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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) 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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9) U.S. Allies Rebuff Trump’s Appeal for Help in Strait of Hormuz
Germany and other nations rejected President Trump’s call for warships to reopen the vital oil route. The Israeli military escalated ground attacks against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump is expected to speak soon.
By David E. Sanger, Christopher F. Schuetze, Megan Specia and Aaron Boxerman
American allies around the world have responded coolly to — or outright rebuffed — President Trump’s call to send warships to escort merchant vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf, illustrating the consequences of his dismissive approach to global alliances.
The sharpest refusal came Monday from Germany, whose defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said, “This is not our war; we did not start it.” Top officials of Japan, Italy and Australia said Monday that their countries would not participate in efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Others were noncommittal, including France, South Korea and Britain, whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, said his country would not be “drawn into wider war.”
Mr. Trump’s call on social media on Saturday for other nations to join the United States in an escort effort came just a week ago, he turned down Mr. Starmer’s offer to send two British aircraft carriers to the region. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Mr. Trump said at the time.
As Iran blockades most traffic through the oil shipping choke point, Mr. Trump’s appeal was the first time he had sounded eager to build a broad coalition against Iran. But he was asking for backup from allies who were not consulted ahead of the U.S.-Israeli decision to go to war, and who were derided by Mr. Trump in the past.
The American-Israeli air war against Iran, now in its third week, has killed more than 2,000 people, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, and has drawn in much of the Middle East, as Iran has launched rockets and drones at neighboring countries and at ships in the Gulf. Global energy prices have skyrocketed with tanker traffic all but stopped through the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for around a fifth of the world’s oil shipments. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, briefly reached $106 on Monday.
The United States appears to have been unprepared for the extent of that retaliation and the need to escort ships through the strait — something that administration officials have discussed publicly since the first week of the war, but has not yet begun.
Mr. Trump said NATO member nations should help, and told The Financial Times on Sunday, “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.” He called on China to send naval escorts, too, but Beijing has little incentive to cooperate; Iran, which sells oil to China, is letting its ships pass safely. Mr. Trump has threatened to postpone a planned summit meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, as he focuses on the war.
There are few signs that the conflict is easing. Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israeli forces had launched a “ground maneuver” in southern Lebanon, adding to fears that they could soon launch a more sweeping invasion.
More than 800,000 people in Lebanon have fled their homes, particularly from the country’s south. Many will not return to their homes until the safety of Israelis living in communities close to the border “is guaranteed,” Mr. Katz said in a statement.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, in a video update on Monday, did not offer details on how the United States would reopen the strait, saying only that the U.S. military would “continue to rapidly deplete Iran’s ability to threaten freedom of navigation in and around the Strait of Hormuz.”
Here’s what else we are covering:
· Israel strikes Iran: The Israeli military said on Monday it had launched a “broad wave” of attacks across Iran. Earlier, airstrikes again targeted the Mehrabad airport in Tehran, and a thick plume of smoke was rising from the airport, according to several residents of Tehran.
· Iranian response: Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told CBS News on Sunday that the country was “ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes” and denied Mr. Trump’s claim a day earlier that Iran wanted to make a deal. “We never asked for a cease-fire, and we have never asked even for negotiation,” he said.
· China summit: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said President Trump’s trip to China later this month may be delayed because of the war against Iran, the latest example of how the conflict’s growing reverberations are casting a shadow over the relationship between the world’s two biggest economies.
· Death toll: At least 1,348 civilians in Iran have been killed since the start of the war, Iran’s U.N. representative told the Security Council on Wednesday, the latest figure the country has provided. In Lebanon, officials said that 850 people had been killed. And in Israel at least 12 people have been killed, according to the authorities. The Pentagon has said that 13 American service members have died since the start of the war.
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10) Family Outing in West Bank Ends in Hail of Israeli Gunfire
Six members of a Palestinian family went out for a ride in the car. Only two made it back home.
By David M. Halbfinger, Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Tammun on the West Bank, Published March 15, 2026, Updated March 16, 2026
Mustafa, 8, and Khaled, 11, on Sunday, a day after their parents and two brothers were killed. Credit...David M. Halbfinger/The New York Times
Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The Israeli police and military, in a joint statement Sunday morning, said that border police officers and soldiers, while on a mission in Tammun to arrest suspected terrorists, had “sensed danger” after a vehicle “accelerated towards” them and “responded by shooting.” They said the circumstances of the episode were being investigated.
The two accounts could not have been more contradictory. But one fact was undisputed: Mr. Bani Odeh, 37, his wife, Othman and Muhammad were all shot and killed.
The Israeli-occupied West Bank is under siege as it has not been in years, with extremist Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian villagers on hillsides and in valleys where they live near one another. The body count is rapidly piling up: Seven Palestinians have been killed so far this year, all but one of those since the war with Iran began on Feb. 28.
The Israeli military, which is the governing authority in the West Bank, has condemned settler violence and insists that it is working to prevent it. The Israeli police, who are responsible for investigating crime committed by Israelis in the West Bank, say they act against any violence, but have largely failed in bringing violent settlers to justice.
But Tammun is deep inside the territory governed and policed by the Palestinian Authority, far from the friction with settlers. And Mr. Bani Odeh believed that, even if he encountered Israeli soldiers, he had little to fear, according to his father, Khaled Sayl Bani Odeh, 65. He knew he posed no threat, and believed that if stopped, he could talk his way out of any trouble — in fluent Hebrew — thanks to his experience working inside Israel.
On Saturday, Ali Bani Odeh was reluctant to take the boys on an outing, his father said. He was tired and wanted to rest. But the boys were restless, and he gave in.
Muhammad, the youngest, usually stayed with his grandparents because he was hyperactive, according to the elder Khaled Bani Odeh. “I was trying to tell him not to go,” he said at the family’s wake on Sunday afternoon. “But his grandmother said, ‘It’s not far, let him go.’”
Little Muhammad asked his grandfather to fix his hair and give him some of his cologne. “I did, and he set off,” Mr. Bani Odeh said.
Later Saturday night, as the grandfather was watching soccer on television, he said, his wife prodded him to call their son and check on them.
“I said, ‘They’re in a car with the children — there’s nothing that can happen to them,’” he recalled ruefully, as dozens of men streamed into the cavernous social hall where he sat, paying their respects.
Palestinian security officials said they had been briefed by their Israeli counterparts only after the fact, and told that the Israeli police and military mission in Tammun was to arrest two youths: one suspected of making explosive devices, the other of using social media to incite violence against Israelis.
Israeli officials mentioned only people suspected of making explosive devices.
Liron Rubin, a spokesman for the border police, said that the officers and soldiers had signaled for the vehicle to stop using flashlights and laser pointers but that it kept coming toward them.
“They’re a very professional force,” said Dean Elsdunne, another police spokesman. “If they felt their life was at risk when they’re operating there against terrorists in a very dangerous place, it’s for them to say.”
They declined to discuss other details of the case, citing the investigation underway.
Khaled and Mustafa, the surviving boys, spoke later outside the women’s wake for the family at a home uphill from the social hall. Mustafa wore a bandage across his nose, where he said he had been hit by shrapnel from a bullet.
He described trying to pull 5-year-old Muhammad toward him, to help him, but said that his brother was already dead.
Khaled, a sixth-grader, did most of the talking.
“When the shooting stopped, I opened the door and started yelling, ‘Please help me,’” he said. He said the soldiers told him to shut up, and that one pulled him out of the car by his hair. He said he had been thrown to the ground and stepped on, questioned aggressively about whether anyone else had been in the car, and beaten on the head and legs.
An Arabic-speaking soldier spoke to him kindly, calling him “Habibi,” but then kicked him repeatedly, Khaled said.
When Khaled told the soldiers that he and his brother needed a bathroom, he said, the soldiers pointed them in the direction of a Palestinian ambulance that had been waiting about 100 meters away. As they walked that way, he said, a soldier opened the door of his family’s car. Inside, he said, he saw his dead parents.
Khaled’s grandfather said he had seen his slain family members’ bodies at the hospital. His daughter-in-law had been shot multiple times in her head and chest. Young Muhammad was shot several times in the face.
His 11-year-old namesake, visibly numb, said he had found part of his little brother’s body on his shoes.
“It’s indescribable,” Khaled said. “One or two hours before, we were in Nablus. They took us to so many places. They bought us doughnuts. Then we were on our way home.”
They never got the doughnut holes out of the bag.
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11) Quartz Cutters Are Falling Ill. Countertop Makers Want Protection From Congress.
By Rebecca Davis O’Brien, March 16, 2026
Jeff Rose, a part owner of a countertop fabrication shop in Nicholasville, Ky., is among the hundreds, if not thousands, of workers who have been diagnosed with silicosis, a lethal lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust. Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Jeff Rose, a 55-year-old grandfather in Georgetown, Ky., contracted a lethal lung disease doing a job he loves: carving kitchen countertops from slabs of quartz, a man-made product that has surged in popularity as an alternative to marble and granite.
Mr. Rose’s 30-year-old son, Skyler, followed his father into the stone-fabrication business and, like him, inhaled the tiny particles of silica that are released when quartz is cut. He contracted silicosis, too.
“It really hurts knowing I’m sick like this,” said Mr. Rose, who used to chop down the family Christmas tree but now loses his breath climbing a flight of stairs. “I love being creative with my hands. I’m not able to do that anymore.”
The Roses are among hundreds of stone-fabrication workers who have been diagnosed with silicosis, a disease long associated with industrial toil that is afflicting more of the workers who help build American kitchens. The industry, confronting mounting litigation, is seeking legal immunity from Congress.
Representatives for manufacturers and distributors — many of them small businesses — say fabricated quartz, also known as engineered stone is, safe, and blame fabrication workshops further down the chain of production, where the slabs are cut to spec with improper equipment or precautions, for the surge in silicosis cases.
“The problem is the process, not the product,” said Rebecca Shult, the chief legal officer at Cambria, the largest engineered stone manufacturer in the United States, in testimony before a House subcommittee in January. Republican lawmakers expressed concern that the litigation might gut a $30 billion industry or drive business overseas.
The hearing concerned a bill that would put quartz in the same category as vaccines and firearms, products whose manufacturers are shielded by federal law from injury lawsuits. A similar push has sought to shield companies, including Bayer, from liability over health claims related to Roundup, a weedkiller used on crops.
The workers who cut the slabs, along with their lawyers, doctors and occupational health experts, said there was no safe way to cut quartz, which they describe as extremely toxic. They said the lawsuits would pay for victims’ medical care and reform the industry.
“This is something that I’m afraid is really going to get out of control quickly,” Mr. Rose said.
Made Stone
Engineered stone is sold widely as “quartz,” a commercially appealing name that reflects its primary component: finely crushed quartz, an abundant mineral made of silicon and oxygen. Resins and pigments are added before the product is treated at high heat and formed into large rectangular slabs.
Most quartz slabs sold in the United States come from manufacturers in China, Israel and Spain. They reach American homes from a network of big-box stores and smaller distributors, passing through fabrication shops where they are cut for sinks, corners and faucets.
When engineered stone is cut, it lets off tiny particles of silica. The dust lodges in the lungs, where the body identifies it as foreign and mounts an aggressive immune response. Over time, scar tissue forms and spreads, slowly killing the lung.
When Wade Hanicker started cutting stone countertops in Tampa, Fla., 15 years ago, many of the local shops were family businesses in people’s backyards.
The work earned Mr. Hanicker a stable living, and he was good at it. “You’re sculpting countertops, you’re putting shapes on them, arches, curves,” said Mr. Hanicker, 39. “To me it felt more like artwork.”
He said those early shops were pretty dusty. They often “cut dry,” he said, without soaking the slab with running water to tamp down dust.
Industry leaders say wet processing is critical to mitigate airborne dust. California in 2024 made it illegal to cut quartz dry.
Workers and doctors said wet processing is insufficient because the resulting wastewater eventually dries into dust. Other protective measures, including robotic cutting, ventilation and protective gear, are too expensive for many shops, they said.
Mr. Hanicker said his first safety concerns were about the blades and the heavy slabs. He sometimes wore an N-95 mask to inhale less dust. He could tell when he was cutting quartz, rather than marble or granite, because of the smell: It reminded him of burning plastic or rotten eggs.
Nobody talked about the risk of silicosis.
“Never once did I think that the dust that we were creating was going to do this type of harm to me,” he said.
Around 2022, Mr. Hanicker experienced back pain, which he treated with large doses of ibuprofen. Soon, the pain crept around to his chest. Months of doctors visits later, he was diagnosed with silicosis. He has experienced autoimmune disease, hip failure and loss of strength since his diagnosis; he is not on a list for a lung transplant, but the disease is progressing.
He still works in the industry, but can no longer do the heavy manual labor. Last year, he filed a lawsuit against about two dozen entities, including distributors and manufacturers. He also sued Cambria.
“What hurts me the most is, the things that a dad expects to do with their kids, being able to play with them — that’s being robbed from me,” said Mr. Hanicker, who has two young children.
Cases Mount
Dr. Jane C. Fazio, a pulmonologist at Olive View-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, saw her first case of silicosis in 2021: a man in his 60s who needed a lung transplant. Other patients soon arrived in the emergency room — middle-aged working men, mostly undocumented immigrants. She asked about their work.
“Everyone had the same answer,” she said. “They work in countertops.”
California has confirmed 512 silicosis cases from engineered stone and 29 deaths since 2019, according to the state’s public health department.
Dr. Fazio has visited fabrication workshops in the neighborhoods around the hospital, where she has observed varying levels of protection — and sometimes none at all — on “people covered in white powder.”
It takes years of exposure to contract silicosis, and even longer before symptoms appear. This, doctors say, is why silicosis among fabricators didn’t really emerge until about five years ago, more than a decade after manufactured stone hit the market. They expect cases to rise.
“It’s extremely debilitating when it progresses,” Dr. Fazio said. “It always progresses. And there is no real treatment.”
In 2022, Dr. Fazio diagnosed a 48-year-old undocumented man from El Salvador with silicosis. After 15 years cutting slabs, he arrived at the hospital in such pain that he couldn’t work. In an interview, the man said he had always worn a mask and cut with water.
“Nobody told us that this dust would cause silicosis,” he said, requesting anonymity because of his immigration status.
In February 2025, he received a double lung transplant. But even this is a short-term fix. In a matter of years, lung transplant patients often slowly develop chronic organ rejection or other complications.
Legal Challenges
As cases mounted, lawsuits followed.
In 2024, a jury in Los Angeles awarded $52.4 million to a former stone fabricator in a lawsuit brought against manufacturers and distributors of engineered stone, including Cambria.
Cambria, a family-owned company in Minnesota, has fought the litigation. Cambria said employees at its shops had cut “over 650,000 Cambria slabs without a single reported case of silicosis.” The company said it had been targeted in lawsuits “over workplace practices entirely outside our control.”
Cambria has taken its fight to Washington, where last year it spent $250,000 on lobbyists. In September, Representatives Tom McClintock of California and Andy Biggs of Arizona, both Republicans, introduced a bill that would bar lawsuits against manufacturers or sellers of engineered stone for injuries that resulted from cutting the product in third-party facilities.
The bill places the burden for assuring safety on fabrication shops and workplace regulators.
In January, at a House subcommittee hearing on the bill, Representative Darrell Issa of California, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee, called the plaintiffs opportunistic and their lawsuits abusive.
Democrats on the committee noted that Marty Davis, Cambria’s chief executive, was a big donor to President Trump. Members of the Davis family gave more than $340,000 to committees supporting Mr. Trump in the 2024 election, campaign finance records show.
Mr. Davis also supported Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, and encouraged him to fight the election results. He also gave Trump Media & Technology Group a $5 million loan through a limited liability company, so the fledgling social media company could stay afloat before going public, The New York Times reported in 2024.
In her testimony, Ms. Shult, Cambria’s top lawyer, cast the blame for the silicosis outbreak on the fabrication shops in California.
Gary Talwar, the vice president of a family-owned stone distributor in Anaheim, told lawmakers that he was facing higher insurance premiums and mounting litigation costs, with 65 pending lawsuits.
Dr. David Michaels, an epidemiologist who ran the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009 to 2017, also testified at the hearing.
During his tenure, OSHA updated standards for silica dust exposure. They may already be outdated, he told Congress, and it is not enough to protect workers from the dust given off by cutting engineered stone. He suggested that the industry look for safer substitutes, such as slabs made from recycled glass.
Mr. Rose said wryly that he was “caught between a rock and a hard place.” He is sick, and wants the industry to improve the safety of its product. But as the part owner of his company, he worries about the repercussions of the litigation.
“What I’m aiming for is to be a leader in this industry, to do things right,” he said.
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12) I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.
By Richard Bookstaber, March 16, 2026
Mr. Bookstaber is the author of “A Demon of Our Own Design,” which in 2007 warned of the coming financial crisis.
Liana Finck
At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, I was at a hedge fund. By its end, I was at the U.S. Treasury. At both, I worked with people only a few years out of college. The drama of 2008 was all they knew about financial markets. “Remember what’s happening,” I told them. “You’ll never see anything like this again.”
Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they’ll see worse.
We have returned to a period of risk, one rife with the sort of pressures that have led to major financial crises. This time, the risks are spread across industries, markets and nations: artificial intelligence, the roughly $2 trillion private credit industry, stock markets, Taiwan and now Iran. These risks are analyzed one by one, news article by news article. We understand them in isolation. Yet they are different entry points into the same underlying structure — a complex and tightly coupled system where the specific source of stress matters less than how quickly that stress can spread.
Signs of systemic strain are emerging.
Let’s start with private credit, which is already showing worrisome signs. Over the past two decades, the retreat of traditional banks after the financial crisis has left many companies increasingly reliant on borrowing from institutional investors. But these loans rarely exchange hands, leaving investors uncertain about what these instruments are really worth or how easily they could be sold if conditions deteriorate.
Now clouding the picture is the fact that many of the borrowers underpinning the lending industry are software and technology companies — the kinds of businesses whose services could be replaced by A.I.
That vulnerability is starting to worry investors. Already uneasy about the way higher interest rates are raising borrowing costs, some have begun withdrawing their money from the private credit funds of well-known companies like Blue Owl, BlackRock and Blackstone. Shares in Blue Owl have fallen sharply. And because the market has no organized exchange and information is inaccessible, investor withdrawals can trigger the kind of wholesale run that in the past turned financial stresses into full-blown crises.
Simultaneously, the A.I. boom is driving extraordinary investment into a small group of dominant technology companies, inflating their valuations to the point that 10 stocks now account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s value. That level of concentration is unprecedented — and dangerous, because it means a shock to any one of these companies can ripple across the entire market rather than be absorbed by it.
What appear to be separate developments — a new kind of lending market and technological dislocation on one hand, stock market exuberance on the other — are in fact the same network of money and expectations, approached from different directions.
Of course, private credit isn’t only financing those companies vulnerable to A.I. It is also a critical source of financing for the infrastructure that drives A.I. — the data centers and semiconductor chips. This infrastructure is largely being built by the handful of companies like Google and Microsoft that dominate our stock market. In this tightly connected system, the weakening of private credit strains the A.I. investments of the tech Goliaths, which in turn threatens the stock portfolios, the retirements and the pensions of tens of millions of people.
In addition, the A.I. boom is placing new strains on the physical infrastructure it depends on. It drives enormous electricity consumption and has a ravenous appetite for advanced semiconductors. These carry geopolitical weight.
Take Iran. An energy shock from the conflict that raises the cost of power or constrains its supply directly affects data centers and A.I. production, raising costs for the A.I. Goliaths, which then transfer those pressures to our private credit and stock markets.
Then there’s Taiwan. If China were to invade or blockade it, America’s access to semiconductors would be severely limited. That would immediately slow deployment of A.I., weakening the companies driving the A.I. boom, with the inevitable knock-on effects.
Our current financial system fails not because any one thing goes wrong. It fails because different shocks propagate through the same structure and in ways that are hard to anticipate. When something eventually goes wrong, it spreads faster than it can be contained.
It is critical that our policymakers realize that private credit is not just a parallel risk sitting alongside the A.I. boom. A.I.’s data centers, chips and infrastructure have been built largely on private loans. Investors in those loans cannot easily sell their positions. So if there is any quake in the system and they find they need to raise cash, they will do what investors do when they can’t sell what they want to sell: They sell what they can. And what they can sell easily are the large, publicly traded technology stocks that dominate the major indexes.
This is not the first time we have built a system like this. The crisis of 2008 is often remembered as a story of homeowners gorging on excessive debt, a housing bubble fueled by speculation and millions of mortgages going bad. But the housing bubble itself was not the reason the crunch became so destructive. The accelerant that pushed the crisis to such depths was the financial system that had been constructed around the housing market. Novel and complex financial instruments obscured the risk, intertwined balance sheets across the financial system and eliminated the buffers that once absorbed shocks. When the housing market tanked, these instruments nearly took our entire financial system down with it.
This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze. Our models for detecting risk look at prices, volatility and correlations. They have no instruments for reading a grid failure, a drought or a severed supply chain. By the time warning signs show up in market data, the damage will already have been done.
The physical risks of Iran, Taiwan and the A.I. boom are supplanting the types of financial risks that preceded 2008. I’d take financial risk any day. Financial risk moves just prices. Physical risk moves the world.
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13) Professors Are Changing What They Teach, Even Far from Trump’s Gaze
Harvard is the White House’s biggest target, but professors all over the country have been censoring themselves, avoiding provocative topics and rewriting grants.
By Alan Blinder, March 16, 2026
Schools in more liberal places, including Northwestern in Illinois and Brown in Rhode Island, have sometimes acceded to some of the federal government’s demands. Tony Luong for The New York Times
Rewritten syllabuses. Self-censored lectures. Stilted classroom discussions. Grant applications stripped of words that might infuriate President Trump and his allies, if they are submitted at all.
Many of the nation’s professors are changing how they teach and research as Mr. Trump pursues a seismic reimagining of American higher education.
Although the Trump administration has focused much of its ire on elite institutions, the government’s tactics have unnerved people throughout academia. The consequences are trickling to campuses large and small, public and private.
The White House insists that its campaign is essential to stamp out bigotry and rebuild eroded public confidence in an academic system that conservatives say is tilted against them. The quest to impose Mr. Trump’s ideas, though, has been so rigid that some critics have likened it to how authoritarian leaders suppress free thought and dissent.
Conservative states like Texas and Florida have rushed to follow Mr. Trump. Schools in more liberal places, including Northwestern in Illinois and Brown in Rhode Island, have sometimes acceded to federal demands.
Faculty members who had fretted that academic culture had become too cloistered and political have sometimes welcomed the shifts. But in interviews in recent months, and in written submissions to The New York Times, dozens of others described feeling stifled. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The cadence of the federal attacks has outwardly slowed in recent months, with fewer abrupt crusades against specific universities or funding cuts that schools learned about through social media.
Still, professors said they worry about administrators capitulating to Trump demands, as well as things like doxing and students recording their comments in class.
“You feel like an attack can kind of come from anywhere, right?” said Marin Pilloud, an anthropology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, a school that Mr. Trump has not overtly targeted. “That you can be a target from anyone.”
How classes have changed
For the most part, colleges are still offering the same courses they were before Mr. Trump’s election. But some professors say that classes have changed even if course names and numbers have remained intact.
Christopher Kutz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said he is self-censoring to protect students, particularly those in the United States on visas. He said he worried that they might write or say something that could end up being turned against them.
“I’m not going to change what I say, but I will try to make sure the assignments don’t invite students into making statements that could get them in trouble,” said Professor Kutz, whose school has been a particular focus of the Trump administration.
“I have to think very hard about whether it’s worth talking about something that’s obviously clearly relevant to the course.”
Christopher Kutz, a law professor at University of California, Berkeley
Loyola University Chicago has not been targeted by Mr. Trump. But Norberto Grzywacz, a neuroscientist and a former provost there, said he is worried about international students on his campus. They appear to be “afraid of openly saying things,” he said.
Avoiding ‘disapproved subjects’
Professor Kutz has weighed how much to discuss sensitive topics, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in courses about subjects like the ethics of war. In a declaration to a federal court last year, he cited what he thought the Trump administration viewed as “disapproved subjects,” including affirmative action, immigration and transgender rights.
“It’s a subjective sensation that I’ve never had before: I have to think very hard about whether it’s worth talking about something that’s obviously clearly relevant to the course,” he said in an interview.
Dr. Pilloud said that she felt like she had to present ideas that were not scientifically sound — such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new, and widely disputed, guidance about vaccines — so that she could say she had taught a broader array of viewpoints.
“My goal in class is to encourage intellectual debate, to develop the critical thinking skills,” she said. Instead, she suggested, classes have become more superficial.
“I spend a little less time on interpretation, and I kind of present more of both sides and the state of the topic,” she said.
Decaying trust in the classroom
Some professors described a fraying of the customary trust between teachers and students.
Kylie Smith, who until recently taught at Emory University about the history of health care, said her area of expertise was inherently political. She came to fear how a student at Emory, which has sought to avoid the Trump administration’s wrath, might weaponize her words.
“You just don’t know whether they are going to report you to someone, or are they recording you,” said Dr. Smith, who added that she felt she had to “change the way I relate to my students.”
“I value integrity and my authenticity and my openness and my honesty, and I feel myself not being that way with them, which I hate because that is what students value: a professor they can ask the hard questions of,” she said.
One part of her calculation last year, Dr. Smith said, was her status as a permanent resident, not a citizen, of the United States.
“There have been times in class where they have asked me hard questions, and I would normally get up on my soapbox, and I’ve had to say, ‘Well, I think we’re not going to talk about that today.”
Kylie Smith, history professor at Emory University
Professor Grzywacz is a naturalized citizen and hopes that makes him “a little immune” from scrutiny. But, he said, he knows other faculty members born outside of the United States who worry about running afoul of federal officials who have proved willing to try to deport people over speech the Trump administration does not like.
“The environment is harder,” he said. “People are afraid, that’s for sure.”
Fewer constraints on conservative speech
Some professors have welcomed how the Trump administration targeted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the academic cultures they fostered. Jessica Trisko Darden, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said she saw fewer students and faculty members announcing their personal pronouns or identity groups during discussions.
“I think that was really limiting for discourse, but also for the ability for students to see the world in complex ways,” said Dr. Trisko Darden, who said she had felt “constrained” during former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term.
Terms like menstruating persons “made it way too complicated for folks who are not heavily invested in those internecine definitional wars to be able to identify with.”
Jessica Trisko Darden, political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University
She no longer feels that way with Mr. Trump in power. She said she perceived less pressure to use terms like “menstruating persons” and that she sensed many students felt the same. The result, she said, was an ebbing of “identity tribes” among students and more open discussion.
“My students are no longer circumscribed in their beliefs, opinions, analyses by identity categories that people are ascribing to them,” Dr. Trisko Darden said.
How research has changed
The Trump administration has explicitly targeted federal research funding, a cornerstone of American academia’s economic model for generations, with the most punitive cuts directed at a handful of schools.
But the administration’s approaches to D.E.I., abortion rights, gender transition care and climate change, among other issues, are leading professors to narrow or recast their research ambitions, if they pursue them at all.
Amander Clark, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she had decided to “rewrite my grants so that I would remove any language that would potentially compromise the funding of my work.”
Giving up on grants
A federal judge in San Francisco tried last year to limit research funding threats to the University of California system. But in an interview in December, after the judge's ruling, Dr. Clark, a reproductive scientist who said she had often tried to speak about her work in “an inclusive way,” said the environment remained “stressful.”
Faculty members are anxious that a stray or misinterpreted remark could make them or their schools targets of the White House.
"I feel a little frozen."
Marin Pilloud, anthropology professor at University of Nevada, Reno
In Nevada, Dr. Pilloud said the climate was “impacting the type of research that I think I can do and that I can get funding for.” She has not kept certain words out of grant applications.
“I just haven’t even applied for any grants because I feel stuck,” she said, noting that it was only recently that agencies were pushing researchers to include diversity and inclusion and to describe how their research would help marginalized populations.
A generational divide
Dr. Pilloud said she is lucky compared to the students coming up behind her. As a full professor, she said, she has years of data that she can draw on for papers. Younger researchers do not.
“I definitely see it having a long-tail impact on early-career academics,” she said.
At some schools, the customary pathways to doing research have been cut off to young people entirely. From Michigan State to Harvard, some graduate programs have suspended or limited admissions because of uncertainties about federal funding.
The changes could have lasting consequences on American research.
Dr. Smith, who came to Emory in 2015, has already done substantial work for a project about children with disabilities who are in juvenile detention. But she figured she would not get funding for it, and she was resistant to tailoring any applications to satisfy government officials she saw as ideologues.
“I really, really resented the idea that you should change the words so that you could get the funding,” she said, adding, “To me, that is compliance with fascism, and I’m not going to do it.”
Earlier this year, she moved to Australia.
“Censorship,” she said, “has never been an issue there.”
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14) Trump Says He Will Have the ‘Honor’ of ‘Taking Cuba’
President Trump’s words came amid a nationwide blackout and as a top Cuban official said his country would move to open the economy to foreign investors.
By Annie Correal, Jack Nicas and Frances Robles, Reporting from Mexico City and Florida., March 16, 2026
President Trump raised the possibility of the United States “taking” Cuba on Monday, telling reporters at the White House, “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.”
“Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it,” he said. “They’re a very weakened nation right now.”
The president’s words came on the same day as Cuba experienced a nationwide blackout, amid diminishing fuel supplies. On Monday evening, Cuban officials had also planned to announce that the country’s Communist government would open itself to foreign investment, including from the United States, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, told NBC News.
“Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies, also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants,” the deputy prime minister said in a clip of an interview posted by the network on Monday morning.
It is unclear how widely Cuba intends to open its economy, or how the moves compare with those made a decade ago under President Barack Obama. But the scheduled announcement coincides with a severe humanitarian and energy crisis, with some experts saying the island could run out of fuel within weeks because of a de facto blockade by the Trump administration.
For the past three months, the United States has choked off Cuba’s access to foreign oil, blocking shipments from Venezuela and elsewhere. Frequent blackouts have followed — including the broad power outage on Monday — and hospitals have had to postpone some procedures, deepening a humanitarian crisis that has also involved food shortages and has led to rare protests on the island.
Officials had planned to announce the economic changes on an evening television program, Mesa Redonda, or Round Table. The program was not broadcast at the scheduled hour. It was not immediately clear if that was the result of power outages.
The Obama administration had opened up business opportunities for American investors in the Cuban private sector, but the Cuban bureaucracy was unable to rapidly adapt and the Trump administration rescinded Mr. Obama’s measures.
Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga, who also serves as Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, also said the Cuban government would open the economy to investments beyond the private sector. “This goes beyond the commercial realm,” he said. “It also applies to investments, not only to small ones, but also to large ones, especially in infrastructure.”
But because of the decades-long U.S. embargo, Cuba is not easily able to attract American capital, Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga said.
A person close to the recent negotiations said that the Trump administration was waiting to see whether the changes to be announced on Monday would be truly structural and meaningful — not simply cosmetic — before deciding whether to issue licenses that would allow such investments. The person asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomatic matters.
Carlos A Giménez, a Republican congressman from Florida who is Cuban American, said on X on Friday, in Spanish, “There will be ZERO investment from the US unless there is MAJOR political change on the island.”
As U.S. and Cuban officials negotiate over the future of the Communist-ruled island, the Trump administration is said to be seeking to push President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The Trump administration has warned that if Cuba does not cooperate, it could face a fate similar to that of Venezuela. In January, the U.S. military captured the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, after he refused to step down.
Last week, President Díaz-Canel acknowledged in a televised appearance that his government was engaged in talks with Trump administration officials to resolve the standoff.
In his 90-minute appearance, Mr. Díaz-Canel said that a decision to be announced on Monday would “greatly facilitate” the participation of Cubans abroad in the island’s “economic and social development program.”
Demographers estimate that more than two million Cubans have left the country in the past five years. In his remarks, Mr. Díaz-Canel said, “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.”
Some Cuban exiles in Florida and elsewhere have for years pushed for the Cuban government to allow Cubans overseas to invest in the nation’s economy.
Cuban officials have signaled to some Cuban Americans that Monday’s announcement will involve allowing exiles to return to the island freely and to run a type of enterprise that was legally recognized by the government in 2021. Those entities are allowed to import goods, provide services, and create jobs, and they have quickly become critical to the Cuban economy. Private supermarkets, for instance, have higher prices than state-run stores but carry a far broader selection of food.
For more outsiders to enter and run businesses in Cuba, the U.S. government would have to ease restrictions on traveling and doing business on the island.
Hugo Cancio, a Cuban American in Miami, has been running perhaps the most visible U.S.-owned business in Cuba for years. His e-commerce platform, Katapulk, has become a sort of Cuban Amazon, allowing Cubans abroad to order and ship goods to their friends and relatives still in Cuba.
Mr. Cancio built Katapulk as a U.S.-based entity with a special license to form partnerships with businesses in Cuba, which deliver the goods on the ground. But that structure has been complicated, and U.S. government restrictions have at times hamstrung operations, he said.
If the Cuban government allows Cuban Americans to own businesses in Cuba, they could function as a bridge to Washington, Mr. Cancio said.
“As the Cuban authorities recognize our rights to be part of the Cuban nation, to participate in the economic transformation and the potential political reforms of the future, we will be the ones that will change Washington,” he said. Exiles, he said, could push Congress and Trump administration officials to lift sanctions.
“We will be the ones that will talk to Washington and say, ‘Our country now recognizes us, and we want to be part of that transformation,’” Mr. Cancio said.
David C. Adams, David E. Sanger, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Ed Augustin contributed reporting.
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15) Admiral’s Comments Undercut Pentagon’s Cluster Munition Policy
The first Trump administration defended cluster munitions as “legitimate,” but on Monday, Adm. Brad Cooper condemned them as “inherently indiscriminate.”
By John Ismay, Reporting from Washington, March 17, 2026
In a video posted on social media on Monday, Adm. Brad Cooper, the leader of U.S. Central Command, condemned a recent Iranian cluster munition attack on Israel.
Calling them “an inherently indiscriminate type of munition,” Admiral Cooper said the “Iranian regime” had launched “a reckless attack against civilian neighborhoods in Tel Aviv.” A video showed dots of light streaking through the night sky from an incoming missile.
“We join countries across the region in condemning this aggression,” he added.
The first Trump administration, however, defended the use of cluster munitions in a policy that remains in effect today.
Cluster munitions are a class of military ordnance that breaks apart in midair and scatters smaller explosive or incendiary weapons, often called bomblets, over a large area. About 20 percent of those bomblets fail to explode on impact but can still explode if discovered even decades later.
In November 2017, Patrick M. Shanahan, who was serving as the deputy secretary of defense at the time, signed a memo calling cluster munitions “legitimate weapons with clear military utility.”
His memo reversed an earlier Pentagon decision to ban the use of its existing arsenal of cluster weapons by 2019 because of the harm they pose to civilians.
In 2008, the defense secretary at the time, Robert M. Gates, signed a policy giving the Pentagon 10 years to seek alternatives to its cluster weapons, which were prone to failure and posed a hazard to civilians in conflict areas. That memo said newer cluster munitions must be designed so that less than 1 percent of the dozens or hundreds of bomblets they release remain on the ground as hazardous duds that could still explode.
Mr. Gates said that for the next decade, only the four-star combatant commanders who direct military operations over specific parts of the globe could authorize the use of older cluster munitions. After that time, the use of older cluster weapons would have been permanently banned without exception.
Mr. Shanahan’s memo upended those deadlines, making the munitions available to commanders indefinitely. Almost a year later, he cited the threat of North Korea as a reason for keeping them in service.
The office of the secretary of defense did not respond to a request for comment about the admiral’s remarks on Monday.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which took effect in 2010, bans their use because of the harm they pose to noncombatants. More than 100 countries have signed that treaty, though not the United States, Russia, Israel or Iran.
According to government records, the last known instance of U.S. forces using cluster weapons was in December 2009, when Navy warships launched Tomahawk cruise missiles carrying explosive bomblets at suspected Qaeda camps in Yemen.
The Biden administration made no public effort to reverse Mr. Shanahan’s 2017 decision, ultimately transferring large numbers of cluster munitions to Ukraine for use in its war with Russia. Russian forces have used the weapons extensively in Ukraine.
In July 2023, the White House ordered the transfer of “dual-purpose improved conventional munition” artillery shells to Ukraine, each containing 88 grenades. A second shipment was sent in March 2024.
In November 2024, the Pentagon acknowledged sending Ukraine two separate shipments of cluster munition artillery shells that each dispense 36 small antipersonnel land mines.
By December 2024, the Biden administration had provided Kyiv with more than 100,000 155-millimeter shells that each contained nine small antitank mines.
Iran launched a similar attack with cluster munitions against Israel in June.
The most recent congressional effort to ban the Pentagon from using cluster munitions failed in the House in June 2024 by a vote of 129 to 284.
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16) Americans Are Stuck in Dead-End, Exploitative Part-Time Jobs
By Adelle Waldman and Matt Bruenig, March 18, 2026
Ms. Waldman is the author of “Help Wanted,” a novel about hourly workers at a big-box store. Mr. Bruenig is a labor lawyer and the founder of People’s Policy Project.
Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Nitat Termmee/Getty Images
What comes to mind when you think about working part time? For Americans who work salaried jobs, part-time work tends to be seen as a choice, even a luxury, something those who can afford it might pursue to spend more time with children, pursue education or simply enjoy more leisure time. But for millions of workers, part-time employment has become a trap.
Across the country, more than 6.7 million Americans tell surveytakers that they work part-time jobs, not because they want to, but because they cannot get full-time hours. For many workers, not getting enough hours causes more hardship than the hourly wage. It’s telling that the platform for Target Workers Unite, a group of rank-and-file Target workers pushing for better working conditions, lists as its first demand not higher pay but more hours. Its second demand? More stable schedules.
A shift from full-time to part-time work across many major American companies over the past 20 years stems in large part from the rise of what’s known as just-in-time scheduling. Instead of guaranteeing the bulk of their staffs 40 hours a week, many big employers largely reliant on low-wage workers make a majority of them part time and then schedule only the bare minimum number that they expect to need. If customer traffic turns out to be busier than anticipated, those companies have a large pool of part-time workers to call in for last-minute shifts.
Workers might get four hours one week and 30 hours the next. The resulting irregular pay can make it harder to progress in other parts of life, like getting approved for apartment leases and auto loans. It also makes working second-jobs more difficult, as part-time workers need to be available to maximize hours at their first job. Turning down a shift can mean being offered fewer shifts in the future. According to the Federal Reserve, adults who work part time because they can’t find full-time work are much more likely to say that they struggle to pay bills or do not have enough to eat.
What all this amounts to is a transfer of risk from business owners and corporate shareholders to the nation’s lowest-paid workers.
For decades, policymakers and activists have devoted far more attention to raising the hourly wage than to the question of how many hours employees are working. For example, New York City lawmakers, echoing a campaign promise of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, recently introduced legislation to increase the minimum hourly wage paid by employers of over 500 workers from $17 now to $30 in 2030. This is well intended, but because income depends on both the hourly wage and the number of hours worked, improving workers’ lives requires addressing both. One of us worked in a big-box store as part of research for a novel about low-wage work and saw this firsthand. Even an increase of $2 or $3 an hour doesn’t do much if some weeks you’re scheduled only for a single four-hour shift.
That is why we — a novelist and a labor lawyer and policy analyst — have come up with a solution to mandate a federal right to full-time work for many employees currently shunted into undesirable part-time work because that’s all they can find.
Specifically, we propose that part-time employees who work at companies with more than 50 full-time-equivalent employees be given the option to work full time after three months of employment. When a qualifying worker makes such a request, an employer would be required to grant it, provided that doing so would not create an undue burden on the employer (a common standard in employment law).
Such a right would be in keeping with U.S. labor policy since the New Deal. The 40-hour workweek, the federal minimum wage and the right to overtime pay all derive from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The law was designed to combat the problem of overwork. Employers at that time were demanding 70- or 80-hour or even longer workweeks from employees, without paying them more. The law was so successful that by now most of us have come to treat the 40-hour workweek as the standard. Now underwork has become as much of a problem as overwork once was.
Our proposal is not as radical as it may seem. Our labor system has long accepted that employers should balance their profit interests with accommodations that provide stability and security for workers. Several laws — the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and state workers' compensation programs — guarantee employees the right to shift to part-time work or to take time off in the case of disability, illness or a medical crisis in the family. These laws also require employers to accommodate requests to return to full-time work once the need for leave or a reduced schedule has passed.
Employers have justified their use of part-time workers by insisting that their employees prefer the flexibility of part-time work. If this is so, nothing would change, as the obligation to provide full-time hours would kick in only when a person made a full-time request. Moreover, because this policy would affect all large employers, it would create an even playing field, meaning that those companies that treat their employees decently would no longer need to fear losing out to more ruthless competitors.
This effort could be politically attractive. American politicians who have been reluctant to increase taxes and spending to reduce inequality and hardship tend to be much more willing to use labor regulations like the one we propose to help achieve those goals.
Americans have long taken pride in the belief that we are a country where those who are willing to work hard can live decently. Establishing a right to full-time work would help millions of Americans achieve that ideal.
It’s healthcare. Healthcare is the cause of and solution to so many of our problems.Most of us are stuck and vulnerable because without a full time job, health insurance is out of reach financially. Until we have universal healthcare, none of these fixes around the edges will matter or make much difference in the lives of those of us not in the 1%.
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