The average price of gas in the United States hasn’t fallen below $2.50 since early 2021, when former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took office, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, a government statistics agency.
The lowest average gas price of Mr. Trump’s second term came in the week ending Oct. 20, at $3.02 per gallon — 50 cents more than Mr. Trump had claimed. In the week ending Nov. 17, the average price was $3.06 per gallon. That was a 1.6 percent decrease from $3.11 for the week ending Jan. 20 and a tiny increase from $3.05 at the same point last year.
What Was Said
“In the past six months, the price of breakfast items has fallen 14 percent. Bread prices are down. Dairy prices are down. And the price of eggs has declined 86 percent since March.”
— at the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Monday
This needs context. Mr. Trump is correct that the prices of some breakfast items have declined, but he is omitting that the prices of other staples have increased.
Mr. Trump appeared to be citing a report from DoorDash, the food delivery company, that estimated a 14 percent decline in the company’s “Breakfast Basics Index,” which includes three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel and an avocado. That spread cost $5.07 in March, compared with $4.35 in September, based on data from retailers consistently available on DoorDash. The prices of eggs and avocados declined, driving the dip in the index, while the prices of bagels and milk were virtually unchanged.
DoorDash’s data also tracks with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows a 44 percent decline in the price of eggs from March to September and a 34 percent decline in the Producer Price Index for avocados from April to August. (The wholesale price of eggs has declined even more dramatically, from $8.07 a dozen in late February to $2.22 a dozen in mid-November.)
The average price of white bread has declined by 3 percent from January to September, while the price of milk has increased by about 2.6 percent.
The costs of many other breakfast items not mentioned by Mr. Trump have increased since he took office: coffee by 30 percent as of September, bacon by 3.5 percent, oranges by 18 percent and potatoes by 4 percent.
Overall grocery prices — measured as “food at home” — were up 2.7 percent in September over the same time last year.
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3) Their Kids Had Questions About Wealth Inequality. How Did They Respond?
Some parents turn to books or family movie nights to facilitate discussions. But they admit they don’t have all the answers.
By Kristin Wong, Nov. 23, 2025
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This summer, Catherine Collins took her 11-year-old twins, Aria and Edison, to visit the Field Museum in Chicago. As they walked back to the car, Ms. Collins and her children noticed a woman across the street with a cardboard sign, asking for change. Edison asked his mother a question that stopped her in her tracks.
“He was very emotional, and he said: ‘Mom, why does that woman need money? And why are her kids with her?’” said Ms. Collins, 38, who co-hosts “Five Year You,” a podcast about personal development.
The question brought up important issues about wealth and structural inequality, social class differences and privilege — all topics she wasn’t sure how to explain to a child.
“When we got home, we had a conversation about how not everybody has the same resources, not everybody has the same access to things, not everybody has a home,” Ms. Collins said. “I hoped that I answered in the right way, but I think it would be a disservice to the kids for me to think that I have all the right answers.”
As millions of Americans are at risk of losing access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and more people are becoming homeless across the country, signs of inequality are everywhere. Children notice these signs, and many parents are figuring out how to navigate conversations when their children have questions. Some encourage their children to ask more questions, use family movie nights to have conversations and rely on parenting books for ways to talk about the topics.
Once, when her children complained about piano lessons, Ms. Collins used the moment to explain to them that music lessons were a privilege. Now, they have a general understanding of the concept.
“I think privilege means you get to live in a nice neighborhood, you get to go to a nice school, you get to wear nice clothes,” Ms. Collins’s daughter, Aria, said in an interview. Her brother, Edison, added: “Sometimes walking around the city of Chicago, you see people on the streets with cardboard signs. That’s when I feel more privileged.”
One way to help children understand complicated topics is to use developmentally appropriate language that they can understand. Ms. Collins has used a metaphor she learned from another mother. Every person receives a different deck of cards in life, she explained, and it’s up to us to decide how to use it. Some people use their decks to help others with lesser decks.
“Adults know about social, economic, cultural issues, but kids don’t understand all that yet,” she said. “So the deck of cards helps them understand.”
Encouraging More Questions
Nir Eyal moved his family to Singapore in 2020 from the San Francisco Bay Area. During a trip to see the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, his 14-year-old daughter noticed two young boys fishing in a polluted stream.
“I remember my daughter asking: ‘What’s going on? Why are things so much worse in Cambodia than they are in Singapore?’” he said. Mr. Eyal didn’t want to give his daughter the impression that he had all the answers.
“I’m not sure the average American adult can explain homelessness very well,” said Mr. Eyal, 48, a behavioral designer and an author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.” Rather than offer his daughter his own interpretation of social class and privilege, Mr. Eyal encouraged her to ask more questions.
“I grew up in the traditional education system, where you’re told the answer before you even have the question,” he said. “I don’t think that sparks curiosity, and as a parent, I’ve learned that my role is not educator but facilitator.” He encouraged his daughter to enroll in Good Economics for Hard Times, a free M.I.T. course taught by the economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
In 2019, Mr. Banerjee, Ms. Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Nobel in economic science for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Rather than relying on economic theory to influence policies and programs, they tested these policies as “interventions” in real-world settings. Their work revealed that many widely held assumptions and stereotypes about what causes and cures poverty fall apart once they are put to the test.
Mr. Eyal took the class with his daughter and learned a lot in the process. “She was 15 when she took the class,” he said. “It’s not anything a 15-year-old couldn’t handle.”
Differences in Approach
Emily Guy Birken made it a point to have discussions about social and economic differences with her children after reading “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,” by Ashley Merryman and Po Bronson. Ms. Birken said she had learned that, while children were like sponges in terms of taking in new information, they were often unskilled at interpreting that information.
“So kids will take in the fact that we don’t talk about race, and then they put their own interpretation on it,” said Ms. Birken, 46, who lives in Wauwatosa, Wis. Some research from the University of Michigan suggests that not having these conversations with children can reinforce implicit bias, make them more likely to act on stereotypes and limit their ability to empathize with others.
Ms. Birken, a freelance writer and daughter of a financial planner, has been open with her children about money and what it means to have privilege. But she also shows them how privilege can be used to help others.
“There’s a large unhoused population in Milwaukee near where we live, which is really worrisome with our winters,” she said. When Ms. Birken and her husband moved there in 2016, their children were 5 and 2 years old, and they made a family activity of putting together donation bags to pass out to people.
“We explained to the kids openly, in age-appropriate ways, that there are things we can do to help others, even if it’s easier to just ignore it and drive past,” she said.
This became a problem, however, when Ms. Birken befriended Don, a man who appeared to be in his 60s and had come to her door asking if he could rake leaves.
“We got to be friendly, and he was not doing well,” she said. “Over time, I probably gave him about 600 bucks. My husband was not really OK with it.”
One day, when Ms. Birken wasn’t home, Don came by, and her younger son answered the door. Unsure what to do, he called his mother, who rushed home to manage the situation. Later, when her husband learned what had happened, he urged her to draw a line with Don and stop giving him money. Ms. Birken agreed, but the exchange revealed a difference in approach: She had encouraged her children to respond with sympathy, whereas her husband emphasized the importance of setting firm boundaries.
It’s inevitable that these kinds of differences will arise. A presentation from Thrive Initiative, a parenting program affiliated with Pennsylvania State University, suggests that children benefit from parents who are aware of their differences and have open conversations about how to handle them.
Ms. Birkin has also used family movie nights to have discussions about money and inequality.
“We just recently watched ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’” Ms. Birkin said. “My kids hated it because of the way Ferris treated Cameron and how privileged he is — people collecting money for him when he doesn’t need it, that sort of thing.”
She and her husband asked their children how much money they thought Ferris spent on his day off, what they would do with that money and what they didn’t like about the film. “It was interesting watching it through my son’s eyes,” she said.
Ever since Ms. Collins’s twins could talk, she has encouraged them to share something they’re grateful for every day. Her daughter recently initiated the gratitude conversation at dinner.
“It delighted me,” Ms. Collins said. “It shows me that these lessons, habits and conversations do sink in and become a part of the fiber of who they are.”
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4) We’re Seeing What a No-Immigration Economy Looks Like
By Wendy Edelberg, Nov. 23, 2025
Ms. Edelberg is a former chief economist for the Congressional Budget Office.
Fortunate Joaquin
The latest jobs report, delayed for almost seven weeks by the government shutdown, finally came out on Thursday and we learned that job growth in September exceeded expectations — coming in at 119,000 net new jobs, an improvement on August, which saw a net loss. The White House took the occasion to celebrate. But the summary provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics juxtaposed the news with another key piece of information, noting, “employment edged up by 119,000 in September but has shown little change since April.”
Indeed, employment growth from May to September averaged just under 40,000 new jobs per month, which gives us a better indication of the employment picture: Right now, job growth is low. Given President Trump’s immigration crackdown and the attendant decline in net immigration, we need to start thinking about low job growth as the new normal.
Let me explain: Net immigration in 2025 is on track to be close to zero or even negative — more people will probably end up leaving the United States than entering for the first time in decades. Fewer immigrants overall means fewer immigrants entering the work force and fewer immigrants spending money.
We’re conditioned to think that job growth of 40,000 a month is a terrible omen for our economy — a sickly labor market or a sign of an impending recession. But if Mr. Trump’s restrictive immigration policies continue, it might simply be what the sustainable pace of new employment looks like.
The monthly new-jobs number doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. For it to tell us whether employment growth is weak, healthy or overheated, we have to compare it with the number of job seekers.
If we have sustainable employment growth combined with a low unemployment rate, it tells us that the labor market is healthy: When the number of new jobs created is roughly in sync with the number of new job seekers, overall, employees’ wages should grow fast enough to increase their purchasing power but not so fast as to create unwanted inflation.
The sustainable pace of job growth just before the Covid-19 pandemic was about 100,000 new jobs a month by my calculations, lower than in prior years as more people reached retirement age. The post-pandemic surge in immigration changed all that; from 2022 to 2024, the estimated sustainable pace was around 200,000 per month as the influx of immigrants (often with temporary work permits) joined the labor force. Current immigration policy seems to have thrown that into reverse.
Over the next year, then, a healthy job market will probably mean a low unemployment rate of 4 to 4.5 percent (which is where we’ve been since early 2024) and job creation that hovers around the current pace. In July, Stan Veuger, Tara Watson and I published an analysis projecting that by 2027, the sustainable pace of net new jobs could fall to as low as negative 10,000, meaning fewer jobs each month than the month before.
Proponents of Mr. Trump’s approach to immigration tend to see it differently. Last year, then-Senator JD Vance essentially argued that fewer immigrants would lead to more job openings for native-born job seekers, particularly men, and that the resulting increase in wages would entice more native-born men to join the ranks of job seekers.
But I have my doubts. Empirical analyses suggest that reductions in immigration bring little change to the wages of native-born workers with skills similar to those of the immigrants who would otherwise be doing the same work. The percentage of native-born men between the ages of 25 and 54 in the job market has shown a long downward trend since 1960, with periods of strong wage growth doing little more than temporarily slowing the decline.
It was easy to predict that Mr. Trump’s immigration policies would reduce the number of people looking for work, what wasn’t always fully considered was that the choking-off of immigration would reduce labor demand as well: The immigrants who aren’t here because of Mr. Trump’s policies not only aren’t working here; they’re also not spending money here. When consumer demand for goods and services diminishes, business owners don’t need to hire as many people. No doubt, the costs and uncertainty created by Mr. Trump’s tariff policies have also led businesses to hire fewer people.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, has said that the labor market is in a “curious kind of balance.” It is remarkable that the number of available new jobs has come down almost in tandem with the drop in the number of available new workers. (This is not the case in every community and every sector; surely there are construction companies having trouble staffing their crews.)
Some Fed officials and other observers have worried that if the pace of job creation loses too much steam, it could tip the labor market into weakness and push the unemployment rate higher. Indeed, it made sense that the Fed stepped in to prevent that by modestly lowering interest rates.
Nonetheless, consider the flip side. In a world where the demand for new workers by employers remained at 2024 levels but the number of job seekers fell abruptly because of immigration policy, the Fed would have needed to either cool an overheated labor market or risk a situation where rising wages added to inflationary pressure. If we’re finding out that restricted immigration combined with high and ever-changing tariffs in fact reduced the overall need for labor, then those policies did the work that the Fed would have otherwise had to do.
Again, a good outcome in this economic environment will consist of a low unemployment rate with low or no employment growth. This will be something new for many Americans, who understandably connect a healthy job market with higher monthly jobs numbers.
A healthy job market, however, doesn’t necessarily mean a thriving economy. A smaller population resulting from lower immigration means a smaller economy well into the future. On top of that, more restrictive immigration means fewer working-age immigrants paying taxes, even as many of them wait years to get most federal benefits (or never become eligible for them). Finally, economists link immigration to productivity growth.
In other words, making America less hospitable to immigrants will eventually make America poorer.
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5) Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Black Power Activist Known as H. Rap Brown, Dies at 82
A charismatic orator in the 1960s, he called for armed resistance to white oppression. As a Muslim cleric, he was convicted of murder in 2000 and died in detention.
By Paul Vitello, Published Nov. 23, 2025, Updated Nov. 24, 2025
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown, in 1967. At the time, he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who as H. Rap Brown defined Black militancy in the 1960s with a call to arms against white oppression, and who later lived quietly as a Muslim cleric and shopkeeper until his arrest in 2000 in the murder of a sheriff’s deputy, died on Sunday in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82.
His death, at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, was confirmed by Kristie Breshears, the director of communications for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which operates the hospital. She did not specify a cause. In February, The Washington Informer reported that Mr. Al-Amin had multiple myeloma and that his health was deteriorating.
He had been serving a life sentence without parole.
Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.
An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he preached armed resistance and separatism, declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners.
Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.
That summer, as riots erupted in Black neighborhoods in more than 100 American cities, Mr. Al-Amin made himself known to a wider audience through speeches that gave voice to Black anger and righteous indignation over a century of unfulfilled expectations since the end of slavery.
“Black folk built America, and if it don’t come around, we’re gonna burn America down,” he would say, a call-to-arms he delivered hundreds of times from 1967 to 1969 on street corners and college campuses and in meeting halls across the country.
“You’ve got to arm yourself,” he said. “If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a gun store.”
After five days of rioting in Detroit that left 43 people dead and some 2,000 buildings destroyed in July 1967, Mr. Al-Amin declared that violence would be the new language of race relations. “I don’t think you could articulate the sentiments of Black people any better than they just did in Detroit,” he said.
The rhetoric gave him a high profile in the news media, made him the target of F.B.I. surveillance and led to his repeated arrest on gun-related, arson and conspiracy charges. His actions also helped ensure passage in 1968 of the first law in the nation’s history to make it illegal “to incite, organize, promote or encourage” a riot.
Conservatives in Congress attached the provision to the landmark 1968 fair housing law as a condition of their support. Though they were reacting to riots in Detroit, Newark and the Watts section of Los Angeles, in which Mr. Al-Amin had played no known role, they called the measure the “H. Rap Brown Federal Anti-Riot Act.”
Mr. Al-Amin told reporters who sought his reaction: “We don’t control anybody. The Black people are rebelling. You don’t organize rebellions.”
Wanted by the F.B.I.
Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.
Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.
By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam. By his account, he had become a new man with a new name. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice, and publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions of his youth.
Mr. Al-Amin founded a mosque, called the Community Masjid, opened a small general store selling groceries, incense and Korans, and for the next quarter century was known to his neighbors as a local businessman and spiritual leader.
He organized summer youth games and led efforts to curb street crime and drug trafficking in the city’s West End, where he lived. He and his wife had at least one child, a son, Kairi. (Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.) The head of an Islamic civic group in Atlanta called Mr. Al-Amin “a pillar of the Muslim community.”
Law enforcement authorities came to view him differently. Beginning shortly after the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, local and federal authorities began a series of investigations into Mr. Al-Amin’s activities, according to police files uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000.
Quoting from F.B.I. documents and local law enforcement officials, the newspaper said that the F.B.I. had sent paid informants to infiltrate Mr. Al-Amin’s mosque and helped local police investigate possible links between Mr. Al-Amin and a variety of criminal activities, including terrorist plots, a gunrunning syndicate, a series of Atlanta bank robberies, an explosives-making ring and 14 murders in the city between 1990 and 1996.
No links were found, the newspaper said.
In 1995, a neighborhood resident who was shot near his store named Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant but later recanted, saying the police had pressured him into making a false accusation. (He said he did not really know who shot him.) Mr. Al-Amin’s lawyer said at the time that the police were looking for any excuse to put Mr. Al-Amin in jail.
But he remained out of jail, and relatively out of the public eye, until March 2000.
His re-emergence — like his resurfacing in 1971 — was announced by a hail of gunfire exchanged with the police.
A Deputy Sheriff Dead
While approaching Mr. Al-Amin’s store on the night of March 16 to serve Mr. Al-Amin with an arrest warrant for missing a court appearance on a minor traffic case, the Fulton County, Ga., deputy sheriff Richard Kinchen and his partner, Aldranon English, were both shot by a heavily armed man standing on the street outside. In an ensuing shootout, Mr. Kinchen was fatally shot in the abdomen. Mr. English was struck by four bullets but survived.
That night, in a hospital, Mr. English identified Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant through a photograph and told investigators that he was pretty sure he had shot the man. His account was supported by a trail of blood leading from the spot where the gunman had stood.
Mr. Al-Amin was arrested four days later at a friend’s home in rural Alabama. He showed no sign of a gunshot wound or injury to explain the blood at the scene, as his lawyers later pointed out at his murder trial. The police and prosecutors later said that the blood had proved to be a false lead, unrelated to the March 16 shootings.
Mr. Al-Amin denied being the gunman and characterized his arrest as the latest in a series of secret government efforts to frame him.
“The F.B.I. has a file on me containing 44,000 documents,” he told The New York Times in 2002, speaking from a pay phone at the Fulton County jail on the eve of the trial. “At some point they had to make something happen to justify all the investigations and all the money they’ve spent.
“More than anything else,” he added, “they still fear a personality, a character coming up among African Americans who could galvanize support among all the different elements of the African-American community.”
A jury — nine of whose members were Black — convicted him after a three-week trial. The chief witness against him was Mr. English, who testified that on the night of the shootings, he and his partner approached Mr. Al-Amin on the street, told him they had a warrant and asked him to show his hands. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ frowned and swung up an assault rifle and started shooting,” Mr. English said in court.
In a death penalty hearing, a parade of witnesses testified on Mr. Al-Amin’s behalf, asking that his life be spared. One was Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations, who said that Mr. Al-Amin had helped reduce crime and improve conditions for many people in the city’s impoverished West End.
Louisiana-Born
Hubert Gerold Brown (Rap was a nickname from his youth) was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 4, 1943, the youngest of three children of Eddie and Thelma Brown. His father, who was serving in the Army when Hubert was born, worked for the Standard Oil company for 30 years. His mother worked two jobs — as a domestic and as a teacher at an orphanage for Black children — and was partial toward Hubert “because I was lighter,” he wrote in his 1969 autobiography, “Die, Nigger, Die!”
Light-skinned Black people, he wrote, were considered more likely to gain a foothold in white society, according to the hierarchy of skin color observed by his mother and her generation in the early 20th-century South. “Because I was lighter, it meant that I was supposed to get ahead,” he wrote, adding that the favor she showed him created tension between him and his two siblings, especially his older brother, Ed.
“Ed and I are very close now, and that color thing doesn’t come between us anymore,” he wrote. “But it’s a thing which could really damage the Black community if people don’t begin to understand it. Black is not a color but the way you think.”
After graduating from a private school affiliated with Southern University, a historically Black institution in Baton Rouge (his mother insisted that all her children attend it), Mr. Al-Amin spent two years at Southern, then left for Washington to work in the civil rights movement with his brother. Ed Brown, a student at Howard University, had become active in organizing lunch-counter sit-ins for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Mr. Al-Amin participated in voter registration drives in Mississippi and Alabama and in rural Lowndes County, Ga., where only a handful of Black citizens were registered to vote, even though 85 percent of its population was Black. He became friendly with Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), who was a veteran of the early 1960s Freedom Rides and one of S.N.C.C.’s rising stars.
In 1965, when Mr. Al-Amin was named head of the Washington, D.C., chapter of S.N.C.C., he joined a faction led by Mr. Carmichael, and calling itself the Young Turks, in urging the organization to take a more aggressive posture. Outmaneuvering moderate leaders like the S.N.C.C. chairman, John Lewis, the future Georgia congressman, and Julian Bond, who went on to become a Georgia state senator, the militant faction elected Mr. Carmichael chairman in 1966.
Mr. Carmichael made the first of his many “Black power” speeches shortly afterward, warning that until Black people achieved the necessary economic, political and firearm power — as was their right under the Second Amendment — there would never be racial harmony in America.
By the time Mr. Al-Amin succeeded Mr. Carmichael as chairman in May 1967, S.N.C.C. had adopted a Black separatist agenda, a policy barring white people from leadership roles and the stated goal of achieving freedom, in the words of Malcolm X, the nationalist leader assassinated in 1965, “by any means necessary.”
The beginning of Mr. Al-Amin’s tenure coincided with the urban riots that swept the county in what came to be known as the Long Hot Summer of 1967.
Mr. Al-Amin visited Cincinnati in June to show support for the young Black men who had rioted for three nights running, then gave a speech the next day to several hundred youths in Dayton that the Dayton police said incited a window-breaking rampage covering 12 square blocks.
On July 24, after addressing a crowd of several thousand at a rally in Cambridge, Md. (“If Cambridge doesn’t come around, burn it down!” he told them. “Take your violence to the honkies!”), Mr. Al-Amin suffered a superficial gunshot wound in the forehead when the police fired their weapons to disperse the crowd, setting off a riot there, too.
Under Surveillance
In memos later made public, the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, ordered his agents to begin arresting Mr. Al-Amin and other S.N.C.C. leaders “on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail.”
Informants were dispatched to infiltrate S.N.C.C. and other groups referred to by Hoover as “nationalist hate-type organizations” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them.
Mr. Al-Amin continued to hopscotch the country as indictments, subpoenas and extradition orders began raining down. He was under surveillance around the clock. But the pressure did not change his rhetoric.
“If President Johnson is worried about my rifle,” he told reporters after being released on bail for federal weapons charges in New York in 1967, “wait until I get my atom bomb.”
Mr. Al-Amin’s brother, Ed, who became president and chief executive of the Southern Agriculture Corp., a nonprofit organization helping Black farmers obtain federal subsidies and other benefits historically denied them, died in 2011.
Mr. Al-Amin twice appealed his murder conviction, in 2004 and 2019, and was denied each time. But as recently as 2020, his supporters had sought a new trial on the grounds that exculpatory evidence — including a prison inmate’s confession to having shot Deputies Kinchen and English — was withheld from his defense lawyers.
From the time of his arrival in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado, Mr. Al-Amin was held for long periods in solitary confinement, which his family members contended was a violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
In a 1995 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. Al-Amin said he was forever being asked about his famous aphorism about violence being “as American as cherry pie.”
He said the remark referred to the sweep of American history, beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through slavery, the subjugation of American Indians, foreign wars and civil strife.
“People ask me if I didn’t mean apple pie,” he added. “No, George Washington and cherry pie.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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6) The Boomers Are Protesting Trump. Where Is Gen Z?
By Brendan Nyhan, Nov. 24, 2025
Mr. Nyhan is a political scientist at Dartmouth College and a co-director of Bright Line Watch, which monitors the status of American democracy.
Alexander Coggin for The New York Times
The second Trump administration is already breaking through constitutional constraints on its power and subverting the rule of law. So why has the public response been so tepid?
Given America’s proud history as the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, we might have expected an enormous mobilization in response. And while there has been pushback — most notably, the No Kings movement drew an estimated five million people to the streets in October — the scale of the protests is still not as large as one might expect, given the severity of the threat. During President Trump’s first term, millions of people protested when the situation was far less dire.
One of the most notable and puzzling factors is the lack of young people. If you have participated in a No Kings protest or seen one in person, you have surely noticed the upward skew in the age of participants. Only 8 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they took part in the protests in October, compared with 13 percent of those age 65 and older, according to YouGov. Students are most conspicuous in their absence. The Rice University student newspaper counted only “about 30” students out of a crowd of more than 13,000 at a Houston protest, and Tulane’s newspaper documented “several” students at a protest of more than 10,000 in New Orleans.
These patterns mark a sharp reversal from the peak of the George Floyd protests in June 2020, when 13 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds reported attending an event in the previous month, the Pew Research Center found. At the time, people under 30 represented four in 10 of those protesting. The Floyd protests were not an anomaly. Teenagers and young adults have helped lead protest movements in the United States, such as those calling for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, they were the core of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Internationally, young people played a key role in the Arab Spring and the resistance to China’s takeover of Hong Kong.
The absence of young people in protests against Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism matters, and not just for crowd counts. The No Kings protesters look like, and in many cases are, the same people who protested during Mr. Trump’s first term in office. But older people with signs are old news in the attention economy. As a result, the No Kings protests have had less effect on our politics than, say, the smaller Tea Party protests during Barack Obama’s first months as president, which helped spark a backlash before the 2010 midterm elections.
The most obvious potential explanations for this absence of young protesters do not hold up. First, there is no evidence that young people like Mr. Trump. Though they supported him at higher rates in 2024 than they did in his prior campaign, their approval of his job performance has plummeted during his time in office — one reason that his party performed poorly in recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia. At this point, seven in 10 people under 30 disapprove of how Mr. Trump is handling his job, the highest rate of any cohort.
Another explanation that might appeal to older people is the shift in attention toward online culture, but the existence of Instagram and other platforms didn’t stop more than one million students from walking out of school in the 2018 March for Our Lives protest against gun violence. Social-science evidence suggests that mobile phones and social media can actually facilitate protests by spreading information, helping with coordination and creating awareness of peer participation.
Another possibility is that young people are focused on other issues, such as the cost of living; the debate over the state of democracy may just seem too abstract or irrelevant to their lives. But that seems too simplistic. About one in four Americans ages 18 to 29 say they worry about someone they know being deported by the current administration, a much higher share than among the older Americans who dominate the ranks of recent protests, Pew found. Young people are also more likely than older people to say they worry about being asked to prove their citizenship. And the Trump administration is directly targeting young people through its actions against universities.
Finally, it is true, of course, that the fear of arrest, harassment or worse may be keeping some people away from Trump protests. But similar risks did not deter young people from protesting in greater numbers after Mr. Floyd’s killing or against the Gaza war. Nor did risks in Hong Kong, during the Arab Spring or in the United States during the civil rights and Vietnam War protests.
The more persuasive explanation for the relative lack of young people in the anti-Trump, pro-democracy movement is that they are demobilized and demoralized. But it would be a mistake to blame them for this attitude. Older generations should instead recognize that the world we have created does not seem to offer a viable path to making change.
Consider the experiences of the last few years. The racial justice movement that peaked in 2020 ended in disappointment and backlash. The Gaza protests provoked intense conflict without delivering clear political or policy victories for their organizers. Maybe most important, Mr. Trump himself is back in the White House, suggesting a futility to opposition and activism among young people who have only ever known him as the central figure in our politics. He first took the oath of office when today’s first-year college students were in elementary school.
The electoral choices offered to young people are not much better. Given the realities of our dysfunctional two-party system, the only alternative to a Trump-dominated G.O.P. is the Democratic Party, which is dominated by a decadent gerontocracy whose elites were more likely to attend a wedding in the Hamptons than a No Kings protest on the same day.
Young people also no doubt notice the cowardice of many individuals and institutions that have the most at stake from Mr. Trump’s attacks against democracy. Some prominent universities and law firms have struck lopsided deals with the Trump administration; several media organizations and tech companies have likewise reached dubious settlements that involve paying the president in some form. Most recently, many companies have been solicited by Mr. Trump to make donations for the new ballroom he is building after tearing down the East Wing of the White House. He has reportedly expressed amazement at how easily he bullied these law firms and donors. Even Congress is quiescent, with the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon comparing it to the Duma, the rubber-stamp Russian parliament.
The absence of young people from conventional protests is both a problem and a warning. The opposition to Mr. Trump’s authoritarian speed run requires new strategies that will engage a wider swath of the population. In Chicago, for instance, neighbors have formed community groups that use tools ranging from text messages to whistles to counter harrowing immigration raids. Whatever form the opposition takes, it must offer what conventional protest currently does not: a morally compelling form of resistance that can deliver results.
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7) Restrained, Beaten, Asphyxiated: New York Prison Guards’ Brutality Grows
As frustrations among corrections officers mount, abusive treatment of inmates is rising and becoming more vicious, records and interviews show.
By Jan Ransom and Bianca Pallaro, Nov. 24, 2025
The reporters analyzed thousands of disciplinary, medical and use of force records, combed through hundreds of lawsuits and interviewed dozens of inmates and their relatives.
"In a prison system where more than 75 percent of employees are white and 73 percent of prisoners are Black or Hispanic, many of the incidents had racist overtones, inmates said, with white guards using racial epithets and other demeaning language during attacks. One inmate said guards restrained him and then called him a slur as they punched and kicked him and tore dreadlocks from his scalp at Clinton in 2021."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/nyregion/ny-prison-guards-abuse-brutality.html
Ten New York State prison guards were charged in a deadly attack on Robert L. Brooks, an inmate at Marcy Correctional Facility. New York State Attorney General office, via Associated Press
The reporters analyzed thousands of disciplinary, medical and use of force records, combed through hundreds of lawsuits and interviewed dozens of inmates and their relatives.
Even in a system known for its brutality, what New York State prison guards did to Robert L. Brooks and Messiah Nantwi stood out.
Both men were handcuffed before guards beat them viciously, leaving them unable to defend themselves or even shield their faces as the blows rained down. Both died soon after being attacked, victims not of justified force but, essentially, of torture.
The killings caused a brief reckoning this year within the walled-off world of New York’s prisons, resulting in criminal charges against 20 of the officers involved and sending officials scrambling to try to portray the episodes as unacceptable aberrations.
But a New York Times investigation has found that state prison guards have been credibly accused of engaging in such behavior — putting inmates in restraints and then assaulting them — far more often than was previously known.
Drawing on thousands of pages of court records, disciplinary data and interviews with dozens of current and former inmates, The Times identified more than 120 instances in the past decade in which guards were described as having punched, kicked or stomped on prisoners, smashed their fingers in cell doors, held their legs apart and struck their genitals with batons, and even waterboarded them — all while the prisoners were handcuffed or otherwise restrained.
Across the prison system, the rate at which staff members have used force against inmates has been climbing steadily for the past decade.
Use of force on the rise
In 2024, prison staff members reported more uses of force per inmate than in any year since at least 2014.
Reports per 1,000 prisoners
But interviews with watchdog officials, prisoners’ advocates and prisoners themselves suggest that instances of the most egregious abuse have increased significantly in just the past three years.
The officials, advocates and prisoners have linked the increase partly to seething anger among guards over recently enacted limits on their ability to use solitary confinement. And they said the uptick had been accompanied by a general increase in rule breaking by officers, who maintain that the solitary confinement restrictions have made their jobs less safe.
Just before 10 guards were charged in the killing of Mr. Brooks in February, thousands of officers walked off the job in illegal strikes across the state, plunging the prisons into chaos and prompting Gov. Kathy Hochul to deploy the National Guard to restore order. When officers began returning to work weeks later, many were still fuming, inmates said.
“The abuse has been worse since the strike,” said Duane Brown, 44, who is serving 30 years to life for murder and said guards at Green Haven Correctional Facility had beaten him to unconsciousness in September.
A spokesman for the union that represents the guards, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, denied that officers had tortured inmates. He acknowledged that they were using force more often but said they were doing so because of working conditions that left them no choice.
“The reality is that when you are dealing with inmates who attack staff and other inmates and refuse orders to cease, force is necessary to contain the situation and minimize the amount of injuries that occur at the hands of inmates,” the spokesman, James Miller, said.
But a vast majority of cases identified by The Times did not fit that description.
One occurred in June 2024 at Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border, where guards handcuffed Ernastiaze Moore, a 25-year-old inmate who had filed lawsuits against prison staff members, punched and kicked him and then dragged him to a medical room, where they held a plastic bag over his head until he lost consciousness.
Another beating unfolded in September 2023 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility north of New York City, where Dane Stuart, 34, said guards restrained his hands before putting him in a chokehold and stomping on his arms and legs.
A third happened in April 2022 at Collins Correctional Facility near Buffalo, where Byron Santos, 28, said guards handcuffed him, put him in a headlock, threw him to the floor, kicked him and knelt on the back of his neck.
In a prison system where more than 75 percent of employees are white and 73 percent of prisoners are Black or Hispanic, many of the incidents had racist overtones, inmates said, with white guards using racial epithets and other demeaning language during attacks. One inmate said guards restrained him and then called him a slur as they punched and kicked him and tore dreadlocks from his scalp at Clinton in 2021.
Most guards who are accused of such abuse are never charged with crimes, or even disciplined. There were about 9,500 misconduct investigations brought against officers from 2000 to mid-October 2020 and closed by mid-2021, an average of more than 460 a year or about 38 a month, records show. Of those, about 10 percent involved accusations of inmate abuse. A vast majority of guards accused in such cases were never terminated.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said that the safety of prison staff members and inmates was the agency’s “top priority.”
“The department has zero tolerance for violence within our facilities,” the spokesman, Thomas Mailey, said. “Anyone engaged in misconduct will be disciplined, and, if warranted, incidents will be referred for outside prosecution.”
At a public hearing in Albany in May, Daniel F. Martuscello III, the state’s corrections commissioner, acknowledged problems and promised improvements.
“Individuals are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment, and there is an expectation of safety and opportunities for rehabilitation,” he said. “The last few months have challenged the foundation of this belief.”
Any reform efforts face a steep uphill climb, current and former inmates said.
At the Marcy Correctional Facility, where Mr. Brooks was killed, vicious beatings occurred so often that Sean Chung, a 29-year-old former inmate who worked there as a janitor, said in an interview that he had developed a routine to clean up after them.
He would follow orders to face the wall and listen as the first blows landed.
“I am hearing loud thuds,” said Mr. Chung, who was released on parole in 2024 after serving eight years for weapons possession and conspiracy. Then came shouts from the guards: “‘Stop resisting, stop fighting, put your hands behind your back!’”
“You hear the hard, gut-wrenching punches,” he said, “the screams, the ‘I’m sorrys,’ ‘I can’t breathes,’ ‘You’re going to kill me.’ You hear ‘Mom,’ and it gets quiet and you just keep hearing the thuds.”
Afterward, he said, his eyes would water and his throat would burn as he scrubbed the oily residue of pepper spray from the walls. He would use a mop to soak up blood from cracks in the floor and apply disinfectants to areas where urine and feces were sometimes left behind. He had a red bin marked “hazardous waste” for collecting broken teeth, torn-out hair and bits of clothing.
“It used to be traumatizing, but then it became normal. This is every day,” Mr. Chung said, before adding, “Everybody knows about this.”
‘The Slaughterhouse’
Few places in the prison system have a worse reputation for violence against inmates than the Clinton penitentiary.
The setting for brutal attacks on inmates in the 1980s and ’90s, the scene of a fatal beating in 2010 and the epicenter of brazen assaults after two inmates escaped in 2015, the prison, in Dannemora, has more recently become known for a unique form of punishment, The Times found.
In interviews and lawsuits, nine inmates have described being handcuffed, beaten and then nearly suffocated by guards who held plastic bags over their heads.
In the most recent such incident, in August 2024, an inmate named Deveron Raymond was walking back to his housing area when guards ordered him to face the wall. One pulled a plastic bag over his head and another punched him in the stomach, he said in an interview. A third wrapped his hands around Mr. Raymond’s neck, and he lost consciousness, he said.
When he came to, he was in the infirmary, in a room known among prisoners as “the slaughterhouse,” and a guard was hitting him in the face with a baton, he said. Others punched and kicked him as he lay handcuffed on the floor and then pushed his face against a hot radiator. Then they pulled another bag over his head, he said.
“I knew it was over,” said Mr. Raymond, 41, his voice cracking. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is it. This is how I have to go out.’”
Mr. Raymond, who had been serving 13 years to life on a burglary conviction, emerged with a dislocated thumb, a missing tooth and permanent injuries to his jaw and face, according to a lawsuit he filed, which is pending.
Two other inmates, brothers Paris and Curtis Perkins, said they had been singled out for similar treatment in February 2023.
Paris Perkins, who is 47 and serving a life sentence for murder and other charges, said he was waiting in line for the mess hall when guards slammed his head into a wall, threw him to the floor, handcuffed him and took him to the infirmary, where they punched, kicked and stomped on him, breaking five of his teeth. (The Marshall Project, a criminal justice news outlet, has previously reported on accusations of abuse being carried out in prison infirmaries, where there are no cameras.)
Mr. Perkins said a sergeant, Matthew Liberty, had pulled a bag over his head before he lost consciousness.
Sergeant Liberty is accused of similar brutality in two other pending lawsuits. A corrections department spokesman said the agency sought to fire him in 2013 but that the termination was overturned in arbitration. The sergeant did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Curtis Perkins, who tried to come to his brother’s aid, said he was also restrained and taken to another room, where guards pulled braids from his scalp, bent his fingers at odd angles, shoved fingers in and out of his anus and called him a racial slur, he said. They held a plastic bag over his head until he lost consciousness and then did it again when he came to, said Mr. Perkins, who is 37 and serving up to 27 years for attempted murder and other offenses.
Another inmate, Tevin Jackson, said he was handcuffed when guards punched him in the face and back, kneed him in the chest and lashed at his feet with batons. A sergeant then held a plastic bag over his head until he passed out on an exam room table in February 2022, said Mr. Jackson, who is 34 and serving 20 years for manslaughter and attempted robbery.
The corrections department spokesman, Mr. Mailey, said in a statement that all of the accusations involving Clinton described in this article had been investigated and were determined to be unfounded or unsubstantiated. He added that the agency had separately investigated past claims about guards placing plastic bags over inmates’ heads and had found no evidence to support them.
But Ellie Silverman, a lawyer who represented several inmates who said they had been nearly suffocated at Clinton, said the practice occurred regularly and involved not just a few officers.
“We are no longer even talking about bad apples anymore — we are talking about a bad culture,“ Ms. Silverman said. “It has become an accepted culture at Clinton, which is terrifying.”
She said the case of Tyrone McCalla exemplified that culture.
Mr. McCalla was serving up to 10 years for burglary and other charges when he was pulled out of the line for the recreation yard in March 2022 and ordered to put his hands on a wall. When Mr. McCalla, who had a history of filing grievances against guards, did not immediately comply, officers threw him to the floor and piled on top of him, according to Mr. McCalla and video of the incident.
They pulled him into the infirmary, where they continued beating him before pulling a plastic bag over his head, he said. One guard kicked him in the genitals and said he was rendering him incapable of fathering Black children, whom he described with a racial slur, Mr. McCalla said. Others punched him in the face, stripped him to his underwear and pulled another bag over his head, he said. He recalled seeing blood and feeling his nose breaking.
Afterward, Mr. McCalla, who was set to be released that July, was sent to solitary confinement and falsely accused of attacking guards, he said. He was charged with assault, convicted and sentenced to another seven years in prison.
“This is their currency,” Mr. McCalla, 38, said. “Jumping on inmates and charging them. They try to paint a picture like we are attacking them until stuff like what happened at Marcy,” he added, referring to the killing of Mr. Brooks.
“Who is going to be next?”
Using Force
No organization regularly tracks instances of brutality inside state prisons.
But after the beating deaths of Mr. Brooks and Mr. Nantwi, Times reporters set out to learn how often prisoners had received similar treatment.
Scouring corrections department records, legal filings, news articles and other sources, they identified 127 cases in which inmates said they had been handcuffed or otherwise restrained before being physically abused. All of the cases occurred in the past decade.
Some of the accounts were drawn from lawsuits that were ultimately dismissed for procedural or other reasons. Others came from claims that led to legal settlements. A few were relayed by the inmates themselves in on-the-record interviews. A small number were described in charging documents or state disciplinary records.
Taken together, they paint a damning picture of brutality inside New York’s state prisons.
Where force is used the most
The Times analyzed incident report data from 2024 and found that guards at Marcy Correctional Facility used more force per officer than guards in any other prison.
Uses of force per 100 uniformed staff
Department policies bar guards from using unnecessary force, and guards who do so can potentially face criminal charges.
Yet the Times review found that guards have been regularly accused of such behavior for years.
And for years, state officials with the power to crack down on such conduct have largely tolerated it. They have treated some cases as isolated incidents, labeled others as justified and written off still others as lies told by untrustworthy prisoners.
Even when the same guards have been accused of abusive behavior repeatedly over several years, officials have not fired them.
That was the case with Troy Mitchell.
In 2002, Mr. Mitchell was an officer at Auburn Correctional Facility when he targeted one inmate with a vicious beating, breaking both of his hands, his ankle, his nose and a tooth, the inmate said in a lawsuit. That case was settled in 2008 for $55,000.
In 2008, Mr. Mitchell, who had been promoted to lieutenant, was accused of assaulting another man while he was handcuffed, leading to another settlement.
In 2016, Mr. Mitchell and other guards shackled an inmate named Matthew Raymond at his hands and feet and brought him into a room in the prison’s medical unit, according to another lawsuit.
Mr. Mitchell held Mr. Raymond down by his hair, pulled his shirt over his face and slowly poured a large bucket of water over his nose and mouth, simulating drowning, Mr. Raymond said in an interview and in a lawsuit. Then Mr. Mitchell pummeled Mr. Raymond’s face, neck and chest, twisted his genitals and beat them with a baton while another officer held Mr. Raymond’s legs apart, he said.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Raymond, who was released in 2020. “I feel helpless for the people who are in the position that I was in.”
Afterward, Mr. Raymond was locked in solitary confinement and denied medical care for months, the lawsuit said. He sustained permanent bladder damage, and, nearly a decade later, must still urinate through a catheter. Earlier this year, the state settled his lawsuit for $1.2 million.
Mr. Mitchell would be accused of at least two more beatings before he was allowed to retire in 2018, amid disciplinary charges that he had failed to turn in his pistol and had communicated in an unprofessional and profane manner. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The corrections department spokesman, Mr. Mailey, said the agency had investigated Mr. Raymond’s claims and found them to be unsubstantiated. Later, he said, a nurse came forward and said that Mr. Mitchell, who had retired by that time, had assaulted Mr. Raymond. Mr. Mailey said the department had referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office, which had declined to prosecute.
A Times analysis of disciplinary records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that even when guards have been formally accused of extreme abuse, they have rarely faced serious consequences.
On at least 377 occasions from January 2000 to mid-October 2020, officers were accused of punching inmates in the face while they were shackled to a chair, forcing them to perform oral sex, using a wooden paddle to strike them on their bare buttocks, handcuffing them and kicking them in the ribs, stomping on their heads, striking them with batons while ignoring orders to stop, and other offenses.
Just 28 lost their jobs.
Methodology
Reporters analyzed disciplinary records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union through a lawsuit and provided to The New York Times. The records cover closed cases initiated between January 2000 and mid-October 2020. Only misconduct investigations involving captains, sergeants, correctional officers and lieutenants were considered. The records associate each disciplinary case with one or more types of misconduct; The Times focused on those classified as “inmate abuse.” The records also include a field indicating the penalty imposed. The Times identified guards who lost their jobs based on cases where the penalty was termination or dismissal.
To identify the most extreme cases of inmate abuse described in disciplinary records, The Times used an artificial intelligence model to examine the records’ brief incident descriptions, looking for cases in which officers were accused of using “excessive,” “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” or “inappropriate” physical force on inmates. Journalists then reviewed and verified the results.
The Times’s analysis of use-of-force frequency is based on “unusual incident” data published by the Correctional Association of New York, a prison oversight organization. The data is based on reports submitted by New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision staff members. Reports were treated as including staff members’ use of force if they met at least one of the following criteria: They contained at least one incident classified as involving such force, had a report-level use-of-force flag or indicated a staff member’s use of a weapon. (Reports that included multiple incidents classified as use-of-force were counted only once.)
To calculate the annual use-of-force rate per 1,000 inmates, The Times divided the counts above by the average monthly number of incarcerated individuals in custody each year, based on data also obtained by the oversight organization through public records requests. A similar methodology was used to calculate the use-of-force rate per 100 uniformed staff members by facility in 2024.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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8) A Stand Against Coal Could Push Oakland Toward Bankruptcy
After Oakland, Calif., reneged on a contract allowing coal shipments, a Kentucky company went under. Courts say the city must now pay hundreds of millions of dollars.
By Soumya Karlamangla, Reporting from Oakland, Calif., Nov. 24, 2025
Port activities have long been a driver of Oakland’s economy, but the city ultimately tried to block a plan to ship coal from its terminal. Credit...Lauren Segal for The New York Times
In April 2015, the Richfield Reaper covered a new initiative to export Utah coal through a port in Oakland, Calif., and across the Pacific Ocean. The story found its way to Bay Area environmentalists, who quickly circulated the piece and were outraged that Oakland’s waterfront could become a conduit for shipping fossil fuels overseas.
What followed was a decade-long political and legal saga that ultimately could push the struggling City of Oakland toward bankruptcy.
Port activities have long been a driver of Oakland’s economy, with towering white cranes a signature sight along the shoreline. The city of 444,000 residents has the nation’s ninth busiest port, which unloads containers from Asia and ships American cargo across the Pacific.
Situated in one of the nation’s most politically liberal regions, Oakland’s seaport activities also have been an inevitable draw for progressive activists, given that the port serves as the East Bay’s link to the world. Over the years, there have been Occupy rallies and demonstrations against military shipments to Israel.
A decade ago, when environmental protesters banded together and convinced the city to renege on a contract allowing coal shipments from an Oakland terminal, it set off a chain of events that undermined a Kentucky coal company and left the city potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. Since then, judges have ruled multiple times against Oakland, which is already plagued by serious financial problems.
“We lost, lost, lost, and we continue to lose,” said Ken Houston, a first-year Oakland city councilman who inherited the fallout from the city’s coal wars.
At the foot of the Bay Bridge, far below where cars zoom along the white ribbon rising over the water toward San Francisco, the Oakland Army Base once sent supplies and troops overseas during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. After the base was decommissioned in 1999, the city of Oakland received some of the land.
In 2013, the city gave permission to a local developer, Phil Tagami, to build a $250 million shipping terminal on that land. He then signed a lease with a company that planned to ship as many as 12 million tons of coal per year, according to court documents. It was set to become the largest coal export facility on the West Coast, opening up Asian markets as demand dipped domestically.
That is, until news of the plan broke in 2015.
“It became a cause célèbre overnight — this shocking development taking place with the former Oakland army base,” said Ted Franklin, one of the original organizers of No Coal in Oakland, a grass-roots organization that formed to fight the project.
Local activists and environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, lobbied the Oakland City Council to stop coal from entering the city. Hundreds of “No Coal” demonstrators showed up to City Council meetings.
Though coal wouldn’t be burned in Oakland, toxic dust can be created when pieces jostle against each other, such as in a rail car or when conveyed onto a ship. And environmentalists were adamantly opposed to Oakland contributing to the use of more fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gas emissions that worsen climate change.
City officials, however, found themselves in a pickle. They had already approved a contract with Mr. Tagami to export bulk commodities from the terminal — and nowhere did it say coal was prohibited.
The officials, including then-Mayor Libby Schaaf, first tried to discourage Mr. Tagami behind the scenes. He refused.
“I believe in climate change,” said Mr. Tagami on a recent windy morning, standing with his back to choppy waters at the port. “This is a fraction of the seaborne coal market. You’re saying this makes the difference in the world? Oakland needs to balance its budget and fill its potholes.”
Nonetheless, the City Council acceded to public pressure and, in June 2016, unanimously passed an ordinance banning the transport and storage of large coal shipments in Oakland.
So Mr. Tagami sued the city of Oakland, and won. Twice.
A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled in 2018 that Oakland officials didn’t have sufficient proof that coal shipments would harm residents, and instead had canceled Mr. Tagami’s contract over broader concerns about global warming. And a state judge also ruled in 2023 that the city had to uphold its deal with Mr. Tagami.
In September, Oakland exhausted its last legal option for appeal, and the coal project must now go forward. The city is currently looking at Mr. Tagami’s permits to begin construction, he said.
But the court saga isn’t over.
Last month, Bankruptcy Judge Joan A. Lloyd of the Western District of Kentucky ruled that Oakland’s “improper and unjustified conduct significantly disrupted and burdened” the Kentucky-based company that had been contracted to ship coal out of Oakland’s terminal, forcing it into bankruptcy.
The judge suggested the damages were between $654 million, before interest — what the coal company is pushing for — and $230 million, what Oakland’s own expert estimated the coal company had lost.
A federal district judge is reviewing the ruling, and the city is urging him to reject it. But district judges often affirm bankruptcy court decisions, and if that happens, a Kentucky jury likely would determine next year the exact damages that the city of Oakland would owe.
In a statement, the Oakland city attorney’s office said it looked forward to the results of the higher court judge’s independent review. As for the prospect of the city filing for bankruptcy, the office said that such speculation “would be premature at this time.”
David Levine, a professor at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, who specializes in remedies, said that if Oakland must pay damages, it could likely do so in installments over a decade because it is a municipality. It could raise taxes or issue bonds, paying interest to plaintiffs and bondholders, but neither might be possible because the city has so little cash.
“It’s an amazing losing streak,” said Mr. Levine. “The specter of bankruptcy for Oakland is not off the table.”
Oakland has struggled with a yawning budget deficit since the pandemic and the City Council recently approved cuts in a two-year budget to close a $265 million gap. An Alameda County grand jury report this year found that the city didn’t issue any bonds in 2024 because of its poor finances.
“Oakland’s financial situation is so precarious that insolvency may be closer than the city’s elected officials have been willing to acknowledge publicly,” the report states.
Seneca Scott, a political organizer who ran for Oakland mayor in 2022, said that he was less concerned about the potential health harms from the coal project than about the financial fallout from litigation. He lives in West Oakland, a low-income neighborhood where the terminal sits and where any coal pollution would likely be concentrated.
“We’re already on the razor’s edge of fiscal insolvency,” he said. “Whatever is going to happen, it isn’t going to be good, and the people who suffer are once again the people in Oakland paying taxes.”
Over the past year, all three major credit rating agencies downgraded Oakland. Pascal St. Gerard, an analyst at Fitch, said in an interview that the city’s ongoing budget deficit and lack of a plan to resolve it led to the recent reduction, but he was also monitoring the coal lawsuit.
Sarah Sullivant, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s, said she believed Oakland’s financial picture had improved, albeit slowly, with new leadership in recent months, and she did not think the city would have to pay out the amount of damages that had been claimed.
Dan Lindheim, who worked as city administrator of Oakland during the Great Recession, said the city likely has insurance that could cover some damages owed. But a major payout in the coal case could force the city into a precarious position.
“It would be a ton of money that the city doesn’t have,” he said.
Still, environmentalists said that they and city leaders were right to fight the coal project. Dan Kalb, a former Oakland City councilman who proposed the original coal ban, said that he and his colleagues thought their case had been strong enough to prevail in court.
“Sometimes you think one thing and it turns out the other way in court,” Mr. Kalb said.
Anyone who understands the risks of climate change as well as coal-related air pollution “can’t in their right mind want to ship and then burn so much coal,” he added. “It’s just nuts. How could someone say they care about future generations and then do this?”
Sejal Choksi-Chugh, the executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, also applauded the city of Oakland for doggedly pursuing the fight against coal. She called the council’s efforts to protect public health “courageous,” even as the financial toll has mounted.
“Cost is not the only thing that cities should be considering,” she said.
On that recent morning, Mr. Tagami navigated between cargo trucks and under cranes as he walked the 19-acre parcel along the waterfront where he proposed building a shipping terminal more than a decade ago. He said that despite the fuss, he did not regret signing the deal with the city.
And in the end, the City Council might only have delayed matters. Mr. Tagami said he expects cargo ships could depart from Oakland as soon as 2027 carrying coal overseas.
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9) $10 Billion and Counting: Trump Administration Snaps Up Stakes in Private Firms
The Trump administration is trading billions of dollars of taxpayer money for ownership stakes in companies. The unusual practice shows no sign of slowing.
By Ana Swanson, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 25, 2025
MP Materials, which owns rare earth mines in California, is among the private companies in which the Trump administration has acquired an ownership stake. Credit...Steve Marcus/Reuters
The Trump administration is snapping up ownership shares of private companies it deems essential to national security. It is an unusual new strategy that has already committed more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds and shows little sign of slowing.
The government’s growing portfolio of corporate ownership involves minority stakes, or the option to take them in the future, in at least nine companies involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy and semiconductors, a New York Times analysis found. The deals were all struck in the past six months, with the bulk made in October and November.
The effort appears mostly driven by national security concerns, particularly a desire for the government to prop up strategic industries and lessen America’s reliance on foreign countries like China for key resources. Some officials are hopeful the equity stakes will generate a windfall for taxpayers, but the likelihood of that is unclear. Many of the companies are facing financial headwinds, and some could take years to become profitable.
The unusual government intervention into the private market is fueling some concerns, including the opacity of the process, the potential for favoritism, corruption and market distortions, along with the possible loss of taxpayer funds should the investments fail.
Aaron Bartnick, a fellow at Columbia University and a former Biden White House official, said there were serious questions about whether the government role in private industry would address national security vulnerabilities and deliver a return on taxpayer dollars.
“In the absence of a clearly articulated strategy,” he said, the concern was that “this could just devolve to arbitrary deals that favor friends or disfavor foes.”
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, defended the administration’s approach.
“If business-as-usual policies worked, America would not be reliant on foreign countries for critical minerals, semiconductors and other products that are key for our national and economic security,” he said in a statement. “The administration’s targeted equity stakes ensure that taxpayers get a good bargain and that the ball meaningfully moves forward to encourage further investment by the private sector.”
Prior administrations have tried to speed the development of sectors like semiconductors and clean energy with grants, loans, tariffs and other policies. But taking equity stakes in companies is incredibly rare. During the 2008 financial crisis, the government took over shares in companies that were faltering or whose collapse posed broader financial risks, including General Motors and Chrysler, along with the giant insurer AIG.
The Trump administration has taken a more aggressive and opportunistic tack. Trump officials have proposed establishing new price floors for minerals to help American firms remain competitive in the face of cheap Chinese imports. They have also discussed taking a cut of certain export revenues, in addition to building a growing portfolio of equity ownership.
The approach contradicts traditional Republican thinking about the power of the free market to identify winners and losers. But officials in both parties have become more supportive of industrial policy and government intervention in recent years. That shift has been brought about by China’s dominance of strategic industries, and accelerated by its move to clamp down on exports of minerals needed to make planes, semiconductors, robots and cars this year as part of a trade clash with Washington.
Daniel Kishi, a policy adviser at American Compass, a conservative think tank that supports industrial policy, said that concerns about intervening in markets rested on a “flawed premise.” Markets have already been significantly distorted by Chinese subsidies and Beijing’s efforts to monopolize global industries, he said, necessitating U.S. government intervention.
“We need an industrial policy of our own to combat the predation of our trading partners,” Mr. Kishi said.
Like past administrations, Trump officials have continued taking stakes in companies through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which finances private sector projects around the world. Over the past five years, the development corporation has invested in dozens of international funds and companies.
But the Trump administration has begun using other agencies to take equity stakes as well. Many of the minerals investments are being made through the Defense Department, which has tried to develop sources of rare earths outside of China. Some deals involve the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, which was set up in 2022 and received additional funding through the Trump-backed tax and spending law passed this year to invest in critical minerals, shipbuilding and other strategic sectors.
The Energy Department has leveraged loan programs created in the Biden administration to take equity in mineral companies. The Commerce Department has also used its control of a Biden-era semiconductor fund and investments from foreign countries to begin building a portfolio.
The administration’s first significant investment took place in June when it acquired a “golden share” in U.S. Steel in exchange for allowing Japan’s Nippon Steel to buy the iconic firm. Administration officials demanded a nonfinancial stake that would give them veto power over certain company decisions, like moving factories offshore. When U.S. Steel planned to close a facility in Granite City, Ill., earlier this year, the government used its influence to intervene.
In July, the Defense Department agreed to take a $400 million stake in MP Materials, a mining company that has struggled to turn profits amid tough price pressures from China.
A month later, the Commerce Department became the largest shareholder of Intel, the beleaguered U.S. chip giant. A public filing from the Office of Government Ethics shows that, shortly after that agreement was made, President Trump personally purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Intel’s corporate debt.
The government’s equity deals gained speed as China’s export curbs intensified, putting America’s access to critical minerals and magnets at risk. In October and November, the government made a spate of investments with companies specializing in rare earths.
In October, the Commerce Department also gained the option to take an 8 percent stake in Westinghouse, the nuclear power company. The Commerce Department will help facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors across the United States. If Westinghouse’s valuation reaches $30 billion, the government can require it to carry out an initial public offering, with the right to purchase a fifth of the new public company.
Trump officials have speculated about taking stakes in more firms, in industries including mining, semiconductors, technology and defense.
Not all companies have welcomed government investment. Some firms have been reluctant to meet with Trump officials out of fear the government would pressure them to hand over parts of their company, according to industry executives. Intel agreed to do its equity deal with the government after Mr. Trump called for its chief executive to be fired over ties to China.
Officials and analysts have also questioned how much due diligence the Trump administration is performing. While the Biden administration took many months to evaluate targets for grants and loans, and was often criticized for moving slowly, the Trump administration appears to have arranged several of its equity stakes in a matter of weeks.
William A. Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said Biden officials had been “slow and meticulous” in selecting targets, while Mr. Trump seemed to be investing “by whim.”
“You know, he meets with somebody, he likes them and so, well, let’s do a deal,” said Mr. Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official. “You don’t get the sense with Trump that there’s a strategy to it. You get a sense that it’s a series of tactics.”
Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, who has studied the deals, agreed that “in a number of these cases, there seems to be almost no serious review.”
“They don’t seem well thought out,” Mr. West said, adding that some of the investments involved high-risk areas. “There’s no guarantee the government’s going to make money, so they’re really putting taxpayer money at risk.”
But some analysts have praised the Trump administration’s sense of urgency, saying that the Biden administration had done extensive research on America’s dependence on Chinese rare earths but done little to change it.
After China responded to Mr. Trump’s high tariffs by clamping down on its exports of those minerals in April, U.S. officials began calling companies to ask about their capacities, and searching for pots of money to deploy. Private companies, too, began pitching their services to the government, sometimes relying on old friends or former business associates to arrange meetings.
At the Defense Department, a critical minerals task force was set up in the spring with roughly 40 officials and a 90-day deadline to identify new rare earth resources, one former official said. Officials had estimated it would take more than $3 billion in investment to reshore supply chains for rare earth magnets, a critical component for automakers and defense companies.
The Defense Department turned to MP Materials, a company that makes those magnets and had bought a struggling rare earths mine in California. In July, the company announced that the federal government would invest $400 million in exchange for a 15 percent stake, including warrants, which give the government the right to make future stock purchases.
Some Pentagon officials expect the deal to be profitable, but analysts have expressed skepticism. Others have pointed out the long timeline for this plan and other minerals projects, like a mine in Alaska being developed by Trilogy Metals, in which the Defense Department said last month it would take a 10 percent stake.
“You have an entire subset of the U.S. economy that’s almost running dry, and if the relief comes in 10 years, that’s not necessarily going to have any impact on short-term company needs,” said Emily Benson, the head of strategy at Minerva Technology Futures, a consultancy.
In early November, the government announced its latest equity deal, with Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina-based start-up making rare earth magnets. The company offered the government equity and warrants in return for $50 million from the Commerce Department and $620 million from the Defense Department.
Vulcan Elements plans to expand its capacity to 10,000 metric tons in the next few years, up from 10 tons currently. The company has received investment from several venture funds, including 1789 Capital, where the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is a partner.
In an interview, John Maslin, the chief executive of Vulcan Elements, said the company had received no political favoritism, and that the partnership would help reduce a dependency on China that could prevent the United States from making key goods like cars, phones and robots.
“We’re making sure that we don’t have to ask China permission on whether or not we’re allowed to build or buy defense applications or data centers for our A.I. race,” Mr. Maslin said. “This truly is about making sure that we have the redundancy and the resiliency in the United States to control our destiny.”
“This needs a whole-of-industry and a whole-of-government approach, working together to solve this problem,” he added.
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10) Mamdani Response to Protest Inflames Tensions With Jewish Leaders
The mayor-elect chastised a synagogue that hosted an event promoting migration to Israel and settlements in occupied territories. His stance further tested his strained relationship with pro-Israel Jews.
By Dana Rubinstein and Liam Stack, Published Nov. 24, 2025, Updated Nov. 25, 2025
Protesters gathered outside the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan last week. Credit...Selçuk Acar/Anadolu, via Getty Images
It was the first high-profile incident since Zohran Mamdani’s election involving one of New York City’s most sensitive flash points: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
A rowdy protest descended last Wednesday on Park East Synagogue, one of New York’s most prominent Modern Orthodox congregations, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel as well as to settlements in the occupied West Bank. Chants of “death to the I.D.F.” and “globalize the intifada” rang through the air.
Mr. Mamdani, the mayor-elect, responded the next day, saying through a spokeswoman that he “discouraged the language” used at the protest and that New Yorkers must be “free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.”
But it was what he said next that alarmed some Jewish leaders: He chastised the synagogue, saying through his spokeswoman that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
Mr. Mamdani, who will become mayor on Jan. 1, has struggled to build bonds with segments of the Jewish population, many of whom opposed his candidacy in part because of his sustained criticism of Israel and his pro-Palestinian activism.
And though Mr. Mamdani has said he will protect Jewish institutions amid heightened levels of antisemitism and hate crimes, his initial response to the protest did little to quell that unease and was criticized by some Jewish leaders.
On Monday, he tried to move beyond the issue, this time omitting any criticism of the synagogue, with a more forceful denunciation of the protesters.
“We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights while making clear that nothing can justify language calling for ‘death to’ anyone,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement to The New York Times. “It is unacceptable, full stop.”
A spokeswoman also said that Mr. Mamdani spoke with the synagogue’s rabbi and the rabbi’s son, who is also a rabbi.
At the heart of the conflict are the activities of Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps North American Jews move to Israeli cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv but also promotes migration to dozens of settlements in the occupied West Bank.
On Monday, Mr. Mamdani’s spokeswoman clarified that the mayor-elect believed any violations of international law were confined to the organization’s promotion of settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, which Israel took control of from Jordan after it was invaded in 1967.
Critics took issue with the implication that the synagogue had done something wrong.
“A synagogue is where Jews learn, pray, and strengthen Jewish life,” William Daroff, the chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said on social media. “Teaching about aliyah and Zionism belongs in that space. It reflects who we are as a people.” (Jews make “Aliyah” when they move to Israel.)
The clash also highlighted a difference in approach between Mr. Mamdani and the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a strong supporter of Israel who appeared at the synagogue in person on Saturday. Speaking at Shabbat services, Ms. Tisch expressed regret that the Police Department had not done more to shield the synagogue’s entryway from the protest’s “turmoil,” especially at a time of “heightened fear” within the Jewish community.
She also said she deeply and personally understood the pain the congregation was experiencing. Her comments were met with a standing ovation, according to The Times of Israel.
Mr. Daroff, who said he also sits on the board of Nefesh B’Nefesh, said in an interview on Monday that he was unimpressed by Mr. Mamdani’s handling of the incident.
“I’m hopeful that this is a sign that the mayor-elect will be more careful in their words and their expressions, but the jury is still out,” he said. “We are still judging him, and I’d say that at the moment he’s got a failing grade.”
Yael Katsman, a spokeswoman for Nefesh B’Nefesh, said about 150 people attended the gathering at the synagogue on Wednesday, which the organization had rented for an event she described as “a holistic overview of the logistics involved in relocating to another country,” including issues like finding schools, jobs and health care in a new place.
In a statement on its website, Nefesh B’Nefesh said it was “dedicated to supporting, educating, and advising individuals and families throughout their Aliyah (immigration to Israel) journey.” The group condemned “the violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior that took place outside of the Park East Synagogue.”
Ms. Katsman said Nefesh B’Nefesh “does not endorse, recommend, or promote any specific community, location or neighborhood to move to in Israel.”
But that appeared to be at odds with the organization’s website, which contains pages of detailed recommendations about life in Israeli towns as well as in some of the largest settlement blocs in the West Bank. Those include the 22 settlements in Gush Etzion, an area south of Jerusalem, and Ma’ale Adumim, a large settlement located between the northern and southern West Bank that many Palestinians see as a threat to the territorial integrity of any future Palestinian state.
Nefesh B’Nefesh encourages Americans to move to smaller settlements, too, which it portrays as integral parts of Israel. It describes the settlement of Elkana, in the occupied West Bank, for example, as “a beautiful, comfortable and well-situated community in the center of Israel. Location! Location! Location!”
It is unclear what proportion of the individuals who use the group’s services relocate to disputed territories.
Americans make up roughly 15 percent of the population of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to researchers. The territory, which Israel occupied in 1967, has been the site of increasing settler violence against Palestinians over the last two years.
The group that organized the protest, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation Awda of New York and New Jersey, declined to comment on Monday. But in statements posted online, it denounced the event at Park East Synagogue as “a settler recruiting fair, which seeks to recruit American settlers to illegally occupy stolen Palestinian land.”
The chaos outside Park East Synagogue comes at a disquieting time for American Jews. In New York City, hate crimes against Jews have soared in recent years, which has left some Jewish New Yorkers on edge.
“If you are standing outside a synagogue calling for ‘intifada revolution,’ you are not peacefully protesting,” Micah Lasher, a state assemblyman on the Upper West Side and a candidate for Congress, said on social media. “You are trying to intimidate and create fear among Jews, and that is never acceptable.”
In audio recordings published online from last Wednesday’s protest by The Times of Israel, a man can be heard addressing the crowd, with a large group of protesters repeating him in unison, a frequent low-tech tactic used to amplify a speech without using microphones or sound systems.
“It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events,” the speaker says. Then he repeats, three times: “We need to make them scared!”
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani called Rabbi Marc Schneier, the founder of Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., and the son of the rabbi at Park East, who suggested that the mayor-elect back legislation barring demonstrations directly outside of houses of worship.
“He told me, ‘Rabbi, I love the idea and I can’t thank you enough,’” said Rabbi Schneier, who is an outspoken critic of Mr. Mamdani. (The mayor-elect expressed his interest in hearing more details about the Schneier pitch, according to Dora Pekec, his spokeswoman.)
On Sunday, Mr. Mamdani spoke with Rabbi Arthur Schneier, the rabbi at Park East, who made a similar pitch, Ms. Pekec said.
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11) Deported and Desperate to Be Reunited With Their Children
Across the United States, children have been left in the care of relatives and neighbors after deportations. In Venezuela, parents are clamoring for the return of their sons and daughters.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Julie Turkewitz and Isayen Herrera, Nov. 25, 2025
The journalists reported from Venezuela, Colombia and New York. They interviewed more than a dozen Venezuelan families and officials, and reviewed police, immigration and government records.
The 11-year-old from Venezuela was alone in his Texas home, waiting for his mother, who had been detained by U.S. immigration officials. She would never come back.
The boy, Emmanuel Leandro Caicedo Venecia, ended up living by himself for three months this summer, attending school, even walking to his fifth-grade graduation to collect his diploma, his mother said. A neighbor brought food, but Emmanuel mostly fended for himself.
His mother had decided it had to be this way. Afraid that her son would be placed in foster care, she had made a choice while in detention: She lied to immigration officials, she said, telling them that Emmanuel was being taken care of by an adult. She was deported to Venezuela without him in late July, with Emmanuel eventually moving in with an acquaintance.
“I just keep hoping he’s reunited with me,” his mother, Deisy Carolina Venecia Farías, said earlier this year.
Across the country, a growing number of Venezuelan children whose parents were deported back to their home country have been left behind in the United States, in the care of relatives, neighbors, babysitters — whomever parents could identify.
Venezuelan officials claim that 150 Venezuelan children, from newborns to teenagers, have wound up separated from their parents as President Trump’s deportation campaign has accelerated. Most of the children were born in Venezuela, and some in Colombia, but some of the youngest, including months-old babies, were born in the United States, complicating efforts to repatriate them.
While there is no tally kept by U.S. officials or advocacy groups, Venezuelan officials shared a list of children they said had been separated, and The New York Times interviewed the parents and relatives of more than a dozen children, corroborating their accounts with court documents, police records and immigration case files.
The Venezuelan government’s roster includes children whose parents were deported to Venezuela as well as children whose parents remain locked up in the United States.
In interviews, many of the parents said they had chosen to be deported without their children, a painful decision that they made to avoid months in detention. They hoped, they said, that returning to their homeland would expedite a reunion with their children.
Others asserted that they were pressured or misled by U.S. immigration officials into boarding deportation flights without their children, some of whom have ended up in foster care.
The Trump administration has said that it does not separate families, a divisive practice that roiled the president’s first term. During the summer, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency issued updated guidelines that require its officers to give immigrants who are in the United States illegally the choice to be deported with their children.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, defended the Trump administration’s policies but did not address Venezuela’s claims or say how many children have remained in the United States.
“ICE does not separate families,” the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
While some families have been deported together, many mothers and fathers have been landing in Venezuela without their children, setting off a diplomatic scramble inside the Venezuelan government to track down and repatriate the children.
Other Latin American countries — including Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico — appear to be grappling with similar separations, sometimes involving U.S.-born children, according to media reports. But no country has been as vocal about the separations as Venezuela has.
The government of the country’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro, has turned the separations into a national rallying cry against the United States amid rising tensions between both countries and a large American military buildup in the Caribbean.
Mr. Maduro’s own policies, including repression, economic mismanagement and human rights abuses, played the largest role in the migration crisis that pushed more than seven million people to leave Venezuela, according to a broad swath of political analysts and human rights groups. Now, he is attempting to cast himself as a champion for Venezuelans he claims have been mistreated by Mr. Trump.
Families clamoring for the return of their children have put almost all their hopes in Mr. Maduro. They have readily participated in government-led rallies in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and recorded heartfelt videos shared on social media. In August, many families signed a letter to Melania Trump, the first lady, asking her “to listen to the cries of families.”
“My girls call me asking when I’m going to pick them up,” Anabel Bustamante, 26, who has been separated from her 3- and 7-year-old daughters for nine months, said in an interview.
“They asked recently if they could sneak into a box and be shipped to Venezuela,” said Ms. Bustamante, whose daughters, Diangerlin and Aranza, are living with their grandmother in Arkansas.
Ms. Bustamante hasn’t seen the girls since February, when police officers showed up at her house on a sleepy street in Arkansas, where the family lived after migrating to the United States two years ago. They charged her with nonfinancial identity fraud, according to police records, which she surmised was related to her work as a delivery driver without papers.
Ms. Bustamante was jailed and transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, where she said federal officials asked her to sign a document if she wanted to be deported with her daughters. She declined to sign it, she said, out of fear that ICE officers would detain her sister and mother if they went to retrieve her daughters.
In July, she was deported, leaving her daughters behind.
An Agonizing Choice
Many parents, most of whom entered the United States during the Biden administration, told The Times that they were offered the choice to be deported with their children.
Some of them regarded that as an agonizing pressure tactic: If they wanted to be deported with their children, some said ICE told them that they would have to spend as long as a year in detention while U.S. officials retrieved their children and made travel arrangements.
Jaimary José Cárdenas Paz said that she was urged by ICE and a social worker to deport without her 9-year-old, José Daniel Urdaneta Cárdenas, after ICE agents detained her with her partner outside an immigration courthouse in Boston on May 7.
On May 19, while Ms. Cárdenas, who had entered the United States in 2024, was in detention, an ICE officer interviewed her. She told the officer, “What I want is to get out of here and go back to my country with my son,” according to a transcript.
But she said that officials later told her that José Daniel, who was staying with his aunt in Massachusetts, “could have a better future in the United States,” and perhaps even be granted U.S. citizenship in the future.
She said officials told her that she would remain in ICE custody for six to nine months if she wanted to be deported with her son. She chose to leave without José Daniel, on July 11.
Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said Ms. Cárdenas “chose to be removed by herself and asked her son be placed in the care of his aunt.” Her son was deported to Venezuela two months later, in September.
Some parents said they chose a similar fate because they feared for their children’s safety at the hands of immigration officials.
A few said that they were never offered a choice or were given misleading guidance, with one mother saying that she boarded a plane with the impression that her son would be on the flight, but wasn’t.
María Alejandra Rubio González said that she repeatedly asked immigration officials to be deported to Venezuela with her 8-year-old son, Anyerson, who stayed with a friend in the Atlanta suburbs after she was arrested on March 15. She was charged with driving under the influence and without a license by local officials, police records show.
“They told me, ‘OK, we’re aware. Don’t worry, you’ll be deported with your son,’” she recalled. When officers tried to place her on a deportation flight, she said she refused to board because she didn’t see her son on the plane.
“I cried and I cried, and I didn’t get on,” she said. “They tricked me.”
Ms. Rubio González was ultimately deported without Anyerson on July 23, along with more than 200 other Venezuelans, including four mothers who also left without their children, she said.
Ms. McLaughlin said Ms. Rubio González “chose not to file an appeal” after she was ordered deported by a judge and “relinquished custody of her son to a friend.” The mother was reunited with her son more than six months later, after the friend handed over Anyerson to ICE and the Venezuelan government facilitated his return on Sept. 17.
Tracking Down Children From Venezuela
More than 17,000 Venezuelans, largely men, have been deported to Venezuela this year, according to Venezuelan officials.
Along the way, Venezuelan leaders say, 150 children younger than 18 have been split up from their parents, after the adults were detained or deported.
Fifty-seven of those children have slowly been reunited with their families in Venezuela. They were placed on deportation flights following negotiations between the Venezuelan and U.S. governments.
Venezuelan officials have shared lists of children they want back with the U.S. State Department, which has forwarded that information to ICE. The diplomatic channels appeared to have deteriorated since the United States began striking suspected drug-smuggling boats off Venezuela’s coast, even as deportation flights continue.
As of mid-November, 93 children were still in the United States, Venezuelan officials said, and the number is expected to continue growing.
Officials in Venezuela have described the separations in stark terms, broadly accusing the Trump administration of “kidnapping” the children.
Cases reviewed by The Times show that many parents landed in ICE custody after being picked up by immigration officials — leaving immigration court or at a traffic checkpoint — or after having run-ins with the law, according to police records.
In Georgia and Texas, states in which local law enforcement officials regularly cooperate with ICE, some parents were pulled over by police and jailed for traffic violations, such as driving without a license, before being transferred to ICE custody.
“Just like American citizens who commit crimes may face separation from their family, so, too, can illegal aliens,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
‘Let It Be Mine’
During the past few months, anxious families flocked to Simón Bolívar International Airport, outside Caracas, propelled by the hope that flights from the United States would include a clutch of children who had been separated from their parents.
Mothers pray under their breath.
“Que sea el mío, Dios mío, que sea el mío.”
“Let it be mine, my God, let it be mine.”
One morning in September, a group of mothers crumpled to the floor upon learning that their children were not on the flight they had been waiting for. Their cries and pleas pierced the airport terminal.
But the agony has also given way to scenes of joy.
After nearly seven months apart, the mother of Emmanuel, the 11-year-old who lived alone for three months, arrived at the airport after being told that her son was coming home on Nov. 7.
The mother, Ms. Venecia Farías, 35, hadn’t seen him since she was detained by Border Patrol officers on April 21, along with her husband, while they were driving to their home near the U.S.-Mexico border, in Brownsville, Texas.
“My son was at home, alone, waiting for us,” she said.
Ms. McLaughlin argued that she was detained by Border Patrol trying to “illegally re-enter the country” after leaving the United States without her child. Ms. Venecia Farías said that was false.
“That’s crazy,” she said, insisting that she never left the United States and was arrested after taking a wrong turn on her way home, driving into one of many Border Patrol checkpoints near the border.
She recounted the challenges that she originally faced to make it to the United States, including thousands of dollars paid to smugglers and a brief kidnapping in Mexico. “You think I was going to leave the United States? To Mexico?”
After his mother was detained, Emmanuel spent most of the summer living alone. He slept on a mattress on the floor and administered a nebulizer to treat chronic asthma, his mother said. He eventually moved in with an acquaintance in Texas, who charged his mother $400 a week to cover the boy’s expenses.
The sum was so large that Ms. Venecia Farías had to crowdsource money to pay the cost from Venezuela. Emmanuel, approaching adolescence, had grown more irritable. And asthma attacks always loomed.
All the worrying would come to an end.
Earlier this month, Emmanuel disembarked from a plane and spotted his mother among a throng of families. He hurried, brushing past the crowd as his mother spread her arms.
He leaped, so hard that they both fell onto a sofa, weeping and locked in a tight embrace.
Hamed Aleaziz, Annie Correal, Jody García and Gabriel Labrador contributed reporting.
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12) U.S. Plans Compounds to House Palestinians in Israeli-Held Half of Gaza
The project could offer relief for tens of thousands of Palestinians who have endured two years of war, but has raised questions about whether it could entrench the partition of Gaza into Israeli- and Hamas-controlled zones.
By David M. Halbfinger, Adam Rasgon, Natan Odenheimer and Aaron Boxerman, Nov. 25, 2025
Reporting from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Kiryat Gat, Israel
A tent camp for displaced people northwest of Gaza City this month. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Trump administration is pushing for the rapid construction of a number of residential compounds to provide housing for Palestinians in Israeli-controlled parts of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, an effort that is fraught with risks and potential pitfalls.
The compounds, or “Alternative Safe Communities,” as U.S. officials are calling them, will be concentrated in the eastern half of Gaza, currently controlled by Israel since a cease-fire took effect in October. Few of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians remain there. Most are crammed in the Hamas-controlled part of the enclave where the United States and Israel are not yet allowing any reconstruction.
U.S. officials hope Palestinians will feel encouraged to move to the new compounds, drawn to the prospect of greater security, freedom from Hamas, job opportunities and a chance to rebuild their lives.
The vision of American officials involves the creation of a string of model compounds — more permanent than tent villages, but still made up of structures meant to be temporary. Each could provide housing for as many as 20,000 or 25,000 people alongside medical clinics and schools, U.S. officials and European diplomats say.
“There’s a practical issue: How do we get people into safe housing as soon as humanly possible?” Aryeh Lightstone, a senior Trump administration official who is leading the effort, said in an interview. “This is the easiest way to do that.”
In the short term, the plan could offer relief for thousands of Palestinians who have endured two years of war. In the long term, the proposal has raised questions about whether it could entrench a de facto partition of Gaza into Israeli and Hamas controlled zones.
This article is based on interviews with 20 officials from the United States, Europe and Israel working on or briefed on the plans for postwar Gaza, including diplomats, military officers and aid workers. Nearly all insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Some details of these compounds were previously reported by The Atlantic.
There are many complications. Officials involved in or briefed on the planning efforts have raised a number of concerns, including whether Palestinians would be able to leave the compounds and if Israeli vetting could mean that many Gazans are blacklisted from moving to them.
It’s also unknown whether Gazans would be able or willing to move to them anyway. Even if 10 such compounds were built, they would house a fraction of Gaza’s 2 million residents. It is not yet clear how the project would be funded.
The proposal is an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s peace plan, which left Gaza divided into a Hamas-controlled “red zone” and Israeli-held “green zone.” But it also reflects the lack of progress in ousting and disarming Hamas, as the peace plan required, leaving U.S. and Israeli officials to do what they can where they can.
The United States wants to see reconstruction in the parts of Gaza where most people currently live, Mr. Lightstone said, but only after Hamas has been dislodged from power there.
Some Palestinians say that rebuilding should be allowed everywhere in Gaza.
“The people in Gaza are not pieces of furniture that you move from one place to another,” said Ayed Abu Ramadan, the chairman of the Gaza Governorate Chamber of Commerce. “They have emotions and attachments. They want to be as close as they can to their destroyed homes.”
A key objective, two U.S. officials said, is to kick-start the enclave’s economy by creating jobs, including for the Palestinian laborers who officials say will build the new compounds.
The prime movers of the project are U.S. officials, with Israelis providing necessary support, though they appear to be more skeptical that the compounds will be a step toward a peaceful and prosperous Gaza. European diplomats, United Nations officials and aid workers aware of the project have warned of a range of risks and drawbacks.
The Timing
Officials say the first compound will likely not be ready for several months. Israeli soldiers were expected this week to begin clearing the first site in Rafah, near Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel. The cost for that compound could run into the tens of millions of dollars, according to two people involved in the planning.
The rubble clearance could stretch to months if crews discover tunnels, unexploded munitions from Israel’s punishing bombardment of Gaza, or human remains, which would need to be disposed of sensitively.
It would then likely take another six to nine weeks to erect prefabricated homes, officials said.
One option being considered is containerized housing units, officials said. Modular dwellings the size of shipping containers have been used before to house refugees in Syria, earthquake victims in Turkey and U.S. troops at military bases across the Middle East.
Officials say that the new compounds are meant to open with housing for several thousand residents and continue growing until they each have tens of thousands.
The Team
The undertaking is in some ways an unlikely fit for the Trump administration. As recently as last May, President Trump mocked the United States’ long record of “nation building” in the Middle East. Yet his administration is now pursuing a project in Gaza that looks strikingly similar to past such forays in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Lightstone, the Trump official leading the effort, was a top aide to former Ambassador David M. Friedman, the president’s first envoy to Jerusalem. His team includes an eclectic, fluctuating group of American diplomats, Israeli magnates and officials from the Department of Government Efficiency — the sweeping Washington cost-cutting effort overseen earlier this year by Elon Musk.
The team operates out of two luxury beachfront hotels in Tel Aviv, the Kempinski and the Hilton, where rooms regularly run over $700 a night, brainstorming ideas and sketching out diagrams of what the new Gaza compounds should look like.
Mr. Lightstone was also the C.E.O. of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, which was founded by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. He reports to Mr. Kushner, according to officials, although he also is in close contact with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.
Mr. Lightstone’s group has a much broader and longer-range mission than just the compounds. It has kicked around ideas ranging from a new Gaza cryptocurrency to how to rebuild the territory in such a way that it has no traffic, two officials said.
The Hurdles
The project on the new compounds is the furthest along. Several issues have slowed its progress.
· Security. Planners want to ensure that residents of the compounds can feel safe, including from Israeli soldiers. They have yet to firm up a plan for how or when the Israeli military would reposition its forces so that the new compounds do not feel besieged.
Some officials say they support the idea of Palestinians policing the compounds. Others want to have the new compounds patrolled by troops from the International Stabilization Force that is envisioned by the Trump peace plan, though it is unclear if and when that force will be assembled.
· Freedom of movement. Some Israeli officials have argued that, for security reasons, Palestinians should only be able to move into the new compounds, not to leave them, according to officials. Several European officials raised concerns about the potential restrictions on movement. Supporters insist that this would be a short-term arrangement until Hamas is disarmed and Gaza comes under one unified government. One person involved in the planning also said that Palestinians living in the new compounds could enjoy greater freedom to leave Gaza, such as for medical treatment, than people in the Hamas-controlled areas.
· Vetting potential residents. Israeli security officials are expected to scrutinize the backgrounds of Palestinians in Gaza who apply to live in the new compounds. What constitutes grounds for rejection has yet to be determined, officials say. European diplomats are concerned that the criteria could wind up blacklisting many public-sector workers like police officers and health workers, given that Hamas has governed Gaza for 18 years, as well as the relatives of Hamas militants.
· Property rights. U.S. officials say they are addressing the legal hurdle of how to compensate Palestinian property owners whose land is used for the new compounds. They are exploring ways to pay for the land on which the compounds will be built without getting bogged down in negotiating with thousands of landowners. Still, officials have already begun trying to obtain the land registry from Rafah, according to one person involved.
Partition Concerns
Even as they work to hammer out those questions, some European diplomats briefed on the planning lament that little attention has been given to the red zone, where the vast majority of Gazans live.
Moreover, they argue, every day that passes while the U.S.-led planning effort focuses on the green zone, Hamas is regrouping and consolidating its power.
Some officials have also expressed concern that the compounds may feel more like refugee camps or even internment camps than desirable neighborhoods. An early schematic discussed by diplomats at the U.S. military’s operations hub showed four clusters of homes, along with a school, hospital and employment center, surrounded by patrol roads, fences, surveillance cameras and military outposts. The only thing softening its otherwise harsh institutional feel was an inner ring of trees.
What no one involved can know, of course, is whether Gaza residents will embrace the new compounds. One official and a person involved in the planning said that much could depend on whether Hamas seeks to sabotage the effort or treats participants in it as collaborators with Israel, for example by threatening to harm those who move to the new communities if they later return to the red zone.
Mindful that time is not on their side, planners are pressing ahead. The guiding principle, two officials involved said, is to move forward with whatever is feasible, rather than waiting for answers to every open question.
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13) The Auto Industry Was Warned: Battery Recycling Was Poisoning People
Despite decades of evidence on the toxic effects of lead battery recycling, companies opted not to act and blocked efforts to clean up the industry.
By Will Fitzgibbon, Nov. 25, 2025
This article was reported in collaboration with The Examination, a nonprofit newsroom that covers global public health.
“Each year, lead poisoning is estimated to kill more than 1.5 million people, most of them in developing countries.”
A worker unloading dead batteries from a vehicle at a breaking yard in Lagos, Nigeria, in April. Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
At Ford Motor Company headquarters near Detroit, Phillip Toyne, a shy Australian lawyer, warned executives in 2005 that the lead inside car batteries was poisoning people.
Lead is an essential, but toxic, element of car batteries. As demand rose, the auto industry increased its use of recycled lead. But many recycling factories around the world were pumping toxic smoke into communities.
Mr. Toyne, records show, pitched a solution: a program in which inspectors would certify factories that operated cleanly. Car manufacturers and battery makers could then market themselves as buying only from environmentally friendly suppliers.
It went nowhere.
An investigation by The New York Times and The Examination showed that African factories have poisoned people while recycling lead to be sold to American companies. Children near one cluster of factories outside Lagos, Nigeria, had lead in their blood at levels that could cause lifelong brain damage, according to testing commissioned as part of the investigation.
Most carmakers, including Ford, declined to comment on the findings, saying that they rely on their suppliers to follow the law and corporate codes of conduct. A few companies, such as Volkswagen and BMW, promised to start internal reviews.
But records and interviews with industry executives and health and environmental advocates show that automakers and their suppliers have known for almost three decades that recyclers were releasing lead into the air as they melted down old batteries.
Time and again, car and battery manufacturers opted not to act and blocked efforts to address the problem. When the world’s largest car companies wrote their environmental policies, they excluded lead. They did so even as a patchwork of shoddy factories in Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania provided more lead for their batteries.
Ford did not respond to questions about Mr. Toyne’s pitch. But notes and documents summarizing the meetings show that executives were intrigued by the program, called Green Lead. They thought it could appeal to environmentally conscious customers.
But the following year, 2006, Ford recorded what at the time was its worst financial loss ever. Bill Ford, a sustainability champion, stepped down as chief executive officer.
As the auto industry struggled through the subsequent financial crisis, other car companies and battery retailers also declined to sign on. Green Lead collapsed.
Battery makers buy some of their recycled lead from global trading companies, which buy from recyclers around the world.
Addressing lead pollution and other environmental problems proved “financially challenging,” recalled Bernd Gottselig, a retired Ford executive who was involved in talks about Green Lead. “Several ideas would have required setting up completely new and unique supply chains,” he said.
Michael Rae, who was working on a program to certify metals and minerals in the jewelry industry at the time, sat in on a Green Lead meeting. He said it posed a public relations challenge for automakers: By touting their environmental commitment, they’d be calling attention to their reliance on a metal that has been known for centuries to be toxic.
“My recollection is that there was active resistance from the motor vehicle industry to the idea of saying ‘green lead’ because of the implication that there was ‘bad lead,’” Rae said.
A Honda-owned motorcycle company warned of sick children
As the Green Lead initiative stalled in Detroit, another proposal was taking shape in India. In 2007, executives at Hero Honda, the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer at the time, realized that they would need ever more lead over the coming decade.
Executives knew what was likely to happen as a result. A company presentation said the consequences of increased lead production included “ill health of innocent persons / children.”
So the company, which was co-owned at the time by Honda Motor Company, signed on to a pilot program in India in which it would buy batteries only from manufacturers that had passed external audits and had been certified as reducing lead emissions.
The company hoped that would encourage competitors to invest in better technology, according to a corporate presentation.
The program was called BEST Standard 1001. The United Nations, which had provided funding to Green Lead, supported the initiative.
As with Green Lead, advocates lobbied carmakers around the world, hoping to take the project global.
“As you are aware, lead poisoning is an extremely serious issue in many parts of the world,” organizers wrote to car companies, including DaimlerChrysler and Ford.
None of them signed up.
Major Indian battery manufacturers also stayed away, said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of OK International, a nonprofit health research organization that helped design the project.
Honda declined to comment on the program. It said it supported the ethical sourcing of materials and was “committed to the responsible management of the batteries of today and tomorrow.”
One company that declined to participate in the pilot program was Mitsubishi.
“We are aware of lead poisoning, and understand your gist,” Eizo Tabo, the manager of environmental and recycling programs at Mitsubishi, wrote at the time. But the company said its batteries came from Japan, not India. “We do not have extra resources to be involved in the overseas project for recycling lead batteries,” Mr. Tabo wrote.
In the years that followed, lead from polluting factories has seeped further into the global supply chain. Japan, for example, has imported recycled lead from Nigeria in the past decade, trade records show.
A Mitsubishi spokesperson said it is working to eliminate lead in its products and that it has not identified serious risks of human rights violations in any of its supply chains.
World’s largest battery maker blocked new standards
In December 2011, a New York Times article described a “putrid mist” falling upon a town in Mexico after a factory there began recycling old American car batteries. An infant convulsed with seizures. A teenager suddenly developed nosebleeds and stomachaches.
The article followed a research paper by a pair of environmental groups. Researchers noted that as the United States tightened environmental restrictions, battery exports to Mexico for recycling increased, leading to “significantly higher occupational and environmental exposures.”
That troubled Bob Holcombe. As a director with the General Services Administration, he was responsible for more than 600,000 U.S. government vehicles. He contacted a group called ASTM International and asked for help.
ASTM answers all kinds of complicated questions for governments and industries: How strong must a bridge’s steel beams be? How tall should the fences around public playgrounds be? How fast can a roller coaster safely accelerate?
Holcombe asked ASTM to come up with standards for lead battery recycling.
No company had more at stake than Johnson Controls, the world’s largest automotive battery maker at the time. A new set of industry standards could have meant higher production costs and increased attention on its supply chain.
In early December 2012, battery makers, lobbyists and environmental advocates arrived at the G.S.A. office in Washington, two blocks from the White House. They were there to vote on whether ASTM International should create a committee on battery recycling, the first step toward setting an industry standard.
ASTM’s rules required a simple majority to form a committee, and anyone who attended the meeting could vote. “Johnson Controls showed up at that meeting and, apparently, had read the bylaws very well,” said Tim Whitehouse, an energy consultant and former EPA lawyer who was there.
Of the 98 attendees listed as eligible to vote, 80 represented battery makers — including 50 representatives of Johnson Controls. The vote failed.
“It was pretty clear in the room that we had gathered to do this and then Johnson Controls decided they didn’t want it,” said James Meinert, who attended the meeting on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Johnson Controls has since sold its battery business, which rebranded as Clarios. It did not answer questions about the meeting. “Clarios maintains an unwavering commitment to advancing stringent global standards for battery manufacturing and recycling,” the company said.
Car companies excluded recycled lead from their sustainability reports
For years, the world’s largest car companies have celebrated their efforts to protect people and the planet.
They supported a 2013 global agreement to limit the trade of mercury, which had been used in vehicle components. And after news reports identified child labor at mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, car companies pledged to use only ethical suppliers for gold and the metallic ore coltan, which is used to make automobile electrical systems.
“These minerals hit the news and you had all these human rights violations going on,” said Steven B. Young, an industrial ecologist and professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “Some companies said, ‘Holy crap, we don’t want this in our supply chain. What can we do?’
“I don’t think lead has had that moment,” he said.
All major car companies now identify minerals and metals that are known to harm the environment and human health if they are obtained irresponsibly.
Hyundai, for example, keeps a list of minerals that are important to the “future and environment of mankind.” It requires that suppliers obtain those minerals ethically. General Motors has placed six metals under heightened scrutiny. Neither company addresses lead.
Other companies responded but did not answer questions from The Times and The Examination. Some pointed to broad commitments to buy or recycle all products responsibly. Volvo and Mitsubishi shared policies that do list lead among the metals they monitor. Nissan said its policy is to phase out the use of lead “where technically feasible.”
In July, Ford released its most recent sustainability report, announcing that it was “voluntarily holding itself accountable to a new level of rigor.”
“Supply chain transparency and human rights protection go hand in hand,” Ford wrote.
The report says nothing about lead.
Mr. Toyne died in 2015. His partner in Green Lead, Mick Roche, said he learned from its failure.
Mr. Roche went on to help set up one of the first global certification systems for diamonds and gold. It was easier to persuade retailers and manufacturers to care about precious metals in rings, necklaces and earrings than the lead hidden inside car batteries, he said.
“It was just one of those things with lead,” Mr. Roche said. “It didn’t have the sex appeal of everything else.”
Peter S. Goodman contributed reporting.
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