March 19: The Voice of Hind Rajab Screening @ Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) Offices
1101 Eighth St, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA
Join the Middle East Children's Alliance for our screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab. This tragic docudrama, written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, follows the Red Crescent response during the killing of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl, by the Israel Occupation Forces during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. It stars Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, and Clara Khoury.
Tickets: $10.00
https://events.humanitix.com/the-voice-of-hind-rajab?emci=a59ade92-0318-f111-a69a-000d3a1f0a97&emdi=7c21261a-2118-f111-a69a-000d3a1f0a97&ceid=2453624*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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Saturday, March 28
11:30 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Embarcadero Plaza
Market and Steuart Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
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Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Tell Congress: No War On Iran!
On Saturday, February 28th, the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s capital. Shortly after, President Donald Trump announced a planned prolonged war against Iran and stated that American servicemembers would likely be killed in the process. He addressed Iranians, telling them to stay inside because bombs would be dropping all over Iran, and called on them to overthrow their government. The self-proclaimed “peace president” has launched yet another endless war – risking millions of human lives. The entire world should be outraged.
Tell Congress we want PEACE with Iran, we don’t want the US bombing Iran, we don’t want a regime change war, and we want to lift the sanctions that are hurting everyday Iranians.
https://www.codepink.org/iranaction
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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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/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
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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 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 auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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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Articles
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1) A Third of Americans Have Cut Spending or Borrowed Money for Health Care
As medical costs rise, more than 80 million people have made sacrifices like skipping meals and driving less, a new survey finds.
By Reed Abelson, March 12, 2026
A recent poll found that health care costs topped a list of the public’s economic anxieties, above concerns about the prices of food and groceries, gas and utilities. Credit...Arin Yoon/Reuters
Americans are feeling the squeeze from rising health care costs, and they are already doing without. One-third of Americans — an estimated 82 million people — say they are making sacrifices, including skipping meals or driving less, to pay for care, according to a new survey released on Thursday.
In the survey, 15 percent of individuals said they had borrowed money in the last year to pay for medical expenses, while another 11 percent said they had skipped a meal. Those without insurance reported even more trade-offs.
The survey was conducted from June through August 2025 by the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America, a partnership between Gallup and West Health, a group of nonprofits focused on health care costs.
“It is impacting people every day in their decisions,” Tim Lash, president of the West Health Policy Center, said. “It is getting worse.”
In the survey, people also said they had delayed making major changes to their lives, like having a child or retiring, in the last four years because of health care costs. About 29 percent said they had postponed a vacation, while 26 percent said they had put off surgery or another medical treatment.
A poll by the same groups in late 2024 found an increasing number of Americans believed they would not be able to afford care if they needed it. At the time, the share of adults reporting that they had recently been unable to pay for a medicine and treatment was about 11 percent, the highest level in four years.
“It’s telling a consistent story here,” said Ellyn Maese, a senior researcher at Gallup and research director for the West Health-Gallup Center.
The broader issue of affordability already looms over the midterm elections, with health care costs a major part of it. The bitter debate in Congress over the fate of enhanced Obamacare subsidies helped focus attention on rising costs. When those subsidies ended last year, millions of Americans saw their insurance premiums more than double, and Democrats seized on the issue.
But it’s not just Obamacare; people with coverage from an employer are also facing much higher rates. Health insurance premiums for a family are approaching $27,000 a year, and people are paying more out of pocket when they see a doctor or stay overnight in the hospital.
A recent poll by the health policy organization KFF found that health care costs topped a list of the public’s economic anxieties, above concerns about the prices of food and groceries, gas and utilities. And the issue proved consequential in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats made major gains in Congress after Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In the West Health-Gallup survey, some individuals reported delaying major life events because of health care costs. About 14 percent said they had postponed buying a new home, while 18 percent said they had put off changing jobs. About 6 percent said they had delayed having or adopting a child, and 9 percent said they had postponed retirement.
Even those with family incomes above $240,000 a year were postponing significant events, according to the survey. Individuals who said they were in poor health were more likely to make sacrifices.
“No one is safe from making these trade-offs,” Ms. Maese said. She added that she was startled to see people saying they were making such significant decisions about their work, their homes and how they lived their lives because they needed to pay for medical expenses.
“To see some of those things put at risk was jarring,” she said.
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2) The Death Penalty Is Even More Horrifying Than You Think
By The Editorial Board, March 13, 2026
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times
The use of the death penalty has risen sharply in the United States, with more executions in 2025 than any year since 2009. It is a cruel and unjust development.
In theory, the death penalty is reserved for “the worst of the worst.” In practice, it is very different. People who are executed for their crimes are disproportionately poor or intellectually disabled and often lacked good lawyers. They are also more likely to be sentenced to death if they have been convicted of killing a white person.
Anthony Boyd, who maintained his innocence until Alabama executed him last year at age 54, had an inexperienced court-appointed lawyer and was convicted on disputed eyewitness testimony. Charles Flores, 56, has spent 27 years on death row in Texas for a murder conviction based solely on unreliable testimony from a hypnotized witness. Robert Roberson, who has autism, remains on death row there despite having been convicted on now-debunked evidence that he had shaken his daughter to death.
Adding to the injustice, executions often go awry and become a grisly spectacle. As Alabama administered nitrogen gas to kill Mr. Boyd, he violently thrashed and drew agonized breaths for 30 minutes.
The death penalty is a fraught subject because most people on death row are guilty of murder and deserve tough punishment. But a life sentence without parole is a tough punishment. And the death penalty is both unavoidably flawed and unworthy of a decent society. As long it exists, it will disproportionately spare criminals with more resources and be used against people who are poor, mentally disabled or otherwise vulnerable.
Much of the world has come to this same conclusion. The list of countries that have abolished or effectively ended the death penalty includes all of Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Morocco, South Africa and Australia. By continuing to execute people regularly, the United States puts itself in the company of only about 20 countries, among them Afghanistan, China, Iran and North Korea.
Over the past year, the United States has become even more of an outlier among democracies because the states that still conduct executions have accelerated the pace. Many of these states have in recent years passed secrecy laws to hide the details of what they are doing. We urge Americans not to look away.
In the initial years of the 21st century, more Americans recognized the flaws with the death penalty, and its use fell sharply. Opponents highlighted a wave of DNA-related exonerations, including of more than 20 people who were cleared after having spent time on death row.
More than 200 people on death row have been exonerated since 1973.
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3) U.S. Economy Was Vulnerable Before War With Iran
Economic growth at the end of 2025 was revised downward and consumer prices rose at the start of 2026.
By Talmon Joseph Smith, March 13, 2026
The latest price data offers a worrisome setup for inflation going forward. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Economic growth was slower at the end of 2025 than data first showed and inflationary pressures persisted at the start of this year, a troubling snapshot of an economy on unsteady footing before war with Iran upended oil and financial markets.
Consumer prices increased moderately in January, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge showed on Friday. Economists worry prices will march even higher in the coming weeks. And gross domestic product, the benchmark measure of economic growth, which is adjusted for inflation, was revised down to a 0.7 percent annual pace for the last three months of the year.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, notched a 0.3 percent monthly increase in the first month of 2026. Compared with the same time last year, prices were up 2.8 percent. The “core” inflation reading, which strips out more volatile food and energy prices, came in at 0.4 percent on a monthly basis, and 3.1 percent on an annual basis. That is a full percentage point above the Fed’s 2 percent target.
“It basically shows that inflation firmed up to start the year,” Omair Sharif, founder of the research firm Inflation Insights, said of the data. “All the key measures are moving in the wrong direction.”
A snapshot taken just before the shock to oil prices from the war with Iran, the price data offer a worrisome setup for inflation going forward.
After peaking over 9 percent on an annual basis in 2022, inflation cooled off by 2024, gliding just above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Since 2025, though, the inflation picture has worsened. Goods inflation, which had been slowing for years, has swung back up in various categories since President Trump announced tariffs last spring. Some of those tariffs have been struck down by the Supreme Court. Others, though, remain in place, and have led businesses to toggle between absorbing the increased cost of imports and passing along those new costs to consumers.
“Things aren’t collapsing,” said Claudia Sahm, the chief economist at New Century Advisors and a former forecaster at the Fed. “But I do think consumer spending has been a source of resilience, and things are not as strong as they’ve been in recent years.”
According to analysts at Employ America, a research group that tracks employment and price data, tariffs are an “obvious culprit” of some excess inflation, especially in apparel and furniture. But they note that shortages stemming from the artificial intelligence boom are also playing a part in price rises. Computer accessories and tech equipment, for instance, are experiencing abnormal cost increases compared with averages in recent years.
Inflation in health care services, a major part of the economy, continues to play a role in hotter prices too. This Personal Consumption Expenditures index released Friday has been running slightly hotter than the more commonly cited Consumer Price Index. That divergence is largely the result of the fact that C.P.I. weighs housing inflation more heavily. And the rate of increases in rent has slowed as the overall economy has slowed.
Regardless, both inflation measures are likely to tilt higher next month once the inflationary impacts of higher oil prices are felt. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, has risen to around $90 a barrel from $60 levels in February. Airfares, gasoline prices and restaurant costs are all expected to be affected. Despite all of the sobering news weighing on consumer sentiment and financial markets, consumption levels in January indicate that the economy is growing.
The new data, and the new war, complicate decision making for Federal Reserve leaders who have found themselves torn between the bank’s dual mandates of price stability and maximum employment.
The economy added just 116,000 jobs in all of 2025, and employers have cut jobs in two of the past three months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And yet, inflation has been above the central bank’s 2 percent target for five years now.
Investors worried about the purchasing power of their dollars want the Fed to hold steady and not reduce interest rates, even as the oil shock threatens growth. They point to the example of the 1970s, when a Fed facing an oil shock caused by geopolitical tremors overseas decided to ease interest rates. The “stagflation” of rising prices and stagnant growth conditions persisted.
The consensus in central banking today is that this move was a mistake, and that the Fed then ought to calibrate interest rates to fend off inflationary pressures, rather than risk contributing to them.
Analysts and traders that closely follow the Fed acknowledge the balancing act is treacherous. In the lead up to the global financial crisis of the 2000s, energy prices soared. Near-term inflation rose substantially, ticking above 5 percent on an annual basis.
At the same time, central banks across the globe in 2008 were still worried about rate cuts fueling further inflation and financial market speculation. That year, the price of oil peaked at over $130 before falling to $41 by December, as the global economy entered a recession.
“We can learn something from history,” Ms. Sahm, the former Fed economist, said. “I can come up with scenarios for the Fed going forward in which it’d be appropriate for them to pause, cut or hike rates. They’ll need to be ready to act when it’s clear.”
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4) Globalization Faces Its Next Crisis
Beyond its effects on oil and gas, the unfolding war in the Middle East is roiling shipping and airfreight, threatening the availability of a vast range of goods.
By Peter S. Goodman, March 13, 2026
Peter Goodman covered the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic and has written about global trade for 25 years.
The container terminal in Newark. Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Thousands of miles from the attacks in the Middle East, at his company’s headquarters in Toronto, Amar Zaidi confronted what is normally a straightforward logistical task. He needed to ship fabric from a mill in Istanbul to a customer in Shanghai.
But the usual route involved passing through Oman via the Suez Canal — a pathway suddenly fraught with danger. The price of booking a container ship was soaring.
Mr. Zaidi’s company, Rebus International, makes yarn and textiles, supplying raw materials to international clothing brands like Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss. Before the war in the Persian Gulf, transporting a container from Turkey to China cost about $2,000, he said. When he tried to book the journey this week, carriers demanded surcharges that multiplied the price to $10,000.
“It’s chaos,” said Mr. Zaidi, 52, who has worked in the industry for three decades. “It’s the ripple effect. Everything is blamed on the war.”
Fabric is probably not the first item that springs to mind on the list of cargo waylaid by war. Wildly fluctuating prices for oil and natural gas are the most obvious manifestation, a result of the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the channel linking the Persian Gulf to the rest of the planet.
But the consequences of upending commerce in much of the Middle East are far broader, and increasingly apparent in industries beyond energy. From industrial commodities to tropical fruits, products needed in one place are getting stuck somewhere else. The longer the hostilities persist, the greater the upheaval for shoppers and businesses throughout the global economy.
The reverberations amount to a rebuke of the notion that globalization is history, a claim popularized by nationalist movements on multiple continents.
President Trump has pursued a trade war in the name of forcing factory production back to the United States. China and India have pursued versions of self-sufficiency. Yet the war in the Middle East has highlighted the enduring reality of global economic integration. Supply chains are not only intact but expanding, heightening the risks when the movement of goods is interrupted.
“Every time we get one of these disruptions, we have these predictions that it’s the end of globalization,” said Steven A. Altman, a globalization expert at New York University’s Stern School of Business and co-author of a recent study on the continued expansion of trade and investment across borders. “The narrative is different from the reality.”
The turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed how bottlenecks in shipping can trigger cascading troubles. A floating traffic jam off a port in Southern California strands chemicals needed to make paint in Delaware. It ties up containers that could otherwise be used to load cargo in China, delaying exports of electronics destined for Ireland and pushing up the price of moving cargo everywhere.
Such realizations prompted companies to highlight commitments to “supply chain resilience” alongside their usual devotion to efficiency. Retailers like Walmart shifted manufacturing from Asia to Mexico, shrinking the distance between factories and customers to limit their vulnerability to the hazards of global commerce.
But the push toward more regional trade appears to be reversing, according to Mr. Altman’s report.
From 2020 to 2023, the share of American imports arriving from Mexico and Canada increased to 29 percent, from 26 percent. But over the first nine months of 2025, it dipped to 27 percent.
As the pandemic fades into memory, international companies have returned to seeking the lowest-cost suppliers of goods, wherever they may be.
And as the Trump administration dismantles federal programs aimed at increasing renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power, the nation is more exposed to the implications of higher prices for oil and gas.
All of which means that the halting of marine traffic through the Persian Gulf is likely to spread dysfunction widely.
The most immediate crisis centers on energy. Tankers have been attacked. Oil facilities have been shut down. The war has delivered “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the International Energy Agency declared on Thursday.
Not even the concerted release of oil reserves by 30 nations could prevent the price of oil from again breaching $100 a barrel. The prospect of a sustained increase in energy prices has economists warning of the potential for stagflation, a term coined to describe the impact of shocks in the 1970s: stagnant economic growth and higher prices.
Higher energy prices make fuel more expensive for trucks, tankers and jets, increasing the costs of moving cargo. Larger bills for gasoline and air-conditioning leave households with less money to spend on goods and experiences — a drag on economic growth.
Companies that import products into the United States, the world’s largest economy, are grappling with confusion over the future of Mr. Trump’s tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled that he had breached his presidential authority.
“We have created equal if not greater uncertainty parameters than during the pandemic,” said Nick Vyas, a supply chain expert at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “It’s a perfect storm for stagflation.”
In Southeast Asia, producers of shrimp and tropical fruits now struggle to transport their wares to Europe and North America. From India to Indiana, farmers are confronting higher prices for fertilizer because of the disruption to stocks produced in the Persian Gulf. The price of aluminum is climbing, given impediments to shipments from Qatar and Bahrain. Helium, a critical element for making computer chips, could soon become scarce.
“This is not just an oil story,” Mr. Vyas said. “This is an industrial supply story.”
The Gulf is a dominant source of urea, the leading form of nitrogen fertilizer. Making it requires ammonia, which is produced with natural gas. So long as energy production is hampered, the ability to make fertilizers will be constrained. Urea prices have already climbed significantly.
If farmers economize in their use of fertilizer, that could reduce harvests, diminishing the supply of food and pushing prices higher. In vulnerable countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, that could lead to greater malnutrition.
At the center of concern is disruption to shipping lanes and air cargo hubs in the Persian Gulf.
With planes unable to land and refuel at major airports in Dubai and Doha on trips between Europe and Asia, they have had to reroute, often over Central Asia. That has lengthened journeys, requiring more fuel. And that has forced carriers to limit how much cargo they carry.
The cost of airfreight from Asia to Europe has doubled since the beginning of the war. Vietnam to the United States has increased by nearly half. That has challenged the ability of American automakers and retailers to secure electronics and components.
“Freight rates are more volatile,” said Chloe Lee at Olympia Express, a freight forwarding company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “Many Vietnamese exporters are becoming more cautious about booking shipments.”
This is the time of year when major importers tend to negotiate yearlong contracts with ocean carriers. Container shipping prices have been relatively cheap because of a glut of new vessels entering the market. But now ocean carriers are absorbing the likelihood that fuel prices will be significantly higher just as some routes are impeded by the war.
“It’s certainly just one thing after another in this industry,” said Ryan Petersen, chief executive of Flexport, a global logistics company.
For the shipping realm, the latest conflict in the Gulf is unfolding just as the last one appeared to be fading — the strikes on ships entering the Red Sea by Houthi rebels. Vessels moving between Europe and Asia had been avoiding that corridor, instead traveling the long way around Africa.
In recent months, ships had been returning to the Red Sea. Not anymore.
With ships again looping around Africa on trips between Europe and Asia, carriers are affixing fees and lifting prices.
That was the situation confronting Mr. Zaidi and his Canadian textile company this week.
He tried to ship a load of fabric to England from Pakistan. The carriers said they could not locate shipping containers. The steel boxes were scattered at ports around the Indian Ocean, held in place by the shutdown of marine traffic through the Middle East.
“I’m ready to pay whatever it costs, and I don’t have containers available for the next three weeks,” Mr. Zaidi said.
His company tried to ship 10 containers of machinery to Pakistan from Durban, South Africa. It had already booked the journey at a price of $2,500 per box. The carrier suddenly lifted the rate to $4,800. The route required a much longer run to Singapore.
The further out Mr. Zaidi contemplated, the greater his concern grew.
If the shipping crisis persists, cotton harvested in China may arrive late to Pakistan, delaying his production of yarn. Mills that weave fabric in Indonesia will struggle to find raw materials. Making clothing will get harder.
“Prices will go up,” he said.
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5) E.P.A. Moves to Weaken Limits on a Cancer-Causing Gas
The gas, ethylene oxide, plays a crucial role in sterilizing medical devices. But long-term exposure is linked to several types of cancer and other ailments.
By Maxine Joselow, Reporting from Washington, March 13, 2026
A chemical and petroleum industrial corridor, a known source of ethylene oxide emissions, in Ascension Parish, La. Credit...Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed to weaken limits on emissions of ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas, from manufacturing facilities that use it to sterilize medical devices.
The move revived a long-running debate about the paradoxical effects of ethylene oxide on public health. While it plays a crucial role in sterilizing lifesaving medical devices like pacemakers and syringes, long-term exposure can cause leukemia and other types of cancer among people who work in or live near medical sterilization facilities.
“The Trump E.P.A. is committed to ensuring lifesaving medical devices remain available for the critical care of America’s children, elderly and all patients without unnecessary exposure to communities,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement.
The agency’s proposed rule would loosen limits on ethylene oxide emissions from around 90 commercial sterilization facilities across the country. Roughly 2.3 million people live within two miles of these facilities in what are often low-income neighborhoods or communities of color, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
The proposal is the E.P.A.’s latest move to relax pollution limits in an effort to lower costs for industries. In recent months, the agency has also weakened restrictions on mercury from coal-burning power plants and repealed a scientific finding that allowed the government to regulate planet-warming pollution from cars and trucks.
In a news release, the E.P.A. said the Biden administration’s stricter limits on ethylene oxide emissions would be difficult, if not impossible, for many facilities to meet. In particular, the agency said it was proposing to rescind a requirement that facilities conduct round-the-clock monitoring of their ethylene oxide emissions.
Ethylene oxide is used to sterilize about half of all medical devices in the United States, helping to prevent infections in patients undergoing surgeries and other treatments. It is applied to roughly 20 billion medical devices each year, including catheters, heart valves, stents and ventilators.
The gas is valued for its ability to destroy bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms without damaging delicate materials like plastics. There is no viable alternative on the market, the E.P.A. said in the news release.
At the same time, inhaling the gas can cause coughing, dizziness, fatigue and nausea. Long-term exposure can damage the brain and central nervous system and can increase the risk of breast cancer, leukemia, lymphoma and other cancers of the white blood cells.
The E.P.A. first classified ethylene oxide as a human carcinogen in 2016. The agency based the determination on studies showing that the gas was 60 times more toxic to children and 30 times more toxic to adults than previously thought.
The Biden administration significantly strengthened limits on ethylene oxide emissions in 2024. The move was part of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s “moonshot” effort to sharply cut cancer deaths in the United States.
At the time, Biden administration officials estimated that the rules would reduce ethylene oxide emissions from sterilization plants by 90 percent. Some of the plants would have been required to install or upgrade pollution controls.
President Trump has already exempted 40 sterilization plants from complying with the Biden-era limits on ethylene oxide for two years. In a proclamation in July 2025, Mr. Trump argued that the rules would “likely force existing sterilization facilities to close down, seriously disrupting the supply of medical equipment.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Southern Environmental Law Center and other environmental groups have filed a lawsuit to block the exemptions. The suit, which is pending in federal court in Washington, argues that many of the sterilization facilities were capable of complying with the Biden-era rules using existing pollution controls.
“This administration is systematically looking for ways to let polluters off the hook,” Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “If this abuse of authority is left unchecked, communities will pay the price in higher cancer risks.”
AdvaMed, a group that lobbies for the interests of medical device manufacturers, said in a statement that the proposed rule issued on Friday would ensure the supply of safe, sterile devices without interruption.
The E.P.A. will solicit public comments on the proposed rule for 45 days after its publication in the Federal Register. The agency will then finalize the rule, likely within the next year.
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6) Cuban President Acknowledges Talks With Trump Administration
President Miguel Díaz-Canel, whose country is rapidly running out of fuel, said the talks were based on “respect for the political systems of both countries.”
By Frances Robles, David C. Adams and Patricia Mazzei, March 13, 2026
“Mr. Díaz-Canel, in a 90-minute news conference broadcast on state media, said the talks were aimed at finding solutions to Cuba’s differences with the United States. He said the discussions were based on ‘respect for the political systems of both countries, sovereignty and our government’s self-determination,’ suggesting that, from his point of view, political changes in Cuba were not on the table.”
Searching for salvageable items after the attacks in Caracas, Venezuela, in January. Credit...The New York Times
In what was seen as a last-ditch effort to save his hobbled government, President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba announced on Friday that his government had been holding talks with the Trump administration while managing an increasingly severe lack of fuel.
Cuba’s government is facing an existential crisis as the Trump administration ratchets up pressure on the 67-year-old Communist state, maintaining what amounts to an oil blockade. Fuel is rapidly running out, plunging Cuba into prolonged periods of darkness.
Though the discussions with the United States had previously been reported by U.S. news outlets, it was the first time the government had acknowledged that talks were underway.
Mr. Díaz-Canel, in a 90-minute news conference broadcast on state media, said the talks were aimed at finding solutions to Cuba’s differences with the United States. He said the discussions were based on “respect for the political systems of both countries, sovereignty and our government’s self-determination,” suggesting that, from his point of view, political changes in Cuba were not on the table.
He said international factors had facilitated the exchanges, without providing specifics. Cuba’s foreign minister recently met with the Vatican, as did Mike Hammer, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana.
The Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said the Vatican had taken “the necessary steps, always with a view to a dialogue-based solution to the problems that exist.”
Cuba’s government announced on Thursday that it would soon release 51 prisoners, in what appeared to be an effort to appease the Trump administration.
Mr. Díaz-Canel said a development to be announced on Monday would “greatly facilitate” the participation of Cubans abroad in the island’s “economic and social development program,” strongly suggesting that the government would allow Cubans overseas to invest in the nation’s economy. Exiles in Florida and other places with large Cuban communities have been pushing for that for years.
Over the past year, Mr. Díaz-Canel said, the island’s foreign ministry has held talks with Cubans abroad to listen to their ideas. He acknowledged that there had been a significant exodus from the country, saying the number of Cubans overseas “has grown.”
More than two million Cubans have left the country in the past five years, demographers estimate. “It is our responsibility as the government to embrace them, listen to them, tend to them and offer them a space to participate in the economic and social development,” Mr. Díaz-Canel said.
He said Cuba’s power grid was growing increasingly unstable because the country had imported no oil in three months.
Two crucial power plants had exhausted their supplies of fuel, he said. “Therefore, a considerable number of megawatts that we were generating, especially during peak and nighttime hours, are lost from that generation system, putting the grid in a very unstable situation,” Mr. Díaz-Canel said.
He said that Cuba was rushing to expand its use of solar energy, but that the challenges were daunting. Nearly 7,000 homes in Cuba are now connected to solar power, he said.
Electric cars are being used to bring patients to dialysis appointments, he said. About 700 bakeries have converted to wood-fired or charcoal-fired ovens, Mr. Díaz-Canel said.
Mr. Díaz-Canel said the talks with the United States were needed, in part, “to determine the willingness of both sides to take concrete actions.” He said the discussions were unlikely to yield results soon.
“Agendas are built, negotiations and conversations take place, and agreements are reached — things we are still far from because we are in the initial phases of this process,’’ Mr. Díaz-Canel said.
He put the blame for Cuba’s ills squarely at Washington’s feet. “Workers are making an effort to overcome the impossible,” he said. “It’s the fault of the energy blockade that has been imposed on us.”
The Cuban government has been in dire straits since the United States attacked Venezuela in January, arrested its president, took control of its state oil industry and blocked fuel shipments to Cuba. Venezuela had been Cuba’s top supplier of oil.
President Trump threatened to impose severe tariffs on any country that provided Cuba with oil. The Cuban government was forced to curtail public transportation, elective surgeries and other services that depended on diesel fuel.
With Cuba dependent on foreign oil for 60 percent of its fuel supply, experts have estimated that it would run out of fuel this month. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that the Cuban government would collapse on its own.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump suggested that a Cuba deal was imminent. “As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Mr. Trump said.
“Cuba’s at the end of the line,” he added. “They have no money. They have no oil.”
Earlier in the week, hosting the Inter Miami soccer team at the White House, Mr. Trump indicated to its co-owner Jorge Mas — the son of a prominent Cuban exile leader, Jorge Mas Canosa — that travel restrictions to Cuba would be eased. “You’re going to go back, and you won’t need my approval,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Mas.
He also said about Cuba, “They want to make a deal so badly. You have no idea.”
Any meaningful deal between the United States and the Cuban government, experts say, would have to include the release of all political prisoners, an end to the criminalization of dissent, permitting independent political organizing, the legalization of political parties besides the Communist Party and a restoration of basic civil liberties, including freedom of speech and the press.
“The main question for me is whether and what political, social and civic changes will also be included in any deal,” said Ted Henken, a Cuba scholar at Baruch College.
Jack Nicas contributed reporting.
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7) War in Iran Has Put Middle East Water Supplies at Risk
By Mira Rojanasakul, Claire Brown and Hiroko Tabuchi, March 13, 2026
Two weeks into the war in Iran, two water desalination plants in the region have been damaged in military operations, raising concerns over the vulnerability of a system that serves as a lifeline for millions across the Middle East.
Last week, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said an attack on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, in the Persian Gulf, on March 7 had affected the water supply to 30 villages. While Iran blamed the United States for the attack, the Pentagon has denied responsibility, as has Israel.
And in Bahrain, the Interior Ministry blamed an Iranian drone for “material damage” to a desalination plant, though the country’s water and electricity authority said water supplies had not been affected.
Over the last few decades, the arid countries of the Persian Gulf have become increasingly reliant on desalination plants to supply water to cities and towns.
Desalination plants have become crucial infrastructure in places like Qatar and Bahrain, both of which now rely on the technology for more than 50 percent of their fresh water.
Efforts to remove salt from seawater and brackish groundwater in the Middle East go back more than a century. But desalination plants have proliferated on the Persian Gulf as climate change has made droughts more frequent and severe, and as desalination technology has improved.
Damage to a single large desalination plant, including a plant shutdown, could have immediate and widespread effects on the region, said Menachem Elimelech, an environmental engineer at Rice University.
The Al Dur plant in Bahrain, for example, supplies over one million people with water each day, providing more than a third of the country’s needs. Desalination facilities are complex, and extensive damage could take a long time to repair.
While countries like the United Arab Emirates have tried to build up strategic water reserves, analysts say that some stocks would be depleted within days.
“The response would be to truck in bottled water, mobile desalination systems, tanker water,” said David Michel, a fellow in the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. “Those supply chains exist,” he said. “But that’s still a huge logistical hurdle. It’s extremely disruptive.”
International law prohibits attacking or destroying infrastructure indispensable to the survival of civilians. That includes water infrastructure, food supplies and energy systems.
Still, the episodes on Qeshm Island and Bahrain “appear to not be inadvertent or collateral damage, but an intentional, direct targeting of those systems,” Mr. Michel said. “So the signal has been sent that those systems could be at risk.”
“When you’re targeting water infrastructure, you’re directly affecting a civilian population,” said Mohammed Mahmoud, Middle East Lead for the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “That's absolutely a war crime to attack infrastructure that civilians are so dependent on, on either side."
Even if desalination plants aren’t targeted directly, damage to surrounding facilities could still disrupt their operations. Some plants draw water from the sea, raising the prospect that polluted water could clog plant filters or contaminate pipes.
“Say there is an oil spill next to the intake to the desalination plant,” Mr. Elimelech said. “That would practically kill the desalination plant.”
In 1991, the United States accused Iraq of deliberately spilling millions of gallons of Kuwaiti crude oil into the Persian Gulf with the intention of crippling desalination capacity or thwarting an amphibious invasion.
That created a nine-mile oil slick and prompted a monthslong effort to keep the oil from shuttering a desalination plant that supplied half of the drinking water for Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Oil spills on land, meanwhile, infiltrated many of Kuwait’s aquifers.
Energy infrastructure is another vulnerability. Desalination plants are energy‑intensive, and many are built on sites shared with oil, gas and renewable power plants. They risk losing power if nearby facilities are damaged or taken offline.
Riyadh, for example, is supplied by water pumped hundreds of kilometers from the coast. Damage to a water pipeline could interrupt supplies even if desalination plants remained operational.
Countries like the United Arab Emirates heavily subsidize desalinated water, allowing for copious consumption of water, including watering golf courses and other luxury uses that would otherwise be economically unsustainable in a desert, Mr. Michel said. But that has hampered investment in water efficiency and increased the region’s dependence on desalinated water.
Some nations have taken measures to bolster their reserve supplies of water. There has also been talk of interconnecting water supply systems internationally. But that hasn’t moved ahead amid regional rivalries and mistrust, Dr. Mahmoud of the U.N. University said.
Those efforts have been tricky, he said, because states prefer self‑reliance over shared systems. “But what do you do when you lose your water lifeline?” he said.
Lisa Friedman and Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting
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8) Trump and Rubio’s Vision of War: The Art of Destroy and Deal
Unleashing his inner hawk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans President Trump’s military interventions. So far, they favor regime compliance, not change.
By Edward Wong and Michael Crowley, March 14, 2026
Edward Wong and Michael Crowley have reported for decades on international news from Washington and overseas. They travel with the U.S. secretary of state.
“Mr. Trump has ordered attacks in eight countries in the last year.”
A billboard praising Mr. Trump in Tel Aviv this week. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Soon after President Trump joined Israel in launching a new war against Iran, an A.I. video featuring Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated online.
Clad in a black turban and robe, he presides over an Iranian military parade, speaks at a mosque and gazes over the Tehran skyline. The caption: “Marco Rubio realizing he’s the new Supreme Leader of Iran.”
Though intended as satire, the video crystallizes a pivotal moment for Mr. Rubio.
Throughout his long political career, Mr. Rubio has advocated toppling governments hostile to the United States. He was once considered so ideologically out of step with Mr. Trump that many officials and politicians doubted he would last a year in the administration. But today, Mr. Rubio is at the helm of Mr. Trump’s aggressive campaigns to reshape the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and beyond.
The U.S. president, who promised to end American wars, is now embracing the policies backed by Mr. Rubio and the secretary’s ideological compatriots, dismaying supporters who thought Mr. Trump had ushered in a new era of military restraint.
But Mr. Rubio is not trying to convert Mr. Trump to George W. Bush-era neoconservatism, which sought to remold other nations’ political systems, sometimes with military force, American officials and analysts say. Instead, he seems to be pursuing a new approach built on power free of principle. It is a merger of neoconservatism with Mr. Trump’s transactionalism, and it amounts to using U.S. military and economic power to turn authoritarian countries into client states.
It is regime compliance rather than regime change, a doctrine of destroy and deal.
Traditional neoconservatives saw promoting democracy and doing nation-building in the world as a moral good, even if it was done at gunpoint. And they viewed those as a means of transforming adversaries wholesale and extending American influence by spreading ideas. The Trump administration’s approach, so far, leaves internal politics to the rival nations as long as they show obeisance.
“For Rubio and other members of this younger group, foreign policy isn’t as much about regime change as much as it is about power,” said Emma Ashford, a scholar at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington. “It is about sustaining American military primacy, making other states fear and respect us.”
Mr. Rubio laid out that idea at the Munich Security Conference last month in a speech in which he lamented the passing of the “great Western empires” and vowed that America would carry on their mantle.
“To be clear: Secretary Rubio is an ‘advocate’ of implementing the America First foreign policy of President Trump,” said Tommy Pigott, the deputy spokesman for the State Department. “As President Trump said, he makes peace wherever he can, but he will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must. That is a policy Secretary Rubio fully supports, and President Trump’s historic results speak for themselves.”
‘Unleash Chiang’
Mr. Rubio’s warning to Iran was violent, if a bit cryptic: “We’re going to unleash Chiang on these people in the next few hours and days.”
The mysterious reference came soon after the war began, as he talked about accelerating the American and Israeli bombing campaign. “You’re going to really begin to perceive a change in the scope and in the intensity of these attacks, as, frankly, the two most powerful air forces in the world take apart this terroristic regime,” he said on Capitol Hill.
“Chiang” points to a little-known tie between Mr. Rubio and the Bush family, whose younger president, George W., was the architect of the two American “forever wars” of this century, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2005, Jeb Bush, a younger brother of George W. and then the governor of Florida, handed Mr. Rubio a golden sword at the Florida legislature when Mr. Rubio was poised to become the House speaker. It was the weapon, Mr. Bush said, of “a great conservative warrior,” the “mystical” Chiang.
That was an inside joke: “Unleash Chiang” was a phrase shouted by his father, George H.W. Bush, the former president and ambassador to China, at tennis opponents, and it referred to Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S.-backed Chinese military leader who fought Mao’s Communists but ultimately lost.
Mr. Rubio, whose hawkish foreign policy views have long been aligned with those of the George W. Bush administration, is finally unleashing his inner Chiang and brandishing his golden sword across the globe. He has even spoken about the need to wage pre-emptive war against Iran, citing a nonexistent imminent threat — the same language the Bush administration used to justify invading Iraq.
The influence of neoconservatives reached its zenith under that president and his post 9/11 wars. But their ideas still hold sway in Washington, and some of their views are now at the fore of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, championed by Mr. Rubio.
One is bolstering the American military partnership with Israel and striking at Israel’s adversaries — Iran in particular. The United States first attacked Iran last June, during the 12-day war started by Israel.
Mr. Rubio, who is also Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, helped plan that assault and most if not all of the administration’s other major military operations. Mr. Trump has ordered attacks in eight countries in the last year.
“Rubio was a top-tier ally,” said Michael Oren, a former ambassador for Israel to the United States who worked with Mr. Rubio when he was a senator representing Florida. “He did not waver. He was always there.”
Mr. Oren disputed any notion that Mr. Rubio was dragging Mr. Trump into a world of war. The two men are partners, he said, and Mr. Trump is taking action to leave his mark on history.
“So where’s the legacy?” he said. “It’s in foreign policy, and an activist foreign policy, not isolationist foreign policy. I think Trump cares about this, and that’s where Rubio is. He’s in lock step.”
Seeking Submission
When Mr. Rubio became Mr. Trump’s secretary of state in January 2025, he dialed back his martial views in public to align himself with the president’s campaign promise of “no new wars.”
He also began speaking in conciliatory terms about the superpower rivals Russia and China, whose autocratic leaders Mr. Trump admires — and whom Mr. Rubio once denounced in the good-versus-evil language of neoconservatism.
But last summer, Mr. Rubio became a spokesman for military intervention against countries the Trump administration views as weak. He supported the June attacks on Iran and stressed the need to make Nicolás Maduro, the autocratic leader of Venezuela, answer for stealing an election and, in Mr. Rubio’s words, leading a “narco-terrorist” group.
That led to lethal U.S. strikes on civilian boats near Venezuela and the seizing of Mr. Maduro in January. Mr. Rubio fully unmasked his inner hawk when the administration joined Israel to start the war against Iran on Feb. 28. And he has made no secret of the administration’s goal of weakening or toppling the Communist government of Cuba, a personal decades-long mission.
But following Mr. Trump’s lead, Mr. Rubio is also willing to make deals with those authoritarian governments.
As Mr. Rubio carries out economic warfare on Cuba by blocking oil shipments to the island, he is quietly negotiating to open Cuba’s economy with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl.
He is also working closely with Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela, a leftist authoritarian ally of Mr. Maduro who now governs the country, rather than pushing for a takeover by María Corina Machado, a conservative pro-democracy opposition leader. As a senator, Mr. Rubio co-signed a letter in 2024 supporting Ms. Machado’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.
And he has made contradictory remarks on whether regime change is the goal of the war against Iran. Although he has criticized the “radical Shia clerics” who rule the country, and the first Israeli attack killed Iran’s leading ayatollah, he has not explicitly said that overthrowing them is a war goal. As for Mr. Trump, he has encouraged a popular uprising but has also shown an interest in striking a deal with officials from the current Iranian government.
John Bolton, a national security adviser in Mr. Trump’s first term who promotes the use of military force to secure U.S. hegemony, said the administration needed to commit to regime change.
“On Trump’s resolve, he clearly is playing it day by day, which is no way to maximize the pressure on the regime or to help the opposition,” said Mr. Bolton, who was also a United Nations ambassador for President George W. Bush.
Some conservative restrainers opposed to the war suspect that Mr. Rubio has steered Mr. Trump down a path of bloodshed or did little to keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel from leading the president there. But Carlos Trujillo, a Cuban American politician from Miami who served as ambassador to the Organization of American States in the first Trump administration, said that was too simplistic.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio are acting against nations that threaten the safety of Americans, he said. “This isn’t regime change for the sake of regime change, or regime change for the sake of democracy.”
Mr. Trujillo said he expected the administration to adopt a gradual approach to transforming Cuba and Venezuela.
“It will be a transition back to free markets, within reason, and a transition back to a representative democracy,” he said. “You stop with the oligarchy. You open up the markets, you allow direct foreign investment, you respect the rule of law and you transition toward a recognized election.”
Cuba and Venezuela are high-wire acts for the administration. But it is the war in Iran that could make or break Mr. Trump’s presidency and Mr. Rubio’s political future as they grapple with a question that has confronted many U.S. administrations since World War II: Can one nation reshape another or force it to submit through a relentless bombing campaign?
“It would be great if with standoff exquisite airstrikes we can fundamentally transform the politics of other countries,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which advocates military restraint. “But we can’t. There’s a certain American stubbornness on this point, and we keep learning these lessons over and over again.”
Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Miami.
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9) Trump Administration Approves Ultra-Deepwater Oil Drilling Plan
The $5 billion project in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to produce up to 10 billion barrels of oil by the end of this decade. Critics say it could endanger people and marine life.
By Lisa Friedman and Rebecca F. Elliott, March 14, 2026
An oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2024. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
The Trump administration on Friday approved a $5 billion oil drilling project in ultradeep waters of the Gulf of Mexico over protests from Democrats and environmental activists who said the venture posed significant risks to wildlife and communities.
The project by the British energy giant BP would be about 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana and is expected to start producing oil in 2029. The company projects it will deliver up to 10 billion barrels of oil by the end of this decade.
Known as Kaskida, it would be the company’s first new deepwater project in the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which set off the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history.
“Kaskida is a world-class project that reflects decades of technological innovation by BP and the offshore oil and gas industry,” Paul Takahashi, a BP spokesman, said in a statement. Approval “marks an important step forward for the project and is all the more important at a time of heightened global concerns about energy security and affordability,” he added.
Opponents said the extreme pressure and high temperatures required to operate in waters deeper than 5,600 feet heighten the risk of a blowout that could endanger Gulf communities and the marine ecosystem. Environmental groups are expected to challenge the project in court.
The approval of BP’s production plan by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency of the Interior Department, brings the company closer to being able to start drilling, though other federal permitting hurdles remain.
The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The green light for more drilling in the Gulf comes as the Trump administration tries to blunt the impact of the war with Iran, which has sent oil prices soaring to four-year highs.
Also on Friday, the energy secretary, Chris Wright, invoked emergency powers to allow a company to restart an oil pipeline off the California coast that state officials have kept offline since it ruptured in 2015 and caused one of the worst spills in the state’s history. The Energy Department also approved an immediate 13 percent increase in exports at a liquefied natural gas terminal run by Venture Global in Louisiana.
Mr. Wright cast the moves as central to easing reliance on oil imports through the Strait of Hormuz, a portal for one-fifth of the world’s oil supply that has essentially been shut down by the war.
“At a time when Iran and its terrorist proxies attempt to disrupt the global energy supply, the Trump administration remains committed to strengthening American energy dominance,” Mr. Wright said in a statement.
Democrats in California accused President Trump of using the war in the Mideast as an excuse to restart offshore drilling in the state, something he has wanted to do for months. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called reopening the pipeline “a political attempt to point the finger at California to divide and distract the American people from his wartime failures and the massive spike in oil and gasoline prices his war has caused.”
BP is one of the largest producers in the Gulf of Mexico, and Kaskida, which the company discovered in 2006, is notable for both its bounty of oil and the technical challenges involved in extracting that fuel.
The oil is buried extremely deep, meaning equipment must be able to withstand incredibly high pressure. But the company has downplayed the risks.
“There’s enough production analogs around Kaskida from similar fields with similar characteristics, so I don’t feel there’s really any risk on the subsurface perspective,” Murray Auchincloss, BP’s former chief executive, told analysts in 2024.
Opponents said that BP had not done enough since the Deepwater Horizon disaster to prevent future spills and noted that the company’s emergency plan for Kaskida is similar to what it did 15 years ago: It proposes using chemical dispersants to break oil into tiny droplets and push it underwater.
“It’s deeply disturbing that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a proposal littered with legal and regulatory flaws, especially given BP’s history in the Gulf,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior lawyer with Earthjustice, an environmental group.
“The agency’s decision is a threat to the communities that will be harmed by decades of additional oil that gets refined next to their homes and children’s schools,” Ms. Hardy said. “It’s also an insult to the millions of people and businesses in the Gulf whose lives were changed for the worse by Deepwater Horizon.”
When the project was seeking approval last year, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, criticized what he called “Donald Trump’s offshore whims.” The Trump administration moved in December to repeal permits for five offshore wind projects along the East Coast, some of which are nearly complete. Companies sued, and multiple federal judges have allowed work on all five projects to go forward while the courts consider the merits of the cases against the Trump administration.
On Saturday, Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island, announced that it had begun delivering power to homes and businesses across New England.
“By blocking already-built wind turbines from coming online and approving dangerous deepwater oil drilling, the Trump administration is giving a green light to oil spills and a red light to lower electric bills,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Markey, along with Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, also led a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management noting that in a worst-case scenario, the Kaskida project could result in an oil spill of up to four million barrels. That’s more than the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which spilled 3.19 million barrels into the Gulf over 87 days.
They also argued that BP had failed to show it has the equipment to contain a high-pressure blowout and said that Kaskida was an “unacceptable threat to Gulf communities, ecosystems and the climate.”
“The likelihood of an oil spill is higher from deepwater and ultra-deepwater drilling than from drilling in shallower water,” environmental groups, including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program, said in a regulatory filing last year urging federal officials to block the project or require modifications. “Deepwater and ultra-deepwater oil spills and accidents are also much more difficult to respond to and contain.”
The Trump administration has forged an aggressive plan to increase the production and use of fossil fuels in the United States, and offshore oil is a central part of that strategy. Yet their plans have not gone entirely smoothly.
A lease sale in the Cook Inlet of Alaska earlier this month was a bust, with not a single company offering a bid. And on Wednesday, a sale of more than 80 million federal acres of water in the Gulf of Mexico only drew about $47 million in high bids, the weakest sale in about a decade. Last year an auction in the Gulf brought $279 million.
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10) Is Latin America Ready to Abandon Cuba?
Latin America’s left saw Cuba as its lodestar. Now leaders across the spectrum are hesitant to aid a nation in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.
By Simon Romero, Reporting from Mexico City, March 14, 2026
The Capitolio Nacional in Havana. Cuba’s isolation is deepening in the region. The New York Times
For decades, Cuba has been held up as an ideological lodestar by leftists across Latin America. Fidel Castro and his longhaired guerrillas fueled inspiration by slashing illiteracy, expanding public health care and raising life expectancy.
Even among opponents, Cuba often earned grudging respect as an unyielding bastion of resistance against generations of American presidents.
But now Cuba is running out of oil, and its economy is nearing collapse. A new wave of right-wing leaders in Latin America see Cuba not as a place of revolutionary nostalgia, but of authoritarian dysfunction. And in a seismic shift, the leftists at the helm of the region’s three most populous countries — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia — will not provide Cuba with emergency fuel shipments out of fear of incurring President Trump’s wrath.
“Any gesture of independence now carries the threat of immediate, devastating retaliation” from the United States, said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology. “One simply cannot predict the fallout of President Trump’s ire.”
Taken together, Latin America’s reorientation of its ties to Cuba reflects a sweeping change in the region’s politics, marking a rupture from what had been a wide diplomatic embrace of the island nation. Latin America’s leaders are now finding the costs of siding with Cuba too high after 67 years of Cuba’s one-party Communist state persisting in the face of U.S. resistance.
Mexico showcases this dilemma. It was the Cuban Revolution’s cradle, from which an exiled Fidel Castro launched his armed struggle. It was also Cuba’s longtime protector, supplying Cuba with oil while reliably defending it on the world stage.
At the start of the year, Mexico had emerged as Cuba’s top oil supplier. At the same time, Mexico is exceptionally dependent on trade with the United States. In late January, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, halted all oil exports to Cuba after the Trump administration threatened crippling tariffs on countries that provide Cuba with fuel.
Brazil and Colombia, two oil-exporting countries governed by leftists who had previously tried to ease Cuba’s isolation by pressing for the U.S. government to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, are also doing little to help ease Cuba’s energy shortage.
Venezuela, which came to Cuba’s rescue after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was, until recently, Cuba’s top oil supplier, stopped sending fuel to the Cuban government after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, killed 32 Cuban advisers in the attack and took control of Venezuela’s oil industry.
Deepening Cuba’s regional isolation, Ecuador expelled all Cuban diplomats, claiming interference by Cuban agents in its domestic affairs. Nicaragua halted visa-free travel for Cubans, cutting off an important route for migrants to reach the United States. Guatemala, Honduras and Jamaica moved to end deals that paid Cuba for providing doctors. Cuba’s medical missions around the world are a crucial source of hard currency for its government.
In Mexico, a proud tradition of assisting Cuba appears to be operating on borrowed time.
Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Mexico was the only country in Latin America to refuse to yield to U.S. pressure exerted on all member countries of the Organization of American States to break diplomatic and trade ties with Cuba.
That stance produced an informal arrangement in which Mexico would consistently defend Cuba in international forums and oppose the U.S. trade embargo, while Fidel Castro agreed not to export revolution to Mexican soil.
Under the leftist administrations of Ms. Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s protection shifted from diplomatic rhetoric to becoming a critical economic lifeline for Cuba.
When Venezuela’s oil shipments to Cuba plummeted in recent years because of economic disarray in Venezuela, Mexico emerged as one of Cuba’s top suppliers of subsidized oil, even as Mexico’s oil industry was hampered by declining production and soaring debts.
After the U.S. increased pressure on Venezuela in the run-up to capturing its leader, Nicolás Maduro, Mexico eclipsed Venezuela in 2025 to become the top oil supplier to Cuba. But not for long.
In late January, when the Trump administration threatened Mexico with tariffs if it continued to ship oil, Ms. Sheinbaum’s government shifted to sending food and medicine instead.
Across Latin America, the Trump administration’s blockade of oil shipments to Cuba is testing ties at a crucial juncture. Fuel for vehicles is growing scarce, and blackouts are plaguing the electric grid, raising questions about whether the regime can survive. Cuba on Friday acknowledged for the first time that it was in discussions with the United States to defuse their confrontation.
In Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration has had to balance a tradition of supporting Cuba with Washington’s threats of retaliation and growing domestic skepticism of helping Cuba.
“This path of escalating pressure, to systematically asphyxiate the island, ends up victimizing the entire population,” said Celso Amorim, Mr. Lula’s chief foreign policy adviser, in a telephone interview.
The U.S. pressure campaign aimed at coercing Cuba’s leaders into making concessions, Mr. Amorim said, would most likely have the “opposite effect” of hardening a regime for whom standing up to the United States is a core ideological tenet.
Still, Brazil, with its diversified economy and its status as Latin America’s largest producer of oil and agricultural commodities, could arguably adopt a more assertive posture in alleviating the crisis in Cuba.
But like Mexico, Brazil is limiting its help to humanitarian aid, largely of basic food staples. Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, produces nearly twice as much oil as Pemex, its Mexican counterpart, but has opted against supplying fuel to Cuba.
Mr. Amorim said he could not speak for Petrobras. But he cited the company’s extensive web of international banking ties, including in the United States, which could expose it to “secondary sanctions or retaliatory measures.”
A spokesman at Petrobras, which is publicly traded but controlled by Brazil’s government, did not immediately respond to a query about the company’s approach to Cuba.
Other factors weigh on Brazil’s deliberations over aiding Cuba. With Mr. Lula’s leftist Workers Party holding power in Brazil for the better part of the past quarter-century, the authorities have faced criticism over previous efforts to bolster Cuba’s economy.
During Mr. Lula’s first term, Brazil began financing construction of the Port of Mariel, a deepwater port capable of handling enormous cargo ships. Brazil’s national development bank provided more than $600 million for the project.
But the project stalled, saddling Brazil with unpaid debt from Cuba. When Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s right-wing president from 2019 to 2023, he used his opponents’ support of Cuba as a rallying cry for his own supporters. Now Mr. Lula is facing a re-election bid against Mr. Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio Bolsonaro, in what is becoming a highly competitive race.
Cuba’s increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissent, including the expansion of civilian groups that spy and inform on neighbors and new censorship measures criminalizing online criticism of Cuba’s political system, have also hurt Cuba’s standing. As happened in Venezuela under Mr. Maduro, who also imprisoned hundreds of political critics, these moves have withered the support Cuba traditionally held in the Brazilian left.
“Cuba’s treatment of the domestic opposition has made it very difficult even for hard-core cadres of the Workers Party to come out in support of the regime,” said Matias Spektor, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil.
Then there is the effect that Cuba’s economic decline is having on Brazil and other countries in Latin America. Since 2020, an estimated 2.75 million people have fled Cuba, the largest demographic decline in the country’s modern history.
The Cuban diaspora is undergoing a major shift. While the United States remains the main target for many Cuban migrants, stricter U.S. policies have turned countries like Brazil and Mexico into primary destinations.
Brazil has seen the biggest surge in Cuban migration. In 2025 Cubans became the top asylum-seeking nationality there, surpassing Venezuelans for the first time.
The arrival of so many new Cuban migrants, in Brazil and other countries around the region, is seen as a vivid illustration of the failings of the Cuban regime and its planned-economy governing model, said Lillian Guerra, a historian at the University of Florida.
“None of those folks are cheering their government,” Ms. Guerra said. “They have all been vectors about what is actually happening in Cuba.”
This exodus occurs in a context sharply different from a decade and a half ago, when Cuba was the center of a regional embrace driven by revolutionary nostalgia and efforts to consolidate autonomy from Washington during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2009, after Mauricio Funes, a leftist, took office as El Salvador’s president, he made his country the last in the region to recognize Cuba. The island nation seemed to have come full circle from its isolation in the 1960s, when Mexico was the only Latin American country that dared have diplomatic ties with Havana.
Now El Salvador’s president is Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who has used mass incarceration and the suspension of civil liberties to lower his nation’s crime rate, emerging as a star of the Latin American right. This month, Mr. Bukele joined counterparts from countries including Argentina, Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Paraguay, at a summit organized in Florida by the Trump administration.
Forming a broad coalition at odds with Havana, Mr. Bukele and others enthusiastically applauded when Mr. Trump told the gathering that Cuba’s Communist government had been brought to its knees, and that “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was.”
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11) Inside a Doomed Mission to Cuba: 10 Men Willing to ‘Leave Everything’
The Cuban immigrants sailed from the Florida Keys and wound up in a gunfight off Cuban shores. They were anti-Communist militants from fringe groups.
By Patricia Mazzei and David C. Adams, Reporting from Miami, March 14, 2026
Before Héctor Cruz Correa left his home in South Florida for an ill-fated boat trip to Cuba last month, he told his mother that he was going fishing. He asked her to make his favorite beef soup for the trip.
Another man, Roberto Álvarez Ávila, a father of three, told his wife that he would see her after his shift as a Walmart security guard. A third, Conrado Galindo Sariol, who had spent eight years in a Cuban prison, told his wife he was going to work delivering packages.
None of them returned home.
The three men were among 10 Cuban immigrants who, according to the Cuban government, stowed a stockpile of weapons on two boats in the Florida Keys, set sail and wound up in an armed confrontation with the Cuban coast guard about a mile off the island’s northern coast. The government called it a foiled terrorist attack.
Four of the men, including Mr. Cruz Correa, died in the firefight on Feb. 25. Mr. Álvarez, who had been shot, died nine days later. The five others were all injured and remain detained in Cuba.
More than two weeks later, what the men intended to do that day remains a mystery. They knew each other from TikTok group chats and fringe organizations dedicated to freeing Cuba from communism. Most of them lived and worked in and around Miami and Tampa, two hubs of anti-Castro sentiment. Their relatives remain skeptical of the Cuban government’s account.
Yet some Cubans in Miami have started to believe that the men might have convinced themselves that a few anti-communist militants could take on the Cuban dictatorship.
Cuba’s economy is on the brink of collapse. Its Communist government looks weaker than at any other point in recent history. After deposing the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who had provided Cuba with an economic lifeline, President Trump has said that the Cuban regime may be the next to crumble. The Cuban government confirmed on Friday that it is in talks with the White House over its economic future.
Some in South Florida’s exile community suspect that a handful of their own seized an opportunity to try to provoke unrest in their homeland.
“It was a display of bravery, of courage,” Jorge Luis García Pérez, a well-known activist against the Cuban government who goes by the name Antúnez, said last Sunday during a small ceremony that exile groups held for the men in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. “Those men went there to leave everything.”
For four decades after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, exiles ran guns, planted bombs and tried to subvert the island’s government from their adopted home of South Florida. Miami’s anti-Communist fervor ran so deep that often, the militants were not even prosecuted in the United States.
But those days had seemed long over. The earlier generations of militant exiles had grown old, died or become resigned to never seeing a democratic Cuba.
Last month’s boat plot involved younger Cuban immigrants, many of whom came to the United States much more recently, suggesting that at least a handful of men had sought to pick up the mantle of earlier generations.
Unlike in the past, however, there has not been an outpouring of support for the 10 men who were on the boat. The ceremony in Little Havana drew maybe 50 people, fewer than organizers had hoped, and no politicians.
Yet those who attended treated the men with reverence.
Sergio Rodríguez of the November 30 Movement, which was founded in the 1960s by former supporters of Fidel Castro, said that his group and other exile organizations “will always support any belligerent act or action” against the Cuban regime.
Several attendees mused that if Cuba continued to flail and the White House was unable to reach a deal with its government, like-minded militants might try to take matters into their own hands.
The timing of the shootout led some to initially believe it was the start of another Bay of Pigs, the failed, C.I.A.-backed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade the island in 1961 and depose Mr. Castro. But the Trump administration said it knew nothing about the plot.
It also drew comparisons to an incident that took place exactly 30 years before the men set sail from the Keys, in February 1996, when the Cuban government shot down two planes belonging to a Miami-based exile organization, Brothers to the Rescue. A Cuban intelligence agent had infiltrated the group and warned his government about the planned attack.
Relatives and friends of the men on the boat think it could have happened to them, too.
‘Everything Was Normal’
One of the plot’s masterminds, according to the Cuban government, was Amijail Sánchez González, 48, who was injured in the shootout. He had co-founded an exile group called People’s Self-Defense about five years ago.
His girlfriend, Maritza Lugo Fernández, was accused by Cuban officials of organizing the scheme and allowing the men to train on her ranch near Naples, Fla., where she raises pigs and chickens and grows peppers.
Ms. Lugo, 62, is the head of the November 30 Movement. She was jailed in Cuba in 1999 for anti-government activities and left the island in 2002. In an interview, she said that she had been dating Mr. Sánchez and that she also knew some of other men who were on the boat. But she had no knowledge of their plan, she said.
“We’ve participated in activities together,” she said. “But it’s a lie that I’m the promoter or the boss of anything, nor did I finance anything.”
She said she last saw Mr. Sánchez two days before the shootout.
“Everything was normal,” she said. “I found out from the news, like everyone else.”
A Facebook account that appears to belong to Mr. Sánchez shared posts in recent months urging Cuban citizens to join a “definitive battle” against their government. The account shared photos of people holding Cuban flags while making hand gestures resembling guns. One photo displayed a T-shirt with the slogan, “If the price of freedom is life, I will pay.”
Mr. Sánchez and another man injured in the shootout, Leordan Cruz Gómez, had been wanted by the Cuban government; after the incident, it said the two had previously been involved in the “promotion, planning, organization, financing, support or commission” of terrorist acts against Cuba.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba said on Friday that the men had several targets, including military ones, and wanted to “create confusion, to create unease, to sow fear.” He added that an F.B.I. team would soon arrive to take part in the investigation.
Cuban prosecutors have filed terrorism charges against Mr. Sánchez, Mr. Cruz Gómez, Mr. Galindo and the two other survivors, José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló and Christian Acosta Guevara. At the ceremony in Little Havana, Ms. Lugo said that her organization planned to caravan to Washington to demand the men’s release.
The Cuban government also filed charges against another man, Duniel Hernández Santos, who it said had been “sent” from the United States to meet the boat. No one at the ceremony last Sunday seemed to know anything about him.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Mr. Hernández “entered the U.S. illegally” in 2024, during the Biden administration, using an app that allowed certain migrants to cross the border from Mexico at a port of entry. In December, an immigration judge issued a final order of removal against Mr. Hernández. “He then chose to self-deport to Cuba in February,” the department said.
The Cuban government identified the dead as Mr. Cruz Correa, Mr. Álvarez, Michel Ortega Casanova, Pavel Alling Peña and Ledián Padrón Guevara.
Mr. Alling’s social media posts showed an affinity for writing and performing poetry that later gave way to a singular interest in liberating Cuba. Mr. Ortega, a truck driver and a grandfather, also became “obsessed” with the cause in recent years, according to his brother, Misael Ortega Casanova. Four Cuban state security guards showed up at their sister’s house in Cuba after their brother’s death, he said, “to intimidate her.”
“My sister’s phones are tapped,” he added.
With the surviving men either hospitalized or detained and unable to speak freely, answers remain elusive.
Mr. Galindo’s wife, Ana Seguí, who lives in a small pink house in Miami, said that he had spoken by phone to a relative in Cuba who had told Ms. Seguí about the conversation. He told the relative that he had a shoulder injury, Ms. Seguí said, but he had a minder nearby who did not let him say much else.
In the Cuban government’s telling, the 10 men traveled from the Keys on two boats with a dozen high-powered weapons; more than 12,800 rounds of ammunition; 11 pistols; and other gear, including boots, helmets and camouflage backpacks. One of the boats broke down en route, the Cuban government said, forcing all of the men and their weapons into the other, a 24-foot boat built in 1981.
The boat was reported stolen the same day out of Big Pine Key, in the Lower Florida Keys, according to a report from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. It belonged to a contractor who employed Mr. Cruz Correa.
The boat owner had found the vessel gone and Mr. Cruz Correa’s white Chevy truck parked nearby. A neighbor told sheriff’s deputies that she had seen a man park the truck and board the boat by himself.
The owner said that he had assumed that Mr. Cruz Correa had taken the boat to go fishing, though he had never done so before. He also said that Mr. Cruz Correa had been trying to repair a large boat with twin motors in the days leading up to the fishing boat theft.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said that no other boats were reported stolen that day, or in the days leading up to the shootout.
Mr. Cruz Correa’s mother, María Antonia Correa Pérez, lived with her son, his wife and other relatives in a rented house in Homestead, Fla. She recalled his request for soup with beef and vegetables the day before his trip.
“He was going fishing and asked for me to cook for him,” she said of her son, a father of three whom she called by the nickname Yayi. “And I did.”
He had some for lunch and took the rest in his lunchbox, she said, leaving in a navy blue pullover. He texted her from his truck when he arrived in the Keys.
Last week, she identified her son’s body via video call from Cuba.
“My heart is so hurt,” she said. “I cannot stand this pain.”
Frances Robles contributed reporting from Miami. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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12) Netanyahu Has the War He Always Wanted, but on Trump’s Terms
Israel’s prime minister wanted regime change in Iran. But President Trump seems prepared to settle for something less.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 14, 2026
“More than 30 years after he first publicly identified Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a singular menace to his country, Mr. Netanyahu seemed to have finally gotten the war he always wanted when the mighty United States joined the fight shoulder to shoulder with Israel. But the war is being fought on President Trump’s terms. The United States is exerting influence over what Israel may destroy in Iran. It demonstrated that a week ago, when American politicians expressed displeasure with Israel for attacking fuel-storage depots in and around Tehran, filling the skies with huge clouds of black smoke. ‘Please be cautious about what targets you select,’ Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Trump ally, wrote on social media the next day, stressing the need to preserve such infrastructure to give the Iranian people a chance at a functioning economy, should they manage to overthrow their government. The scolding fueled speculation in Israel that, Mr. Netanyahu’s hopes aside, the Trump administration may have a grander strategy in mind than merely removing a threat to Israel. Should the United States come away from the war with influence over Iran’s oil industry, the thinking goes, it would gain leverage with China, Iran’s biggest oil customer, in a future showdown over Taiwan.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January at the funeral of an Israeli hostage. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to war on Feb. 28 promising that Israel and the United States would “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.”
Two weeks later, though Israeli and U.S. fighters own the skies over Iran, Mr. Netanyahu’s war aims have been brought sharply down to earth. Israel, he says now, is seeking merely to degrade the Islamic Republic as a nuclear and ballistic missile threat.
As for regime change, Israel continues to target Iran’s internal security forces, Mr. Netanyahu said on Thursday in his first news conference of the war. Beyond that, it can do little more than hope for the best, he said: that the Iranian people find a way to overthrow their government someday, perhaps even soon.
It is a striking shift, pointing not only to the difficulty of trying to achieve challenging political objectives with air power alone, but also to an irony of the Israeli leader’s position. More than 30 years after he first publicly identified Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a singular menace to his country, Mr. Netanyahu seemed to have finally gotten the war he always wanted when the mighty United States joined the fight shoulder to shoulder with Israel.
But the war is being fought on President Trump’s terms.
The United States is exerting influence over what Israel may destroy in Iran. It demonstrated that a week ago, when American politicians expressed displeasure with Israel for attacking fuel-storage depots in and around Tehran, filling the skies with huge clouds of black smoke.
“Please be cautious about what targets you select,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Trump ally, wrote on social media the next day, stressing the need to preserve such infrastructure to give the Iranian people a chance at a functioning economy, should they manage to overthrow their government.
The scolding fueled speculation in Israel that, Mr. Netanyahu’s hopes aside, the Trump administration may have a grander strategy in mind than merely removing a threat to Israel. Should the United States come away from the war with influence over Iran’s oil industry, the thinking goes, it would gain leverage with China, Iran’s biggest oil customer, in a future showdown over Taiwan.
Israelis, who overwhelmingly support the war, also now take it as a given that the United States will decide when it ends — both in the fight against Iran and in the second front that Israel has opened up against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where that country’s government enjoys U.S. backing.
“Israel is in the war, but is not leading it,” the columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Friday. “It is operating in the dark. Over every one of its actions hangs a large question: When will Trump, the supreme leader on our side, decide to declare victory and stop the fire?”
Mr. Netanyahu has tried to mitigate this impression. In his Thursday news conference, he assured Israelis that he and Mr. Trump speak “almost every day, openly and without holding back.”
“We focus together, exchanging ideas and advice, and making decisions together,” he said.
But he also seemed to be preparing the public for an end to the war, whenever that might come — and for the idea that it will not be a war to end all wars with Iran or its proxies.
The war has weakened Tehran, Mr. Netanyahu said, to the point that “it no longer threatens as it once did.” Still, he cautioned, “If we must defeat them again and again, we will defeat them again and again.”
“You cannot say things will be finished,” he said, adding: “It requires more blows and more blows. But these blows weaken our enemies enormously.”
To Israelis, who were promised total victories in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran over the past few years — none of which materialized as advertised — the lowering of Mr. Netanyahu’s rhetorical sights, from decisive triumph to the latest in a series of rounds, had a familiar ring.
“If we look at the Netanyahu doctrine, it’s hit, degrade, declare victory, build up, prepare, and then do it again,” said Yaakov Katz, an Israeli analyst and a founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue. “And that’s probably what Israel will continue to do because we refuse to ever follow any military action with a political resolution.”
For a prime minister who long sought comparisons with Winston Churchill, it has also been striking how quiet, how absent from center stage, Mr. Netanyahu has been as a wartime leader so far.
Until Thursday, he had delivered only a few video messages and sat for a single interview — in English, with Sean Hannity, on Fox News. That interview, on March 2, was hastily arranged after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Washington that the United States had attacked Iran because Israel was going to strike regardless, which would have brought Iranian retaliation against American forces.
“There are people that say, ‘Wow, the prime minister of Israel dragged him into it,’” Mr. Hannity said.
Mr. Netanyahu laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world. He does what he thinks is right for America.”
Of course, it would be foolhardy for Mr. Netanyahu to openly take credit for persuading Mr. Trump to join the fight. Mr. Trump has come under pressure from many allies within his MAGA movement to pull away from his close support for Israel.
Then again, Mr. Netanyahu does not need to boast to Israelis that he persuaded Mr. Trump to attack Iran. He has allies to do that.
On Israel’s Channel 14, which cheers on Mr. Netanyahu even more than Fox News boosts Mr. Trump, leading commentators like Yaakov Bardugo have credited the prime minister with outdoing even Churchill. The British prime minister, Mr. Bardugo said, persuaded Roosevelt to stand by Britain in World War II, but Mr. Netanyahu got America to enter this war from the start.
Polls show that the Israeli public broadly approves of Mr. Netanyahu’s management of the war. But so far, that has not benefited him politically where it counts most, and where he had to be expecting better news: in his prospects for an election that must be held by October.
The latest survey, published Friday in the Maariv newspaper, found that Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties would win only 50 of 120 seats in Parliament if the vote were held now — roughly the same poor position it has been in for years. The opposition’s Jewish parties would win 60 seats, putting them on the cusp of a majority, and the Arab parties, who align with the opposition, 10.
However much the war has united Israel behind its military, Mr. Netanyahu has also given his domestic opponents new material to use against him.
In pushing through a spending increase on Tuesday to cover the war’s costs, his government also authorized hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new aid for ultra-Orthodox Jewish institutions. That comes as the military struggles with a manpower shortage while, to the outrage of thousands of reservists and their families, many ultra-Orthodox men avoid the draft.
All of which is a reminder that the comparisons to Churchill have a double edge: As much as they may flatter Mr. Netanyahu, they also cheer his opponents. Churchill, after all, was ousted before World War II had even ended.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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13) F.C.C. Chair Threatens to Revoke Broadcasters’ Licenses Over War Coverage
The comment from Brendan Carr came on the heels of a social media message from President Trump criticizing the news media’s coverage of the war with Iran.
By Ashley Ahn, Published March 14, 2026, Updated March 15, 2026
Brendan Carr in Washington in January. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened on Saturday to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the war with Iran, his latest move in a campaign to stomp out what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.
As the war entered its third week, Mr. Carr accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions” in a social media post and warned them to “correct course before their license renewals come up.”
“Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” he said.
Mr. Carr shared a Truth Social post by President Trump that criticized the news media for its coverage of the war with Iran. Mr. Trump referred to a story published by The Wall Street Journal that reported five American refueling planes had been struck in Saudi Arabia, claiming its headline was “intentionally misleading.” He accused the news media of wanting the United States to lose the war.
Dow Jones & Company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a similar vein, delivered a lengthy complaint about CNN’s coverage of the war in the Middle East during a news conference Friday, saying that he looked forward to the news network being controlled by the billionaire David Ellison.
Mr. Ellison, who has a friendly relationship with Mr. Trump, is the owner of Paramount Skydance, which is seeking to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion. That deal, if it closes, will bring CNN under Mr. Ellison’s purview. He is best known in the journalism world for shaking up leadership at CBS News, where he has installed more conservative journalists.
Since taking over the F.C.C. chairmanship at the start of Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Carr has regularly raised the possibility of seizing station licenses over various programming decisions at the major television networks, whose owned and affiliated stations need F.C.C. licenses in order to operate.
But long term experts in media regulation have said that the process for taking away station licenses is involved and exceedingly onerous by design. The pre-eminent national communications law prohibits the government from using regulations to censor.
Democratic lawmakers and free-speech watchdogs were quick to condemn Mr. Carr’s threat as a violation of the First Amendment. On social media, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called it “straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” while Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said that “when our nation is at war, it is critical that the press is free to report without government interference.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for free-speech rights, said in a statement that Mr. Carr’s tenure as F.C.C. chairman “has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press.” It called his latest post “shocking — and dangerous.”
Mr. Carr’s comments on Saturday follow a pattern he has charted, which critics say is dangerous and positions him as a national censor.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was temporarily pulled off the air after Mr. Carr took issue with some of the ABC host’s comments, and Mr. Carr has suggested the F.C.C. should investigate the network’s daytime talk show “The View” over its political content. And in February, Stephen Colbert blasted Mr. Carr and said that his network, CBS, had barred him from airing an interview with a Democratic candidate in a U.S. Senate race because of new guidance by the F.C.C. about equal airtime for political candidates.
The Trump administration’s messaging against the news media comes as polls show it faces low public support for the war and it tries to thwart Iran’s efforts to block a vital oil route amid skyrocketing global oil prices.
Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.
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14) It’s Good to Be a Billionaire, Even at Tax Time
Paying taxes would feel better if the truly rich were bearing a fair share, our columnist says.
By Jeff Sommer, March 15, 2026
Jeff Sommer writes Strategies, a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.
Alex Nabaum
If you’ve been thinking about your tax bill, here’s something else to stew about.
Scores of people with enormous wealth are paying relatively little, if anything, in taxes. Billionaires — and those with fortunes that are merely in the hundreds of millions — can avoid taxes legally, using loopholes that are unavailable to the rest of us.
The income tax is for working people. So is the payroll tax — which wage earners and their employers pay into Social Security and Medicare, week after week. The payroll tax and the income tax corral nearly everybody who holds down a job.
Then there are the superrich. They live by another set of rules. The wealthiest people in the United States pay taxes on a minuscule proportion of their income, and some avoid the income tax and payroll tax entirely, says Ray Madoff, an expert on taxes at Boston College Law School. Much of their staggering wealth — assets including cash, stock, bonds, gold, art collections, homes, yachts and every other valuable thing they have already accumulated — is barely taxed, she says.
Professor Madoff has written a persuasive book, “Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.” She says billionaires in the United States can be virtually exempt from taxes, like the French aristocracy before the revolution of 1789.
Some billionaires manage to bypass the income tax entirely, she says. And they are all barely touched by the payroll tax because the income captured by that tax is capped at $184,500.
“There are two classes of people in the United States today,” she said in a long phone conversation. “Those who pay taxes, which is most of us, and the ‘wealth class’” — a self-perpetuating elite that passes on riches that are barely taxed, from generation to generation.
The tax code, she said, has helped create a new “hereditary class,” which is taking advantage of arcane rules that are hard for most people to fully understand.
Taxes Are for Workers
Salaries are heavily taxed, Professor Madoff writes. So perhaps the most critical move in the standard “Tax-Avoidance Playbook” for billionaires, she adds, is “to avoid those traditional earnings.”
On the face of it, that seems a little strange. After all, traditional earnings are all I’ve ever had. I’ve usually assumed that I don’t have enough. And if I retire one day, most of the money I’ve put away in tax-sheltered 401(k) and individual retirement accounts will be taxed in the traditional way when I start to spend it.
But if I were a billionaire, I’d know better. The superrich don’t need to bother with paychecks or 401(k) withdrawals. There are much better ways for them to minimize taxes and, perhaps, avoid paying them entirely.
Consider that The New York Times has published annual accounts of the compensation of the highest-paid chief executives in the United States, using Equilar data, for the past 18 years. These tallies often have not included some of the richest people in corporate America — billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and, for a time, Elon Musk.
Why have they been missing? These billionaires paid themselves little or nothing in salary, instead amassing wealth mainly in stock shares and options. (Even so, Securities and Exchange Commission regulations have led to the disclosure of occasional gargantuan stock grants.)
For day-to-day expenses, to say nothing of yachts and planes and private islands, billionaires have excellent options, from a tax standpoint, to raise cash.
The most straightforward is to sell assets. Even if you sell hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock or other assets, like art collections, you will be taxed at a low federal rate for long-term capital gains — an advantage often advocated by economists as an incentive for investment. But this preferential treatment makes an already tilted playing field even steeper.
“Capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than earnings from work,” Professor Madoff writes. “Because of this difference in tax treatment, someone who earns $50,000 from working a job pays higher taxes than someone who makes $50,000 from selling an investment.”
The truly rich may never need to sell their assets. Instead, banks and private credit firms will happily lend money at favorable rates, using wealth as collateral. And as long as their wealth grows at a higher rate than the interest rate charged on their loan, they become richer, tax-free.
Along with everything else they reveal, the millions of pages of documents released by the federal government in the Jeffrey Epstein files shed light on this tax strategy of the superrich. They show how Mr. Epstein helped Leon Black, the former chief executive of the Apollo Group private equity firm, live luxuriously while minimizing his taxes. Mr. Black was able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, which he received in low-interest bank loans, using his art collection as collateral. As an account by John Hyatt points out in Forbes, the collection’s value grew from an estimated $1 billion in 2014 to $1.4 billion in 2017.
A Loophole for Private Equity
If Uncle Sam agreed, many people could save on taxes simply by claiming that their “earnings from work are investment income, and thereby eligible for capital gains tax rates,” Professor Madoff writes.
The Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t let me make that claim. Yet under current rules, managers of private equity, venture capital and hedge funds receive a fat share of their funds’ profits for their work, which they get to call “carried interest.” As a consequence, they pay lower tax rates.
In a recent S.E.C. filing, the Blackstone private equity company disclosed that Stephen A. Schwarzman, its chief executive, earned more than $1.2 billion last year. That included $111.8 million in incentive fees and carried interest, according to Equilar. His compensation included a $350,000 “base salary” — of which about half would presumably be subject to the payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare.
I am likely to earn more than the $184,500 cap this year, though not nearly as much as Mr. Schwarzman’s base salary. But under current rules, I would pay the same amount of payroll tax as Mr. Schwarzman.
Generations of Untaxed Wealth
There’s a strategy for billionaire families seeking true, intergenerational wealth to avoid taxes forever. It’s called “buy, borrow, die.”
Say you’re already rich, have accumulated assets and have borrowed against them. That covers “buy” and “borrow.” Now for the nasty part. Even billionaires die.
The estate tax once aimed at preventing the creation of an American aristocracy by taxing wealth when it was passed on to heirs. But Professor Madoff says that important tax is virtually toothless today. Branded “the death tax” in a fabulously successful public relations campaign financed by wealthy families, it can be gotten around completely if you’re rich enough to hire the best lawyers, she says.
Billionaires can pass these holdings on to their heirs without ever having paid tax on their gains. And for the heirs, the appreciated value of the holdings becomes the base against which future gains and losses are measured.
Over the course of a U.S. billionaire’s life, and even after death, taxes on “investments are not just less burdensome but effectively optional,” Professor Madoff writes. The wealth of families like the Waltons, the Kochs, the Mellons and the Rockefellers persists for generations. The tax system hasn’t prevented this, she says. It has helped make it happen.
What Is to Be Done?
Proposals for wealth taxes have been in the news in California, New York, Paris and Copenhagen. But these ideas aren’t simple.
Wealth taxes are imposed on what you already own, while income taxes are levied on the money you bring in. Property taxes are a form of wealth tax. More sweeping wealth taxes might require payments on a proportion of everything you own, not just real estate. And wealth taxes face a fundamental problem in the United States: The Supreme Court might well declare them unconstitutional.
In the meantime, Professor Madoff has another suggestion: taxing inheritances and gifts, with the recipient paying the bill. She would preserve hefty exemptions that now shield most people from gift and estate taxes, and exempt moderate-size family farms and businesses.
But when a billionaire dies or gives her estate to her daughter or son, the heir would owe the government a large tax bill. Perhaps as much as one-third of “all bequeathable wealth comprises unrealized gains,” she writes, citing a recent Brookings Institution study.
This proposed change in the tax code has a long, though unsuccessful, bipartisan history. Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Barack Obama both endorsed it. It would make a difference, though certainly not an immediate one.
Major changes in the U.S. tax code have come about in reaction to wars, depressions and, in other countries, revolutions. It may be too much to expect the United States to find ways of taxing the superrich gently and peacefully, without first experiencing a profound disaster. But I certainly hope that it can.
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15) Israel Attacks Hezbollah. The Lebanese Pay the Price.
By Nada Bakri, March 15, 2026
Ms. Bakri is a journalist and essayist based in Cambridge, Mass.
"I cannot call this liberation when the liberator is also the occupier."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/opinion/iran-israel-us-war-lebanon-hezbollah.html
Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
I have been tending my house on a hill in Marjayoun in southern Lebanon by phone since fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, after Oct. 7, 2023. I call the caretaker of the house every week. Is the road passable? Is the water running? Is the house still standing? He tells me what he can see. I ask him to do what he can.
A cease-fire in 2024 quelled the fighting, although Israel continued with sporadic raids. This month, the area became a major front in the American-Israeli war with Iran. Israel ordered people to leave our neighborhood and sent its army and attack planes to fight Hezbollah. In two weeks, the Israeli military has killed more than 800 people and driven some 800,000 others from their homes there and elsewhere in Lebanon, with devastating strikes on Beirut, and turned schools, stadiums, sidewalks and other corners of ordinary life into places of shelter.
The orders came after Hezbollah fired on Israel, saying it was avenging the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and acting in defense of Lebanon. The Lebanese government answered by banning military activity by Hezbollah, declaring that only the state can make decisions about war and peace. President Joseph Aoun on Monday said Hezbollah showed “no regard for the interests of Lebanon or the lives of its people.”
For decades, Lebanon has been a place for other people’s wars and our own unfinished ones: Palestinians and Israelis, Syrians and Israelis, militias and the state. Old civil war battle lines never fully disappeared, and new wars keep finding the same ground. Even now, after all these years, Lebanon is still caught between a party that claims to defend it — Hezbollah — and a war whose consequences the country is left to absorb. My house is still standing. But like much of the country, it remains intact only at the whims of the armies surrounding it.
Lebanese politicians have been talking about ending Hezbollah’s enormous influence on Lebanon for at least 30 years. Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in 1996 during a previous Israeli occupation, spoke about plans to disarm Hezbollah and absorb it into the Lebanese political landscape once Israel withdrew from the south.
Mr. Hariri was not an idealist floating proposals from the margins. He was rebuilding Beirut, and understood that you do not dismantle a militia by confrontation but by making it unnecessary, by building a state functional enough that the argument for a parallel state becomes moot. Remove the occupation, he was saying. Remove the cause. Disarmament will follow. It was a specific, logical theory of how Lebanon works. But it was also a threat to the parallel state that Hezbollah was building.
Israel eventually withdrew, but Hezbollah didn’t disarm. A car bomb killed Mr. Hariri on the seafront road in Beirut in 2005. Many people blamed Syria. A U.N.-backed tribunal convicted a Hezbollah member of the killing but failed to find enough evidence tying it to the party’s leadership. Hezbollah blamed Israel. Following an appeal in 2022, two more Hezbollah members were convicted in the killing.
After the assassination, Lebanon had a moment. The Cedar Revolution, which filled streets with protesters, pushed out Syrian troops who had also been in the country for decades. But the politicians chose accommodation. By May 2008 Hezbollah had turned its weapons on Beirut. The government had moved against it; the army declared neutrality; Hezbollah took West Beirut in just a few days. The state had been built to watch. In just over 15 years, Hezbollah gained elected representation, then cabinet presence, then veto power.
Now Israel is back occupying part of Lebanon and creating a new security zone south of the Litani River. The same argument from 1996 — that occupation gives Hezbollah its reason to stay armed — is being made again, at a vastly larger scale and with vastly more destruction. The paradox is deeper. Even if, like much of Lebanon, you want Hezbollah disarmed, Israel cannot be the means of that disarmament. Its occupation, and its assault on Lebanese territory, are exactly what Hezbollah, or whatever is reconstituted from its wreckage, will invoke to justify rearming.
Israel denies territorial ambitions in Lebanon. Yet biblical and expansionist language is no longer easy to dismiss as being on the fringe. In an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said it would be “fine” if Israel “took it all,” a remark that the embassy later said was taken out of context. Whatever he meant, it is the kind of talk that does not reassure a small country watching an army that keeps invading. Once an army enters, Lebanon has learned, you don’t know when it will decide to leave.
I have been watching videos coming out of Lebanon, many from areas under Hezbollah’s control, of people angry at the group, asking why their children and villages are being offered up again for sacrifice. They are furious about Israel’s bombs and its refusal to leave, and furious about being treated as expendable. The resistance narrative and the annexation narrative need each other.
I want Hezbollah gone. I have wanted this for a long time, as a Lebanese who watched what it did, directly or indirectly, to the country I come from and intend to return to. And yet. I cannot call an enemy state’s war on Lebanese land a cure for our lost sovereignty. I cannot conflate wanting an outcome with supporting whoever delivers it. I cannot call this liberation when the liberator is also the occupier.
Mr. Hariri’s great mistake, maybe, was believing that a country could be built faster than it could be hollowed out. Something akin to a house that still stands after being gutted.
My house in Marjayoun needs repairs. Cracks in a wall. Some plumbing. Things that in any other moment I would have scheduled without thinking. I keep postponing the work, because I am not ready to spend money on a house I cannot visit, on a road I cannot drive, through a town under bombardment by a military that keeps rewriting the terms of when normal life can return.
I came to this home through love and then through loss. My husband’s great-grandfather built it. My husband found it in ruins almost a century later and restored it. He died in 2012, four years after finishing the work.
The house outlived the man who built it. It outlived the man who restored it. Will the house outlive my son? What Lebanon will be left when the bombs stop falling?
I have learned, in the years since my husband’s death, that not knowing is not the same as not caring. This is what tending becomes: you do it anyway. Or you don’t, because the road closes, the town empties, and even the phone call to a caretaker is no longer possible.
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16) A Refugee Died After Border Patrol Left Him at a Cafe. Fear Followed.
Buffalo’s Arakan Rohingya community was rattled after a disabled man’s death. “Our worry comes from future incidents that may happen,” one resident said.
By Mark Sommer, Reporting from Buffalo, March 15, 2026
The body of Nurul Amin Shah Alam was prepared for burial on Feb. 26 in Buffalo. He was found dead five days after Border Patrol agents dropped him at a doughnut shop. Credit...Craig Ruttle/Reuters
In the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood of Buffalo, fear is in the air.
It is where the city’s Arakan Rohingya community has made a home. And it is where refugees who are in the United States legally have been rattled by the death of a man who was left by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a closed doughnut shop on a frigid winter night. His body was found on a city street five days later.
The Rohingya community, and other Buffalo residents, are upset that the man, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, was left alone, five miles from his home. He was nearly blind, had trouble walking, couldn’t understand English and was wearing thin, jail-issued footwear.
“Our worry comes from future incidents that may happen,” said Alam Bin Mohamid, co-owner of the neighborhood’s new Burmese Bangla Grocery and Halal Meat store. “If this happens once, it’s likely to happen again unless there are preventive measures.”
The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority, have faced decades of repression in Myanmar, and many community members in Buffalo first made their way to Malaysia before settling in western New York. The family of Mr. Shah Alam was among them.
Mr. Shah Alam was 56 when he was found dead in late February. The story of his death, first reported by The Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in Buffalo, has stirred outrage over the Department of Homeland Security’s treatment of immigrants and refugees.
Fatimah Abdul Roshid, Mr. Shah Alam’s widow, said that what happened to her husband had shaken the Rohingya community’s hope that they would feel safe in their new home.
“We thought we were safe here because we had papers to show somebody that this is who I am,” Ms. Abdul Roshid, wearing a traditional black niqab that left only her eyes visible, said through an interpreter, her voice catching through her tears. “But now our community is scared the way they were scared in other countries.”
One community activist estimated that about 2,000 members of the Rohingya community live in Buffalo. Most came after the Myanmar junta’s campaign of mass murder, rape and destruction in the western part of the country, carried out by the armed forces and the police from October 2016 to January 2017, when an estimated 700,000 refugees fled.
In their new home in Buffalo, the Rohingya refugees have gained access to health care and to public and religious schools. The number of Rohingya patients at the Jericho Road Community Health Center tripled between 2023 and 2025, to 1,000, according to the center, which has two clinics in Broadway-Fillmore. One in eight babies whose deliveries were handled by the health center came from a Rohingya family.
The neighborhood, which suffers from high levels of poverty and crime and was once a bastion of the Polish community, is now a home to African Americans and Bengalis as well as Rohingya people. The Rohingya, many of whom have construction skills, have moved into and are repairing dilapidated, 19th-century wood-framed cottages on streets bruised by past demolitions. Many of the homes are in the shadow of the Central Terminal, a towering former Art Deco train station that is being redeveloped.
The Rohingya neighborhood straddles Broadway, once the main commercial thoroughfare leading to Buffalo’s outer neighborhoods. The Rohingya community — with its three Rohingya-owned grocery stores and a restaurant — is adding to the street’s predominantly Bengali-owned businesses.
In their homeland, the Rohingya are systematically denied education and health care. In Buffalo, they see their new life as full of possibility, said Mohamad Rahman Imam Hussein, 31, the city’s first Rohingya real estate agent, who is active in the community. He arrived in Buffalo in January 2025, just before President Trump issued an executive order indefinitely freezing refugee resettlement in the United States. The Rohingya can learn a lot, he said, from the thousands of Bangladeshi refugees who came before them.
“They have built a blueprint. All of the communities have done that,” Mr. Imam Hussein said. “We were living like refugees in our home country. So, when we move to a new country, especially one that is well-structured like in the U.S., we have to learn everything from scratch.”
Mr. Shah Alam’s journey in western New York began on Christmas Eve in 2024, when he arrived as a refugee from Malaysia. He had gone there in 2002 to flee Myanmar’s military junta after being subjected to forced labor, and was later joined by his family. They decided to come to the United States because they couldn’t get the documents needed to become Malaysian citizens.
“A lot of our community members would say go to America, it is a place where you can thrive and be treated the same as other people,” one of Mr. Shah Alam’s sons, Mohamad Faisal Nural Amin, 23, said.
But shortly after Mr. Shah Alam arrived, he was arrested. A police report from February 2025 asserted that he had trespassed onto a woman’s property and damaged a shed door. The property owner called the police, who later said that Mr. Shah Alam had swung long poles he used as walking sticks at them. The police said a scuffle ensued, and that an officer was injured.
“I apologize for my husband’s mistake, that he got lost and ended up in a house, and that he didn’t listen to the cops, but to be fair he didn’t understand anything,” Ms. Abdul Roshid said.
Afraid that Mr. Shah Alam could be taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, given the agency’s aggressive actions across the country, the family elected to have him spend what became a year in the Erie County Holding Center. Eventually, he accepted a plea deal to a lesser charge than what he had initially faced.
Upon his release, Mr. Shah Alam was taken by Border Patrol and dropped off at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop. His son had been waiting outside the jail to take him home, while Ms. Abdul Roshid set her husband’s clothes out for him at home and prepared a meal to break the fast for the first night of Ramadan, the holiest Muslim holiday. His death on a city street, all alone, haunts them. No one had told the family that Mr. Shah Alam had been left at the doughnut shop.
“On his death bed, I couldn’t even see him, I didn’t even know where he was,” Ms. Abdul Roshid said. “And to find out he was gone without even saying goodbye breaks my heart.”
The Trump administration’s moratorium on new arrivals has put those Rohingya who were on the verge of being allowed into the country in limbo. That includes three of Ms. Abdul Roshid’s children, and her grandchildren, who remain in Malaysia. She and her other two sons who live in Buffalo are desperate to be reunited with their relatives.
Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, is investigating the circumstances surrounding Mr. Shah Alam’s Feb. 24 death and what transpired before then. A spokesman for the Buffalo Police Department said it was helping the investigation by seeking surveillance footage and witnesses.
Emails to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Buffalo field office and the Department of Homeland Security inquiring about whether the Border Patrol was investigating the handling of Mr. Shah Alam were not returned.
In an earlier emailed statement, Border Patrol officials said that their officers had offered Mr. Shah Alam a courtesy ride after he was released from the jail, and that he accepted. The officials said that they dropped him off at the Tim Hortons, which they determined to be a “warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station.”
Imran Fazal, director of the Rohingya Empowerment Community, which helps refugees with filling out paperwork, understanding bills and facilitating legal services, said that Mr. Shah Alam’s experience was a reminder of the vulnerability that people feel when they encounter language barriers. (The Rohingya speak an Indo-Aryan language.) The halt in the processing of green card applications, ordered by Mr. Trump in November for those coming from Myanmar and 18 other countries, has also deeply concerned the community.
“People are not going outside if they don’t have to, unless it’s to go to work, and some are even going to work in a group because they are scared,” Mr. Fazal said.
Mayor Sean Ryan of Buffalo, a Democrat whose first executive order as mayor in January was to ban city officials from cooperating with ICE, said that the Rohingya had been a “welcome addition to the city.”
“The tragedy of this family is they fled state violence to go to Malaysia, and came to America for the promise of safety from government violence, and look what happened,” he said.
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17) Oscar Winners, Will You Be Complicit?
By Daniel Kehlmann, March 15, 2026
Mr. Kehlmann is a German author and playwright whose latest novel, “The Director,” is about the German film industry under Nazi rule.
Photo illustration by Shannon Lin/The New York Times
Six weeks into President Trump’s return to power last year, I watched the Academy Awards in disbelief as his name wasn’t mentioned once and as the broadcast’s host, Conan O’Brien, made only veiled allusions to the state of things. He acted like a moderator in an authoritarian state where the smallest gesture of irreverence is seen as courageous. The political statements by the more famous winners and presenters — Zoe Saldaña, Daryl Hannah, Adrien Brody — were similarly muted or indirect. Especially after Hollywood’s open defiance during Mr. Trump’s first term, when Black Lives Matter and #MeToo gripped the entertainment industry, the change was profoundly disheartening. Why were people who had all the freedom to speak their minds already behaving as if that freedom had been taken away from them?
One year later, America has only gotten worse, its democracy more damaged, its treatment of the rest of the world more appalling and destructive. But thus far, 2026 awards ceremonies (the Golden Globes, the Actor Awards) have also been mostly politically muted, especially compared with other major televised events, like the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl. Perhaps American film stars — or the studios from which they make a living — fear retaliation. Or their silence may have more to do with an ambient sense that celebrities who express political opinions are somehow frivolous, out-of-touch elites. That sentiment has been best personified by the comedian Ricky Gervais, who in 2020 opened the Golden Globe Awards by telling America’s actors: “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.” Last month, he decided to repost that message on X, adding, “They’re still not listening.”
Mr. Gervais and those who agree with him are wrong. Hollywood’s great actors and directors are not merely well known; they are famous figures everywhere, even in dictatorships now closed to the world, such as Russia and North Korea. On Oscar night not only will the eyes of the American public be fixed on them; so will the ears of the entire planet, listening for the answer to the question: Your country is being turned into a dictatorship, people are being arrested and shot in the streets, your mad king is trampling your venerable Constitution underfoot — what do you have to say about it?
Actors are used to saying things other people have written for them. But right now it matters a lot whether they can find the right words themselves.
All authoritarian leaders crave the adoration of big cultural figures. That was true when Virgil praised the Emperor Augustus in his poems, and it was still true when Mr. Trump took over the Kennedy Center, renamed it for himself and then — after artists refused to perform there — decided to shut it down. The president rarely seems more personally aggrieved and vengeful than when a celebrity, whether it’s Rosie O’Donnell or Bad Bunny, snubs or insults him. When I did research for “The Director,” my novel about the German film industry under Nazi rule, I was surprised to see how focused Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were on winning over the luminaries of German film — as long as they were not Jews, of course — because they knew very well that the conduct of these world-famous people would send a signal across the globe.
The Nazis had some success. Emil Jannings, the first recipient of an Oscar and one of the most famous actors internationally at the time, allowed Goebbels to bestow on him the title of Staatsschauspieler and played leading roles in several major films of the nationalized German film industry. Werner Krauss lent his considerable talent to the infamous Nazi propaganda movie “Jud Süss,” claiming that no actor with any interest in his craft could pass up the opportunity to play so many different characters — at least four of them evil Jews — in one movie. G.W. Pabst, one of the most important directors in international cinema, made the films “The Comedians” and “Paracelsus” about heroes of German history. Erich Kästner, a children’s book author and a poet of cheeky political chansons, remained in Germany, fell silent and primarily wrote apolitical comedy and history movies under a pseudonym, with the tacit approval of Goebbels.
There were consequences for those who would not capitulate. Fritz Lang, Germany’s revered director of “Metropolis,” arguably the greatest silent movie of all time, rejected Goebbels’s offer to reshape the entire German film industry according to his will and went into exile. So did Marlene Dietrich, for whom the Nazis would have rolled out every red carpet, and the writers Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, both of whom could have stayed in Germany if they had only fallen silent and confined their opposition to private remarks.
No famous person in the United States has to choose between complicity and exile. The worst that can happen to renowned actors and filmmakers who speak out against their current government’s disregard for the law and common human decency is that they might be passed over for lead roles in franchise tent poles or streaming series. That can, of course, change. As we see in Hungary and Turkey, authoritarian regimes are never satisfied with what they have achieved; if they do not encounter resistance, they tighten the screws further. The amount of public dissent that may still be possible today could be impossible tomorrow.
For now, the world can still hear whether America’s cultural leaders will choose to stay silent. Mr. Trump is listening, too. It does make a difference if powerful famous people find the courage to speak out. It actually makes all the difference. So by a strange turn of events, a big part of the defense of American freedom now lies with people who have played Jedi knights, Avengers, guardians of galaxies, magicians, spies and athletes. For if they are too intimidated — or just don’t care enough — how can we demand bravery from anyone else?
Opportunism is contagious, but so is courage. The question is not whether actors should become politicians but whether citizens who happen to be very visible will at a decisive moment refuse to play the role that every authoritarian leader assigns them: decorative proof that all is well.
On a night when the world is watching, a few clear words will not save the Republic. But their absence may help end it.
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8) Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future
By Thomas L. Friedman, March 15, 2026
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Minneapolis.
Pao Houa Her for The New York Times
The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist. It’s not just that I’ve had to watch the Trump administration destroy cherished alliances, like ours with Western Europe and Canada, that have upheld freedom, democracy and global trade since World War II. It’s also been the stunning cowardice and boundless greed with which leaders of big law firms and Big Tech have bent their knees to King Donald and indulged a cabinet of clowns — not one of whom they’d hire in their own businesses.
But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.
It was one of the most courageous battles ever fought by American men and women not in uniform. It was led by moms ready to donate their breast milk to strangers and dads ready to drive someone else’s kids to school because the parents, terrified of ICE agents, were too afraid to go out outdoors. It was neighbors ready to hit A.T.M.s to help out neighborhood restaurants and businesses deciding not to open — thus forgoing their income — for fear that masked ICE agents might drag away their cooks or dishwashers or desk clerks.
And the best part was this: At a time when we have a president so shameless that he insists on putting his name on every public building he can, these good Samaritans of all colors and creeds acted without fanfare. “There were hundreds of leaders of this movement,” Bill George, a longtime Twin Cities business executive, said to me, “and I don’t know a single one of their names.”
Many surely got to know one another, though, because they were all propelled by a verb I’d never heard before: “neighboring,” as in, Today I will be neighboring — going out to protect the good people next door or down the block. Not because I favor illegal immigration, but because I oppose the fundamental indecency of President Trump and Stephen Miller and the blessedly now departed Kristi Noem trying to fulfill their daily quota for evicting illegal immigrants by arresting my neighbors, most of whom work hard, pay taxes, go to church or mosque and help me dig out my car from the snow in winter.
Here’s some free advice for Trump and Miller: Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighborliness — not everywhere, not always, but in a lot of places on a lot of days. Its power is rooted in its ordinariness — just a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbors and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.
Observing it up close made me think about what Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in January: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Well, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the real world after all, because your private ICE army — “governed by strength” and “force” — was sent packing by a bunch of moms and dads armed only with cellphone cameras and whistles, ready to walk out on a freezing morning in bathrobes and bunny slippers, to defend their neighbors, some of whom they barely knew.
Yes, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the “real world” after all, because the real score here is Neighboring, 1. Trumpism, 0.
Virtually every person I spoke with had at least one remarkable story. In fact, I have not heard so many stories of either incredible cruelty by men and women with guns or incredible kindness by neighbors and strangers for one another since I covered the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s.
To fully appreciate what is so new and special, though, you probably need to have grown up here. I was born in 1953 on the Northside of Minneapolis, a few miles from where George Floyd was killed, and back in my childhood everything seemed binary: You were either white or Black, Christian or Jewish, et cetera. Minnesota was roughly 99 percent white. By 2023, however, the state was 76 percent white, with Black, Hispanic, Asian and other minorities all making up a far bigger share of the population than in my youth.
That is a lot of demographic change. Indeed, in the mid-1970s, my aunt, who lived in Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, took me aside one evening during a family event and furtively whispered, “Tom, I was in the grocery store on Saturday and I heard someone speaking Spanish.” It was a first for her. She never forgot it, and neither did I. Willmar was almost entirely white when she moved there in the late 1940s. Today it is 59 percent white and has vibrant Somali and Latino communities.
The state economy could not thrive without immigrants — legal and illegal — as producers and consumers. Immigrants make up some 11 percent of the Minnesota work force today, and about 16 percent of the state’s manufacturing work force is foreign-born.
Bruce Corrie, a professor emeritus of economics at Concordia University, remarked in a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio that Trump’s rant claiming Somali immigrants “contribute nothing” could not be more wrong. “Foreign-born workers make Minnesota affordable, wealthy, productive,” Corrie said, “whether we’re eating out or getting our roof fixed.” He estimates that immigrant workers and businesses contribute $26 billion annually to Minnesota’s economy.
But, I repeat, there has been a lot of demographic change, very fast. The other morning, I took an Uber to visit my Somali American friend Hamse Warfa, head of a very creative education nonprofit, World Savvy, at his office in St. Paul. My Uber driver was also Somali. Her name was Huda, and, she told me, she has an adult child in the U.S. Air Force.
I thought to myself: Huda is taking Tom to see Hamse in St. Paul, where the new mayor is a Laotian Hmong refugee woman. Welcome to Minnesota circa 2026. Go Vikings!
That is the demographic and economic backdrop to Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. Beginning in December, Trump and Noem poured 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents into the Minneapolis-St. Paul region to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. That federal force, whose poorly trained foot soldiers eventually shot and killed two citizen observers, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dwarfed the local police force in number. In announcing the operation, Trump ranted that Somali immigrants were “garbage,” that “these aren’t people who work” or say “let’s make this place great.”
Trump’s view of Somali Minnesotans was, no doubt, shaped in part by the fact that nearly 80 individuals, most of them Somali immigrants, have been indicted and at least 57 of them convicted for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from government food programs. That fraud was a shameful moral failure by its perpetrators and a shameful management failure by Gov. Tim Walz, but Trump’s attempt to tar all 80,000 Somali Americans and Somalis in Minnesota, and other immigrants, generally to justify his federal invasion into the Land of Lakes has turned out to be a huge mistake, and, in my view, a racist one.
While church and other civic groups had built some organizational foundations in case ICE came to Minneapolis — after seeing what federal forces had done in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles — it is safe to say that no one anticipated the spontaneous upsurge of neighboring that exploded in the Twin Cities and eventually forced Trump into a humiliating withdrawal.
“Trump expected that the protests against ICE would be dominated by antifa or violent leftists and that they would become the damnable face of the resistance and the face of Minneapolis,” and therefore “legitimize” Trump’s invasion, Don Samuels, a Black former city councilman, told me.
But what happened instead, said Samuels, was that many everyday middle-class white Minnesotans turned out “to share risk and leadership of the resistance with their brown and Black neighbors.”
As the whole rainbow of Minnesotans watched their Hispanic, Hmong and Somali neighbors — some of them their local shopkeepers, small-business owners, carpenters or cooks — being violently pulled out of homes, restaurants and construction sites, Samuels noted, the popular reaction was: “I can’t believe this is happening in America — they killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood!”
Black and brown residents, many less likely to be as confrontational in their interactions with ICE, told their white neighbors: This is what we’ve been dealing with forever!
And so, suddenly, Samuels added, Trump and ICE found themselves “fighting the people they thought they were supposed to be saving America for”: white moms and dads and college students appalled by the obvious cruelty of federal agents dragging away their neighbors.
“This was Minnesota standing up — not being just ‘nice’ but being good and courageous and unified,” said Samuels. “Something was born in this crisis that could never have been born on a good day. Otherness has been replaced with kinship between brown, Black and white Minneapolitans.”
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota, told me, “We broke out of bowling alone,” referring to Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone,” about how communities in America had fragmented. “The concept of neighbors meeting neighbors has come back,” he said. “The idea of community was present again. I was at Costco the other day and a woman, she was white, just came up and asked if she could hug me.”
Members of two Minneapolis congregations — Shir Tikvah, a Reform synagogue, and San Pablo/St. Paul Lutheran Church — shared two services together, on Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, as a show of solidarity following the immigration siege. Then they jointly raised $1 million in one month to aid immigrant families who could not pay rent or buy food; some of it came from the synagogue’s and church’s own members, and some came from donors in 47 states.
In addition to residents who made benevolent gestures like buying groceries, there were activists willing to annoy less provocative Minnesotans if their creative tactics could annoy ICE more.
After the Minnesota-based Target Corporation refused to speak out against ICE operations, no doubt for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, Minnesotans went into local Target stores by the dozens and each bought a single container of salt — “to melt ICE” — and then immediately returned it, over and over again, to clog up checkout lines and drive away customers.
Other protesters found the suburban hotels where immigration agents were staying and stood outside until late at night banging pots and pans, blowing noisemakers, shouting through speakers and leaning on car horns so the agents couldn’t sleep.
A local sex toy store donated dozens of dildos that were distributed to protesters outside a federal building housing ICE activity, with some tossed at immigration officers. The organizer told Minnesota Public Radio that the sex toys were employed in the spirit of weaponizing the absurdity of the whole ICE campaign. “Power hates being mocked more than it hates being challenged,” he said.
It was Adriana Alejandro Osorio, a board member at World Savvy, the education nonprofit led by my friend Hamse, who first said to me that Minnesotans had turned “neighboring” into a verb. Then people outside of Minnesota saw how locals responded, she added, “and that was magical. People were contacting me and asking: How did you mobilize so fast? People recognized that they need to neighbor, and that was a positive thing in a dark time.”
The World Savvy board chairwoman, Linda Ireland, told me about a mom who donated breast milk because she was a superproducer and discovered she could help in a totally special way: “After being called to bring breast milk to a baby whose mom was taken by ICE during a diaper run, she connected with mothers who were so frightened they struggled to provide for their babies or could not leave home, and they created a network of moms donating breast milk.”
Abdirashid Abdi is the principal of AIM Academy of Science and Technology, a charter school in South Minneapolis, not far from where Pretti was killed. His school serves mostly Minnesotans from East Africa. He turned to me during a discussion with other school leaders and, with the most sincere and painful look, asked why the president of the United States would call Somali immigrants “garbage.”
Trump slings so many insults, it’s easy to get inured to them. It makes you forget what it might actually be like to be called “garbage” by the American president. The more we talked, though, the more it became clear that Trump’s verbal and physical onslaught was in some ways beneficial to Somalis and immigrants in the state.
“What came out of this was an understanding of who our neighbors are,” Abdi told me. “It has redefined that they are not just neighbors only. They are family, and we are not alone in this, and I have never been prouder to be a Minnesotan. That was a gift to our community. I have lived in the same place for 15 years, and I just met some of my neighbors. They brought over cookies.”
Bill Graves, who runs a family foundation focused on education and youth development, has a team of seven and said two of his team members were staying home, even though they were both citizens. One of the people made the decision because she “was followed one day by ICE and witnessed her neighbor being abducted by ICE while taking out the garbage,” Graves said.
In the other case, the team member’s parents were staying with her after they came from their home in Saudi Arabia for medical care, Graves explained. The parents are both Oromo, part of an ethnic group from Ethiopia and Kenya. After the ICE invasion began, the parents decided to return to Saudi Arabia, where the father ran a school, before his treatment was completed. The couple said it was “safer” in Saudi Arabia, Graves told me, given how ICE had seized other East African patients when they went to Minneapolis hospitals for care.
I have two childhood friends in the restaurant business in the Minneapolis area, and over dessert one night they poured out their stories of what a struggle it has been to keep their doors open these past few months. I’m not naming them; with ICE still operating with a small crew in Minneapolis, and with my friends’ staff made up mostly of immigrants, they could not risk being publicly identified.
When I sat down at the table in their restaurant, they asked if I wanted anything.
“Only a glass of water,” I answered, to which one instinctively asked me: “Ice or no ice?”
We laughed — but just for a moment. Because just hearing those three letters — I-C-E — still sends shivers down the spine, especially for people here in the restaurant business, where so many cooks, servers and bussers are immigrants, particularly from Hispanic countries.
To keep their doors open, my friends hired drivers to pick up their workers from their homes at 4 each morning, when fewer ICE agents were on the streets. They provided roughly 100 rides through each day and night. Employees did not want to drive their own cars because ICE was tracking license plates. The paid drivers were trained to circle an employee’s neighborhood once to ensure ICE was not present, then quickly pick up the employee and drive to the restaurant. Inside the restaurant were air mattresses next to the kitchen, for the many employees who preferred to sleep at the restaurant rather than risk moving around in public.
Customers, friends and neighbors filled the restaurant’s back rooms with household and personal products for employees to take home — and my friends set up movies on a laptop. Other neighbors and volunteer groups would drive these employees’ children to school while the parents were at work.
As one of my friends put it: “The unbelievable randomness, aggression and frequency of ICE abductions created fear among all immigrant workers, whether they had followed all the rules, had work permits or had been here for 20 years.”
Now, many of the employees’ children are so traumatized by stories of parents’ being taken away by immigration agents that they still refuse to go to school. Consequently, one parent must stay home from work, reducing the family income. A conservative friend of these restaurateurs one day simply dropped off a bag containing 40 $100 bills and told them to distribute the cash to their neediest employees. Other customers gave smaller amounts.
Today, there is an epidemic of ICE PTSD in the Twin Cities of epic proportions, but it is matched by an equally epic level of kindness.
“This is our family,” my friends said of their employees. They told me one of their longest-serving cooks said to them the other day: “I came here for a better life. I had my children here. I worked two jobs to put them through school, but now all I want to do is take my garbage to the curb without being afraid.”
It is not clear how many restaurants will survive the aftershock. With fewer employees able to work regularly, those who can often do double shifts, meaning they receive overtime pay, thus increasing costs for every restaurant owner.
Meanwhile, on any given day, restaurants did not know how many people they were going to serve. Some past regular customers would not come — or would post hostile one-star online reviews — if a restaurant did not put “ICE OUT!” posters in its windows, and some conservative customers would boycott if it did.
The whole two months of the intense ICE presence reminded many workers and employers of living through Covid — but without the anesthetic of a huge infusion of cash from the government to ease the pain.
No one is more aware of the financial costs to the city than Mayor Jacob Frey. But nor is anyone more aware of the way that the neighboring movement has helped heal Minneapolis, especially the fraught relationship between the city’s police and its residents caused by the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a police officer. Floyd’s murder created a real rupture locally, and it was not just political. Trust in the police fractured. Trust in institutions fractured. Trust between people of color and white people fractured.
Since the ICE operation began, Frey told me as we sat around his conference table in City Hall, “my most vocal critics were embracing police and thanking police and grateful for their presence” — not only because they declined to assist ICE agents, but also because, he said, the Minneapolis police force has been transformed in the past few years.
“They are better trained,” said Frey, whose security team includes a Somali immigrant, and “they are now the most diverse police department we have ever had.” In the last year, he said, the city has had a 135 percent increase in applications to join the force.
The diversity of the protest movement, Frey said, was unlike anything he’d ever seen. “It was ‘neighboring’ — not ‘Latinoing’ or ‘Somaliing,’” he said. “You come for one of us, you come for all of us.”
And, for now at least, it has trumped both the divisive identity politics pushed by the far left and the borderline racist politics pushed by the far right, which combined to rip apart the city after Floyd’s killing.
“This was not a resistance movement,” Frey insisted. “It was about something far more powerful and expansive. It was ‘Love thy neighbor.’” ICE agents thought they were coming for random migrant strangers stalking Minneapolis, he added. What they learned the hard way was that, for many Minneapolitans, they were coming for their babysitter or their kid’s best friend — people embedded in their communities and not the caricature of the illegal immigrant rapist spread by the Trump administration.
But while neighboring helped defeat ICE, the unpaid bill federal agents left behind is its own form of Trumpian revenge. In January alone, Frey said, small businesses suffered over $80 million in lost sales, workers lost $47 million in wages, the city had to pay the police some $6 million in overtime, an additional 76,000 people experienced food insecurity and over $15 million in rent could not be paid to landlords.
For anyone outside of Minnesota who wants to help, the best thing you can do is vacation in the Twin Cities or hold your next convention here.
To be sure, many Republicans in Minnesota and across the country support ICE. “Opinions about the agency and its actions are sharply divided along political lines,” PBS News reported in early February based on a national poll, “with 91 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents registering their disapproval. Republicans, however, remain supportive, with 73 percent approving of the agency’s work.”
It’s hard to predict the long-term political impact, but, for now, I’d say a Trump endorsement in a 2026 midterms race in Minnesota might not exactly be a blessing for a candidate.
Justin Buoen, a leading Democratic political strategist, pointed out to me that a few weeks ago the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party held its precinct caucuses to nominate candidates for the November elections. The caucuses were held in school classrooms, cafeterias and gymnasiums, and the turnout was so overwhelming that lines snaked around the block outside many meetings.
Minnesota Public Radio quoted a woman named Theresa Baker as saying that the ICE crackdown motivated her to attend her first precinct caucus since high school. She said she now always carries her passport in her car, so she can prove her citizenship, if necessary. “I was born in St. Paul,” she said, but “it doesn’t matter anymore. And so I have to care. … I have to give a damn.”
The longer I stayed in Minneapolis, the more a phrase that Jews recite on Hanukkah to commemorate the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks came to my mind: “Nes gadol haya sham” — “A great miracle happened there.”
My shorthand for it is that Donald Trump, who seeks to govern only by division, never by addition, accidentally created “out of many, one” in Minnesota.
Thank you, Mr. President. We needed that.
Sondra Samuels, president of the Northside Achievement Zone, remarked to me that after Floyd’s killing, many white Minnesotans said, “That is so terrible what happened to Black people.” But the ICE invasion “happened to all of us. And then we redefined ‘us.’”
We redefined “us.” I love that expression. That is EXACTLY the miracle that happened here.
Flannery Clark, a parent-activist at a Minneapolis elementary school, told me, “Families are paying rent at our school for 130 other families.” They had “a lot of grandmas driving Subarus around to make sure their neighbors were safe. … We created a new version of ‘neighbor’ here, and we need to export that.”
We need to export that. I really love that expression, too.
Minneapolis, St. Paul and even lots of small rural towns look more like the world today than ever before. And the world looks more like Minnesota today than ever before. And so the great governing challenge in Minnesota, to my mind, is a microcosm of the great governing challenge facing America today: Can we make “out of many, one” — our great national project since our founding — when the “many” is now so much more diverse, even more than it was just 10 years ago.
If Minnesota can model that, maybe America can model it, too. And if America can model that, it could become our greatest political export to the world in the 21st century — as much as democracy was 250 years ago.
Why? Because today, as my friend Dov Seidman, an author and expert on leadership, likes to say: “Interdependence is no longer our choice. It is our condition.”
All the big existential challenges humanity faces today are planetary in scale — how to manage A.I., climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics and global migrations with so many people on the move. All of these challenges require planetary-scale collaboration. Either we figure that out soon — or we’re heading for a really bad century together.
In Minnesota, I heard a talk by Ian Bassin, a founder and the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to ensure election integrity. In a follow-up conversation, he told me a story that perfectly captured the power, peril and importance of what happened here.
“A lifelong Minnesotan shared with me two lessons she’d learned watching the recent federal assault on her hometown,” said Bassin. “The first was her jarring realization that ‘there is no net below us.’ She had spent her life assuming that somewhere beneath the visible architecture of laws and institutions there existed a backstop — guardrails that would prevent a fall into the unthinkable. Watching masked federal agents abduct her neighbors and shoot them with impunity forced her to reckon with the reality that no such net exists.”
But the other lesson she drew from Minnesota, said Bassin, was that in the absence of solid safeguards, “watching ordinary citizens show up for one another — offering shelter, standing watch, car-pooling an endangered family’s kids to school — gave her a different kind of confidence. Not that formal checks will save us, but that solidarity remains a renewable resource — that we are and can be our own net.”
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