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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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) ‘Imperial Israel’ in the New Middle East
By Roger Cohen, Visuals by David Guttenfelder, Nov. 26, 2025
Roger Cohen and David Guttenfelder traveled on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border before the anniversary of the cease-fire to report this article.
The remains of a vehicle hit by an Israeli drone strike as it traveled near the Litani River in Lebanon.
Beaufort Castle, atop a towering cliff that rises from the Litani River in southern Lebanon, is a 900-year-old Crusader fortification offering a magnificent panorama. These days, it may also be a place from which to view a killing.
The sky was a cloudless blue on a late September afternoon as the hum of an Israeli drone disturbed the beguiling beauty of the surrounding olive groves and vineyards. Steadily it drew closer.
Then, with a screeching whistle, the drone fired a missile that turned a white car on the highway hundreds of feet below the stone castle into a ball of fire. The explosion reverberated in the valley. Other cars careened to a helter-skelter halt.
About a half-hour later, a New York Times photographer, David Guttenfelder, and I reached the incinerated carcass of the car. The driver’s seat was blown to oblivion. Two distraught young men, dressed in black, picked up small pieces of charred flesh, one by one. They dropped them into plastic bags to be buried the next day.
So goes the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, reached a year ago on Thursday. Almost daily Israeli strikes against Hezbollah, including the killing this week in Beirut of one of the militant group’s top commanders, punctuate a fraying peace. Lebanon exists in a gray zone between war and peace, which could also be the fate of Gaza as Hamas resists disarming and Israel strikes selected targets.
In effect, the war that spilled into Lebanon after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel has slowed but never stopped.
“The Israelis say they can’t leave unless Hezbollah disarms, and Hezbollah says how can we disarm as long as the Israelis don’t?” Nawaf Salam, the Lebanese prime minister, said in an interview. “Hezbollah knows things have changed in the region but are still trying to resist.”
A morass of mistrust had now led to a dangerous escalation, and the Trump administration’s target for Hezbollah to disarm completely by the end of the year looks implausible.
Across the region, the United States is pressing to transform the Middle East by new means. “Democracy” is not part of President Trump’s lexicon. Prosperity, not the ballot box, is put forward as the new panacea. But a journey of several weeks to Lebanon, Israel and Turkey suggests that, for now, renewed war is likelier than spreading peace.
The situation in Lebanon offers a compelling example of a new Middle East where Israel’s reach is near ubiquitous. The Iran-led “axis of resistance,” of which Hezbollah has been a central part, is a shadow of its former self. Iran, battered by Israel in a brief June war, is weaker. Syria, after the fall of the Assad regime last year, is no longer a friend of Tehran; nor is it the pipeline for Iranian arms to Hezbollah that it once was.
The region is adapting to what Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates, calls an “imperial Israel,” a country that will kill enemies anywhere: from Lebanon to Syria, Gaza to Iran, Yemen to Qatar. Pre-emptive Israeli strikes are the new norm.
Given such dominance, the United States will have to decide what constraints, if any, it will impose on Israel in the interests of furthering peace in the region. One way to achieve this may be strengthening the militaries of other regional players, like Saudi Arabia or Turkey, which Mr. Trump seems intent on doing.
For Hezbollah, diminished but defiant, the adjustment has been severe. It has not responded militarily to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, even since they intensified after the Gaza cease-fire last month.
Israel accuses Hezbollah, which has deep roots in Lebanon’s large Shia community, of seeking to rebuild its combat capacities.
Tom Barrack, the U. S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Lebanon and Syria, told me that if Israel senses any threat, “They’re going to respond anytime, anywhere.”
“When the Israelis find these guys, they just take them out, so you have two or three a week that are whacked,” he said of the strikes against Hezbollah.
That was the fate of Hassan Abdel Karim Shahrour, later identified by Hezbollah, in his white car beneath Beaufort Castle on Sept. 20. The Israeli military said it had “eliminated” a “Hezbollah terrorist.”
A Hezbollah statement the next day read: “You are invited to participate in the blessed funeral procession of the happy martyr on the road to Jerusalem.”
‘Don’t Forget or Forgive’
Shlomi Hatan, a rifle slung over his shoulder, sat in the On-the-Border Café gazing across its green AstroTurf flooring at the Israeli side of the border wall. “Peace Train,” a Cat Stevens number, played on the sound system, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the wall, in Lebanon.
Murals and inscriptions with an unlikely theme of reconciliation and peace adorn the barrier, including a woman watering an olive tree and words from the Book of Isaiah: “They will beat swords into plowshares.”
Six years ago, in a moment of optimism, 10 artists came for a month to Shtula, a small Israeli farming community that abuts the Lebanese border. Each was to paint a symbol of peace on a 33-foot stretch of wall. Now the images seem more a portrait of human delusion.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s war in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, has hurt Israel’s image, deepened its global isolation and divided Israelis. Against this charged backdrop, it is unclear whether Israel has the political cohesion and will to turn the dominance of its armed forces into strategic security.
Mr. Hatan, 55, is an uninhibited voice for Israel’s new strategy of aggressive pre-emption. He was born in Shtula and is the chief security officer of his small community.
Most of the 300 residents of the village were evacuated under Hezbollah rocket fire after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. They were among the 60,000 Israelis moved out of northern Israel two years ago.
But he could not abandon the community that has been his life. Only a third of residents have returned. Stray cats slink along empty streets.
In the distance, spindly Israeli communications towers on five hilltops inside Lebanon glinted reddish in the sun. Israel, to Lebanon’s fury, has refused to remove the small encampments around them despite the cease-fire that called for a complete Israeli withdrawal.
“We’re not going back to the situation before Oct. 7, with our enemy close to the fence,” Mr. Hatan said, pointing to the ruin of a Hezbollah observation tower. “Our definition of suspicious movement is now very low and will draw an immediate response.”
Before the Oct. 7 attack, Israel was a nation lulled, he now believes. Tourism, peace and a thriving economy were hard to resist. The enemy, whether in Lebanon or Gaza, appeared deterred before “they took the masks off their faces,” he said.
We wandered along the wall. “Now, we will have to live by the sword for the next century,” he said.
I entered a concrete guard post facing Lebanon. Scratched on its wall beside a narrow loophole were the words: “Man. Father. Jew. Israeli. Don’t forget or forgive. Remember why you are here and what you are facing.”
The Uncompromising Hegemon
“The so-called cessation of hostilities,” as he put it, has been a frustration for Mr. Salam, the Lebanese prime minister.
A lawyer from a prominent Beirut family, he took up his job early this year as a reformist determined to establish the Lebanese state’s exclusive right to bear arms. A largely failed state has never achieved this. This goal means disarming Hezbollah, and Mr. Salam’s underpaid, ill-equipped national army is charged with doing that.
The drumbeat of Israeli strikes complicates that task on his side of the border.
“We have an unchecked player acting as a hegemon under a leader, Netanyahu, growing stronger by the day,” Mr. Salam told me. “At the same time there’s a new generation across the world that can no longer tolerate Israeli behavior.”
Israel pledged in the truce last year to withdraw from Lebanon within 60 days, but “stayed in five points on hilltops,” Mr. Salam said. He has raised this issue many times, including with Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III, the American officer who was a leader of the “monitoring mechanism” of the cease-fire for several months, but to no avail.
“I told him we are not in 1914 or 1915,” Mr. Salam said with exasperation. “To monitor what goes on around you, you don’t need to be on top of a 700-meter hill with binoculars or a Galileo telescope! Israel has satellite imagery and drones and balloons with the most sophisticated cameras on earth.”
France, which oversees the cease-fire alongside the United States, formally demanded this month that Israel withdraw from the five positions, but the United States has not publicly pressed the issue.
Morgan Ortagus, a senior U.S. envoy to the Middle East, insisted in Beirut recently that the Lebanese Army complete the total disarmament of Hezbollah by the end of the year. There was no suggestion of any quid pro quo.
Yassine Jaber, the Lebanese finance minister, questioned the army’s ability to achieve that goal. “You cannot ask the army to do wonders when they lack the means, and the behavior of the Israeli side is undermining it,” he said.
Mr. Barrack acknowledged that the obstacles to Hezbollah disarmament are formidable. The group is at once an established political party in Lebanon with considerable Shia support and a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
“If you’re a soldier in the Lebanese army earning $300 a month, you have to have three jobs. You’re an Uber driver, a barista and a soldier,” he said. “So you go knock on a Shia door on Mondays and say, ‘I’m sorry, man, can I go into your basement and take out the AK-47s?’ And you’re risking your life.”
Still, he added, “We’ve got to have just one army” in Lebanon.
‘Our Weapons Will Remain’
Achieving that will not be easy. A weakened Hezbollah is not a powerless Hezbollah. Funds still reach it through the drug trade and other means. Its fighters still number in the tens of thousands, by most estimates. In the Shia-dominated Dahiya neighborhood of south Beirut, the mood is defiant.
“Israel will be humiliated! Israel will be gone! We are far from humiliation!”
The cries rose from a Hezbollah crowd of about 1,000 people gathered in a giant hangar during our visit in September.
Rapt, they listened to a speech by Naim Qassem, the Hezbollah leader appointed last year to replace Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel on Sept. 27, 2024, leaving Hezbollah rudderless.
Mr. Qassem appeared from an unknown location on a large screen. He was flanked by photographs of the dead, including many young boys and girls. The occasion was the commemoration of another Hezbollah commander killed by Israel last year, Ibrahim Aqeel.
A partition separated a crowd of men and women, in roughly equal numbers. The women all wore black with yellow sashes. They bore photographs of their dead relatives.
It was a reminder that each death inflicted by Israel, or by either side, seems only to fortify the resolve of its enemies, no matter how weakened, and erode any impulse for peace. A Hezbollah billboard on the coastal highway said it all: “When we are victorious, we win, and when we are martyred, we win.”
A deep crater in Dahiya, where Israeli bombs killed Mr. Nasrallah, has been left almost untouched. A model hand rises from the point of impact holding a yellow, rifle-emblazoned Hezbollah flag. A billboard says, “I won’t abandon you.”
“The enemy is still the same enemy, and the perpetrator of the massacres is the same,” Mr. Qassem declared. “So how can we abandon weapons? How? No, our weapons will remain. From now until the Judgment Day, they will remain!”
‘War Chases Us’
Lebanon’s south has long been Hezbollah’s stronghold and the crossroads of conflict with Israel. It is here that Israeli forces rolled across the frontier in 2024 in response to Hezbollah attacks. Fear and violence are rampant in these borderlands, where the wounds that Israel has inflicted run deepest.
Abbas Fakhr al-Din, the soft-spoken mayor of Nabatieh, a city in southern Lebanon, sat beneath a portrait of Ahmad Kahil, a doctor and his predecessor. Dr. Kahil was killed in an Israeli strike on the municipal building on Oct. 16, 2024, that took the lives of 16 people in all. The rubble remains.
I asked Mr. al-Din if he was afraid. “No,” he said. “I have to be with my people through good times and bad.”
Nabatieh and the surrounding area continue to be hit by intermittent Israeli strikes, killing people and heightening the sense that the cease-fire is even less stable than Lebanon’s battered buildings. To the mayor’s eyes, American strategy is devoted solely to support of Israel.
“Everything is being done to accommodate Israeli aggression and make it easy for Israel to stay,” Mr. al-Din said, spreading his arms in bewilderment. “What has happened to humanity among the regimes of the world?”
Hezbollah, he continued, now faces two enemies: Israel and a hostile regime in Syria, which once provided essential support.
Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Sunni jihadist who set up an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria before moderating his views, is no friend of Iran or of its proxies like Hezbollah.
Mr. al-Sharaa has not forgotten Iran’s strong support for Bashar al-Assad, the brutal tyrant he deposed last year after a 13-year civil war.
“Syria was a big loss, some Hezbollah people say we lost everything,” the mayor, a Hezbollah sympathizer but not a member, said. “So we have two fears, to the south and to the east, and are asked to disarm!”
Farther south, adjacent to the Israeli border, the town of Khiam offers a portrait of the widespread devastation found in the area. Only Christian villages have been spared.
In Khiam, slabs of concrete hang at unlikely angles from crumpled buildings. Somehow the slender minaret of a mosque still stands over the prayer area beneath it that is in ruins.
A couple of earthmovers heave rubble here and there, to no clear purpose. Every now and then a corpse is found beneath masonry. Yellow Hezbollah flags flutter in the swirling dust.
Israeli bombardment, during the war and since, has left no more than the shell of a town where 28,000 people once lived. The number of its dead is unclear, but is certainly in the hundreds.
Khaled Moussa, 23, a Syrian refugee who said he fled from the Syrian civil war at the age of 10 “carried on the neck of my father,” sipped a thick grainy coffee at a solitary street stand.
“War chases us,” he said.
An Effective Distraction?
The living Israeli hostages taken by Hamas are all home from Gaza. That is a great relief to Orna Weinberg at the Menara kibbutz on the Lebanese border.
But she is still angry, full of distrust for the government under Mr. Netanyahu that, she believes, will use expanding conflict to keep itself in power. Israel’s ready resort to pre-emptive strikes against enemies anywhere looks to her like a recipe for endless conflict.
They “can ignite the whole area again if it serves them,” including in Lebanon, she said.
She saw Hezbollah shelling devastate the kibbutz in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The place she loves and where she has spent her entire life had to be abandoned.
But as the war in Gaza dragged on for two years, she recoiled from talk by the extreme right of there being “no innocent people in Gaza” and of “death to Arabs,” which, she noted, would mean killing Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute one-fifth of the population.
She cannot abide the way Israel’s wars since Oct. 7, 2023, have been prosecuted. “Once your government does things that contradict your morals and your very basic feelings and thoughts and ideas and principles, it shatters the soul,” she told me. “It does something awful.”
Unlike Mr. Hatan, 35 miles southwest on the same Lebanese border, she is appalled by Mr. Netanyahu and what a militant Israel has become. Divisions in Israeli society are more raw than ever.
War, she noted, is an effective distraction. Mr. Netanyahu is acutely aware of this. On Nov. 2, he said, “We will not allow Lebanon to become a renewed front against us and will act as necessary.”
Peace May Be Overrated
Mr. Barrack, the American envoy, invited me onto the terrace of the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Istanbul, which overlooks the Bosporus.
Container ships chugged down the wind-whipped waterway, fought over for centuries by covetous powers. From here, for more than five centuries, the Ottoman Empire, which once stretched from the Danube to the Persian Gulf, cast its soporific sway over more than 20 nationalities.
An old business pal of Mr. Trump, Mr. Barrack is trying to calm the wars that have ravaged the Middle East since that empire was carved up a century ago. Now, in his estimation, the region is at a new turning point.
A realist with a can-do briskness, a Californian descended from Lebanese Christian immigrants, he is skeptical of the word “peace,” which he considers illusory or at best temporary in an environment of deep wounds.
He prefers to speak of fostering cooperative prosperity, preventing needless death and getting the lights turned on from Damascus to Beirut. “It’s not the land you hold,” he told me, “it’s the way you live.”
In states like Lebanon and Syria, people have been killing each other for too long over what he called “facts that don’t matter any more.” Mr. Barrack wants a “timeout.”
“How many more generations do you want to kill each other?” he asked.
It’s a good question, but in a region where the disputed facts of the past often hold an iron grip on people, a demand for forward-looking pragmatism in the name of creating wealth can seem far-fetched. The United States has had bold but ill-fated plans before in the Middle East.
The Palestinian people want a state, and it seems inconceivable that money will ever alter that national ambition. This issue’s capacity to ignite war at regular intervals has been demonstrated over and over.
Still, America has upended its approach to the region. Out with circuitous diplomacy and phrases like “two-state solution.” In with bold action creating momentum toward what Mr. Trump calls “a new dawn.”
Mr. Trump’s grand vision is to combine Gulf capital, Lebanese commercial ingenuity, Israeli technology and a large Arab work force to produce economic miracles that conciliate the Middle East. It remains to be seen whether it is more than an illusion.
Mr. Barrack is pushing hard to seize the moment. Disarming Hezbollah, he tells Lebanese leaders, will “bring in the Saudis and the Qataris, who have been burned in Lebanon because they tried and the money went to corruption.”
Mr. Salam told me that Mr. Barrack had suggested simultaneous steps by Israel and Hezbollah as the way forward. “Hezbollah hands over some weapons and vacates part of the country, Israel withdraws from two of the five points, and so on,” he said.
There was a long silence. “It was an excellent idea of his, but nothing.”
‘What Is the Point?’
On Sept. 21, the day after the killing below Beaufort Castle, Israel acted as it deemed necessary in the town of Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon.
A drone strike on Shadi Charara’s car killed him, his two 18-month-old twins, Hadi and Silan, and his eight-year-old daughter, Celine. His wife, Amani Bazzi, survived. A man on a motorcycle was also killed.
Asked about the incident, the Israeli military said it had targeted an unnamed Hezbollah operative and “during the neutralization of the terrorist in an airstrike, a second vehicle carrying civilians approached the target, and as a result of the strike that vehicle was hit, too.”
It added that it “regrets any harm caused to uninvolved individuals.”
Thousands of people attended the funeral of the family on Sept. 23. The tiny coffins of the twins bore a photograph of each of them and were covered in Lebanese flags. The infants themselves were wrapped in blue and pink cloth as they were lowered into the ground.
There were no yellow Hezbollah flags, no Hezbollah rhetoric, no indication that this Lebanese family had any Hezbollah ties.
On the day of the drone strike, Mr. Salam told me he had received a phone call from the Monitoring Mechanism, which adjudicates compliance with the cease-fire in Lebanon and is led by the United States and France. The Mechanism reported to the Lebanese prime minister that it had held an “excellent meeting.”
“A half-hour later I get another call reporting five killed, including three children, by an Israeli drone strike in Bint Jbeil,” Mr. Salam said. “I feel frustrated, but what is the point of protesting again and again?”
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5) Venezuela’s Nobel Winner Pushes False Claims About Maduro, Critics Say
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado faces criticism that she is exaggerating threats posed by Venezuela’s leader to justify U.S. force to overthrow him.
By Simon Romero, Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, Nov. 26, 2025
"The origins of using the term Cartel de los Soles to describe illicit military activities stretch back to an era well before Mr. Maduro became president in 2013. The term gained traction after a 1993 scandal when the C.I.A. worked with the Venezuelan military to send a ton of cocaine to the United States in a bid to infiltrate Colombian cartels."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/world/americas/maria-machado-maduro-venezuela.html
Maria Corina Machado has argued that Nicolás Maduro simultaneously heads two different drug trafficking organizations that threaten U.S. national security. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
As the Trump administration weighs using force to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, former diplomats and even some prominent critics of Mr. Maduro worry that his political opponents in Venezuela are promoting exaggerated claims and falsehoods to justify a U.S. intervention.
Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October and is considered the opposition’s de facto leader, has recently amplified debunked claims that Mr. Maduro fixed elections in the United States, aligning herself closely with President Trump and his allies.
“I have no doubt that Nicolás Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez and many others are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the U.S.,” Ms. Machado told Bloomberg News, referring to Venezuela’s president and the head of its National Assembly.
Mr. Trump followed over the weekend by amplifying unproven assertions that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election.
Ms. Machado and other opposition leaders have also argued that Mr. Maduro simultaneously heads two different drug-trafficking organizations threatening U.S. national security. The Trump administration has similarly sought to link Mr. Maduro to both groups.
The Trump administration has designated those groups, Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles, as terrorist organizations. Trump officials have also claimed that the United States was in a state of armed conflict with “narco-terrorist” drug cartels to legitimize strikes on 21 boats, which have killed at least 83 people since September.
But the administration’s own intelligence agencies, experts on Latin America’s drug trade and other Venezuelan opposition figures have rejected the idea that Mr. Maduro wields control of the two groups or is weaponizing them against the United States. While experts agree that figures in Venezuela’s military have been involved in drug smuggling, some doubt these organizations are even transnational drug cartels.
A broad range of experts in laws governing the use of lethal force say the U.S. attacks at sea are illegal and have described them as murders. They argue that the administration has not established that an armed conflict exists between the United States and Venezuela.
As Mr. Trump considers further moves against Mr. Maduro, some longtime experts on Latin America have expressed skepticism over the reasoning for a potential mission aimed at regime change, saying they echo missteps in Iraq that produced years of protracted war. The Iraqi quagmire fueled concerns that foreign politicians might promote exaggerated narratives to persuade the United States to overthrow leaders of other countries.
“It’s time to summon the ghost of Ahmad Chalabi,” said John D. Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama, referring to the Iraqi politician who had a pivotal role in making the case for the United States to invade Iraq by providing false information that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction and operational ties to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Feeley, who worked for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq war, said it felt as if he were watching similar events unfold. He questioned whether Trump officials were relying on dubious information about Mr. Maduro’s operational control of drug trafficking and the ease of trying to topple him.
“It’s unbelievable how these guys are too stupid to read their own history and know that they’re headed for the same thing,” Mr. Feeley said.
In response, a White House official said Mr. Maduro’s government was a narco-terrorist cartel and that Mr. Maduro was not a legitimate president.
Ms. Machado has emerged as the most prominent figure in Venezuela making the argument that Mr. Maduro is a cartel kingpin.
“We all know that the head of the Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Ms. Machado said in a podcast interview with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. “The regime created, promoted, and funds the Tren de Aragua.”
Through a spokesman, Ms. Machado declined repeated requests to comment for this article. In an interview with The Times last year, she described Mr. Maduro’s ouster as a matter of “hemispheric security” and, therefore, international importance.
Among Venezuelans who oppose Mr. Maduro, there are at least a few skeptical of some aspects of her argument.
Henrique Capriles, an opposition figure, former governor and presidential candidate who has been marginalized in recent years, said in an interview that while Tren de Aragua is a dangerous gang, the idea that it was controlled by Mr. Maduro amounts to “science fiction.”
Mr. Capriles, who ran and lost against Mr. Maduro in 2013, was later banned from running for office, a prohibition lifted in 2025. His critics have accused him of colluding with the government after he decided to participate in a flawed National Assembly election.
For years, leaders in Venezuela’s often fractious opposition have made claims that Mr. Maduro was orchestrating a vast drug-trafficking organization. There is little doubt, experts say, that illicit smuggling is enmeshed in Venezuela’s government. Several senior officials who have broken with the regime have accused top leaders of profiting from the drug trade.
“In our case the cartel is the state,” David Smolansky, a Venezuelan politician who represents Ms. Machado in Washington, said in an interview.
In 2020, during the first Trump administration, the Justice Department indicted Mr. Maduro and other Venezuelan officials on drug-trafficking charges, accusing them of trying to “flood the United States with cocaine.” It specifically mentioned Cartel de los Soles, describing it as a drug-trafficking group directed by Mr. Maduro.
The claims have not been tested in U.S. courts, but Trump officials breathed new life into the indictment this year, doubling the reward for Mr. Maduro’s capture to $50 million.
But experts who have analyzed the Venezuelan drug trade for decades say the Cartel de los Soles is not a literal organization but shorthand for drug trafficking in the armed forces. That phenomenon is not unique to Venezuela, afflicting democratic and authoritarian countries alike in the Americas.
Drugs do pass through Venezuela, but of the cocaine reaching the United States from South America, less than 10 percent flows through Venezuela, the D.E.A. found. And Mexico, not Venezuela, produces fentanyl, the primary driver of overdose deaths in the United States.
Regarding Tren de Aragua, drug trade experts point out that it originated in a prison in Venezuela’s Aragua state and American intelligence agencies circulated findings in February that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government. Its leader is thought to be Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, who escaped from the prison.
Latin American countries, including Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay have recently joined the United States in designating the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, which some Venezuelan opposition leaders cite as bolstering their case against Mr. Maduro.
“These designations mean the Maduro regime is now like the Taliban, the only government in full exercise of power recognized as a terrorist organization,” Mr. Smolansky said.
Asked about proof that Mr. Maduro leads two drug cartels, he replied: “This might be new to citizens in the United States or elsewhere in the region, but Venezuelans have been enduring this for over 20 years.”
Many critics of these claims share the Venezuelan opposition’s disdain for Mr. Maduro, whose authoritarian rule plunged Venezuela into one of the world’s worst economic crashes in modern times.
When the collapse fueled an exodus from the country, Tren de Aragua also expanded into various countries in the Americas, often preying on fellow Venezuelan migrants and engaging in extortion, human smuggling and small-scale drug trafficking.
Still, no evidence has been found that Tren de Aragua is engaged in cross-border drug trafficking, according to Insight Crime, a research group focused on organized crime.
Ms. Machado, however, has kept pushing her assertions about Mr. Maduro and drugs.
“Everybody knows that Venezuela is today the main channel of cocaine, and that this is a business that has been run by Maduro,” Ms. Machado told CNN. “The regime has turned Cartel de los Soles into one of the most powerful criminal structures all along this continent and other continents as well.”
The origins of using the term Cartel de los Soles to describe illicit military activities stretch back to an era well before Mr. Maduro became president in 2013. The term gained traction after a 1993 scandal when the C.I.A. worked with the Venezuelan military to send a ton of cocaine to the United States in a bid to infiltrate Colombian cartels.
Ms. Machado’s recent focus on debunked claims that Venezuelans had rigged U.S. elections — an argument Mr. Trump’s supporters have used to falsely assert that he won the 2020 election — has fueled claims that she is embracing misinformation to gain favor with the Trump administration.
“She’s saying our problem is actually your problem because it’s a national security issue for you,” said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at Tulane University. “This can fit into existing agendas in D.C. and provide an extra emphasis to citizens who are not specialists in Venezuela.”
Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.
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6) What the Pentagon’s Attack Videos Reveal About the Boat Strikes at Sea
The military has released 21 video clips of U.S. attacks on vessels it says are trafficking drugs. But they tell only part of the story.
By John Ismay, Brent McDonald and Carol Rosenberg, Nov. 26, 2025
John Ismay, a former Navy bomb disposal officer, Brent McDonald and Carol Rosenberg studied video clips of strikes posted by the Trump administration and consulted experts on what they reveal.
Incoming munitions appeared as black streaks on an infrared video of a strike on Sept. 19.
The grainy videos released by the Pentagon are just seconds long. Some show boats racing along the water, before they disappear in a ball of fire. In others, hazy figures can be seen moving around on deck before the vessel explodes.
Since early September, the U.S. military has killed at least 83 people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. After each attack, the Pentagon has released a video clip showing the operation’s final moments, at times from multiple perspectives.
The Trump administration says those aboard were smuggling drugs to the United States, but it has offered little evidence to support that claim. Nor has it disclosed the weapons used or information about the people who were killed.
The Times closely examined video of all 21 strikes and consulted military aviators and weapons experts, finding that the U.S. military used a variety of munitions delivered through an operation that relied on both drones and manned aircraft in a departure from traditional stop-and-board operations.
The clips show some of the boats were already stopped at sea when they were detected, and the people onboard were potentially within reach of U.S. forces before they were blown up.
Lawmakers from both parties and legal experts have questioned the legality of the strikes and requested the White House’s legal justification.
Laser-Guided Missiles and Bombs
In some attacks, a missile approaches the boat from the rear, as this video of a Nov. 9 strike shows. Two people are standing along the vessel’s port side. A frame-by-frame analysis shows a missile hitting the vessel.
Fins near the missile’s nose suggest it is an AGM-176 Griffin, a small guided missile designed for covert airstrikes.
The White House said in a statement on Nov. 1 that the operations were being conducted “largely by unmanned aerial vehicles launched from naval vessels in international waters.” But a closer look shows that manned aircraft and large drones that can be launched only from airstrips on land have also been used in the attacks.
In the video of the Nov. 9 strike, the missile is guided by a laser beamed from an AC-130J gunship, a manned airplane identifiable by the shape of the target cross hair in the video. A small blurred box covers the center of the vessel, a redaction to hide data on the laser.
Other weapons used in the attacks are moving much faster, complicating the task of identifying them, as the U.S. military’s airborne cameras typically capture video at 30 frames per second.
In the video of a strike on Sept. 19, two munitions appear as black streaks just before explosions engulf the vessel.
Hitting a moving target like a speeding boat would require the use of laser-guided munitions. After they detonate, a color version of the same video shows plumes of flame and smoke billowing from burning fuel stored inside the boat.
While the lack of detail in the image makes it difficult to discern the exact munition used, the size and shape suggest the use of larger missiles like the AGM-114 Hellfire, as well as 250-pound guided glide bombs.
Those weapons can be launched from gunships and MQ-9 Reaper drones deployed from air bases on land. Some of them can also be fired from helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft launched from Navy warships and cargo vessels that are operating in the Caribbean Sea.
People Visible Before They Are Killed
All but two of the clips have redactions that cover up information such as data or other images that could reveal sensitive attack systems.
But they pointedly leave images that show people on the boats just before they are killed. This is a departure from past practice of showing buildings or vehicles being blown up but avoiding showing such a graphic loss of life.
The Pentagon said it limits its redactions to “operational security reasons.”
Some of the video clips are from infrared imagery, which makes their body heat stand out brightly against the cold background of the ocean.
Pentagon officials said that the first strike in the campaign — on Sept. 2 near Trinidad — killed 11 people. At least eight of them are visible on the open boat.
Intercepting Boats at Sea
Most of the videos show boats moving quickly through the water when they are bombed from the sky.
Until the latest campaign, U.S. forces on Navy warships or Coast Guard cutters would intercept the vessels at sea, a practice that the Coast Guard says is continuing.
On those occasions, U.S. forces then inspect the suspicious boats and, if they find drugs or other contraband, seize it. They have also arrested and charged smugglers. In extreme cases when boats don’t stop, Coast Guardsmen can sometimes fire rifles or machine guns at the engines to disable them, but they are not allowed to kill those inside.
In some of the videos, it is difficult to see details of what is inside the boats.
The videos show the bombing of six boats that appear not to be moving. Motors on three of the vessels are out of the water, possibly indicating mechanical failure.
In an attack on Sept. 15, a man perched on the side of the boat with another person near him disappears in a ball of fire. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said that the strike killed an innocent fisherman, and that the boat was disabled and in need of assistance.
The Pentagon’s video of its Nov. 4 bombing in the Pacific shows a four-engine boat idling in the water, bobbing in the waves. Two men were killed in the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social media post, without explaining why the vessel was not intercepted.
Little Evidence Presented
For years, the Coast Guard has publicized big hauls of narcotics at sea by displaying them on the deck of a cutter or on a pier. But that is not what is happening here.
The military has declined to offer evidence for each attack, instead citing unspecified intelligence that the Pentagon has not made public.
After one attack in September, the Dominican Republic displayed cocaine that it said was recovered.
The U.S. military hit a boat on Oct. 22, then went back for a second strike to destroy packages floating in the ocean.
Drug cartels use an array of vessels, including semi-submersibles, to transport drugs around the world. President Trump claimed on Oct. 18 that a strike hit a “very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE” loaded with fentanyl and other narcotics and headed for the United States directly.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon officials have said how they knew what the vessel was carrying.
One of the four boats the United States bombed in the Pacific on Oct. 27 appears to have bundles of something scattered on the deck. But the load could not be evaluated because it burned up with the boat.
Amogh Vaz contributed video production. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.
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7) Britain Raises Taxes by More Than $30 Billion in Push for ‘Stable Economy’
In announcing the measures, Rachel Reeves, the top economic official in an increasingly unpopular government, cited forecasts for slower growth and the need to hold down debt.
By Eshe Nelson, Reporting from London, Nov. 26, 2025
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, announces the government’s annual budget in Parliament on Wednesday. Credit...Agence France-Presse, via Pru/Afp Via Getty Images
Rachel Reeves, Britain’s top economic official, announced a set of tax increases on Wednesday as she sought to strengthen the country’s public finances in the face of a challenging economic outlook.
In her second annual budget, Ms. Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said that she would raise taxes by nearly 26 billion pounds ($34 billion) by 2030, mostly via policies related to personal income taxes. Last year, Ms. Reeves raised taxes by about £40 billion and said she didn’t want to repeat such a budget.
The need to raise taxes again came in response to forecasts for slower economic growth, a push for more welfare spending, and Ms. Reeves’s commitment on lowering debt. In her favor, the economic projections were not as bad as many analysts had expected, allowing Ms. Reeves to sidestep some of the tougher economic choices that economists thought she might face.
Broadly, Ms. Reeves used the latest budget to shift some of the economic burden onto wealthier people and away from low-income families and the young.
“These are my choices,” Ms. Reeves said. “Not austerity. Not reckless borrowing. Not turning a blind eye to unfairness. My choice is a budget for fair taxes, strong public services and a stable economy.”
Wednesday’s budget was a critical test for the government. Despite a landslide election victory last year, Ms. Reeves and Prime Minister Keir Starmer have seen their approval ratings sink to record lows over the course of their 16 months in power. Ms. Reeves has faced an arduous economic environment — with slow growth, high debt, high interest rates and global upheaval — and she has struggled to win over voters and some members of her own party, while also appeasing anxious bond investors.
Since taking office, Ms. Reeves has said she was seeking to put Britain’s finances on a “firmer footing.” She has also prioritized funneling more money toward public services and capital investment projects. But those plans have been constrained by her own “ironclad” promises on reducing debt and promises to not raise certain taxes on working people.
The result has been a fiscal bind that has trapped her between voters, the markets and members of Parliament.
The budget met its objectives in narrow terms, said Michael Saunders, an economist at Oxford Economics and former Bank of England rate-setter. But in other respects, “it looks less reassuring,” he said, since it lacked measures to promote sustained growth and increased public spending. That “reinforces the impression that the government is unwilling to take difficult decisions,” he added.
Reacting to Ms. Reeves’s speech in Parliament, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said that the budget measures had broken the chancellor’s previous promises on taxes, and represented a “total humiliation.”
A ‘technical error’ released the budget’s details earlier than expected
The annual budget is usually revealed to lawmakers in Parliament, in one of the biggest days on Britain’s political calendar. But on Wednesday, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, mistakenly released its analysis and forecasts based on the budget about half an hour before Ms. Reeves announced her policies to lawmakers.
A link to the 200-page report “went live on our website too early this morning,” the watchdog office said on social media, calling it a “technical error.”
“This is deeply disappointing and a serious error on their part,” Ms. Reeves said at the start of her speech to Parliament.
What were the biggest changes?
Despite saying she did not want to be a “big tax-raising chancellor,” that is the role Ms. Reeves has played. The measures announced on Wednesday will raise Britain’s tax burden, as measured by the tax intake relative to gross domestic product, to more than 38 percent by 2031, a record high.
Ms. Reeves plans to raise about £15 billion in taxes by 2030 through changes to the personal income tax. More than half of that figure comes from extending a freeze on the thresholds at which people pay various tax rates.
The freeze began when Rishi Sunak was chancellor under a Conservative Party government, and is considered a somewhat stealthy way to raise a relatively large amount of revenue. As people’s incomes grow because of inflation or wage increases, more of them are pulled into higher tax brackets.
Ms. Reeves also raised taxes on property, savings and dividend income. She limited the ability for high earners to redirect their income and bonuses into their retirement accounts tax-free. She raised taxes on homes worth more than £2 million, which represent fewer than 1 percent of properties.
The major spending change in the budget was Ms. Reeves’s decision to eliminate the two-child benefits cap, which prevents larger families from getting additional government aid. The move would lift about 450,000 children out of poverty, she said.
To tackle persistently high youth unemployment, Ms. Reeves put £820 million over the next three years into a “youth guarantee” that would aim to give every young person a place in college, an apprenticeship or job support.
She also announced an array of measures intended to reduce inflation next year, including cuts to household energy bills and a freeze in rail fares.
How did the markets react?
Markets wavered when the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report on the budget was unexpectedly released, but eventually rallied, as investors digested the details showing that government borrowing would continue to fall over the next five years.
The yield on Britain’s 10-year government bonds, a crucial measure of the country’s borrowing costs, fell to around 4.43 percent, from 4.5 percent, a move that will be welcomed by the government, if it is sustained. (Bond prices move inversely to yields.) Britain faces the highest government borrowing costs among Group of 7 countries, with interest costs accounting for a sizable share of spending.
The pound gained against the dollar, and the FTSE 100, the country’s benchmark stock index, increased by about 1 percent.
What was the thinking behind another big rise in taxes?
Since last year’s budget, Ms. Reeves has argued that global economic events have forced the government to recalibrate, citing upheaval caused by President Trump’s tariffs and the war in Ukraine, among other factors. But economists have argued that she didn’t do enough to insulate the public finances from external shocks.
The small buffer she left against her fiscal rules was subsequently erased by policy reversals and high debt interest payments. This year, she more than doubled the buffer, to £22 billion, a move that is likely to please nervous bond investors and exasperated economists.
In its latest forecasts, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that annual economic growth would average 1.5 percent over the next five years, 0.3 percentage points slower than it projected in March, because of lower productivity growth. That meant Britain would generate about £16 billion less in tax receipts, the watchdog said. But higher inflation and wages would more than offset that loss, it added.
“The Office for Budget Responsibility absolved the chancellor from having to make any difficult decisions with a far better set of forecasts than anyone expected,” Andrew Wishart, an economist at Berenberg, said.
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8) ‘You Start Getting Desperate’: How It Feels to Be Young and Jobless in Britain
Rising youth unemployment is one of the challenges that will affect the success of the British chancellor’s economic approach as she unveils a crucial budget on Wednesday.
By Michael D. Shear, Photographs by Andrew Testa, Nov. 26, 2025
Michael Shear and Andrew Testa reported from Bristol in southwestern England, where more than one in 10 people between the ages of 17 and 21 are not in school and out of work.
McKenzie Bartley, 19, spent months last year applying for jobs in Bristol. Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Not so long ago, McKenzie Bartley, 19, was one of the many young people in Britain who could not find work.
For three months in 2024, he walked the streets of Bristol, a large city in southwest England, stopping in store after store to drop off his résumé. And he applied for dozens of jobs online.
Only one employer bothered to respond.
“You run out of money, and then you start getting desperate,” he recalled recently in his neighborhood in south Bristol, where the unemployment rate for young people is above the national average. “The least they could do is tell you why they haven’t chosen you.”
As Rachel Reeves, Britain’s chancellor, unveils her annual budget on Wednesday, persistent youth unemployment is one of the many challenges that will determine the success of her economic approach and test the already strained political support for the Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Mr. Bartley still lives with his parents, like many other young Britons who have been priced out of the housing market. Youth unemployment traditionally runs higher than overall unemployment, but the gap in Britain has widened in recent years. That is feeding into a sense of widening generational inequality, economists say, exacerbated by the generous payments extended to retirees by successive British governments and the real estate wealth of baby boomers.
At Labour’s annual conference in September, Ms. Reeves vowed to introduce programs to guarantee young people jobs, education or training. “We won’t leave a generation of young people to languish without prospects,” she said at the time. “I commit this Labour government to nothing less than the abolition of long-term youth unemployment.”
It will not be an easy task. Ms. Reeves and Mr. Starmer are stuck between their campaign-year promise not to raise taxes and Britons’ impatience for increased investment in public services after more than a decade of austerity imposed by the Conservatives. And they must solve that economic and political riddle amid a period of stubbornly sluggish growth.
Among the decisions the chancellor will announce on Wednesday is an increase in the minimum wage. Ms. Reeves will raise it by about 4 percent for workers 21 and over, to 12.71 pounds per hour (about $16.75), the Treasury said. And 18- to 20-year-olds will have a larger, 8.5 percent increase, to £10.85 an hour from £10, in a move toward making good on a campaign promise by Labour to establish a single adult rate.
While this will raise the incomes of young people who have jobs, some economists and businesses have warned that by increasing the cost of hiring young, inexperienced workers, youth unemployment could actually worsen.
Mr. Bartley now has a job, thanks in part to How to Be a Chef, a 12-week culinary course developed by a charity called Square Food Foundation. Since completing the course, which leads to professional qualifications, he has begun an apprenticeship at a chain of pubs called Mitchells & Butlers. He also preps ingredients one day a week at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
But many of his peers — in South Bristol and around the United Kingdom — are not so lucky.
Across Britain, more than 15 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed, not in school or not receiving any training, according to government statistics. That is lower than its modern peak of 22 percent in 2011, after the financial crisis, but as high as it was in 2021, the year after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of the British economy.
In total, nearly 702,000 British youth were out of a job between July and September, the national statistics show.
In Bristol, a city of about 500,000 people, the overall youth unemployment rate is slightly better than the national average, at just over 11 percent. But in some of the city’s southern areas, where poverty is higher, youth unemployment is as high as 18 percent.
Unemployment rates in Britain
“Poverty and unemployment in South Bristol was a multigenerational, long-established issue,” said Jane Taylor, the head of service for employment, skills and learning at Bristol City Council. “This didn’t just happen.”
“We’ve lost the industry where families used to work and nothing has replaced that,” she added, referring to the collapse of the tobacco and cigarette manufacturing businesses that used to employ many of the city’s residents.
In June, the city started a new program aimed at trying to get some of the city’s youth back on track, funded by £1.1 million (about $1.4 million) from the national government. The program, called Youth Guarantee, provides young people with a four-week career counseling course and a guaranteed two-week job placement — a kind of tryout that officials say often leads to a permanent job.
In the five months since, the city has enrolled 139 young people in the course. Ms. Taylor said the city had been told there would be money to run the program for a second year. But beyond that is not clear.
“There’s probably going to have to be some hard conversations about what are we going to keep, what are the elements,” she said. “It will be looking at the numbers and what we’ve achieved.”
Even if the program receives more money, the broader issue of rising youth unemployment in Bristol is not likely to go away any time soon.
At City of Bristol College, which serves as a bridge for young people between the end of regular school and a university education, even full-time students say they are worried about the job market.
Five students gathered last week to discuss the issue, and all of them said it was a frequent topic of conversation.
“I’ve seen lots of students my age struggling, trying to get work and even the basic necessities,” Agastya Dhar, 17, said. Mr. Dhar has a part-time job in a French fry restaurant, but said even getting that job was tough.
“They don’t want students,” he said. “They want experience, but they don’t want to give you the job. They’ll give you the job, but they don’t want you being a student. It just doesn’t make sense in any scenario, you know?”
Kateryna Kalinina, 18, a Ukrainian in Britain on a student visa, said potential employers had told her that young people are “always not coming into work and they are not responsible for what they do.”
Others say there are many financial obstacles to finding a job. Jemima Williams, 16, said she felt caught in a circular problem.
“I’m coming on 17 now, so I might want a car, which would also help me get a job,” she said. “But to afford that car, I need to have a job.”
Jenna Cains, the head of student experience at the college, was quick to tell the students, “It’s not hopeless, I promise you.” She said the institution retooled its curriculum to focus as much on life after school as it does on the classroom instruction. Teachers now emphasize “personal development, employability, essential skills,” she said. “All of that plays on the future development of our young people.”
Mr. Bartley, from South Bristol, said he would like to eventually reopen the Pasta Palace, a small takeout restaurant his father owned but had to close a few years back. Their specialties: carbonara and lasagna, made fresh each morning.
“I want to eventually, at some point, open up my own business with him,” Mr. Bartley said. “Maybe, like a bigger restaurant, so people could actually come in and eat.”
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9) When Every Cent Counts: What Shopping for Thanksgiving Is Like on SNAP
Mary Schiely relies on SNAP benefits, as do many customers at the small grocery store where she works. The nation’s day of feasting is not the easiest for them.
By Kevin Williams and Audra D. S. Burch, Photographs by Madeleine Hordinski, Nov. 26, 2025
Kevin Williams reported from Middletown, Ohio.
Mary Schiely works at a market that serves customers on SNAP benefits. She is also a recipient of the food benefits program herself. Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
More than two hours before the sun rose, Mary Schiely opened the doors of Sloan’s Market over the weekend, like she has almost every morning for the past 15 years.
The week of Thanksgiving has finally brought some measure of normalcy to the tiny neighborhood store in Middletown, Ohio, after a month of disruptions, uncertainty and panic wrought by the pause of government food benefits.
Earlier this month, many of the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were left to scrounge for groceries after funding lapsed during the historic 43-day government shutdown.
While benefits have been restored, SNAP recipients still feel the aftermath. And with new SNAP rules, some of which take effect in December, they are bracing for what might come next in a long, complicated and confusing process.
Ms. Schiely, 49, knows better than most how the suspension of SNAP benefits affected the poorest Americans and frayed what was once a reliable social safety net. As the cost of living rises, a majority of her customers depend on the aid to eat. So does Ms. Schiely.
On her recent predawn walk to work, about a half-mile, Ms. Schiely passed the homes of some of Sloan’s regular customers. She knew what its residents buy: “Mr. Two Red Bulls” lives here, she said, “Mrs. Low Fat Milk” occupies the tidy ranch house, and “Ramen Man” is on the corner.
This week, she has watched as customers, including SNAP recipients, purchase ingredients for their Thanksgiving pies. But she also saw the struggle.
“I actually had a customer, who had not received their SNAP, ask for a credit in tears,” she said on Tuesday. “I made sure they had what they needed. Parent of a special-needs child. She got all the sides and even a cake she needed. I was crying with her as she kept apologizing.”
Stacey Gupta, 56, a Sloan’s regular, is battling a brain tumor and other ailments that keep her from working. Her husband just suffered a stroke, and she desperately needs the $700 in SNAP benefits that feeds her family.
This year, Ms. Gupta’s Thanksgiving menu will be pared down to three items because of the SNAP saga: turkey, macaroni and cheese, and potatoes. On Wednesday, she said that she planned to head to Sloan’s to see if she can find gravy packets for her mashed potatoes. “That’s all we can afford,” she said.
Long considered America’s answer to feeding its hungry, SNAP has new rules limiting benefits and is facing new scrutiny that could eventually mean reduced or eliminated benefits for some participants.
The Trump administration’s broad domestic policy law that passed in July cut SNAP funding by $186 billion over the next decade, in part by imposing stricter eligibility requirements and expanding work, job training and volunteer requirements for some adults. Some SNAP costs will be shifted to states, even as some states have warned they might be forced to make their own cuts to fund the program. Those who fail to meet the work requirements are limited to three months of SNAP assistance over a 36-month period.
And in recent weeks, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that SNAP recipients will be required to reapply for the program as part of the administration’s efforts to root out suspected fraud.
“Secretary Rollins wants to ensure the fraud, waste and incessant abuse of SNAP ends, a U.S.D.A. spokesperson said in a statement, adding, “Using standard recertification processes for households is a part of that work.”
Ms. Rollins said her department has reviewed SNAP data from 29 states and found about 186,000 dead people on the rolls. Another half-million, she said, are receiving double benefits. The agency plans to rebuild the program to ensure those receiving taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits “are vulnerable and can’t survive without it,” she said in a Newsmax interview.
Those changes are adding another layer of anxiety.
“I cry all the time, I can’t get a break,” said Erica Brown, 37, who worries that her SNAP benefits will be cut off again because of the new requirements. Ms. Brown said she cannot work because she is taking care of her mom, who has terminal cancer. Without the almost $1,000 she receives each month from SNAP, Ms. Brown was forced to visit food pantries to feed herself and her three children when the benefits were paused.
Advocates said that many of the country’s poorest are caught in a tightening affordability vise. “For many people, the delay in getting benefits in November was absolutely a crisis,” said Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-poverty advocacy group that supports SNAP. “Families will continue to struggle across the country. They are feeling squeezed in every direction.”
Like other places across the country, the SNAP crisis this month hit Middletown — where Vice President JD Vance was raised — hard. And few places in this small mill city of about 51,000 felt the pinch of hunger more than the neighborhood surrounding Sloan’s. Butler County, where Middletown primarily lies, has just over 40,000 SNAP recipients, according to state data.
The customers who shop at Sloan’s thread a needle between expense and convenience. The store offers a modest and slightly higher priced selection of basic groceries. For those who do not own a car, it is often the best option.
There are other larger stores in the more affluent east side of the city, about four miles away, which means those without a car need to use delivery services or find a ride to get there. For more options, including generic brands, those stores are what Ms. Schiely relies on.
Ms. Schiely works full time for $12 an hour. On many weeks, that means 44 hours at the store. Her largest bill is her $525 rent, which takes two paychecks to cover.
Every month, Ms. Schiely and Alyssa Crutchfield, her 18-year-old daughter, precisely plan how to spend their $500 monthly SNAP allotment.
The mother and daughter, who live in a small two-bedroom duplex, spent an hour one recent afternoon meticulously poring over the price of each item on their list for Walmart. A favorite soy sauce is $3.99, but the store brand is $1.58. They go with the store brand.
By the time they finished, the total was about $130, enough to last about a week. The exercise was a nagging reminder that they are dependent on a federal government that allowed SNAP funding to lapse for the first time.
“The cutting of SNAP taught me to never take the benefits for granted,” said her daughter, a high school senior.
On Thursday, Ms. Schiely had planned to work, but she and her daughter scored a last-minute invite from a friend in Columbus, Ohio, about 90 minutes away by car.
They are going. A day of Thanksgiving and plenty awaits.
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10) D.C. Shooting Suspect Worked With C.I.A.-Backed Unit in Afghanistan
The C.I.A. and an Afghan intelligence official said that the shooter had been part of an Afghan “partner force” trained and supported by the agency in the southern province of Kandahar.
By Julian E. Barnes, Hamed Aleaziz, Elian Peltier and Safiullah Padshah, Nov. 27, 2025
Elian Peltier and Safiullah Padshah reported from Kabul, Afghanistan.
“An Afghan intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to comment publicly on the issue, confirmed that Mr. Lakanwal had served in Kandahar in one of what were known as Zero Units, which were formally part of the Afghan intelligence service. The Zero Units were a paramilitary force that had been trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members, and were accused by human rights groups of widespread killings of civilians. The intelligence official said that one of Mr. Lakanwal’s brothers was the deputy commander of the Zero Unit in Kandahar, which was known as 03.”
Law enforcement at the scene of the shooting. The suspect had worked with a C.I.A.-supported military unit in Afghanistan. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
The Afghan man accused of shooting two members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday had worked with C.I.A.-supported military units in Afghanistan, the agency said.
The C.I.A. said that the shooter had been part of a C.I.A.-backed Afghan “partner force” in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban insurgency during the two-decade war there. Officials identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29.
After American forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021 and gave way to Taliban rule, the suspect was brought to the United States as part of a program to evacuate Afghans who had worked with the agency, according to the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe.
Mr. Lakanwal’s affiliation with a C.I.A.-supported unit was earlier reported by Fox News Digital.
“In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including C.I.A., as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” Mr. Ratcliffe said in a statement.
Mr. Ratcliffe said the alleged assailant “should have never been allowed to come here.”
An Afghan intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to comment publicly on the issue, confirmed that Mr. Lakanwal had served in Kandahar in one of what were known as Zero Units, which were formally part of the Afghan intelligence service. The Zero Units were a paramilitary force that had been trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members, and were accused by human rights groups of widespread killings of civilians.
The intelligence official said that one of Mr. Lakanwal’s brothers was the deputy commander of the Zero Unit in Kandahar, which was known as 03.
The Afghan units trained and supported by the C.I.A. played an important role in the American evacuation as the Taliban drove out the U.S.-backed government in 2021. While many Afghan military units dissolved in the face of the Taliban takeover, the C.I.A.’s partners remained operational and helped bring U.S. citizens and Afghans who had worked with American forces to Kabul to be evacuated out of the country.
Mr. Lakanwal grew up in a village in the eastern province of Khost. A childhood friend, who asked to be identified only as Muhammad because he feared Taliban reprisals, said that Mr. Lakanwal had suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.
Muhammad said he had last seen Mr. Lakanwal a few weeks before the Taliban takeover in 2021, when he came to Khost to marry his second wife. Mr. Lakanwal had started smoking weed, he said, and ended up divorcing his wife a few days after the wedding.
He said he last spoke with Mr. Lakanwal in 2023, when he appeared to have settled well in the United States with his first wife and their children. But he said he couldn’t forget what Mr. Lakanwal told him the last time they saw each other in Khost.
“He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure,” Muhammad said.
“When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind, even if they were from the enemies.”
Taliban officials on Thursday denounced the actions of the Zero Units during the war. Sediqullah Quraishi Badloon, a provincial official in Nangarhar, in eastern Afghanistan, accused the groups of looting during the chaotic fall of the U.S.-backed government.
“After that, they fled to the United States in search of a better life,” Mr. Badloon said in a social media post. “These traitors still do not let the Afghan people live in peace.”
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11) Where the Waters Are Rough, a Fishing Town Confronts Trump’s Priorities
First, Newport, Ore., lost its Coast Guard rescue chopper. Then came the swirl of rumors and evidence that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was coming to town.
By Anna Griffin, Photographs and Video by Ruth Fremson, Reporting from Newport, Ore., Nov. 27, 2025
A group of pilots have been demonstrating against ICE at the municipal airport in Newport.
The welcome signs on the edge of Newport, Ore., celebrate recent high school sports championships, point tourists toward the local aquarium and highlight two of its defining attributes — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific fleet and its designation as one of the nation’s 37 “Coast Guard cities.”
But the central coast town’s long, warm relationship with the federal government has been upended in recent weeks. First, a Coast Guard rescue helicopter was redeployed from the municipal airport to North Bend, Ore., 95 miles down the coast, with no warning to civic leaders, elected officials or the commercial fishing families who work the treacherous waters off the Oregon coast and sleep better at night knowing quick rescue is available.
Then local businesses began getting calls gauging their interest in providing basic services — like water delivery and solid waste removal — to what many concluded could only be an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility at the airport, especially if it is free of the rescue chopper’s operation.
Taken with similar developments elsewhere, including Staten Island, where another Coast Guard facility is being considered for an ICE takeover, people around Newport have reached what they see as a demoralizing conclusion. To them, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both the Coast Guard and ICE, is prioritizing immigration enforcement over coastal safety, and partisan politics over a legacy of trust and communication.
“It’s mind-boggling that the decision was made to move this helicopter, but it’s just as mind-boggling that nobody bothered to talk to us about it,” said Taunette Dixon, a leader of the nonprofit Newport Fishermen’s Wives. “I don’t understand why the approach has to be adversarial here.”
Fishing and tourism are Newport’s economic pillars, and nearly every year-round resident knows someone who works on the water. They also know how dangerous that work can be.
The shoreline is notorious for king tides, sneaker waves and storm surges that can sweep people off beaches or jetties. To reach commercial crab grounds and offshore fishing runs, boaters must cross the Yaquina Bay bar, where the Yaquina River, on Newport’s southern edge, meets the Pacific Ocean. Along the bar, swells, tidal currents and shifting sand create an obstacle course of steep, breaking waves that challenge even Coast Guard rescue boats. Water temperatures off Newport average 50 degrees to 54 degrees, and the Pacific Northwest crab fleet has a higher fatality rate than crabbers more than 1,000 miles north in the Bering Sea.
“Bar crossings are the most dangerous portion of operating a fishing vessel,” said Amelia Vaughan, a commercial fishing safety expert with Oregon State University and a board member of the Newport Fishermen’s Wives. “Having close, easy response times from the Newport air facility can be the difference between life and death.”
The Coast Guard stationed a helicopter at Yaquina Bay, after the fishing boat Lasseigne capsized in 1985. Three people died when rescue aircraft were too far away to respond quickly. It was the Obama administration that first attempted to move the helicopter to North Bend, in 2014, to reduce staffing costs. Local residents sued, Congress intervened, and the Coast Guard is now required to give ample notice and provide research to support any relocation of the helicopter team — even temporary moves for maintenance.
So when rumors spread a few weeks ago that the helicopter was gone, many fishermen dismissed them. Response times from Newport average 15 to 30 minutes, from North Bend, at least 30 minutes longer.
The helicopter’s transfer turned out to be only the first clue that things were changing.
As local officials searched for answers, they discovered notices that a federal contractor had sought to lease space at the airport. Business owners began comparing notes about strange calls: requests for daily deliveries of large volumes of water, or for the capacity to remove up to 10,000 gallons of human waste a day. Online job postings soon appeared from contractors seeking bus drivers, nurses and jail guards with immigration experience for positions based at the airport.
“The evidence is becoming increasingly clear,” said State Representative David Gomberg, a Democrat whose district includes Newport. “Somebody is considering basing a large detainment facility at the airport where the Coast Guard used to be.”
The Trump administration has not confirmed plans for ICE in Newport or any other federal agency. In a statement, a Homeland Security spokeswoman called the suggestion that potential Coast Guard rescue operations have been slowed by the helicopter’s move “an insult to the hard, heroic work the men and women of the Coast Guard put in every day.”
Still, it’s in keeping with other reports that the administration is looking to use Coast Guard facilities in coastal communities for immigration efforts. Ms. Dixon said a local Coast Guard leader in Newport became emotional when he told her that he could not answer her questions.
“We know this is not coming from the Coast Guard commanders based here,” she said. “They’re part of this community.”
Newport has a number of factors that might make it a more appealing site for ICE than a major inland city. The airport, several miles south of downtown, can handle larger transport planes. The city sits at the junction of two federal highways, and the population of Spanish-speaking residents has boomed over the past decade or so as the fishing and fish-processing industries have grown more dependent on immigrant labor.
Newport is also not Portland, Oregon’s largest city and a place with a long history of clashes with the White House, particularly under Republican presidents. President Trump’s immigration crackdown this summer spurred daily demonstrations outside Portland’s immigration processing center — right now the only stand-alone ICE facility in the state — and an expanding legal fight over the facility’s presence and the president’s call for National Guard troops to protect it.
Like most of Oregon, Newport and surrounding Lincoln County lean Democratic, but voters here helped elect a Democrat to the state House and a Republican to the State Senate and have an ecumenical relationship to Washington, D.C.
“Newport is a community that appreciates the federal government,” said Gary Ripka, a crabber and the owner of two crab boats. “There’s no knee-jerk distrust here.”
Mr. Ripka said he wanted to keep the debate over the helicopter’s location separate from conversations about ICE because he voted for Mr. Trump and appreciates some of the president’s moves to tighten the southern U.S. border.
“You just don’t have time to get partisan when you’re in the commercial fishing business,” he said.
The tension has drawn large crowds in this city of 10,000 people. More than 300 people, many holding tiny flags reading “No ICE in Newport,” attended a town hall that Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, held Sunday at Newport High School. A City Council meeting the week before attracted 800 people.
“They clearly are saying to themselves, ‘If we go to small, rural communities in Oregon and elsewhere, we have better prospects for our skulduggery,’” Mr. Wyden said of the Department of Homeland Security in an interview after the town hall. “You can see this community will not stand for that.”
The county, the state and the Fishermen’s Wives have sued over the helicopter’s removal, and on Monday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order and demanded its return for at least the next two weeks. But the federal government has promised to fight the lawsuit and, in a statement, accused local and state leaders of attempting to “micromanage” the Coast Guard.
In a social media post Tuesday, Newport’s mayor said a federal contractor had been calling local hotels seeking up to 200 hotel rooms for a year — and that the Department of Homeland Security had not responded to the city’s requests for information.
People in the fishing and crabbing industries are already feeling strain from other federal decisions, including cuts to maritime research and the president’s trade war with Canada. Almost half of the crab caught in Newport go to Chinese markets, most by way of British Columbia, which has the facilities to store and ship them live. The trade stalemate between the United States and Canada risks driving down the prices crabbers can get in a season that starts in December.
The bulk of the crab will be caught this winter — when the weather is the worst and the danger the highest.
“It makes you question yourself: Is this what I voted for?” Mr. Ripka said. “It just doesn’t seem like these are decisions about the people who live and work here.”
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12) Intelligence on U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Is Limited
The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed.
By Julian E. Barnes, Nov. 27, 2025
Julian E. Barnes has been reporting on counterterrorism strikes for more than 15 years. He reported from Washington.
In decades of war against terrorist and insurgent groups, the military and spy agencies learned that to take down a network, they had to first understand it.
That often meant rounding up low-level people who could lead them to more important people.
While the United States had successes, it also made mistakes, sometimes hitting the wrong target or causing collateral damage, angering local populations and creating more opponents than were eliminated.
As a result of those errors, the United States worked to create detailed intelligence dossiers so that civilians approving the strikes could have confidence in who was being targeted and more clearly see the potential unintended consequences of a strike.
But those lessons of the long war against terrorism appear to have been cast aside as the Trump administration attacks boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that it says are carrying drugs.
The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed, and the strikes were not designed to take out high-ranking cartel leaders.
Instead, the military has killed, at best, low-level people, whose role in the drug trade may have been taking a payment for moving cocaine from one spot to another. (At worst, some of the people killed could have been fishermen, migrants or others who had nothing to do with the drug trade.)
“Traditionally, our counternarcotics efforts have always been targeted at the head of the snake,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “This is obviously the opposite of that. Now we’re going after the tail of the snake. We’re going after some, you know, poor ex-fishermen who took 300 bucks to run a load of cocaine to Trinidad.”
The strikes are also at odds with any effort to understand the cartels moving the drugs. Taking apart a network, experts said, requires capturing people and interrogating them to find out the financiers and leaders. By blowing up the boats, the United States is also destroying the intelligence and evidence.
“If what you wanted was to stop the drug trade, obviously this isn’t what you’d be doing,” said Annie Pforzheimer, a former senior U.S. diplomat who specialized in counternarcotics during her career. “Because you’d be capturing the people in the boats, turning them to get the next level of the organization, turning those people to the next level and getting to the top.”
The military knows that someone on the boats has a connection to a drug cartel, and it has some level of confidence that drugs are on the vessels, according to people familiar with the military’s classified briefings. But in most, if not all, of the strikes, the Pentagon does not know precisely whom it is killing, those people said.
And Democratic lawmakers say that presents a real danger.
“There are two reasons you’re really super careful about this stuff,” Mr. Himes said. “One would hope that you might have some qualms about killing innocent people — there’s the moral dimension, and I’d like to believe that still matters. And then No. 2, there’s the blowback issue.”
During America’s long fight against terrorism, the C.I.A. and the military learned that when they killed terrorism suspects, the family members of those people could become radicalized, turning against the country that had killed their brother or son.
Mr. Himes said each and every boat strike carried the same risk.
“These are guys who made a bad decision to take 500 bucks to run a fast boat up to Trinidad,” Mr. Himes said. “They’re the street-corner hustlers. And if the United States is sending the signal that life doesn’t matter, that’s coming back to us, that is absolutely coming back to us.”
Supporters of the strikes have noted that overhead surveillance by both drones and satellites has improved in recent years and that there is less chance of collateral damage from striking boats at sea compared with targets on land.
Trump administration officials have also pointed out that their Democratic predecessors approved counterterrorism strikes even when they were unsure exactly who was being killed.
During the Obama administration, the C.I.A. conducted antiterrorism strikes in cases in which the United States did not know specifically whom it was killing. Instead, the strikes were based on intelligence assessments from a “pattern of life” and other information that showed connections between the targeted people and known terrorists.
These attacks were called signature strikes because they were based on actions that looked like terrorism, or had a terrorism “signature,” but were not backed up by specific knowledge about who was at a site being targeted or what exactly they might have been planning.
The term, however, was tainted from the beginning. Critics maintained that strikes on large groups of unidentified people suspected of being militants did little to stop terrorist attacks but risked mistakes that could lead to civilian deaths and turn local populations against the United States.
Because of the controversy, restrictions were placed on signature strikes. And when the Obama administration later began targeting militants in Yemen whose identify they did not know, it started calling the operations “terrorist attack disruption strikes.”
While there are some similarities between the boat strikes and the old signature strikes, the military has rejected the idea that the attacks on the boats are signature strikes. In briefings with members of Congress, military officers have asserted that they are confident there are drugs on the boats — and that the drugs are the real target of the attacks.
But lawmakers say that means the people on the boats are, in effect, collateral damage.
“They told us it is not a signature strike, because it’s not just about pattern of life, but it’s also not like they know every individual person on the boats,” said Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Ms. Jacobs said she believed the strikes were wrong.
“I didn’t hear any evidence that convinced me that these weren’t extrajudicial killings,” she said.
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13) Death Toll Rises to 128 in Hong Kong High-Rise Fire
Hope of finding survivors has dwindled, with many residents of the Wang Fuk Court towers still unaccounted for. Eight more people were arrested Friday over the blaze.
By David Pierson and Anjali Tsui, Reporting from Hong Kong, Nov. 28, 2025
Outside the Wang Fuk Court complex in Hong Kong on Friday. Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
The death toll from Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades rose to 128 on Friday, as authorities struggled to identify victims and firefighters extinguished the last embers at the still smoldering high-rise apartment complex.
With hope of finding survivors fading, rescue operations have ceased, even though many residents of the densely packed Wang Fuk Court apartment towers remain missing. Chris Tang, Hong Kong’s secretary of security, said that about 200 people were unaccounted for as more bodies are expected to be recovered. More than 70 people were hospitalized, some in critical condition.
Mr. Tang said rescuers had pulled out more than 100 bodies from the complex, but some charred sets of remains were still inside the site. Only 39 victims have been identified, he said.
With many of the bodies badly burned, police said they were planning to use DNA testing to help expedite the process. Temperatures also remain too high to begin a thorough investigation of the buildings; Joe Chow, the commissioner of police, said some parts of the apartment complex are still as hot as 390 degrees Fahrenheit.
Firefighters were still dousing parts of the complex with water on Friday to prevent flames from reigniting. Smoke could be seen wafting from the charred buildings, which were crisscrossed with what remained of the bamboo scaffolding in various states of disrepair.
Family members seeking missing loved ones gathered at a nearby community center where they were shown photographs of victims, many of whom had been identified. Other people stood outside the housing complex waiting anxiously for any news.
The massive blaze started on Wednesday afternoon at the complex in the northern district of Tai Po. One of the 32-story buildings appeared to catch fire first before the flames jumped to six other towers. Mr. Tang said there were early indications that the blaze was sparked by flammable construction netting that had been used to shroud the buildings, which were undergoing renovation work at the time.
The fire then ignited combustible polystyrene foam that appeared to have been used to cover windows to protect them from damage. The foam caused the windows to overheat, breaking the glass and allowing the fire to spread, Mr. Tang said.
Mr. Tang described the multitude of challenges that firefighters faced in trying to respond to the inferno. He said flaming bamboo poles rained down onto the ground and blocked access for firefighters and their trucks. The heat was so intense in some apartment units that flames reignited even after firefighters had extinguished a blaze.
“Firefighters had to go through each floor and each unit to put out fires and conduct rescue operations,” he added.
The disaster has stunned residents of Hong Kong, where high-rise living and the sight of construction sites covered in green netting and bamboo are part of everyday life. Many people have responded by raising relief funds and volunteering to help distribute donated goods to people left homeless by the fire.
The government is likely to come under increasing pressure to explain why the fire could not have been prevented or if the response could have been better.
Andy Yeung, director of fire services, defended the fire department’s response to the tragedy against criticism online that the agency didn’t deploy enough air units. Mr. Yeung said helicopters would have been ineffective because they would have dropped water from too high while threatening to fan the flames with their rotary blades.
He also said that there was not enough space at the apartment complex to use fire trucks with taller ladders. Mr. Yeung said fire alarms at all eight high-rise towers were not working properly at the time of the blaze.
Among the victims was a 37-year-old firefighter, Ho Wai-ho, a nine-year veteran who collapsed at the scene of the fire and later died at a hospital, the government said.
The city’s anti-corruption commission said Friday it had arrested eight more people over the fire, including scaffolding subcontractors and consultants involved with renovations at the complex.
On Thursday, the authorities arrested two directors and a consultant linked to a construction company that installed the construction materials, saying they were being investigated for manslaughter and gross negligence. The authorities said they were inspecting 11 other private residential building projects where the company had been doing work.
The disaster comes at a politically sensitive time for the local government, which was handpicked by China but is determined to show it is up to the task of running the city. Hong Kong is still semiautonomous, despite the freedoms lost when China imposed a national security law in 2020. Next month, it will hold elections — devoid of opposition parties — for only the second time since then.
The government has said in a statement that it would cancel “nonessential public activities” to devote time and resources to helping the victims of the fire and their families. It also said it would inspect all sites in the city that are currently undergoing external wall construction or renovations involving scaffolding and protective nets.
Authorities also had to address the immediate needs of those left homeless by the fire. A community center near the blackened towers has been converted into a shelter where more than 100 mattresses were strewed across the floor. Parents dug through bins of children’s clothing neatly organized by size, and makeshift signs explained how to access emergency cash provided by the government.
Cheryl Wong, a 7-year-old resident of Wang Fuk Estate, sat barefoot on the bleachers with an aunt who was trying to keep her entertained with sketch pads, origami and a Pokémon activity book. Cheryl said her mother had left the shelter to find her a pair of shoes. She said she has been struggling to sleep since arriving.
“I don’t like sleeping on the floor,” she said. “My pillow kept rolling off the mattress.”
About 500 residents are currently dispersed across nine temporary housing shelters. The government said it would provide a subsidy of 10,000 Hong Kong dollars, or $1,284, to affected households and set up a separate $38 million fund “to assist residents and support all relevant work.”
The government also said it might accelerate the phasing out of bamboo scaffolding in favor of fire-resistant metal scaffolding. So far, the authorities have not indicated that bamboo played a major role in the rapid spread of the fire on Wednesday.
The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong since 1948, when nearly 200 people were killed in a blaze at a warehouse. That fire took place when the city was still a British colony.
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14) VIDEO: Goodbye, Price Tags. Hello, Dynamic Pricing.
Video by James Robinson and Binyamin Appelbaum, Nov. 28, 2025
Mr. Robinson is a producer and editor for Opinion Video. Mr. Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board.
In the Opinion Video above, we tell the story of a little piece of technology that has delivered enormous benefits to consumers — and is in danger of disappearing. It’s called the price tag. Yes, the price tag.
Businesses increasingly are using algorithms to determine prices, and to rapidly adjust those prices throughout the day. This new technology is called dynamic pricing, and it’s poised to change the way businesses set and advertise their prices. Think of the ever-changing electronic signs at gas stations, but for everything.
Businesses can use dynamic pricing to deliver better deals to customers. But they also are using the new technology to jack up prices. As the video says, the humble price tag “was like a little handshake. It represented an agreement, one price for every customer. But now that agreement is breaking.” And we are all going to pay.
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15) Israeli Forces Kill Two Palestinians After They Appear to Surrender, Video Shows
The Israeli authorities said they were investigating the shooting, which came amid days of extensive military operations in the West Bank.
By Adam Rasgon, Sanjana Varghese and Fatima AbdulKarim, Nov. 28, 2025
A still from Palestine TV of two Palestinian men kneeling on the ground shortly before they were shot dead during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Thursday. Palestine TV, via Associated Press
Israeli security forces shot dead two Palestinians in the West Bank on Thursday after they appeared to surrender, according to videos released by an international news agency and two Arab television networks.
The Israeli authorities said in a statement that they were examining the shooting and that the two men were involved in militant activity. Palestinian officials condemned the killings as a “field execution.”
The shooting came amid days of extensive Israeli military operations and raids in the Israeli-occupied northern West Bank. It prompted fresh accusations from Palestinian officials that Israel was using excessive force there.
Footage showed two men emerging from a garage in Jenin, who then lift their shirts, seeming to indicate they are carrying no weapons, and raise their hands. They are seen kneeling, while Israeli security forces point their weapons at them.
The Israeli forces kick the men, who shuffle back toward the garage. Moments later, gunshots are fired and, shortly after, the body of one of the men can be seen slumped on the ground. In one of the clips reviewed, Israeli forces can be seen continuing to shoot into the garage.
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank said the two men were killed and identified them as Al-Muntasir Billah Abdullah, 26, and Yousef Asasa, 37.
Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group, said Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Asasa were members of its military wing.
Ahmad Nazzal, a reporter for Palestine TV, one of the channels that shared the footage, said he was at the scene and watched the shooting unfold. He said in an interview that Israeli forces were operating in the area for hours before the shooting.
The channel is run by the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank.
In a joint statement, the Israeli military and police acknowledged that the Palestinians had been shot at, saying “fire was directed toward the suspects.” They said the shooting was being reviewed by commanders on the ground and transferred to the “relevant professional bodies.”
The statement also said that the two Palestinians had previously been involved in militant activity, including throwing explosives at security forces and opening fire on them.
Eitan Ilan, a spokesman for the Department of Investigations of Police Misconduct, an arm of Israel’s justice ministry, said his office was investigating the shooting.
Israel’s far right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, offered his support for the security forces. “The fighters acted exactly as is expected from them — terrorists need to die!” he wrote on X.
On Thursday, Volker Türk, the United Nations human rights chief, expressed outrage at the “apparent summary execution” of the two Palestinians.
The foreign ministry of the Palestinian Authority condemned the killing as an “ugly field execution” and called on the international community to act.
“The ministry sees this crime as directly extending from an official, systematic, and widespread Israeli policy based on intentionally killing Palestinians outside the framework of the law,” the ministry said.
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, said the killings were “part of a pattern across the occupied territory.”
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said the shootings were the result of “an accelerated process of dehumanization of Palestinians and the complete abandonment of their lives” by Israel.
Since January 2025, the Israeli military has taken control of parts of Jenin in an operation that officials have described as a crackdown on militancy. Palestinian rights groups say that has led to the killing of civilians, the destruction of homes and the displacement of thousands.
The military intensified operations in a number of towns near Jenin in recent days, detaining and questioning dozens of people. Palestinians have reported Israeli security forces destroying roads and taking over homes.
Aritz Parra, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Monika Cvorak contributed reporting.
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16) Israeli Raid in Southern Syria Kills at Least 13, Syrian Officials Say
The raid appeared to be one of Israel’s deadliest cross-border incursions since Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s former dictator, was ousted last year.
By Reham Mourshed and Euan Ward, Nov. 28, 2025
Reham Mourshed reported from Damascus, Syria, and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon.
Damage in Beit Jinn, a town in southern Syria, after an Israeli raid on Friday. Ali Ahmed Al-Najjar/Reuters
An Israeli raid into southern Syria on Friday killed at least 13 people and left several Israeli soldiers wounded, according to Syrian health officials and the Israeli military, in what appeared to be one of the bloodiest cross-border incursions since the fall of the Assad regime last year.
Israeli ground forces carried out the overnight raid in Beit Jinn, a Syrian town near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the ground forces were moving in to detain suspected Islamist militants when they responded to fire from armed gunmen. The Israeli troops were assisted by air support, it added.
Syria’s state news agency, SANA, citing the head of the health directorate in the Damascus countryside governorate, said that at least 13 residents were killed and at least two dozen were wounded in the Israeli attack. Two children were among the dead, SANA reported.
Several Israeli reservists were injured, three of them severely, the Israeli army said.
The Israeli raid was the latest in a series of steadily escalating cross-border incursions into southern Syria since Bashar al-Assad, the country’s longtime dictator, was overthrown by Islamist rebels last year.
Since the collapse of the Assad regime, the Israeli military has seized a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and territory in southwestern Syria. The Israeli military has also launched hundreds of airstrikes on military targets across the country, including on the Syrian capital, Damascus.
In interviews, residents of Beit Jinn described scenes of carnage after they were awakened in the early hours of Friday morning by heavy gunfire and the roar of helicopters. Many were unable to flee amid Israeli bombardment, residents said.
Asala Daher, 36, said her husband was struck by shrapnel when he opened the door during the bombardment. “We were terrified,” she said as she stood beside him at a Damascus hospital on Friday.
The attack underscored how Syria’s new government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, still faces significant security hurdles as it tries to rebuild a nation reeling from a bloody 13-year civil war and decades of authoritarian rule.
Israeli officials have defended the incursions and bombing campaign as an effort to ensure that hostile forces do not entrench themselves along the Israeli border. The Israeli military said the operation on Friday had successfully detained a number of militants belonging to Jamaa Islamiya, a Sunni Islamist political party and armed faction based in Lebanon that fought alongside Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, during Israel’s war against the group last year.
Syrian officials reacted with outrage to the raid.
“What happened in Beit Jinn is a crime in every sense of the word and an assault on our people and safety,” Asaad al-Shaibani, Syria’s foreign minister, said in a statement.
“The persistence of such aggression threatens regional peace and security and demands a firm international response,” he said, adding that the attack had “deliberately targeted innocent civilians.”
Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting.
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17) VIDEO: Trump’s Aid Cuts Are Replacing Fresh Food With Junk
The Trump administration has cut nearly a billion dollars in food aid, creating a scarcity crisis at food banks across the country. We traveled to Georgia to observe how a decades-old emergency food system supported by the U.S.D.A. is being eroded by government spending cuts.
By Bethlehem Feleke, Jeremy Raff, Ben Laffin and Jon Hazell, November 28, 2025
Transcript:
We cut the eggs in half so that it stretches. We used to give out a whole dozen of eggs. Now we cut the dozens in half so they each get a half a dozen. We’re in Georgia, where Jennifer Deal has been operating this food pantry for more than a decade. Now, for the first time, she’s running out of food. You’re welcome. There you go. The amount of people who need it here is up 40 percent compared to last year. —Thank you so much. —Yes, Ma’am. As inflation has gone up, more people in her community say they can’t afford groceries. For example, coffee. In three weeks, it went up seven dollars. The average cost of food in America is 28 percent higher today than it was in 2020 and for Jennifer, that means doing more with less. So this is where we keep our produce. We used to be able to give out a whole pack of lettuce, but now we have to break it down so that we can feed everybody. A few weeks ago, we ran out of food. Despite rising demand, the Trump administration has cut nearly a billion dollars in federal aid for programs that ensure low-income families are fed. Not having enough funding to know that I can feed all the people that need it. I think that’s frustrating and it’s scary. Food pantries where people can pick up food source much of their inventory from larger food banks that act as a wholesaler. The cuts have disrupted that supply chain. For decades, the federal government, through the U.S.D.A., has sent billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of pounds of food to food banks across the country. Private businesses and individuals also donate money and food, and farms sell food banks’ produce at a steep discount, like this box of fresh vegetables. In March, the Trump administration cut funding for a U.S.D.A. program that sent food from farms to low-income Americans, and it also canceled a pandemic-era aid program designed to make sure that food banks had fresh food. In a statement to The New York Times, the U.S.D.A. said the cuts were needed to correct what they described as a Biden-era slush fund. In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cuts in Congress. Our team has sought to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in all U.S.D.A. programs. Soon after, the U.S.D.A. announced more than $300 million in additional food aid spending. But food banks like this one in Atlanta, which sends food directly to pantries across Georgia, say it’s still not enough. We have to be creative and innovative and go out and find other sources of support to offset any changes that might happen at the federal level. At the Atlanta Community Food Bank, demand is up 70 percent from just three years ago. We would prefer it to be the reverse, where resources are going up and demand’s going down. Okay. Just take it and unload it and bring it back right here. Alrighty. All right, sweetheart. Have a happy Thanksgiving. You too. And thank you. Canned foods, things like that, aren’t as many as they used to be, as well as the meat. We used to get, I think, two to three sometimes. And sometimes it’s been down to one to none. Tamara Kuhlman has been unable to work since being diagnosed with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. She’s depended on this pantry to feed her family for the past few years. We rely on this. If we miss it, we wouldn’t eat. —Thank you so much. —You’re welcome. It hurts a little bit not to be able to give her fresh produce, fresh fruit, things that’s gonna help her heal in her journey. So we used to give out onions and apples and things like that, but now we’ve reverted to the junk food. Chips, candy, things that’s not, you know, a hundred percent nutritional. It’s not good for them, but it’s kind of this or starve. We need relief somewhere. We need something to give. We need to know that it’s gonna get better. And right now it doesn’t look — it looks like it’s getting worse. It’s just bleak. More cuts are coming next year. More than two million Americans are set to lose access to food stamps under the president’s new domestic policy agenda. The largest tax cut in American history, the largest spending cut, 1.7 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, Jennifer is bracing to feed even more hungry neighbors, many of whom she says voted for President Trump. A lot of people went by what Trump said. Now people want to change their mind and it’s too late. You know, we have to suffer the consequences. More people are going to depend on us, but we don’t have anyone to depend on to get the food from or to get the funding from.
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