End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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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) ‘Voodoo Rituals’ and Banana Wars: U.S. Military Action in Latin America
The United States’ history in the region includes several about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
By Helene Cooper, Reporting from Washington, Dec. 9, 2025
The United States’ history in the region includes several about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
A U.S. military helicopter flying over burning buildings in Panama City in December 1989.Associated Press
President Trump, who recently pardoned a former Latin American leader for his drug-trafficking conviction, is considering direct military action against another, whom he accuses of sending drugs and criminals to the United States.
Latin America is used to interference by its behemoth neighbor. In fact, the U.S. military’s modern history in the region is filled with about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
There were the tamales in Panama that U.S. troops insisted were cocaine. A futile monthslong odyssey through the scrub of Mexico to find a certain former ally turned revolutionary foe. And that doesn’t include the C.I.A.’s adventures in the region or the Iran-contra affair, a political scandal so convoluted that it cannot fit in the confines of this article.
Now, the U.S. military is killing scores of people on vessels in the Caribbean Sea, accusing them of smuggling drugs, as Mr. Trump increases pressure on President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Here is a look at some other examples of the U.S. military’s efforts at regime change in Latin America.
1898
Cuba
The Spanish-American War in 1898 led to a number of U.S. interventions in Latin America, particularly in Cuba.
The U.S.S. Maine was sent to Havana that January on a stated mission of protecting American citizens. After a mysterious explosion sank the battleship a month later, the United States began a naval blockade of Cuba and went to war with Spain. That campaign expanded to Puerto Rico, and then reached the Pacific to include the Philippines and Guam.
The war ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, signed in December, which ceded ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States. Spain also relinquished control of Cuba.
Marines had landed in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in June 1898 and moved swiftly through the island. It was the start of a long period of Marine involvement in conflicts in Central America and the Caribbean, which came to be known as the Banana Wars.
“Before the Second World War, this is what the Marine Corps did,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser with the Central for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel. “Their bread and butter was destabilizing and overthrowing governments in Latin America.”
1912
Nicaragua
Nicaragua was in the middle of a revolt against its right-leaning and pro-American president when Marines landed in the country on a stated mission to preserve U.S. interests. This quickly turned into a direct military intervention and began 21 years of occupation of Nicaragua as part of the Banana Wars.
Tensions were high between the United States and Mexico in 1914, as the latter underwent political upheaval fomented by the former. The year before, the United States had worked to overthrow a Mexican president in favor of another who was viewed as more pro-American, leading to a coup d’état, only to turn around and withdraw support for the new president, backing the bandit and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa to depose him.
Then came the I’m-sorry-I’m-not-sorry squabble. The Mexican government arrested nine American sailors in April 1914 for entering an off-limits fuel-loading station in Tampico, on the country’s east coast. Mexico released the sailors, but the United States demanded an apology and a 21-gun salute. Mexico agreed to the apology but not the salute.
President Woodrow Wilson ordered a naval blockade of the Port of Veracruz, to the south. But before that could be carried out, he discovered an arms shipment heading to Mexico in violation of an American arms embargo. The U.S. Navy seized the Port of Veracruz, occupying it for seven months.
1915
Haiti
After President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam of Haiti was assassinated (shortly after ordering the execution of 167 political prisoners), Wilson sent Marines to the country. The stated mission was to restore order and stabilize Haiti’s turbulence, which had been fueled in part by U.S. actions such as the seizure of its gold reserves over debts.
The Marines stayed almost 20 years, finally withdrawing in 1934.
1915
Mexico
Remember Pancho Villa? By 1915, the United States had turned against him and was providing rail transportation for anti-Villa forces. That angered Villa, who started attacking American troops, citizens and their property in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.
On March 9, 1916, Villa’s troops attacked a U.S. Army post in New Mexico, killing eight soldiers and 10 civilians, wounding eight more people, and stealing horses, mules and machine guns.
Wilson sent U.S. Army troops into Mexico to find Villa “with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays,” according to a military statement. They searched for almost a year but did not find him, and returned home in 1917. Villa eventually retired and was killed in 1923 in an ambush led by Jesús Salas Barraza, who claimed his motivation was a dispute with Villa over a woman.
The futile American hunt turned Pancho Villa into something of a folk hero in Mexico. “Whenever the U.S. became an arbiter of internal affairs, it skewed the politics,” said Miguel R. Tinker Salas, a professor emeritus of history and Latino studies at Pomona College.
The United States accused the government of Grenada of building an airport that would project Soviet power in the region, claiming that its long runway could enable the Soviet Union to land giant transport planes capable of moving weapons.
A political leadership crisis in Grenada that fall eventually led to the execution of its prime minister. The military announced a curfew and said anyone on the streets in violation of the order would be shot on sight.
At dawn on Oct. 25, President Ronald Reagan sent 7,600 troops, including two Army Ranger battalions, the 82nd Airborne, the Marines, Delta commandos and Navy SEALs, supported by American warplanes and Army helicopters. His stated reason was to protect 600 American medical students in the island country.
The U.S. troops made quick work of 1,500 Grenadian soldiers involved in the initial defense of the country, and within a few days most of the resistance was gone. Grenada’s military government was overthrown, and an interim one was installed. On Nov. 3, Reagan announced the mission was successfully completed.
Gen. Manuel Noriega, the military leader of Panama, had longstanding ties to the C.I.A. and to its director, George H.W. Bush, who would be elected president. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the United States paid General Noriega to help sabotage the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the F.M.L.N. revolutionaries in El Salvador. He also worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to restrict illegal drug shipments — and laundered drug money as a side hustle.
But around 1986, news reports surfaced in the American media about the criminal activities of General Noriega, who was now the military dictator of Panama. Mr. Reagan asked the general to step down; he refused. American courts indicted him on drug-related charges. General Noriega soured on the United States and started asking for and receiving military aid from Cuba, Nicaragua and Libya, which were Soviet-bloc countries.
The general survived attempted coups and a disputed election. On Dec. 15, 1989, Panama’s General Assembly passed a resolution declaring a state of war with the United States.
The next night, four U.S. service members were stopped at a roadblock in Panama; one was shot and killed. Mr. Bush ordered in U.S. troops to remove General Noriega.
And so arrives the story of the tamales.
Shortly after U.S. troops arrived in Panama, in late December 1989, they announced that they had found 50 pounds of cocaine in a guesthouse used by General Noriega. The head of U.S. Southern Command raised the amount found to 110 pounds.
The next month, the Pentagon issued a retraction. A department spokesman told reporters that the department had been supplied with “less than satisfactory” information by troops in Panama. The cocaine, he said, was actually tamales.
“It’s a bonding material,” The Los Angeles Times quoted Maj. Kathy Wood as saying. She added, helpfully, “It’s a substance they use in voodoo rituals.”
1994
Haiti
Sixty years after their first trip to Haiti, the Marines were back, this time with Army troops, after President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. military to restore to power President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been democratically elected and quickly overthrown.
Ten years later, Mr. Aristide was out of favor with Washington and ousted in a coup orchestrated by the United States and France, which had colonized the country.
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2) $27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That?
By Zack Cooper, Dec. 10, 2025
Dr. Cooper is an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale.
…(if the U.S. health system were a country, in dollar terms, it would be the third-largest economy in the world)”
The New York Times
The debate over whether to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies has consumed lawmakers over the past two months, precipitated a government shutdown and sparked Republican infighting. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong debate.
While I believe we should extend the subsidies, which expire at the end of the month, to help families pay their insurance premiums, doing so wouldn’t fix the underlying problem: surging health care spending. That’s the reason we need the subsidies in the first place, and it’s bankrupting families and shredding jobs for low- and middle-income workers across the economy.
Just how bad is it? The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream.
Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).
Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve.
That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality.
Americans spend more on health care than other countries because we pay higher prices for identical goods and services, are quicker to adopt new and costly medical technology (whether or not it is cost effective) and have higher administrative costs in our complex, decentralized system. Health care markets have consolidated so much that in many regions, hospitals and other providers can charge near-monopoly prices. The fact that we pay providers per service delivered (rather than a fixed salary) also plays a role.
Next year insurance premiums will increase 10 percent for employer-sponsored plans and 18 percent for individual plans on the exchanges compared with 2025. In both markets, they’re going up because the price of medical care is rising (think hospital mergers, staffing shortages and tariffs that make drugs and devices more expensive) and Americans are increasingly using expensive weight loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. The exchange plans are seeing a sharper increase than employer plans because of the uncertainty lawmakers created over whether the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended. Insurers had to factor in the risk that healthier people would be less likely to buy insurance if the subsidies expired, which would lead to a sicker insurance risk pool and higher costs.
I wish there were a simple way to lower U.S. health spending. It’s easy to come up with ideas for what a better health system would look like if we could start from scratch. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of our system (if the U.S. health system were a country, in dollar terms, it would be the third-largest economy in the world) means there are no silver bullet solutions. Reform involves trade-offs. One person’s health care spending is another person’s health care income — profits, jobs and paychecks for the tens of millions of people who work in the health care sector. And some higher spending does lead to better care. As long as they’re in competitive markets, higher-priced hospitals deliver higher quality care. Slowing health spending would create winners and losers, which makes the politics of reform tricky.
If America is serious about lowering health spending, lawmakers need to pursue three paths of reform in parallel. First, we should fix existing policies that are plainly inefficient. For example, as a result of Medicare payment rules created in the 1980s, the government program pays more (sometimes double) for care delivered in a hospital or hospital-owned doctor’s practice versus in an independent doctor-owned practice, even if the care is identical. That makes it more profitable for doctors to merge their practice with hospitals than remain independent. These mergers give doctors and hospitals bargaining power and drive up prices and insurance premiums. To its credit, the Trump administration recently introduced policies that could save $10 billion over the next decade by requiring Medicare to pay hospitals the same rate they pay physicians to administer drugs, such as chemotherapy.
Second, there are numerous meaningful reforms that don’t involve wholesale change and could be introduced now. I run a project called the 1% Steps for Health Reform that identifies discrete interventions that could lower the cost of health care without adversely affecting quality. Enacting 10 reforms, each of which could lower health spending about 1 percent or less, would together have a big impact: more than $250 billion annually, substantially greater than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security. One such reform is to make it easier for people to donate kidneys — which would improve recipients’ health and save billions of dollars in Medicare spending on dialysis.
Finally, policymakers should explore the design and feasibility of larger structural reforms to the U.S. health system that could be introduced over a decade. These ideas include decoupling health insurance from employment, broadly regulating the prices hospitals and other providers negotiate with insurers, creating a very basic, but universal insurance coverage program and, yes, even Medicare for all. It is not enough, however, to describe what an idealized U.S. health system would look like. Serious exploration requires tangible solutions that are politically feasible and won’t tank the economy.
During the government shutdown, one idea that briefly surfaced was a bipartisan commission to study ways to lower health care spending. That commission shouldn’t be a footnote; it’s essential. At the same time, the real pain families are feeling requires extending the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, at least temporarily. Americans have high premiums because elected officials have ducked the tough choices needed to rein in spending. Lower- and middle-income people shouldn’t be stuck paying for that failure. But subsidies alone aren’t a solution; they simply buy us time. The point is to use that time to build a system in which coverage is affordable because care is affordable. That would take political courage and an American public willing to reward leaders who choose to compromise and work together.
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3) Supreme Court Hears Death Penalty Case on Intellectual Disability
The case involves an Alabama man who challenged his death sentence after a murder conviction because of his varying results in a series of I.Q. tests.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, Dec. 10, 2025
Two decades ago, the Supreme Court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But the court’s composition has changed since then. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
The Supreme Court will revisit on Wednesday how states assess intellectual disabilities to decide which capital defendants should be spared the death penalty.
The justices will hear arguments in an Alabama case that involves how I.Q. tests should be used to assess mental capacity. It comes two decades after the court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
That ruling, in Atkins v. Virginia, gave states leeway to determine their own processes for deciding who was intellectually disabled. It led to follow-up cases from Florida and Texas in which the court further limited capital punishment.
But the composition of the Supreme Court has changed since then with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, in 2020 and the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was part of a coalition with the liberal wing that generally supported narrowing the use of the death penalty. They were replaced by two nominees of President Trump, who cemented the court’s conservative supermajority.
The issue in the Alabama case the justices hear on Wednesday is how states and lower courts should evaluate cases in which defendants have taken I.Q. tests multiple times and received varying results, as well as the extent to which they must consider a broader evaluation of evidence in deciding if a person is disabled.
The case deals with Joseph Clifton Smith, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering a man he planned to rob in 1997. In the years before and after the murder, Mr. Smith took five I.Q. tests with scores ranging from 72 to 78. The key part of Alabama’s law on mental disability turns on whether defendants score 70 or lower on the test. But a lower court found Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled, in part because the tests have a margin of error.
The outcome will likely determine whether Mr. Smith is executed or spends the rest of his life on death row. It also has implications for how courts apply the death penalty in other states. Medical and disability groups have warned that a narrow, test-focused approach conflicts with past Supreme Court rulings and could increase the risk that people with intellectual disabilities are executed.
Mr. Smith’s legal team, led by former solicitor general Seth P. Waxman, told the court in filings that when I.Q. scores are “inconclusive, courts must consider other evidence regarding intellectual functioning.”
Twenty-seven states permit the death penalty, but they differ in how exactly they determine intellectual disability.
Rather than focusing on one low I.Q. score to allow a defendant to be spared from execution, the state says officials should be allowed to consider the cumulative effect of multiple scores. In court filings, Attorney General Steve Marshall of Alabama told the justices that Mr. Smith’s tests, viewed together, demonstrated he was not intellectually disabled.
The Trump administration, which lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in January, is supporting the state and will participate in Wednesday’s arguments. D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said the Supreme Court’s past decisions do not require states to ignore a defendant’s complete range of test scores.
“Similar to polling in an election, multiple I.Q. test scores often produce a more accurate image than any single test score does in isolation,” the administration said in a court filing.
Wednesday’s case began when Mr. Smith challenged his death sentence, saying he could not be executed because he was mentally disabled.
As a child, Mr. Smith was physically abused by his father and stepfather, according to court records. He struggled in school and was assigned to a special class for students with intellectual disabilities.
Mr. Smith dropped out of school after failing seventh and eighth grades and spent much of the next 15 years in prison. At 19, he went to prison for six years for burglary. He was released on parole but was found to have violated the terms of his release and returned to prison, before being released again just two days before the murder.
That day, Mr. Smith and a partner lured Durk Van Dam, who they had heard was carrying cash, to an isolated area in the woods in Mobile County, where they attacked him with a hammer and saw, according to court records. After beating him to death, they stole $140, and Mr. Smith took Mr. Van Dam’s boots and pawned the tools from his truck, the records show.
Under Alabama law, to avoid execution, defendants like Mr. Smith are required to show “significant subaverage intellectual functioning at the time the crime was committed, to show significant deficits in adaptive behavior at the time the crime was committed, and to show that these problems manifested themselves before the defendant reached the age of 18.”
After lengthy litigation in state and federal court, a district court judge in 2021 found that Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled. When a score is close to, but higher than 70, the judge said he “must be allowed to present additional evidence of intellectual disability.”
With even one score of 72, the judge noted that it could mean I.Q. was actually as low as 69 because of the standard error of measurement. The district court judge also found Mr. Smith deficient in social, interpersonal skills, self-direction, independent living, and academics.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed the ruling, citing two earlier Supreme Court decisions that said that when a test score, adjusted for the margin of error, is 70 or less, the defendant must be able to provide additional evidence of intellectual disability.
In response to an earlier request from the Supreme Court in the matter, the 11th Circuit said its finding was based on a “holistic approach” and review of evidence — not just a single low score.
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4) U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela
The seizure comes as the United States builds up its forces in the Caribbean as part of a campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
By Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Nehamas, Reporting from Washington, Published Dec. 10, 2025, Updated Dec. 11, 2025
The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was “a large tanker, very large,” adding, without elaboration, that “other things are happening.”
When asked about the ship’s oil, Mr. Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” He declined to say who owned the tanker. “It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement operation, said the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil. They said there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.
In a statement, Venezuela’s government called the seizure a “barefaced robbery and an act of international piracy” aimed at stripping the country of its oil wealth.
The operation was the latest tactic in an expanding effort to squeeze Venezuela and pressure Mr. Maduro. The Trump administration has accused him of running a “narcoterrorist” cartel sending drugs to the United States, although many current and former officials in Washington say the campaign is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Since September, the United States has launched more than 22 known strikes against boats in the region, killing more than 80 people. The Trump administration insists, without publicly providing evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs. Legal experts say the strikes may violate international law.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video on Wednesday evening on social media showing armed U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of the tanker. The video could not be independently verified.
Ms. Bondi said the operation included the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard, supported by the Pentagon. She said the tanker had been used to transport “sanctioned oil” from Venezuela and Iran.
The U.S. officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks as part of the administration’s efforts to weaken Mr. Maduro’s government by undermining its oil market.
One of the officials identified the tanker as a vessel called the Skipper, and said it was carrying Venezuelan oil from Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company known as PDVSA. The official said the ship had been previously linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil — a global black market that the Justice Department has been investigating for years. The vessel was sailing under the flag of another Latin American nation in which it was not registered, the official said, and its ultimate destination was Asia.
A federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government, the official said. Prosecutors have said that Iran uses money generated from oil sales to finance its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has designated a terrorist entity.
The administration did not address many details about the operation, including what happened to the crew and what ultimately will happen to the ship. It was not clear whether the seizure warrant — which is sealed — was for the ship or the oil or both. The White House did not immediately respond when asked whether the United States had the legal authority to keep the oil.
The ship, under a different name, had been put under sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2022. U.S. officials said it was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support Hezbollah and Iran’s revolutionary guard force.
The tanker may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data before the seizure, according to an analysis of satellite imagery and photographs by The New York Times.
The Navy, the Coast Guard, Southern Command and the Pentagon all declined to discuss the episode, referring questions to the White House.
Venezuela is exceptionally dependent on oil, which makes these kinds of seizures potentially damaging to the country’s fragile economy. Oil accounts for the bulk of the country’s export revenues. In turn, Venezuela’s government spends much of the proceeds from oil exports to import basic necessities like food and medicine.
Although Venezuela is believed to have colossal untapped oil reserves, the country produces far less oil than it did at the start of the century, after mismanagement, U.S. sanctions and corruption at PDVSA hobbled output.
The United States was long the largest buyer of Venezuela’s oil, but political tensions have eroded those ties. China now buys roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s overall oil exports.
Smaller amounts of Venezuelan oil are exported to the United States, often to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and to Cuba, where the island nation’s Communist leaders have long relied on such cargoes to provide a semblance of economic stability.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has ordered a huge buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 troops and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Trump has authorized covert action against Venezuela and has warned that the United States could “very soon” expand its attacks from boats off the Venezuelan coast to targets inside the country. But Mr. Trump has also recently spoken by phone with Mr. Maduro about a possible meeting. The president said on Wednesday that he had not spoken to Mr. Maduro since their last conversation.
The administration has developed a range of options for military action in the country, including targeting Mr. Maduro and seizing control of the country’s oil fields. The president has repeatedly expressed reservations about an operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail. Mr. Trump has been in no rush to make a decision, though he has shown a particular interest in extracting some of the value of Venezuela’s oil for the United States.
The oil tanker operation came on the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was formally bestowed on a Venezuelan dissident, María Corina Machado. She was not at the ceremony on Wednesday in Oslo, where her daughter received the prize on her behalf, but the Nobel Peace Prize committee said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo.
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5) A federal judge in Maryland orders Abrego Garcia’s release from ICE detention.
By Alan Feuer, Legal issues reporter, December 11, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March, saying it was “troubling” that the Trump administration had kept him in custody for nearly four months while promising to re-expel him from the country without actually having done so.
The ruling by the judge, Paula Xinis, was a stinging defeat for the administration in a long and byzantine saga that over the past year has transformed Mr. Abrego Garcia from an unknown Salvadoran migrant living in Maryland into one of the best-known symbols of President Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Judge Xinis’s ruling, issued in Federal District Court in Maryland, meant that Mr. Abrego Garcia would be both free from immigration custody and, at least for now, out from under the immediate shadow of being deported from the country yet again.
But while the ruling was a stern rebuke of how Trump officials have handled Mr. Abrego Garcia’s multiple, intersecting cases, it was unlikely to be the final word in his story. The Justice Department could appeal the decision, and administration officials could also seek to open a new immigration proceeding against him.
Moreover, Mr. Abrego Garcia is still facing separate criminal charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants in a different court altogether in Nashville.
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6) U.S. Issues New Sanctions Targeting Maduro’s Family and the Oil Sector
The United States is escalating its pressure campaign on Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, after seizing an oil tanker off the coast.
By Nicholas Nehamas, Tyler Pager, Farnaz Fassihi and Alan Rappeport, Dec. 11, 2025
President Nicolás Maduro during a rally in Caracas on Wednesday. Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
The United States on Thursday issued new sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and on members of President Nicolás Maduro’s family, while taking steps to keep tens of millions of dollars’ worth of oil from a large tanker that U.S. forces seized off the country’s coast.
Venezuela’s economy depends on oil and has been hurt by U.S. sanctions, leading Mr. Maduro’s government to smuggle and sell crude through a web of tankers and middlemen. The new sanctions target three nephews of the wife of Mr. Maduro and six shipping companies.
Separately, the Trump administration is seeking the legal authority to seize the oil from the Skipper, a tanker that U.S. forces boarded and took possession of on Wednesday in international waters near Venezuela, according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. The oil had come from a state-owned Venezuelan company. American authorities have so far obtained a seizure warrant for the tanker — saying that it had been used in the past to smuggle Iranian oil — but not for the cargo currently on board.
“There is a legal process for the seizure of that oil, and that legal process will be followed,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House on Thursday.
Together, the sanctions and the seizure of the Skipper represent a new front in President Trump’s campaign to destabilize Mr. Maduro’s regime. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of operating a “narcoterrorist” cartel and has authorized a series of deadly military strikes against boats that he has said, without publicly providing evidence, are smuggling drugs. Many current and former officials in Washington say the military buildup in the region is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Later in the day, Mr. Trump suggested that immigration was one of the factors that prompted the tanker seizure, saying that Venezuela had “allowed millions of people to come into our country.”
And he reiterated past warnings about a greater escalation.
“It’s going to be starting on land pretty soon,” he said of strikes in Venezuela.
The U.S. government’s actions this week most likely will reduce the number of tankers that are willing to load oil in Venezuela, further isolating a country that depends heavily on the revenue it receives from exporting the fossil fuel. But there was little immediate effect on oil prices, which remained around $58 a barrel in the United States. The market is unfazed because Venezuela produces little oil, less than 1 percent of what the world uses.
New details emerged on Thursday about the seized oil tanker, including about its crew, which is mainly from Russia, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. American authorities have asked the crew to sail the Skipper to the United States, but they have another crew on standby if needed, the official said.
The tanker has a capacity of 2 million barrels. It was loaded nearly full at a Venezuelan port about a month ago, according to data collected by Kpler, a company that monitors global oil shipping. The value of the oil carried by the Skipper amounted to roughly $78 million, said Francisco Rodríguez, an economist at the University of Denver.
The ship may have recently tried to hide its location and disguise its activities, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery and photographs, reflecting the shadowy world of smuggling in which it is said to operate.
On Dec. 6, the Skipper conducted a ship-to-ship transfer in the open seas near Curaçao, offloading about 50,000 barrels of oil onto another tanker called the Neptune 6, according to Kpler, as well as TankerTrackers.com, a company that provides similar services.
Neptune 6 is currently headed to Cuba, said Homayoun Falakshahi, Kpler’s head of oil analysis.
The use of U.S. military and law enforcement forces to seize a foreign oil tanker on the high seas is unusual. But the Skipper had been on the radar of the U.S. government for several years, as part of a so-called ghost fleet that smuggles black market oil around the world. Venezuela and Iran have each made extensive use of such ships to smuggle oil and evade international sanctions.
In recent years, the Skipper has sailed the globe transporting oil for both Iran and Venezuela, according to ship tracking data from TankerTrackers.com and Kpler and analysis by The Times.
In 2022, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Skipper, then sailing under a different name, for smuggling illicit Iranian oil. U.S. prosecutors have said Iran uses the profits from oil sales to fund terrorism. That designation allowed the United States to seize the vessel on Wednesday.
“The Department of Justice requested and was approved for a warrant to seize a vessel because it’s a sanctioned shadow vessel known for carrying black-market sanctioned oil” for Iran, Ms. Leavitt said at the White House on Thursday.
Despite the legal basis for the seizure relating to Iran, U.S. officials have made clear that their actions were designed to pressure Venezuela and that they could seize more tankers carrying Venezuelan oil in the future.
Among the moves by the Trump administration to squeeze Venezuela are the sanctions announced on Thursday.
Two of the Maduro nephews who were put under sanctions were arrested in Haiti in 2015 as they were finalizing a deal to transport a shipment of cocaine to the United States. The men, whom the Treasury referred to as “narco-nephews,” were convicted in 2016 on drug trafficking charges but were granted clemency in 2022 by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and returned to Venezuela, where, according to the Treasury Department, they continued trafficking drugs.
The sanctions also hit Venezuela’s economy by blacklisting six shipping companies — Myra Marine Limited, Arctic Voyager Incorporated, Poweroy Investment Limited, Ready Great Limited, Sino Marine Services Limited and Full Happy Limited — that have vessels transporting Venezuelan oil.
The targeted ships were “blocked” by the Treasury Department, impeding them from doing international business, although it was not clear if the U.S. planned to seize them.
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero in Bogotá, Colombia; Christiaan Triebert and Rebecca F. Elliott in New York; and Eric Schmitt and Chris Cameron in Washington.
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7) Troops Involved in Boat Strikes Face a ‘Moral Injury’ Risk, Experts Say
Troops who play a part in deadly missions that they see as wrong or unjustified may suffer deep psychological harm as a result, research has shown.
By Dave Philipps, Dec. 12, 2025
Each deadly strike involves numerous military personnel who may be at risk of psychological harm. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The Trump administration’s missile strikes against boats that it says are carrying drugs have drawn fierce criticism from legal experts and from some members of Congress, who say that the killing of unarmed civilians in international waters is illegal and amounts to little more than summary execution.
Congress has convened classified hearings, and legal groups have sued to force the administration to release secret memos authorizing the strikes.
But amid all the high-level debate, little public attention has been given to how the strikes affect the low-level people who have to carry them out. For those people, decades of research has shown, the emotional effects of this kind of killing can be devastating.
Participating in killing — even killing seen remotely on a video screen — can leave deep psychological wounds and lead to long-lasting struggles. If the person perceives the killing as morally wrong or unjustified, the effect can be even greater. The Department of Veterans Affairs sees the problem often enough that it has a name: “Moral injury.”
It stems from feelings of intense guilt or shame that can lead to a number of psychological problems, including an increased risk of suicide. It is amplified when the person feels betrayed by an institution or leader that they believed in.
In the boat strikes, hundreds of military personnel could be affected.
When the Trump administration orders a missile strike on a boat speeding across the Caribbean Sea, executing the order isn’t as simple as having an admiral push a red button.
There are intelligence teams using surveillance drones and satellites to track boat traffic. Specialists to intercept radio and cellphone communications, and linguists to translate them. Analysts to sift through intelligence for potential targets, and targeters to call for a strike on a specific boat.
If the strike is carried out by an armed drone, there are sensor operators to aim the drone’s targeting laser, and a drone pilot who ultimately launches the missile. High-definition video footage is beamed to big screens in operations centers, where command teams and their staffs watch every move.
All of those troops, experts say, are at risk of psychological harm from participating in killings that they may see as legally dubious or morally appalling.
“Killing someone is the biggest, most consequential moral decision a person can make,” said Peter Kilner, who was an Army infantry officer for 15 years and then taught ethics at West Point. “Even in the best circumstances, it can be a heavy load to carry, and this is far from the best circumstances.”
Mr. Kilner, who has studied moral injury for more than two decades, said participants in the boat strikes might be at increased risk of moral injuries because the remote-control strikes against unarmed people appeared to fall short of what the military has long held to be moral, ethical and legal.
No service members have come out publicly with concerns, and there is no evidence they have gone privately to members of Congress or other authorities.
But Mr. Kilner said troops often express few misgivings in the heat of the moment. “It can take hold much later, after everyone else has moved on,” he added. “There is a deep feeling of being tarnished, unworthy. People can really struggle.”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former infantry platoon leader, seemed to recognize the risk of asking troops to operate beyond ethical and legal boundaries in 2016, when Donald Trump was calling for the use of torture and the killing of terrorists’ families as he ran for office.
“He says, go ahead and kill the families,” Mr. Hegseth said on Fox News in 2016. “Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding. What happens when people follow those orders, or don’t follow them?”
No evidence has come to light of widespread misgivings among the troops carrying out the boat strikes, nor are any of them known to have refused orders. Because the operations are classified, it would be illegal for the troops to speak out publicly about them.
The troops who do this work are trained to execute orders quickly with little discussion. The orders come from “the customer,” military jargon for whichever command authority requests the mission. For at least some of the boat strikes, the customer has been SEAL Team Six, which reports to Adm. Frank Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, and to Mr. Hegseth.
Military personnel have little if any say over the assignments they get or the orders they receive. Unlike civilians, they cannot simply quit their jobs. And in almost all circumstances, refusing an order is a crime that can lead to prison time.
Military personnel are allowed — and, in fact, are obliged — to refuse illegal orders. But to do so would probably result in swift punishment, while determining the actual legality of the order could drag on in court for months or years, according to Brenner Fissell, a law professor at Villanova University.
When a legally dubious order is given, he said, “the individual is in a horrible bind: If they refuse, they will likely immediately be charged with a crime, maybe put in jail. At some point, maybe, a judge may realize they were right, but at that point they have lost their job and become an outcast.
“There is huge incentive to just obey, even if you deeply, deeply don’t agree with what is happening.”
Mr. Frissell helps run the Orders Project, an organization that connects troops with independent lawyers who can advise them. Such groups say a small number of troops have contacted them with concerns, but none wanted to voice them publicly.
The quick video clips of fiery missile strikes that Mr. Hegseth has posted on social media can make the operations seem like a video game. Military personnel see something much more real.
The teams that manage airstrikes often watch potential targets for days beforehand. They may see a boat crew loading drugs, but they may also see them hug their children before casting off. After a strike, trained analysts view the aftermath — often in high-definition color — to determine how many people were wounded, how many were killed, and how many were civilians. That may mean watching people slowly die.
In the first of the boat strikes, two wounded survivors clung to the wreckage for nearly an hour and signaled for help before a second missile was ordered, killing them.
Because moral injury depends on each person’s individual sense of right and wrong, the same experience can hit people in different ways.
“You don’t know how it’s going to affect you until you’ve actually been in the seat and done the job,” said Bennet Miller a former Air Force intelligence analyst who worked on drone strikes in Syria and Iraq during the first Trump administration.
At that time, Mr. Trump had changed the rules governing airstrikes to loosen oversight. Large teams worked for a top secret task force, which was allowed to hit targets more often than before, based on less intelligence. The task force repeatedly ordered strikes, that hit homes and stores, people on the street and throngs of civilians seeking safety.
There was no public outcry at the time from troops working on the missions, but privately, people started to break down. Some wept. Some turned to drugs. Many left the career field as soon as their assignments were over.
In recent years the Air Force has assigned psychologists and chaplains to many drone units, in recognition of the persistent problems. Southern Command, which oversees the boat strikes, did not immediately respond to questions about how it planned to address the risk of moral injury.
Mr. Bennet said his work started to haunt him after his team followed an Afghan man who the customer said was a top Taliban financier. They watched him dine with his family and play with his children. Then one morning as he walked out of his house, the customer gave the order to kill him.
A week later, the same name reappeared on the strike list, and Mr. Bennet realized his team had been ordered to kill the wrong person. Similar mistakes happened twice more with other targets, he said.
“We could no longer trust that the intelligence was good,” he said.
Mr. Bennett said he had felt trapped, unable to refuse work that he believed was wrong. Eventually, he became suicidal and was hospitalized in 2019, and the Air Force medically retired him.
He said in an interview that his thoughts have lately been with the many people who have to carry out the boat strikes.
“I just hope they are getting taken care of,” he said. “And if they do raise concerns about the mission, hopefully someone can pull them off the line to get help, rather than punish them.”
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8) Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.
By Dana Goldstein, Dec. 12, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html
"In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html
“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.” — Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston
“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.” — Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.
“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’” — Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.
In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.
Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.
Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.
Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.
We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.
More than 2,000 people responded.
Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.
Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.
Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.
These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.
Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.
By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book.
Andrew Polk, 26, teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, not far from where he grew up. As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.
He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”
When whole books are assigned, they are most often from a relatively stagnant list of classics, according to research from the scholars Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.
Here are the most frequently assigned books through the past six decades, according to their forthcoming study.
1963:
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884; Hamlet William Shakespeare 1623; Julius Caesar William Shakespeare 1599; Macbeth William Shakespeare 1623; The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850; A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859; Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1861; Our Town Thornton Wilder 1938; The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895; Silas Marner George Eliot 1861.
What may have changed most is the number of these classics students have read. During the 2008-2009 school year, one survey found high school English teachers assigned an average of four books annually, with a significant minority assigning seven or more books.
A 2024 survey of English teachers by Dr. Perrillo and Dr. Newman found they assigned an average of 2.7 whole books per year. The results will be published in 2026.
Some educators explained the decline by pointing toward the Common Core, a set of national standards for English and math that most states adopted in the early 2010s, and that continues to heavily shape classroom practice.
The Core was intended to better prepare students for college, and introduced more nonfiction reading and thesis-driven writing into schools. It also suggested a more culturally diverse array of authors, and pointed educators toward a long list of titles characterized by “historical and literary significance.”
Many school districts responded by requiring teachers to closely adhere to curriculum products that took an anthology approach — exposing students to dozens of writers and many genres, but through shorter readings. StudySync, for example, includes a single chapter of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” 1,179 words of “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah and James Madison’s “Federalist Papers: No. 10.”
Sandra Lightman, an education consultant who helped to develop the Common Core, agreed that students should be reading whole books but argued it was wrong to blame the Core, which she said had been misinterpreted.
Advocates for the Core had pointed out that some novels commonly assigned to teenagers, like “The Grapes of Wrath,” were not challenging in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. They were akin to a second- or third-grade reading level, despite being thematically rich.
“We never intended that should be banned, only that it shouldn’t be the sole source of reading,” Dr. Lightman said. She argued that overall, curriculum products include higher-quality, more interesting reading material today than they did 20 years ago, before the Common Core.
There are other reasons some schools prefer excerpts. It can be more expensive to purchase books than to assign a variety of shorter works, which are not subject to copyright restrictions and can be easily read on a laptop or tablet.
In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes.
Laura Henry, the teacher in Houston, noted that StudySync offers a 988-word excerpt from “Enemies, a Love Story,” a darkly comic 1972 novel by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels. The current dominant approach — reading one or two full books per year as a class, alongside many excerpts — “makes great sense,” he said, as a way to introduce students to a wide array of writing.
Still, some young adults are frustrated by the lack of book reading in their schools.
Ella Harrigan, 22, of San Francisco, said she read only one book her freshman year, “The Hate U Give.” “I opted out and did an online course instead, where I read a book about every two weeks,” she said.
Parents who responded to the questionnaire complained, too, even when their children were enrolled in advanced classes at some of the most highly regarded public schools in America, including specialized high schools in New York City and affluent suburban schools in Montgomery County, Md.
Both districts said they encourage a mix of whole books and excerpts but give high school principals and teachers significant latitude in how often to assign longer works.
Kasey Gray, a spokeswoman for Imagine Learning, the company that develops StudySync, noted that the curriculum offers some units based on full-length novels. But Ms. Gray acknowledged schools using the program may not incorporate whole books.
“We understand the real constraints educators face — limited time, assessment pressures and diverse student needs,” she said in a statement.
StudySync is distributed by McGraw Hill, and the materials come with a disclaimer of sorts:
Please note that excerpts in the StudySync® library are intended as touchstones to generate interest in an author’s work. StudySync® believes that such passages do not substitute for the reading of entire texts and strongly recommends that students seek out and purchase the whole literary or informational work.
Companies that publish competing products centered on excerpts, including Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said they, too, encouraged teachers to assign whole books.
H.M.H.’s Into Literature includes one full-length play in each year of high school. In response to requests from school districts, the company is developing more daily lesson plans built around whole novels, said Jennifer Raimi, a senior vice president for product development.
There are many schools, educators and publishers defying the trend away from whole books — even if they have to bend the rules to do so.
“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque. Over the past year, she has assigned her juniors and seniors “Hamlet,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Life of Pi” and “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
Her students, she said, have told her they much prefer reading print books than reading on a screen.
There are some smaller players in the curriculum market, like Great Minds and Bookworms, that emphasize full books. So far, much of their business is in younger grade levels. But John White, chief executive of Great Minds, said the company is exploring expanding into high schools.
Dr. White previously served as state superintendent of education in Louisiana. Policymakers can shift classroom practice, he said, by creating new standardized tests that require students to write about books they have read during the school year, instead of just responding to short passages contained within the pages of the test booklet.
A major benefit of a whole class reading a whole novel together is the muscle it builds for citizenship and debating big ideas, Dr. White argued.
“Maybe most important is the common project,” he said, “of engaging other young people in a conversation about a book that is open to multiple interpretations.”
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9) Behind the Seized Venezuelan Tanker, Cuba’s Secret Lifeline
Firms with ties to Cuba are getting a larger share of Venezuelan oil exports, as the island’s security agents boost President Nicolás Maduro’s defenses.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Nicholas Nehamas and Farnaz Fassihi, Published Dec. 12, 2025, Updated Dec. 13, 2025
An oil tanker called the Skipper in the southern Caribbean Sea. It was seized by the United States. Vantor, via Associated Press
The oil tanker seized by the United States off the coast of Venezuela this week was part of the Venezuelan government’s effort to support Cuba, according to documents and people inside the Venezuelan oil industry.
The tanker, which is called Skipper, left Venezuela on Dec. 4, carrying nearly two million barrels of the country’s heavy crude, according to internal data from Venezuela’s state oil company, known as PDVSA. The ship’s destination was listed as the Cuban port of Matanzas, the data shows.
Two days after its departure, Skipper offloaded a small fraction of its oil, an estimated 50,000 barrels, to another ship, called Neptune 6, which then headed north toward Cuba, according to the shipping data firm Kpler. After the transfer, Skipper headed east, toward Asia, with the vast majority of its oil on board, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have for decades sent oil to Cuba at highly subsidized prices, providing a crucial resource at low cost to the impoverished island.
In return, the Cuban government over the years has sent tens of thousands of medics, sports instructors and, increasingly, security professionals on assignments to Venezuela. That exchange has assumed special importance as Mr. Maduro has leaned on Cuban bodyguards and counterintelligence officers to protect himself against the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean.
In recent years, however, only a fraction of Venezuelan oil set aside for Cuba has actually reached the island, according to PDVSA documents and tanker tracking data.
Most of the oil allocated for Cuba has instead been resold to China, with the money providing badly needed hard currency for the Cuban government, according to multiple people close to the Venezuelan government.
Some of that money is believed to have been used by Cuban officials to purchase basic goods, though the opacity of the country’s economy makes it difficult to estimate where that money ends up, or how it is spent, or how much goes to business intermediaries with ties to both governments.
On Friday, Cuban officials condemned the American seizure of the tanker, calling it in a statement an “act of piracy and maritime terrorism” that hurts Cuba and its people.
“This action is part of the U.S. escalation aimed at hampering Venezuela’s legitimate right to freely use and trade its natural resources with other nations, including the supplies of hydrocarbons to Cuba,” the statement said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The main person managing the flow of oil between Cuba and Venezuela is a Panamanian businessman named Ramón Carretero, who in the past few years has become one of the largest traders of Venezuelan oil, according to PDVSA data and people close to Venezuela’s government.
The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mr. Carretero on Thursday for “facilitating shipments of petroleum products on behalf of the Venezuelan government.” Mr. Carretero, through a legal representative, declined to comment on the government’s decision. He did not respond to detailed questions for this article.
Mr. Carretero’s role as an economic intermediary between Cuba and Venezuela was first reported by Armando.info, a Venezuelan investigative news outlet.
Skipper, the seized tanker, was carrying oil jointly contracted by Cubametales, Cuba’s state-run oil trading firm, and an oil trading company tied to Mr. Carretero, PDVSA documents show. Overall, Mr. Carretero’s trading companies have accounted for a quarter of the oil allocated by PDVSA for export this year, the documents show.
Cubametales has won contracts to buy about 65,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan oil so far this year, a 29 percent increase from 2024, and a sevenfold increase from 2023, according to PDVSA documents. The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Cubametales in 2019 for buying Venezuelan oil, a move that formed part of Mr. Trump’s previous standoff with Mr. Maduro during his first administration.
The oil from Venezuela that does reach Cuba generates electricity and provides fuel for airplanes and machinery. But it is not enough to prevent widespread power outages that have plagued the island amid a broader economic crisis.
Skipper’s planned voyage shows how, in practice, Cuba benefits from oil trade in Venezuela. Cubametales, the state-run firm, listed the ship’s destination as Cuba, suggesting that all of the company’s allocated 1.1 million barrels were heading to the island.
The tanker, however, ultimately headed to China after offloading only a small fraction of the oil to the Neptune 6 and sending it en route to Cuba, according to a person close to PDVSA.
Then, on Wednesday, as Skipper sailed east in international waters between the islands of Grenada and Trinidad, it fell into a U.S. ambush.
Armed American law enforcement agents wearing camouflaged combat gear rappelled from a helicopter onto the tanker’s deck on Wednesday, according to a video released by the U.S. government and a U.S. official with knowledge of the operation. The crew offered no resistance, and U.S. officials said there were no casualties.
U.S. officials said they would seek a warrant to seize the oil, valued at tens of millions of dollars, adding that the crew had agreed to sail the vessel under Coast Guard supervision to a U.S. port, likely Galveston, Texas.
The Trump administration and the Venezuelan opposition have long presented Mr. Maduro’s government as a hub for American adversaries, and the dramatic seizure of the Skipper on Wednesday appeared aimed as much at weakening Mr. Maduro’s alliances as it was at cutting his access to funds.
Venezuela’s communications minister, Freddy Ñáñez, called the detention of the tanker the latest example of Washington’s “piracy, kidnapping, theft of private property, extrajudicial executions in international waters.” He did not comment on the detailed questions sent for this article.
The history of Skipper’s voyages points to a larger, looser network connecting the energy industries of Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia, the four American adversaries that have been, to various degrees, shut out from the formal global oil market by Washington’s sanctions.
Skipper’s crew of about 30 sailors was mostly Russian, a U.S. official said.
Before shipping Venezuelan oil, Skipper spent four years as part of Iran’s covert fleet, transporting Iranian oil to Syria and China, according to data from Kpler, the shipping data firm, and a senior Iranian oil ministry official, who discussed sensitive issues on condition of anonymity.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei on Friday condemned Skipper’s seizure, calling it “state sponsored piracy” in comments to local media.
Elsewhere in Venezuela, Iranian contractors have worked on repairing the country’s El Palito and Amuay refineries, according to Homayoun Falakshahi, Kpler’s head oil analyst and an expert on Iran’s energy sector.
Russia supplies Venezuela with key imports of naphtha, a light oil product that Venezuela uses to dilute its sludgy main type of crude and make it suitable for export. A Russian state-run oil company, Rosneft, produces nearly 100,000 barrels a day of crude in Venezuela, and in previous years the company had played a crucial role in exporting Venezuelan oil to China.
These countries’ energy ties have been driven less by shared anti-American sentiment than by commercial opportunities and necessity, according to experts. They have learned from each other how to avoid sanctions and keep oil revenues flowing.
Russia’s ability to build a shadow fleet of tankers and find new oil markets to fund its war in Ukraine, for example, is partly owed to its oil traders’ experience moving sanctioned Venezuelan crude during Mr. Trump’s previous standoff with Mr. Maduro in 2019.
Venezuela, for its part, has learned from Iran, which has worked to evade sanctions imposed by the first Trump administration after it pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018.
Venezuela, Iran and Russia, however, also compete for the Chinese oil market, whose size and clout have allowed it to continue buying crude sanctioned by the United States, said Francisco J. Monaldi, an oil expert at Rice University in Houston.
“It’s like the OPEC of sanctions: These countries have common interests, but also some opposing interests,” Mr. Monaldi said. “Most of the time, it’s just about business.”
Eric Schmitt and Riley Mellen contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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10) Can Trump’s Grand Plans for Gaza Get Off the Drawing Board?
The next steps for the president’s 20-point Gaza peace plan have been mired in uncertainty and a lack of detail, but that may be set to change. Here’s what to know.
By Adam Rasgon, Natan Odenheimer and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 13, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Doha, Qatar, and Tel Aviv; Natan Odenheimer from Tel Aviv; and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
Displaced Palestinians shelter in tents surrounded by destroyed buildings near Gaza City, last month. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Trump administration’s 20-point plan for Gaza includes several new, internationally-backed bodies that would create the conditions for lasting peace, from stabilizing security in the war-torn enclave to laying the groundwork for its future governance without Hamas.
It’s been two months since a cease-fire, and those grand plans have yet to materialize.
The formation of an international force in Gaza has been dogged by concerns that it could lead to foreign troops engaging directly in combat with Hamas. And there has been a lack of clarity about the composition of a proposed transitional government.
Those elements are supposed to be part of the second phase of a cease-fire that came into effect in October, and saw the release of all remaining living hostages held in Gaza in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
As progress on the plans has slowed, Hamas has filled the vacuum in Gaza, where it is rebuilding its presence by the day, according to analysts. For Gazans, the cease-fire has delivered some respite from the fighting, despite frequent flare-ups of violence, though many wonder if their homes will ever be rebuilt.
Securing Gaza
President Trump’s peace plan called for the deployment of an international force to help stabilize Gaza and train Palestinian police officers. Yet exactly how that force would operate has never been made clear, and the uncertainty has delayed its formation.
Some Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have said they hope the force will spearhead efforts to disarm Hamas. In November, the United Nations Security Council passed a U.S.-led resolution that gave an international mandate to such a force, including for “ensuring the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip.”
The U.N. resolution was not explicit about how the force would go about that, and its language could be interpreted to mean that a confrontation with Hamas was possible.
No country has publicly committed to sending troops to Gaza, though Azerbaijan and Indonesia have been named as possible participants in the force.
For Azerbaijan, sending soldiers was out of the question if they would be involved in fighting Hamas, according to an Azeri official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
Some countries have said their soldiers would be there only to maintain the cease-fire in Gaza, and have pushed back on suggestions that they should get involved in confiscating weapons from Hamas militants, according to officials and diplomats.
Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, told a conference in Doha last week that the international force shouldn’t be expected to do the Israeli military’s job. Turkey has suggested it was interested in joining the force, but Israeli officials have been adamantly opposed to that, citing what they describe as Turkey’s hostile attitude toward Israel.
Still, efforts to form the international force appear to have picked up steam in recent days. The U.S. military is set to hold two meetings about it in the coming weeks, one on Dec. 16 in Doha, Qatar, with a two-star general and a second in January with a four-star general, three Western officials said.
Greater detail about what the force was expected to do in Gaza has also surfaced.
United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, a branch of the U.S. military that is helping develop plans for the force, recently gave a presentation to military officials from dozens of countries. It said that troops would be deployed in parts of Gaza currently controlled by Israel, and a dedicated team would train over 4,000 Palestinian police officers.
The force’s deployment would begin the near the southern city of Rafah and create the conditions for further Israeli military withdrawal, according to the presentation. The New York Times obtained a copy of the presentation and verified with three Western diplomats that it was shown to the officials by CENTCOM.
CENTCOM declined to comment.
The document outlines the deployment of 8,000 soldiers, saying some of them would “secure terrain, routes, and fixed sites to enable flow of humanitarian aid” and “prevent enemy disruption.” The document also says that members of the force would “set conditions for the demilitarization of Hamas” but did not say how disarmament would happen.
The United States has invested extra resources in monitoring the cease-fire and developing plans for Gaza’s future. Some of those efforts have been centered in an American-led facility called the Civil-Military Coordination Center, or C.M.C.C., in southern Israel.
Hamas has long opposed any international force being deployed in Gaza, but Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar, suggested in an interview last week that the group was more open to the idea.
There was “consensus” among Palestinians for international troops being in Gaza, Mr. Badran said, as long as they were there to monitor and maintain the cease-fire, and not get involved in disarmament. “Palestinians can’t accept any force — regardless of citizenship — attacking citizens, entering their homes and trying to find their personal weapons,” he added.
Israel has also appeared skeptical that such a force could successfully disarm Hamas.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored that disarmament would happen, alluding to military intervention, if necessary. “It can be done the easy way, it can be done the hard way. But eventually it will be done,” he said.
Postwar Governance
Another key part of the Trump administration’s peace plan stipulates that the governing of Gaza would be temporarily handled by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee,” overseen by what the plan refers to as a “Board of Peace.”
The board would be chaired by Mr. Trump and its membership would include several heads of state, according to the plan. Beyond that, it remains unclear exactly who will be on the board, or the Palestinian committee, and how they will shape Gaza’s postwar governance.
Trump administration officials had planned to make an announcement about the Board of Peace before Christmas, but that will likely be postponed until early 2026, two Western diplomats said on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
An executive committee was also expected to be involved in decision-making, and would include a host of current and former U.S. and European senior officials, the diplomats said.
They said that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, advisers to Mr. Trump and architects of his peace plan, were expected to be on the executive committee. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who served as a Middle East envoy after leaving office, was mentioned in Mr. Trump’s peace plan as having a role on the board.
Some Palestinian activists have criticized the possibility of including Mr. Blair, who they argue is too sympathetic to the Israeli government.
Nickolay Mladenov, a former U.N. envoy for the Middle East peace process, is also being considered for a position, potentially acting as a liaison with the Palestinian committee, according to the two diplomats.
Last week, Mr. Mladenov met with Aryeh Lightstone, a senior Trump administration official helping to develop plans for Gaza’s future, according to three Western diplomats.
Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza City who was displaced during the war and now lives in Cairo, said that Mr. Mladenov was an effective mediator between Israel and Hamas during his time as a U.N. envoy. “Mladenov is good news for Palestinians,” he added.
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11) Israel Says It Killed Senior Hamas Commander, Despite Cease-Fire
Hamas said the attack on Saturday was a breach of the truce. The militant group did not comment on Israel’s claim to have killed one of its members.
By Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 13, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Adam Rasgon from Tel Aviv.
A destroyed car following an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Saturday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israeli military said it killed one of Hamas’s top commanders in Gaza in a targeted strike on Saturday, in what would be the most high-profile assassination of a senior figure in the militant group since the cease-fire began two months ago.
The target of the attack was Raed Saad, a senior commander in the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, according to the Israeli authorities. Mr. Saad had helped plan the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the two-year war in Gaza, the Israeli military said.
Hamas did not immediately comment on Israel’s claim to have killed Mr. Saad, leaving his fate unclear, but said in a statement that the attack was a “further criminal breach of the cease-fire agreement.” The group has frequently taken weeks or months to confirm the deaths of senior figures killed by Israel.
A longstanding member of Hamas, he had slowly risen in the ranks to become the armed wing’s second-in-command, according to two Arab intelligence officials. He spent much of the much of the war deep underground in Hamas tunnels beneath Gaza City, they said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement that he and the country’s defense minister had personally ordered Mr. Saad’s assassination in response to an explosive device that had wounded two Israeli soldiers earlier on Saturday.
Four people were killed in the attack — which hit a car on Gaza’s coastal road — and their bodies were brought to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the medical center’s director. He said he could not immediately confirm their identities.
The assassination attempt could further rattle the already fragile truce between Israel and Hamas, which has been tested by repeated rounds of violence. The United States and its regional allies brokered the cease-fire in mid-October, which saw the last 20 surviving hostages in Gaza freed in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
But the truce did not entirely stop the fighting. More than 300 Palestinians have since been killed in Israeli attacks, including children, since the truce went into effect, local health officials say. And at least three Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat, according to the Israeli military.
International mediators, including President Trump, have tried to press ahead with carrying out the next phase of the cease-fire, which would see Hamas lay down its weapons and lead to a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Hamas regards giving up all its weapons as tantamount to surrender, as armed struggle against Israel is a core part of its ideology. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that if Hamas did not agree to disarm quietly, it would be done “the hard way.”
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