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Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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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) Oil Climbs Back Above $100 as U.S. Plans Hormuz Blockade
The U.S. military said it would block ships entering or exiting Iranian ports or coastal areas starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. European leaders distanced themselves from the plan.
By Katie Rogers, Tyler Pager, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, April 13, 2026
A U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz was set to take effect on Monday in an effort to raise pressure on Tehran, even as questions surrounded the plan and U.S. allies distanced themselves from it.
The blockade was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time, but the United States had not formally acknowledged that it had taken effect.
The announcement of the blockade, declared by President Trump on Sunday, rattled the already fragile cease-fire among the United States, Israel and Iran, which began last week. A round of high-level talks over the weekend between negotiators from Iran and the United States, including Vice President JD Vance, ended without a breakthrough.
Now Mr. Trump is seeking to prevent Iran from profiting from oil exports and force its leaders to accept American conditions for ending more than a month of war. Iranian forces have largely barred Western tankers and ships from transiting the strait, the Persian Gulf waterway through which about one fifth of the world’s oil passes. The price of oil has soared by more than 50 percent since the war began in late February.
The U.S. military said that it would block ships “entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas” starting at 10 a.m. Eastern on Monday, while allowing other vessels to transit the strait on their way to or from non-Iranian ports. Two tankers linked to Iran — one carrying naphtha, a petroleum product, and the other carrying gas oil — slipped through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday hours before the blockade went into effect.
Earlier on Monday, Iran warned of repercussions. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesman, said Monday that if Iranian ports were threatened, “no port in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman will be safe.” The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose about 7 percent on Monday, to nearly $102 a barrel. U.S. markets opened slightly lower after stocks fell in Asia and Europe.
Experts on Iran questioned whether a U.S. blockade would force Iran’s leadership to accept terms that five weeks of war and the killing of many Iranian leaders had not. The Trump administration has been insisting on stopping Iranian nuclear enrichment, as well as confiscating stockpiles of enriched uranium they say could form the basis for a bomb.
European leaders, already frustrated by Mr. Trump’s military campaign in Iran, quickly distanced themselves from the blockade, despite his promise “that numerous countries are going to be helping us with this.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said in a radio interview that the United Kingdom would not participate, while Spain’s defense minister said the maneuver “makes no sense.”
Mr. Trump had conditioned the two-week cease-fire with Iran, which went into effect last Wednesday, on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But in practice, only a handful of tankers have passed through the waterway, fearing Iranian mines or other interference.
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2) Iran Blockade Sets Up a Test of Which Side Can Endure More Pain
President Trump is trying to choke off the country’s lifeline with a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But the Iranians are betting that his tolerance for political pain is limited.
By David E. Sanger, April 13, 2026
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and written extensively over the past 20 years about efforts to compel Iran to surrender its nuclear program, by diplomacy, sabotage and force.
Fuel prices reflected on a semi-truck in Aurora, Ore., last week. “Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4 to $5 gas,” Iran’s top negotiator warned American consumers after peace talks fell apart over the weekend. Credit...Jenny Kane/Associated Press
President Trump’s decision to blockade all Iranian shipments out of or into the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday morning sets up the next great test in the Iran war: Which side can endure more economic pain, Tehran’s new leadership or Mr. Trump himself?
Almost everything about how this new turn in the war plays out is likely to look very different than what has unfolded so far.
Instead of directing missiles and bombs at military sites, missile emplacements and Iran’s defense industry, Mr. Trump will try to choke off the country’s lifeblood, the oil that accounts for more than 50 percent of its exports and just about all of the government’s revenue.
The president’s first hope, administration officials said on Sunday, is to force the government to surrender to the terms that Vice President JD Vance laid out in peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan — and that Iran rejected, just as it did in negotiations in Geneva before the war began on Feb. 28. The list of terms starts with Iran’s agreement to turn over every ounce of its uranium stockpile, permanently dismantle its huge infrastructure for producing nuclear fuel and give up its claims to regulate traffic in the strait.
Failing an Iranian capitulation, Mr. Trump appears to still harbor the hope he expressed the first evening of the war: that a restive Iranian populace will rise up and overthrow the military-clerical regime that has guided the country since the revolution in 1979. But engineering that outcome is no easier than it was a month and a half ago.
For its part, Iran’s strategy appears to be one of waging the conflict in the global markets, where Tehran has discovered new powers. Acutely aware that they lost the military contest in the first five weeks, but performed above expectations in the information arena and in terrorizing their neighbors with well-aimed missile and drone strikes, the Iranians are betting that Mr. Trump’s tolerance for political pain is limited.
If no Iranian oil gets through the strait, prices could keep rising over time — some companies say they are planning for $175 a barrel. The Iranians understand the potential political effects of continued inflation in the United States less than seven months before midterm elections.
“Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4 to $5 gas,” Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned American consumers after the failure of the talks he led with Mr. Vance. As of Monday morning, with the naval blockade about to begin, the markets did not seem especially panicked: Brent crude oil prices rose about 6 percent, to just above $101 a barrel, but were still below where they were before the cease-fire was declared last week.
Mr. Trump, for his part, is dialing back his previous claim that as the shooting stops, gas prices will drop. He told Fox News on Sunday that prices “should be around the same” during the midterms and might be “a little bit higher.” That is the exact fear of many Republican candidates.
This is uncharted territory. Like President John F. Kennedy’s “quarantine” of Cuba in 1962, intended to keep the Soviets from bringing nuclear weapons onto Cuban soil, it is impossible to know beforehand how this will play out. Back then, Kennedy and his advisers watched anxiously to see if the Soviets would try to “run the line” and risk military confrontation with the U.S. Navy or whether they would retreat, negotiate and find a face-saving way out.
The Soviet leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, chose to back off.
After the blockade on any ships leaving or destined for Iranian ports goes into effect, at 10 a.m. Eastern on Monday, it may become clear whether the new ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps make the same choice. But without a navy, Iran knows it has virtually no chance in a direct confrontation.
For Mr. Trump, this is yet another reversal of strategy. A few weeks ago, he decided to allow Iran to sell oil that was already at sea, in hopes of easing supply shortages. But the effects on prices were minimal. And Mr. Trump looked as though he were conducting a halfhearted war, bombing Iran while allowing it to profit. And the country's imposition of tolls on traffic going through the strait meant that a new revenue stream was opening up for Tehran at the moment it needed it most.
“The current situation, in which Iran gets to deny use of the strait to all except its friends or those who pay up, is untenable,” said Richard Haass, a former Republican senior national security official and the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who was among the first to advocate a blockade strategy.
“It gets rich while others get poor,” he continued. “A blockade adds to the economic pressure on Iran that already existed before the war and was made worse by the war. If they want to sell their oil, they need to reopen the strait to all.”
The test of the strategy may well be how Iran’s biggest customers react. Mr. Haass argues for pairing the blockade with a diplomatic strategy to get China, India, Pakistan and Turkey — all major customers of Iran — to pressure the country to give in to U.S. demands and get oil flowing again. But it is unclear whether they will do so, especially if China sees an opportunity to profit in the long term from the confrontation.
Mr. Haass also said that “we should couple the threat or reality of a blockade with a proposal to establish new governance authority for the strait that would include Iran,” giving it a voice — but not control — over governance of the waterway.
It might work. But there is also the possibility that Iran’s reaction will be to resume attacks on energy facilities in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and perhaps even Saudi Arabia. In that scenario, Iran would essentially say that if it cannot ship oil, its Arab neighbors will not be able to, either.
As with so much in this war, there was confusion on Sunday about what, exactly, was subject to blockade. Mr. Trump’s social media post declared a “complete” blockade on all traffic in and out of the strait. But as described in a news release on Sunday from U.S. Central Command, the blockade applies only to ships going to or from Iranian ports. Cargo from other Gulf states will be allowed to pass, assuming they are willing to take the risk of hitting mines or being attacked by Iranian speedboats or drones. It was also unclear how the United States would determine which ships had paid a toll to the Iranians.
The strait has been shuttered before, of course, but history does not provide much guidance that fits the current situation.
As Mr. Haass, along with the historians Niall Ferguson and Philip Zelikow noted in The Free Press last week, the Portuguese first took control of the strait 519 years ago and charged a toll. They were ousted by Persian and British forces. Half a millennium later, the Portuguese and the British made clear that the attack on Iran, even in the name of preventing it from getting within reach of a nuclear weapon, was ill considered.
In the early 1950s, Britain blockaded the strait after Iran’s prime minister at the time, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the country’s oil industry. He was overthrown in a coup that was partly supported by the C.I.A., a covert intervention that the Iranians resent to this day and that history has not treated kindly.
And there were episodic disruptions during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
But none of those experiences is a very close analog to the complex confrontation that is currently unfolding. If the blockade is short-lived and ends Iran’s ability to extort the global economy, Mr. Trump’s gamble may well look like a savvy turning of the tables. And if the Iranian leadership gives in to his demands, it may ratify Mr. Trump’s conclusion that the new leadership is more “reasonable” than the last.
If the blockade drags on, though, Mr. Trump runs the risk of looking once again as though he failed to see around corners, anticipating what could go wrong with an attack on what appeared to be a weakened Iran. The war that he thought might last only days is entering its seventh week. And for the global economy, the hard part is not close to over.
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3) Israelis Don’t Feel Much Like Victors in War With Iran
The regime in Iran has not changed and the nuclear and missile threats have not been eliminated, leaving many Israelis to wonder what this was all for.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 13, 2026
Activists held posters of war victims from around the region during a protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
The roads are jammed again, businesses are reopening and children have returned to their classrooms. In all but the far north of Israel, people have emerged from their bomb shelters and safe rooms.
But the 40-day war with Iran and the ongoing war with Hezbollah in Lebanon have left many despairing over how little they believe the fighting accomplished, particularly compared to what they had been promised, according to two new polls.
Regime change in Iran? Senior government and military leaders have been killed, but it is still the same regime.
The destruction of Iran’s nuclear program? Damaged or delayed, perhaps, but not ended.
The elimination of Iran’s ability to threaten Israel with ballistic missiles? Reduced, perhaps, but still a threat.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself told Israelis in a televised address on Saturday night: “They have a missile stockpile, and it’s getting smaller.”
Even now, as President Trump alternately taunts, threatens and tries to negotiate with the leadership in Tehran, Israel is left on the sidelines. It is forced to accept whatever Washington decides — as when it received a scolding for a furious wave of airstrikes on Beirut on Wednesday that Iran protested was a violation of the day-old cease-fire.
Barely a third of Israelis believe that when Israel and the United States disagree, Israel can act on its own judgment, according to a an opinion poll released Sunday by the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
A separate poll also released Sunday by Agam Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that three times as many Israelis see the war as a failure than a victory. Some 70 percent believe the cease-fire reflects an American concession to Iran, and two-thirds oppose it.
Many Israelis have become pessimistic, fatigued, disillusioned and distrustful of the information that they are receiving, the Agam-Hebrew University survey found.
It all adds up to a sense that this victory isn’t much of a victory at all, said Yaakov Katz, an Israeli analyst and co-founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue.
“What’s the Israeli story today?” he said. “It’s a narrative of a country that’s constantly fighting, and presents no alternatives except for more war.”
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4) How Iran, Suffering Under Sanctions, Diversified Its Economy
As the nation contended with high inflation, high unemployment and unrest before the war, it became more than just an oil exporter.
By Patricia Cohen and Robert Gebeloff, April 13, 2026
Patricia Cohen is the global economics correspondent based in London. Robert Gebeloff is a data reporter in New York.
Tehran earlier this year. Sanctions have hobbled Iran’s economy, but they have not broken its back. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
For nearly 50 years, Iran has been treated as an outlaw, earning a spot as one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world for its nuclear and weapons programs, its support for terrorism, its human rights abuses and more.
But despite persistent efforts by the United States, the European Union, Britain and the United Nations Security Council to choke off Iran’s international trade and freeze assets, the country has managed to keep doing business with much of the world, a New York Times analysis shows.
The nation has exchanged goods with more than 170 nations since 2019, even as international restrictions have fueled inflation, soaring unemployment and civil unrest. Overall trade is down, but the country has imported much needed food, electronics and auto parts while it sells oil, gas, construction materials, specialty foods and thousands of other products. Sanctions hobbled Iran’s economy, but they have not broken its back.
The shifts in Iranian trade
Iran conducts an increasing share of trade business with China, its neighbors and other Asian nations.
“The expectation is that sanctions have isolated Iran from global trade but that is not entirely the case,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research organization based in London. “Iran’s trade has grown more complex over time in response to sanctions.”
The war with the United States and Israel has conspicuously shifted the country’s prospects. Iran’s blockade of shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has interfered with its own ability to access critical goods and conduct trade. Israeli and American missiles have pounded the country, destroying infrastructure including electricity facilities, transportation, factories, military bases and schools. The possibility of more devastating damage looms if a two-week cease-fire does not hold.
Yet trade data over the past 30 years may offer clues about the shape-shifting power of the Islamic Republic’s 94-million-person economy. Its ability to adapt under the strain of sanctions and other disruptions could signal how it would operate going forward.
China has been Iran’s savior
Precise trade figures are difficult to obtain. Most analysts distrust official government statistics, and Iran’s partners often omit or understate the value of commodity transactions.
Even so, what’s clear is that China has stepped up as Iran’s primary trading partner, accounting for a steadily growing share of Iran’s imports and exports over the past two decades.
A growing reliance on China and Asia
Here is breakdown of Iran’s international trade by country or region
During the pandemic, Beijing vowed to invest $400 billion in the country in the coming decades in exchange for a steady supply of oil. In 2024, it purchased 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, according to the International Energy Agency. China also accounted for roughly a quarter of Iran’s non-oil exports from 2019 to 2024, according to data compiled by Harvard University’s Atlas of Economic Complexity, purchasing billions of dollars of Iranian chemicals and metals.
Payments are made in renminbi, China’s currency, avoiding the use of dollars and the need to involve American banks, which are often the primary entities used to help enforce sanctions violations. China, in return, appears to provide nearly 30 percent of the commodities that Iran imports, selling everything from furniture to sunflower seeds.
There is another crucial layer of trade between the nations not recorded in official statistics. Both countries have engaged in a complicated barter system that involves secret financing channels. Iran ships oil to China and in return, Chinese state-backed construction companies have built airports and other infrastructure.
This hidden system of trade extends elsewhere in the world, experts said, in part to avoid running afoul of sanctions. The shadow activity involves shell companies and frontmen that mask the identity of the actual buyers, the use of non-Iranian banks and diversions through other countries that are used to conceal the fact that Iran is involved.
Iran is no longer purely reliant on oil
Twenty years ago, petroleum accounted for nearly 80 percent of Iran’s export ledger, but that figure shrunk over time as Iran’s economy diversified.
The shift began accelerating when the United States, under President Barack Obama, imposed a new round of harsh sanctions that forced Iran into a tailspin.
“The Iranian economy didn’t start really struggling until about 2012,” Mr. Batmanghelidj said. “The rise in trade from 2000-2012 was associated with a rise in living standards and the growth of Iran’s middle class.”
The sanctions primarily targeted Iran’s oil trade and discouraged Western companies from doing business with Iranian counterparts. That pushed Iran to develop more trade in other areas, and with new partners, a pattern that is continuing, trade data shows.
Some of the sanctions were lifted after the Iran-U.S. nuclear deal in 2015. But since 2019, when President Trump reimposed sanctions against companies doing business with Iran, the pattern resumed.
During that time, Iran has exported more than $120 billion in non-petroleum commodities, the Harvard data shows — a figure roughly on par with the total exports of Costa Rica, Ecuador or Croatia.
What else Iran sells to the world
Here are some of the products whose export value has notably grown in recent years.
Iran is helped by its access to several trade corridors, both overland and by water. It borders seven countries, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Turkey and has Caspian seaports in addition to occupying one side of the Hormuz strait that has been a central feature of the current war.
Both Turkey and Iraq are key customers of Iranian goods. With China, these three nations have accounted for more than half of Iran’s non-oil export trade since 2019.
Kuwait is a major buyer of Iranian cement and sheep. Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan import large quantities of packaging material. Most of the imported saffron in Spain comes from Iran.
Iran makes more of what it needs, but it’s unclear to what extent
One response to sanctions over the years has been to produce more things at home. The country has developed an extensive manufacturing sector that produces automobiles, steel, iron, electronics and pharmaceuticals, as well as a thriving business in food products.
“They’ve made a concerted effort at being self-reliant,” said Kislaya Prasad, academic director of the Center for Global Business at the University of Maryland.
Sanctions have made it much more difficult for Iran to import materials it needs for production like machinery and replacement parts.
European countries used to account for more than half of reported Iranian imports in the mid-1990s. Today, they make up less than 20 percent.
Where Iran imports goods from
In addition to being one of Iran’s largest customers, China has become one of its biggest suppliers.
The United Arab Emirates provides electronics; India ships large quantities of rice; and Brazil sells Iran soybeans and maize.
In several ways, American efforts to block imports to Iran have been more damaging than efforts to curb Iran’s oil exports, the biggest single source of its trade revenue, Mr. Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation said.
He added that the diversification of Iran’s economy was not the result of government policies. “Companies managed to find export opportunities,” he said.
Measuring the magnitude of trade with Iran’s partners, though, involves some guesswork.
“Many assume that trade data should be highly accurate because shipments are recorded at ports of export and import, and because governments have strong incentives to monitor trade for taxation and regulatory purposes,” said Sebastian Bustos, a research fellow at Harvard who helped develop the atlas project.
“While these controls do exist, the reality is that global trade data remain incomplete and poor in quality,” he added. “This problem is worse for developing countries, and even more in countries facing sanctions.”
What’s next?
If the Strait of Hormuz remains paralyzed and fighting escalates, especially after negotiations this weekend between fell apart, Iran’s postwar economy could take years or possibly decades to recover.
Even if a peace deal eventually comes together, rebuilding the economy will take time given the extensive damage that has already been done to housing, schools, factories, research universities, transportation hubs and more.
Tehran has been insisting on an end to sanctions as part of any deal. But if the sanctions continue, the process of repairing the damage while also providing essential goods and services will be longer and more painful. And it’s unclear the extent to which Iran has further isolated itself by attacking some of its regional trade partners during the conflict.
But while the United States and others can squeeze Iran’s economy, what Tehran has demonstrated with its blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, is that it, too, can inflict economic damage that reverberates across the globe.
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5) The Iran War Has Made Clear the Old Arrangements Are Over
By Badr Jafar, April 13, 2026
Mr. Jafar is the special envoy of the United Arab Emirates minister of foreign affairs for business and philanthropy. He wrote from Dubai.
Ricardo Tomás
The United Arab Emirates in March 2025 undertook to invest $1.4 trillion in the United States — the largest single-country pledge on record. The commitment, accelerated during President Trump’s visit to the Gulf two months later, covered artificial intelligence, semiconductors, clean energy and the infrastructure of the future. In both countries, it was considered historic.
Nine months later, amid an uneasy cease-fire in the Iran war, the Gulf region is assessing the fallout from Iranian missiles. The economic disruption has been severe: Iran has choked the Strait of Hormuz and hit energy infrastructure, and now America has declared a naval blockade. Governments across the region are reassessing the pace of overseas commitments they can sustain under fire. The implicit bargain, as one economist put it, was that those investment pledges rested on a foundation of regional stability.
For decades, the U.S.-Gulf relationship was described in shorthand: oil for security. The Gulf provided the energy stability; America provided the military umbrella. But that framework was obsolete even before the war started. The United States achieved energy independence. Gulf economies are spending trillions to diversify beyond oil. The terms of exchange have fundamentally changed — and nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship between the United States and the Emirates.
What this moment calls for is not a rupture, but a recognition that the partnership is structurally deeper than either side fully acknowledged, and that it has outgrown the institutional architecture governing it. America and the Emirates need a more honest accounting of what they owe each other, one that goes beyond the ceremonial arithmetic of investment announcements. It requires recognizing that the United Arab Emirates is not simply a source of capital, but is also a strategic co-investor in shared prosperity; that stability in this region is the foundation on which the entire edifice rests; and that even the strongest partnerships require deliberate stewardship to endure.
The Emirates has been the top destination for American exports in the Middle East for 17 consecutive years, with bilateral trade in 2025 generating a $23.8 billion surplus for the United States, the fourth largest it gets from any country. The trade figures capture only one dimension. New York University has a full campus in Abu Dhabi. The Cleveland Clinic runs a major hospital there. The Guggenheim is building a museum on Saadiyat Island.
Sixty-five thousand Americans call the Emirates home; tens of thousands of Emiratis have studied at U.S. universities, and many have returned with deep ties to American institutions. The Abu Dhabi technology company G42 partners directly with American giants such as Microsoft, which has committed $15.2 billion to A.I. infrastructure in the country. The Commerce Department approved the export of advanced Nvidia chips to G42 for a reason: These collaborations serve American interests as much as Emirati ones.
This is not oil for security. It is a 360-degree partnership — economic, technological, cultural and human — that has been built quietly over decades by businesses, universities, hospitals and millions of individual choices. It is the kind of relationship that great powers spend generations trying to construct. And it already exists.
The current crisis has made the invisible visible. The Emirates is not a passive recipient of American security guarantees. It is an active partner that has bet its diversification strategies and sovereign wealth on the stability of the international order the United States leads. When that order is disrupted, the consequences fall first and hardest on the countries nearest the fire.
The Emirates did not seek this war. It has absorbed thousands of strikes on its airports, ports and cities. Its air defenses have intercepted over 95 percent of incoming missiles and drones, according to its Defense Ministry. The country’s response has been to defend its people, keep its economy open and reaffirm its investment commitments. This is resilience in action. That resolve should not be taken for granted.
I have no doubt this relationship will survive the current crisis. The interdependencies are too deep and too mutual. The Emirates’ commitment to the United States is not contingent on any single administration or conflict.
But surviving is not the same as thriving. The U.S.-Emirates relationship has the potential to be the most consequential economic partnership of the coming decades for both sides. American firms increasingly see the Emirates as a launchpad into Africa, South Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. In the other direction, the country’s vast network of family-run businesses, a largely untapped force in cross-border investment, is ready to deepen its stake in the American economy alongside Emirati sovereign capital.
Whether this partnership fulfills its extraordinary potential will depend on whether both sides govern it as the strategic asset it has become, rather than the transactional convenience it once was.
The missiles have clarified something important: not that the relationship is at risk, but that it has become far too valuable to leave on autopilot.
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6) Gun Manufacturers Won the Ultimate Legal Shield. Big Oil Wants That, Too.
By Dave Jones, April 13, 2026
Mr. Jones was California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 through 2018.
Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: iStock/Getty Images.
As far back as the 1970s, some of the world’s largest oil corporations were aware that burning their products could have potentially catastrophic consequences. But they withheld the evidence, carried out a decades-long campaign that misled the public about climate science and fought the transition to cleaner and cheaper energy sources.
Eventually scientists and activists took oil and gas companies to court to try to get them to pay for their deceptive campaign and the potentially trillions of dollars in damages from disasters made worse by a climate warmed by their products.
Now the fossil fuel industry has mounted a carefully orchestrated campaign to stop these cases. Backed by the Trump administration, the industry is seeking to block all climate lawsuits that seek compensation from fossil fuel producers for damages. Last month Utah became the first state to enact a law that shields companies from such climate-related claims, and Republican lawmakers have introduced similar bills in Iowa, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. But the biggest prize the industry is after would come from Congress: total legal immunity from liability in climate cases.
Putting any industry above the law — especially one responsible for creating many of the greenhouse gas emissions that have helped fuel climate-related destruction of homes, businesses and whole communities — would be beyond dangerous. If Big Oil gets its wish, it would be an injustice with lasting and cascading harm.
The question of whether the industry can be held accountable for the damage from climate change is coming to a head in part because at the end of February — following the urging of the Trump administration and over 100 House Republicans — the Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments about whether the industry can be sued under state law over its role in global warming. The industry has asked the court to dismiss a Colorado Supreme Court decision that allowed a lawsuit filed by Boulder and Boulder County to proceed. In that case, the city and county want Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy to pay for climate damage like that from the 2021 Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes.
How the Supreme Court rules could have profound implications for dozens of other states and municipalities seeking similar recourse against oil companies. But the Supreme Court is not where the industry’s efforts to evade any accountability end. Oil and gas companies have also been lobbying Congress for a legal shield that would block communities from trying to hold them responsible for climate-linked damage. A Republican House member from Wyoming recently announced that she is working on legislation to establish such a shield.
More than a year ago, oil company executives reportedly asked President Trump to help them quash the rising number of climate lawsuits and “climate superfund” laws that state and local governments have advanced. The Trump administration responded by suing New York and Vermont to block enforcement of the nation’s first two climate superfund laws, and by suing Michigan and Hawaii to prevent them from bringing their own climate cases against Big Oil. A federal judge already dismissed the administration’s lawsuit against Michigan, and the states have moved forward with their cases undeterred.
States like New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii and California are also considering bills to make oil companies pay for climate change’s contribution to rising insurance costs. California is pressing forward with a lawsuit over its alleged role in plastics pollution. And the daughter of a woman killed in the 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest filed the first-ever wrongful death lawsuit against oil companies linked to climate change.
A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the oil companies in the Boulder case will probably not make all of the legal threats against Big Oil go away. But a sweeping liability waiver from Congress could — and we’d all be worse off for it.
In addition to food, rent and housing, costs from climate disasters are growing at a frightening pace — now nearly $1 trillion a year by some estimates. And right now everyday Americans are the ones picking up the tab.
Governments are struggling with the growing costs of rebuilding communities and infrastructure like roads, water and sewer systems after extreme weather. Their budgets often can’t cover these costs and there is pressure to raise taxes and fees. Disaster costs are also making home insurance increasingly unavailable and unaffordable — a phenomenon I saw firsthand during my time as California’s insurance commissioner. Some politicians may pretend that climate change isn’t real, but insurance rates don’t lie. In some states, home insurance premiums are projected to continue to rise as insurers’ growing financial losses from previously unthinkable climate disasters get passed on to policyholders.
It is rare for Congress to grant liability waivers to entire industries, and it should be. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that has shielded gun manufacturers from nearly all legal accountability is now widely regarded as terrible public policy that has fueled gun-related deaths in this country. Yet Republican state attorneys general have proposed using that exact law as a model for protecting fossil fuel companies.
If Big Oil were to secure immunity from liability for climate damage, the public would keep paying for the costs of climate change, while the fossil fuel companies most responsible for them would continue to pay nothing.
As climate disasters mount, and the Trump administration slashes federal disaster response, the most important thing members of Congress can do is protect their constituents’ ability to make polluters pay.
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7) Trump Posted a Picture of Himself as Jesus. Now He’s Trying to Explain It Away.
The image showed President Trump bathed in divine light and clad in religious robes. His interpretation was that the image depicted him as a doctor, not Jesus Christ.
By Katie Rogers, April 13, 2026
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent who has covered President Trump since his first term. She reported from Washington.
The image showed President Trump in a white and red robe, commonly used in renderings of Jesus Christ and in Scripture prophesying his return. Bright golden light, which is used to depict divine intervention in religious imagery, radiated from Mr. Trump’s hand as he touched the forehead of a sick man. A woman observed the scene with her hands steepled in prayer.
As he received two bags of a McDonald’s food delivery to the Oval Office on Monday morning, Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not catch all that religious imagery. He said he had thought the image he had posted to his Truth Social account had depicted him not as Jesus — but as a physician.
“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Mr. Trump said of the social media post, which he deleted after an outcry. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”
The post’s removal was a rare retreat for Mr. Trump, who had posted the apparently A.I.-generated image shortly after using the same platform to attack the American-born Pope Leo XIV, a vocal critic of the U.S. war in Iran. The appearance of the image had sparked an evening’s worth of backlash from religious leaders and Christian supporters who were hurt and shocked that Mr. Trump had appeared to depict himself as a Jesus-like figure.
Later in the day, in an interview with CBS News, Mr. Trump repeated his explanation that he believed the image, which he said he thought was made by “a very beautiful, talented artist,” had depicted him as a doctor.
“I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing — you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” he said. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.”
He said he had taken the image down because “I didn’t want to have anybody be confused. People were confused.”
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8) Middle East War Will Slow Global Economic Growth, I.M.F. Warns
The conflict could also fuel another bout of inflation, according to the International Monetary Fund.
By Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, April 14, 2026
New International Monetary Fund projections showed a global economy that was stopped in its tracks by the U.S. war in Iran. Credit...Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
War in the Middle East has upended the world economy, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday, warning in a report that disruptions to oil markets could slow growth, fuel inflation and raise the possibility of a global recession.
The sober message came after the global economy had largely weathered a pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and soaring inflation without tipping into a recession. But President Trump’s decision to initiate a war in Iran has stopped the world economy in its tracks.
In its latest World Economic Outlook, the I.M.F. sharply downgraded its growth forecasts, exposing the economic fallout from a geopolitical crisis that has roiled energy prices and injected a new bout of uncertainty into the global economy.
“The global outlook has abruptly darkened following the outbreak of war in the Middle East,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, wrote in the report. “The war interrupted what had been a steady growth trajectory.”
The I.M.F. said that even if the war is short-lived, the damage to the global economy has been done. In that best-case scenario, the fund expects global growth to fall to 3.1 percent this year from 3.4 percent in 2025. That is down from the 3.3 percent that the fund projected in January. It is also lower than the 3.4 percent growth that it was prepared to project before the war broke out and oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz were halted.
The forecasts were released as global policymakers arrived in Washington for the spring meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank. Just a few weeks ago, the gathering was expected to focus on other disruptions, including trade tensions, artificial intelligence and international fiscal imbalances. It will instead be dominated by the economic fallout of the war.
The conflict has sent oil prices above $100 per barrel. Natural gas has spiked more than 80 percent, and surging fertilizer prices are raising costs for farmers.
The I.M.F. laid out several scenarios for how the war could play out economically. The most severe case involves disruptions to energy markets that extend into next year. Such a scenario would drag global growth down to 2 percent and send inflation up to 6 percent.
“The downside risks are tremendous,” Mr. Gourinchas said.
Even a more optimistic case, in which the war concludes expeditiously and the Strait of Hormuz reopens, will leave behind economic carnage. The I.M.F. estimates that oil prices will increase by 21.4 percent this year and that energy commodity prices, which the fund had said would decline in 2026, will instead rise by 19 percent this year.
Those higher commodity prices will flow through the economy, the I.M.F. warned. That would raise costs of energy-intensive goods such as steel and cement, erode the purchasing power of consumers and most likely require central banks to raise interest rates.
The I.M.F. expects the economic impact of the war to be more damaging to low-income and developing economies and Persian Gulf energy exporters that are facing infrastructure damage and export disruptions from the war.
Advanced economies, such as the United States, are expected to fare better but not emerge unscathed. The I.M.F. now projects U.S. output to rise to 2.3 percent in 2026. That is an increase from 2.1 percent growth in 2025, but slower than the 2.4 percent growth that the fund projected in January.
The White House projected 3.5 percent gross domestic product growth in 2026 in its latest budget forecasts.
In the United States, the most apparent economic vulnerability appears to be the hit that consumers are feeling from higher gas prices. The national average for a gallon of gas was $4.11 as of Tuesday.
According to the I.M.F. report, the biggest winner from the war thus far appears to be Russia, whose economy is now expected to grow 1.1 percent in 2026, up from 1 percent in 2025.
Higher oil prices and the temporary lifting of U.S. sanctions on some Russian oil sales brightened the outlook for its economy.
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9) Some Ships Transit Strait as U.S. and Iran Trade Nuclear Proposals
The status of the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was unclear on its second day. U.S. officials said they were discussing holding another round of talks with Iran, though details were unclear.
By Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, David E. Sanger and Aurelien Breeden, April 14, 2026
A billboard in Tehran on Monday depicting a late commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards naval force. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
The status of a U.S. Navy blockade in the Strait of Hormuz remained uncertain on Tuesday as Iranian and U.S. officials weighed the next steps in diplomacy and negotiations.
Tracking data showed on Tuesday that several ships had passed through the strait before and after a deadline set by the United States. Some of those ships had departed from Iranian ports, were carrying Iranian products or were under U.S. government sanctions, according to the trade analysis firm Kpler.
It was not immediately known whether the ships that had departed from Iranian ports fell within what U.S. Central Command described as a “grace period” around the deadline, had gained permission to pass or had somehow bypassed the blockade. The U.S. military has offered few details on what it would do if merchant vessels tried to run through the blockade, which it has said applied to ships traveling to or from Iranian ports.
President Trump announced the blockade to cut off Iran’s oil income, after high-level U.S.-Iranian negotiations broke down in Pakistan over the weekend. During those talks, the United States asked Iran for a 20-year suspension of uranium enrichment. The Iranians, in a formal response sent on Monday, said they would agree to up to five years, according to two senior Iranian officials and one U.S. official. Mr. Trump rejected Iran’s offer, according to a U.S. official.
Still, the back-and-forth suggested there was room for a deal, and White House officials said there are also discussions of holding another round of in-person negotiations, but that no plans have been finalized. Oil prices fell and stocks rose in Asia and Europe on Tuesday as investors weighed a possible path to peace.
On Friday, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain are expected to co-chair a video meeting in Paris of the coalition that hopes to secure the Strait of Hormuz after the conflict ends.
Mr. Macron on Tuesday called on the United States and Iran to resume negotiations and to reopen the strait “without controls or tolls, as soon as possible.” Mr. Macron said he delivered his message in calls with Mr. Trump and Iran’s president, Massoud Pezeshkian.
According to Iranian state media, Mr. Pezeshkian told Mr. Macron that Iran was prepared to continue talks “solely within the framework” of international law, and he blamed “excessive demands” and a “lack of political will among senior U.S. officials” for scuttling an agreement in Pakistan.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
· Lebanon: Israel launched airstrikes in two cities in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported, hours before Israeli and Lebanese officials were set to hold rare talks in Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will participate, according to the State Department. The meeting is expected to be largely preparatory and is not likely to produce an immediate deal, according to a Lebanese official and another person briefed on the plans.
With Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon and widened ground invasion leaving the cease-fire with Iran on shaky ground, Israeli and Lebanese officials were expected to hold rare talks on Tuesday in Washington to try to find a way forward.
The meeting would be the first direct, in-person talks in decades between Israel and Lebanon, which do not have diplomatic relations. Israel’s and Lebanon’s ambassadors to Washington were expected to participate. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will also take part, according to the State Department.
But the talks will be largely preparatory, according to a Lebanese official and another person briefed on them, who both requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. They are not expected to immediately produce a deal to end the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia that Israel says its attacks are targeting. Hours before the meeting was to begin, Israel launched airstrikes on southern Lebanon, including one near the main hospital in the town of Tibnin that caused “significant damage” and injured several people, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency.
Israel and Lebanon remain sharply divided in their aims for the talks. President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon told Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, that Lebanon was hoping that a cease-fire would be reached, after which direct negotiations could begin, according to a statement shared by the Lebanese presidency on Monday. Mr. Aoun said that any long-term solution must entail Israel’s heeding the growing international calls for it to stop attacking Lebanon.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has ruled out a cease-fire and said that Israel would not stop its attacks on Lebanon. The aim of the discussions in Washington would be disarming Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, and establishing a lasting peace deal with Lebanon, he has said.
Mr. Netanyahu agreed last week to engage in the talks as Iran warned that it could withdraw from the cease-fire unless Israel stopped attacking Lebanon.
The meeting will include Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter; his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad; and the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Michel Issa.
Lebanon is reeling from weeks of Israeli bombardment that has displaced more than one million residents and, according to the Lebanese health ministry, killed more than 2,000 people and injured more than 6,700 others as of Monday.
The war between Hezbollah and Israel reignited last month after Hezbollah fired on Israel in solidarity with Iran. Hezbollah has since launched more than 6,500 rockets, missiles and drones toward Israel, according to the Israeli military.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon have become a flashpoint in the fragile cease-fire between Iran and the United States. Iran insists that Lebanon is covered by the agreement. Iran and the United States say it isn’t.
Israel sharply escalated its attacks in the hours after the cease-fire was reached last week, killing at least 357 people in Lebanon on Wednesday, according to the Lebanese authorities.
Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said in a televised speech on Monday that Hezbollah categorically rejected Lebanon’s planned talks with Israel. He called on Lebanese authorities to cancel the talks, urging them not to become “a tool of Israel.”
Proceeding with the talks would represent “capitulation and surrender” to a country intent on occupying Lebanon, Mr. Qassem said.
Hwaida Saad, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Euan Ward and Christina Goldbaum contributed reporting.
· Energy: The International Energy Agency on Tuesday said it expected demand for oil in the current quarter to shrink by 1.5 million barrels a day, which would be the deepest decline since the Covid-19 pandemic. Resuming the flow of supplies through the Strait of Hormuz is “the single most important variable in easing the pressure on energy supplies, prices and the global economy,” the agency said.
· Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Monday said that 2,089 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, including 357 in a wave of Israeli strikes last Wednesday. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Persian Gulf nations. At least 22 people had been killed in Israel as of Sunday, as well as 12 Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.
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10) A Divided America Processes a War That Trump Has Scarcely Explained
As the war in Iran extends into its seventh week and a truce feels increasingly shaky, many Americans expressed bewilderment about a conflict that came with little warning.
By Jack Healy, Pooja Salhotra, Jazmine Ulloa, Anna Griffin, Emily Cataneo and Ruth Igielnik, April 14, 2026
The reporters spoke with three dozen people in Colorado Springs, San Antonio, Fayetteville, N.C., and western Iowa.
Emmelia Lorenzen, left, and her friend Madison Shaffer were both raised in military families. Ms. Shaffer is upset at the prospect of another generation of young people heading to the Middle East to fight. “It’s happening so fast. We’re not thinking about what we’re doing,” she said. Credit...Cornell Watson for The New York Times
Krystal Zimmerman, an Army veteran who fought in Iraq, is worried about America’s latest war in the Middle East. She supported attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, but as the conflict lurches from bombings and threats of annihilation to a shaky truce with no clear exit, she worries that President Trump has now stumbled into his own forever war.
“It’s a waste of resources, a waste of money, and we come off as bullies,” Ms. Zimmerman, 40, said after she wrapped up a recent appointment at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Colorado Springs, where she receives treatment for the depression and sleeplessness that followed her home from Baghdad.
Many Americans are expressing anger, frustration, even bewilderment as the war on Iran grinds into its seventh week. Over the weekend, peace talks fizzled, and Mr. Trump reverted to bombast and conflicting statements as he ordered a blockade of Iranian ports to counter Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Public-opinion surveys show that roughly six in 10 Americans oppose the U.S.-led war against Iran, a striking shift from the solid public support that accompanied the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, or the Persian Gulf war in the 1990s. Some say they are simply baffled by a war that they feel the president did not prepare them for and that still has not been clearly explained.
“I don’t think Trump is making wise decisions,” Emmelia Lorenzen, 19, said as she and a friend sipped coffees in Fayetteville, N.C., home to the sprawling Fort Bragg Army base, which serves as headquarters to both Army Special Operations and the Third Special Forces Group.
But it has been a muted opposition, unfurling in conversations at cafes and veterans’ halls, and prompting smaller demonstrations instead of the huge protests that accompanied the Vietnam War or the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“I’m incredulous that more people aren’t in the streets but, yeah, it’s kind of hard to be surprised or even shocked by anything he does now,” Mike Keefe, 64, said of the president as he stood with a diminished cluster of protesters outside an immigration detention center in Portland, Ore.
The opposition to the Iran war splits largely along party lines. Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the war, while most Republican voters back the president, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center before the recent cease-fire.
But in a sign of potential trouble for President Trump and Republicans fighting to keep control of Congress, the Pew survey also found that independent voters who lean toward the Republican Party were more closely divided, with 52 percent saying they approved of how Mr. Trump was handling the war and 45 percent saying they disapproved.
Fissures within the Republican Party are primarily coming from outside of Mr. Trump’s core base, according to a CNN poll taken in mid-March. Republicans who do not identify as “MAGA Republicans” are less likely to support the war than their MAGA counterparts.
Young Republicans are also far less likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s decision to take military action than are Republicans older than 45, according to the poll.
Voters who identify themselves as independent, overall, fall firmly in opposition.
Even Republicans who are supportive of the war overall do not necessarily think things are progressing especially smoothly. Only about half of those Republicans said they thought the war was going well, according to the Pew poll.
In three dozen recent interviews, voters in military towns including Colorado Springs, San Antonio and Fayetteville worried that Mr. Trump, who campaigned as a peace president opposed to fighting “stupid wars,” was bumbling the United States into another Iraq or Afghanistan.
Six weeks in, many said they still had no clear sense of the president’s goals in Iran, or why he had joined Israel in attacking now. It all felt so fast and erratic, they said. Past presidents, such as George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, spent weeks, if not months, making the case for the attack on Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and the operation to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Coalitions, willing or not, were formed. Debates rang through the halls of Congress.
Nothing like that preceded the attack on Iran. And the blizzard of shifting statements that Mr. Trump has offered in phone calls with reporters and late-night Truth Social posts only added to some people’s confusion.
Nearly two-thirds of voters — and 71 percent of political independents — said they thought Mr. Trump had not provided a clear explanation in the lead up to the war, according a Quinnipiac University poll from early March.
By contrast, polls showed that a large majority of the public felt that Mr. Bush had made a compelling case ahead of the war in Iraq.
Ms. Lorenzen, who voted for Mr. Trump, was particularly disturbed by his vow to annihilate the entire Iranian civilization if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a threat averted at the last minute when the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week cease fire.
“One of Trump’s biggest campaign motives was that he is not a man of war,” Ms. Lorenzen said. “And then you see us moving to war so quickly after saying that. It just doesn’t really make sense.”
The failures in Iraq and Afghanistan — which killed more than 7,000 American service members and contractors — shaped voters’ views of America’s latest war of choice. In interviews, they brought up the false claims about weapons of mass destruction used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan, and wondered whether history was about to repeat itself.
Queta Rodriguez, 55, a Marine veteran who was working at a base in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 11, 2001, said she remembered a sense of collective grief and American solidarity after the attacks. She had disagreed with Mr. Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq but felt he had at least tried to bring Americans on board.
Now, Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in San Antonio, said she was angry with Mr. Trump for taking the nation to war in a region where many soldiers had already lost lives. She felt disappointed with Congress for not reining in the president, and saddened that many Americans seemed to be tuning out.
Other veterans and military family members — who generally skew Republican — said they still supported Mr. Trump and his war. They applauded him for attacking a theocracy that sponsored terrorism across the Middle East and had helped to kill hundreds of American troops.
If Mr. Trump’s critics said the attacks on Iran were haphazard, his supporters believed they were overdue.
“It’s a threat — it needs to be neutralized,” said Gary Freese, 58, who served in Iraq and now rides his Harley Davidson motorcycle through the Rocky Mountains. He said Mr. Trump had showed “he’s got spine” by attacking Iran.
There is also a wellspring of support for Mr. Trump’s war in places like rural western Iowa, where he won the last three presidential elections by increasing margins.
Kelly Garrett, 51, who sells steaks from the cattle he raises, was one of several farmers who supported the administration’s attacks on Iran even if they did not fully understand the rationale. Many Republicans hold an abiding trust in the president.
Farm country, already reeling from Mr. Trump’s tariffs and immigration enforcement, suffered another economic hit when the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz sent fertilizer and diesel prices skyrocketing just as farmers were preparing their fields and machinery for planting.
Yet many Republican farmers in Iowa blamed the high prices on corporate profiteers, not Mr. Trump.
Wayne Brincks, 72, a retired farmer, said the short-term pain would be worth it if it prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
“These guys are religious zealots,” Mr. Brincks said of Iran’s leadership. “I think the president thought it was now or never, and we had to do something.”
But even in deep-red Iowa, doubts and worries are starting to emerge like the first shoots of corn. Mark Nelson, 35, a farmer and Republican supervisor in Woodbury County who voted for Mr. Trump, said the attacks undermined the president’s “America First” message. That criticism has also been bubbling up among influencers in the Trump movement, including from Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Megyn Kelly.
“The amount of money and resources that have gone into this war is ridiculous,” Mr. Nelson said. He had questions about how much Israel had influenced the president’s decision to enter the war. “I don’t think there was any imminent danger.”
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11) Immigrants Are Scared to File Taxes. It Could Cost the U.S. Billions.
Fears that the I.R.S. could share their data with ICE have turned tax season into a gamble for people who are in the country illegally.
By Miriam Jordan and Andrew Duehren, April 14, 2026
Miriam Jordan, who covers immigration, reported from Los Angeles and Andrew Duehren, who covers tax policy, reported from Washington.
Many undocumented immigrants who want to file tax returns have sought the help of clinics like this one in Los Angeles. Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Evelin and Gustavo Quebedo have filed U.S. tax returns every year for more than a decade.
That they are undocumented immigrants did not deter them.
“Our thinking has been, if one day there’s immigration reform and the chance to legalize our status, we can show that we file our taxes, are not a burden — that we do the right thing,” said Mr. Quebedo, a car mechanic, who lives with his family in Los Angeles.
But as April 15 approached this year, the couple, who came to the United States from Central America, agonized over whether to file.
Their fears, shared by many of the millions of undocumented people who file tax returns, are rooted in the decision last year by the Internal Revenue Service to give immigration officials the addresses of people subject to deportation — a break with the tax agency’s longstanding practices.
The shift sent shock waves through the I.R.S., where taxpayer privacy has been an article of faith, and through immigrant communities, where filing tax returns was seen as a way for people in the country illegally to show that they were complying with tax laws.
The federal treasury could take a hit. Many undocumented immigrants have taxes withheld in every paycheck, but experts worry some could shift into under-the-table jobs. Others with less formal earnings may now skip filing a tax return — and therefore not pay federal taxes at all. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.
The fallout from the I.R.S. agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is becoming clearer as the annual tax deadline nears, according to several organizations that assist immigrants with filing their tax returns.
At the Koreatown Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles, certified volunteers help low-income residents prepare returns through a partnership with the I.R.S. Undocumented immigrants file using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, a nine-digit identifier issued by the I.R.S. for people who don’t have Social Security numbers.
This year, only 10 percent of clients at the Koreatown center’s free tax clinics have been ITIN holders, compared with about a third in previous years, said Audrey Casillas, a director.
A week before the April 15 tax deadline, the Quebedos were among the immigrants who came by the clinic seeking help but were stricken by anxiety.
“I don’t know if we can trust this government not to come after us,” Ms. Quebedo said, glancing at their daughter, born in the United States, and their son, brought to the country as a little boy.
For decades, the I.R.S. implicitly encouraged undocumented taxpayers to file a return as part of its broader mission to promote tax compliance. Before the agreement between the I.R.S. and ICE, unauthorized immigrants paid roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, according to an estimate by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank. Much of it went to Social Security and Medicare, which are programs that undocumented immigrants cannot benefit from.
With few exceptions, taxpayer information was kept walled off from other government agencies, and that won a measure of trust among many undocumented immigrants. But under President Trump, the effort to find as many immigrants to deport as possible led the administration to try to exploit that trust.
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, first sought the help of the I.R.S. in early 2025, soon after President Trump returned to the White House and launched his mass deportation campaign. The I.R.S. initially balked at the request, which sought information on about 700,000 immigrants. Several top I.R.S. officials resigned because they feared working with ICE to detain immigrants could be illegal.
ICE didn’t relent, though, and by the spring, the agency had secured an agreement to get information from the I.R.S., which had cycled through a series of leaders and had seen an exodus of career employees.
Over the summer, ICE sought the addresses of about 1.3 million immigrants, and the I.R.S. handed over information on about 47,000 of them before federal judges ordered a stop to the practice.
“It’s sending the message to undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families that being in the shadows is safer,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
The I.R.S. did not respond to a request for comment.
John Koskinen, who was the I.R.S. commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said the potential consequences of sharing tax data with D.H.S. were evident.
“Our job was to collect taxes owed, not enforce immigration laws,” said Mr. Koskinen. “That was the job of D.H.S. And it was clear to me that, if immigrants thought their information was going to be shared, many of them would quit filing their tax returns.”
Brian Pastori, who helps undocumented immigrants file tax returns in New Bedford, Mass., said he first noticed a drop in filings last year, after news broke that ICE was seeking information from the I.R.S. “We got a significant drop-off last year, and we haven’t recovered,” said Mr. Pastori, who is deputy director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts.
“The damage is already done,” he said.
About 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, the latest available estimate, and about 70 percent of them were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
Since creating the ITIN in 1996, the I.R.S. has issued 31 million of them; about five million were active as of October 2025. In 2022, about 3.8 million tax returns included at least one ITIN, and those returns accounted for about $17 billion in federal income taxes that year, according to I.R.S. data.
Not all ITIN holders are undocumented immigrants. Some are foreign students or other noncitizens who have tax-reporting obligations because they earn income in the United States.
Many of the undocumented immigrants work in jobs in which taxes are withheld on every paycheck. They may have used a fake, expired or stolen Social Security number to obtain that job, but they use the separate nine-digit code provided by the I.R.S. to document their tax payments.
For those workers, filing a return presents an opportunity to receive a refund if they paid too much in taxes, and that can provide a boost to household budgets.
Now, some of those families are going to miss out, said Luz Arevalo, a lawyer who sued to block the sharing of taxpayer information on behalf of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts and other groups.
“People are forgoing refunds, and often it’s money they paid in,” Ms. Arevalo said.
Other undocumented immigrants may be paid in cash, off the books, or work as independent contractors, so they won’t have had taxes deducted over the course of the year. If they decide not to file a return, they would not be paying any taxes.
Undocumented immigrants were already cut off from most federal tax benefits, such as the earned-income tax credit. But last year’s Republican tax law cut off the child tax credit, which had been available to families if a child was a U.S. citizen.
In Huntington Park, a predominantly Latino city in Los Angeles County, banners recently advertised tax preparation offices hemmed between quinceañera dress shops and taquerias.
The area was the target of big immigration raids last year, including one that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, showed up to observe.
Javier Oviedo owns Ov Professional Services, one of several tax preparers who reported a steep decline in business. “We have clients who have self-deported,” he said.
Nonprofits like the United Ways of California, which connects low-income workers with tax prep sites like the Koreatown center, and groups like the National Immigration Law Center have been inundated with questions about what immigrants should do this tax season.
“We had never received as many questions and seen this level of concern and confusion,” said Ben D’Avanzo, a senior strategist at the immigration law center.
On its website, the nonprofit offers some guidance: “If ICE already has your address, filing does not add to your risk. “
“You don’t have to file a tax return unless your income is over the filing minimum, or you owe self-employment taxes,” it says, “but filing tax returns may help if you plan to apply for a green card or citizenship.”
The last time a bipartisan immigration bill was introduced in Congress, it required proof of “good moral character” to qualify for permanent residency. And the last immigration amnesty, in 1986, required applicants to prove they had lived and worked in the United States for several years.
Maria Garcia, who sells cosmetics and clothes at a downtown Los Angeles stall, is among those who have decided not to file.
“In all my years in this country, I had never experienced what is happening now,” said Ms. Garcia, who has lived in the United States for more than 30 years. Earlier this year, she narrowly avoided arrest during a raid that targeted street vendors.
“My whole life is here. My elderly mother is here. My two children are here. I don’t want to be separated from them,” Ms. Garcia said.
At the Koreatown tax clinic, many immigrants said they felt a duty to comply with the law.
“I want to show I have integrity,” said Manuel Aranguiz, a computer technician from South America, after filing his taxes. “One of my sons will hopefully be able to sponsor me for a green card one day.”
The Quebedos completed their return at around 8 p.m., and tucked it inside Ms. Quebedo’s tan purse alongside years of past returns.
“We thought hard before coming here,” Mr. Quebedo said.
Their expected refund: less than $200.
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12) Iran Threatens Retaliation Over U.S. Blockade
Iran’s armed forces said they would attempt to expand their influence over sea lanes beyond the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. military continued to block Iranian shipping.
By Ali Watkins, Peter Eavis, Aaron Boxerman and Erika Solomon, April 15, 2026
A billboard depicting the Strait of Hormuz with a banner that says “Forever in Iran’s hands” in Tehran on Monday. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Iran on Wednesday threatened further retaliation over an American naval blockade of its ports in the critical Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. military said that it had “completely halted” trade in and out of Iran by sea.
More than 10,000 soldiers, as well as dozens of planes and warships, are enforcing the blockade, the U.S. military said. In response, the Iranian military said on state media that it could expand its grip over critical shipping routes beyond the strait if the U.S. blockade continued.
“Iran’s powerful armed forces will not allow any exports or imports to continue in the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman and the Red Sea,” said Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, leader of the military joint command that oversees Iran’s army and Revolutionary Guards.
Mediators are rushing to shore up a two-week cease-fire in the war between the United States, Israel and Iran that expires April 21. But the future of the talks is unclear after a meeting between Vice President JD Vance and senior Iranian leaders over the weekend in Pakistan ended without a breakthrough.
Esmaeil Baghaei, a senior Iranian official, said that Iran had continued to exchange messages with the United States through Pakistan since the talks ended on Sunday morning.
President Trump, in an interview with Fox Business, again deemed the conflict “close to over” — a claim he has made repeatedly — while also suggesting that U.S. attacks could continue as long as needed to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Iran has not fully relaxed its control over the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf conduit for oil and gas, which Mr. Trump said was a precondition for the current truce. Iran began blockading the Strait of Hormuz as a pressure tactic during the war, rattling the world economy and sending energy prices soaring.
Reaching a deal to end the war would require not only an agreement to reopen the strait, but also an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group.
The United States announced on Tuesday that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to “launch direct negotiations” to end fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The announcement followed a rare face-to-face meeting in Washington between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors.
Hezbollah condemned the Lebanese government for negotiating with Israel, however, and it was unclear whether any Israel-Lebanon agreement would lead to an end in the fighting. Hezbollah has long been Lebanon’s dominant military and political force, defying attempts by the official Lebanese government to assert control.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
· Lebanon: The talks between Israel and Lebanon did not lead to an immediate cease-fire. Israeli forces bombarded towns in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, according to Lebanese state media. Several people were killed in a strike in the coastal town of Ansariya, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said.
· Iranian rescues: Emergency teams have rescued more than 7,200 Iranians from rubble after U.S. and Israeli bombings throughout the war, the president of Iran’s Red Crescent society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, said. The Iranian authorities have released little comprehensive information about the dead and wounded in the country, more than a month in the war.
· Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of last Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry said on Tuesday that 2,124 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Persian Gulf nations. At least 22 people had been killed in Israel as of Sunday, as well as 12 Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.
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13) This Is Not a Man in Control of Himself
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist, April 15, 2026
Jason Hendardy for The New York Times
To have spent any amount of time observing President Trump over the last month is to conclude that he is in far over his head.
The president is struggling with the consequences of his actions, raging in protest of the fact that for all its firepower, the United States cannot bomb Iran into submission. When Trump launched his “short-term excursion,” he assumed that it would be — in the words of a Pentagon official in the last Republican administration to launch a Middle East war — a “cakewalk.”
That, as Trump’s own intelligence agencies told him, was a mistake. Now, he is stuck. And he lacks the skill and patience to find a way out of his self-inflicted catastrophe. Unable to will a better outcome into existence — there are limits to the power of positive thinking — and frustrated by his own impotence, his response, familiar to anyone who must manage the emotions of a young child, is to throw a tantrum.
Over the last few days, Trump has denounced “the Fake News Media” as “CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT!” for its reporting on the war. He attacked Pope Leo XIV in a bizarre rant, calling him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” And he posted an A.I. image of himself as Jesus, surrounded by devotees, healing an unnamed man.
This is not a man in control of himself, or a president in control of the situation around him.
I’ve written before about the irony of a strongman president so uninterested in governing that he has handed his power over to a handful of deputies. Trump’s behavior as he faces failure in Iran underscores another such irony.
Months before Trump won his second term, and well before he took office, the Supreme Court handed him the reins of the unitary executive — the promise of an active, energetic administration free of what the court deemed unnecessary constraints. The president has used this power to run wild, trampling over constitutional government. But he has also, at the same time, shown himself to be the weakest and most ineffectual president of recent memory, less a man of commanding authority than, well, a buffoon.
This is not to say that Trump has been an inconsequential president, that he hasn’t presided over the wholesale destruction of large parts of the federal government, or that he hasn’t turned the sharp edge of the state against the most vulnerable people in the country.
First under the Department of Government Efficiency and then under the direction of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration summarily liquidated several key agencies. Among them: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump’s White House has also slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for new medicines and technologies in a crushing blow to scientific research in the United States.
Under the direction of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of the president’s deportation program, the administration has used its court-sanctioned authority to build a roving secret police of armed immigration agents, used both to terrorize the president’s political enemies and to remove as many immigrants from the country as possible, regardless of legal status.
But these grim facts of Trump’s tenure should not blind us to the way his unilateral action betrays the weakness of his regime. Trump works almost exclusively through executive orders — presidential directives used to shape the priorities of the federal bureaucracy. This allows him to move quickly. But there are also limits to his reach. In areas where Trump cannot compel political actors to obey his demands — where there is no legal basis for his authority — he struggles to do anything of consequence.
Consider his effort to impose a new citizenship requirement for voting, as well as a national voter ID. He has issued two executive orders that purport to change federal elections to suit his demands. But neither has much in the way of legal force. Presidential power does not extend to election administration. There is the SAVE Act — a bill that would write these restrictions into law — but other than writing posts on his social media website, Trump has done little to nothing to push that bill through Congress.
He’s done little to nothing with Congress, period. He’s taken few, if any, steps to work with the supine Republican majority to consolidate his transformation of the executive branch through legislation. Some of this is no doubt strategy, with destruction as a fait accompli. But most of it reflects his inability to engage the legislative process. The weakness we see abroad is the weakness we see at home, and vice versa.
Politically, the president’s unilateralism has been a disaster. His universal tariffs — a vanity project as much as an economic program — are a drag on both the economy and his approval rating.
The same goes for his immigration policies, which also started with a broad assertion of executive authority. They then produced an enormous backlash from Americans under siege by ICE and Customs and Border Protection. The resistance in Minnesota, in particular, underscored the extent to which the president cannot withstand significant pushback. And it ultimately forced him to fire his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, sideline the face of his efforts, Greg Bovino, and execute a strategic retreat.
Nothing underscores Trump’s weakness as an executive more than the war with Iran. This is not to downplay the president’s decision to circumvent Congress and start a war without so much as a nod to democratic decision-making. It is the imperial project of a would-be authoritarian. But, like many such projects throughout history, it is a showcase for the pathologies and dysfunctions of the regime in question. Initial operational success has given way to what is essentially a stalemate, with Trump screaming at the world, unwilling to do much else.
For as much as Trump is uniquely unsuited for the tremendous power of his office, it is also true that the idea of the unitary executive rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American political system. It imagines that government can be managed by a single figure, directing each part of the executive branch as an extension of his person. But the American system rests on consensus and collaboration. It depends on an active relationship between the three branches, each working to steer the affairs of a state and each entitled to its influence.
As weak as Trump is, it’s not clear that any president could unilaterally govern the country with any success. Even our strongest and most aggressive presidents — Franklin Roosevelt comes to mind — worked in conjunction and cooperation with congressional majorities and allies within and outside the federal government. They understood that American governance was a partnership and that collaboration is necessary if one wants a durable and lasting legacy.
This raises what is already the most important question of the Trump years thus far: Will his legacy be durable and lasting? Does it represent a new template for American government going forward? Or is it more like an unfortunate detour into a dark alley?
There is a decent chance that Trump is the beginning of something, and not the end. But if we can escape these years intact and respond accordingly, we may find that Trump stands less as an example and more as a cautionary tale of what happens when we embrace unaccountable, unilateral authority.
In the end, it just doesn’t work.
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14) Vance Says the Pope Should Be More Careful When Talking About Theology
The vice president, who is Catholic, took issue with Pope Leo XIV’s statement that disciples of Christ are “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
By Anton Troianovski, Reporting from Washington, Published April 14, 2026, Updated April 15, 2026
Vice President JD Vance spoke at a Turning Point USA event in Athens, Ga., on Tuesday. Credit...Alyssa Pointer/Reuters
Vice President JD Vance invoked World War II on Tuesday to defend the U.S. bombing of Iran from criticism by Pope Leo XIV, extending the Trump administration’s spat with the Catholic Church and underlining the White House’s struggle to justify an unpopular war.
Mr. Vance, who is Catholic, told a conservative audience at the University of Georgia that the pope was wrong to say that disciples of Christ are “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
“Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” Mr. Vance said after referring to the pope’s comment. “I certainly think the answer is yes.”
President Trump has appeared stung by Leo’s condemnation of the war, criticism that has highlighted the challenge the administration faces from the coalition of conservative and religious voters who helped elect Mr. Trump in 2024. The president lashed out at the pope on Sunday in a social media post that called the first American-born pontiff “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
Leo has stuck to his antiwar stance, telling reporters Monday that he had “no fear of the Trump administration.” Without mentioning Iran or Mr. Trump, the pope posted on social media on Tuesday that “God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies.”
The back-and-forth has presented a particular quandary for Mr. Vance, a convert to Catholicism who is publishing a book about his path to the faith and who has long courted the Republican religious base. Asked about the debate between Mr. Trump and the pope at an Athens, Ga., event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA, Mr. Vance admonished Leo, saying that if he was “going to opine on matters of theology,” his comments needed to be “anchored in the truth.”
“In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Mr. Vance said.
But the vice president also echoed the diplomatic approach he took on Fox News on Monday in playing down the political disagreement.
“I have a lot of respect for the pope. I like him. I admire him. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit,” Mr. Vance said. “It doesn’t bother me when he speaks on issues of the day — frankly, even when I disagree with how he’s applying a particular principle.”
Moments later, someone in the crowd interrupted, yelling, “Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” It was an apparent reference to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I agree,” Mr. Vance responded. “Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide, whoever yelled that out from the dark.”
Ben Shpigel contributed reporting from New York.
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15) I Have Watched the Catastrophe of My Country Be Reduced to Nothing
By Mohammed Ahmed, Mr. Ahmed is a Sudanese writer based in Seoul, April 15, 2026
Ben Roberts/Panos Pictures, via Redux
The word “home” held two meanings in my life. One was the physical space of my childhood in Sudan: the textured walls of my room, the scent of my mother’s cooking, the squeak of ceiling fans pushing back against the endless summer heat. The other was an unspoken, fragile assumption that the land we stood on was permanent. On April 15, 2023, the war in Sudan erased both meanings.
The news arrived in frantic, broken messages, reaching me halfway across the globe in South Korea, where I had left for college two years earlier. My family had fled and our house in Khartoum was ransacked. Photographs, books, the mundane artifacts of our daily lives were looted or scattered. An archive of my family’s story, built over several decades, suddenly became silent.
For three years, I have watched this catastrophe be reduced to a headline, then a call for action, then nothing at all. The consequences of the war, meanwhile, read like a checklist of human suffering at its peak: the largest displacement crisis in the world — nearly 13 million people, one in three Sudanese, have been forced out of their homes — amid extraordinary levels of food insecurity, countless cases of violence against women and children, and undeniable acts of genocide.
The world, distracted by other calamities, has largely looked away. But the Sudanese people are not waiting to be saved. In the shadow of the world’s condescension, and in the face of terrible cruelty, we have built our own lifeline. Far from picturesque or photogenic, it is messy and exhausting and achingly slow. But the resilience is real, proof that our spirit cannot be crushed by suffering.
Sudan’s plight is rooted not in poverty but in plunder. Under British colonial rule, Sudan’s resources — gold, cotton, gum arabic, even its people — were extracted for profit. After independence, the pattern continued: Oil was siphoned off as successive regimes enriched themselves and their foreign patrons. Today, the same dynamic plays out with gold, of which Sudan has some of the African continent’s most significant reserves. This war has taken things to a new level of brutality.
After the revolution of 2019 toppled the country’s dictator, the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces, a militia group, settled into an uneasy power-sharing arrangement. The R.S.F., whose roots are in the Janjaweed militias that carried out genocide in Darfur early this century, chafed under the control of the military. Tensions between the two forces and their leaders grew and grew. In April 2023, they broke out into open fighting.
Foreign powers stepped in, with most regional countries supporting the army. But the United Arab Emirates, which had previously cultivated ties with the R.S.F., lost no time in backing the militia. The group could deliver what the U.A.E. coveted: access to the Red Sea and Sudanese gold. Since the war began, smuggled gold has flooded Dubai’s markets, gleaming in the city’s new gold district. The U.A.E. has even reportedly had a role in recruiting Colombian mercenaries to fight alongside the R.S.F. in the conflict.
Outsiders tend to call what is happening in Sudan a “civil war.” The framing is convenient: It allows people to file Sudan away as another incomprehensible African tragedy, too complex to understand, too distant to matter. But there is nothing particularly Sudanese about Emirati drones or foreign mercenaries. What is happening in Sudan is entirely modern: a resource war fought by proxy, playing out against the world’s indifference.
Those fleeing the violence have found scant welcome. Western countries that previously streamlined visa processing for Ukrainian and Syrian refugees did not extend the same courtesy to Sudanese refugees. Several countries have imposed strict barriers on Sudanese applicants, from callous travel bans to stringent new regulations, often indefinitely delaying asylum claims and even short-term visas. In one tellingly egregious example of this spirit of exclusion, independent Sudanese filmmakers were recently denied entry to Germany to attend a Berlinale industry gathering.
We have had to help ourselves. In Sudanese Arabic, the word “nafeer” describes a communal mobilization: When a village needs food to be harvested, everyone gathers; when a home is destroyed by a Nile flood, everyone rebuilds. For the past couple of years, nafeer has gone viral in the best sense. Diaspora WhatsApp groups raise thousands of dollars overnight. Young volunteers inside Sudan coordinate emergency aid kitchens, delivering meals to families who have not eaten in days. Sudanese physicians operate in clinics under R.S.F.-controlled areas, risking death to heal the wounded.
Multinational aid agencies, bound by bureaucracy and security protocols, have largely retreated to the relative safety of Port Sudan. Yet Sudanese volunteers with little funding, and hardly any recognition, have reached places the United Nations cannot. They are not waiting for permission. They are not waiting for cease-fires. They are simply doing what the Sudanese have always done: showing up for one another. This is the story the world fails to see — our stubborn refusal to surrender to misery.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Khartoum. When the military recaptured the capital from the R.S.F. last year, hardly anyone was expected to return. But return they did. More than a million displaced Sudanese have come back to Khartoum, not because it is safe or whole, but because it is home. In February, a Sudan Airways flight landed at Khartoum International Airport for the first time in nearly three years, carrying 160 passengers. It was a small but powerful sign that the capital was coming back to life.
The war continues. The R.S.F., weathering the army’s efforts to push it back, now controls almost all of Darfur in western Sudan. Last April, the militia claimed to have established a parallel administration there, proclaiming it the “Government of Peace and Unity.” The irony is not lost on those who have witnessed the group’s brutality: The same forces that have killed thousands of civilians in ethnically targeted massacres now claim to govern in the name of peace.
With the war in Iran spilling out into the U.A.E., the calculus has shifted. The country that fanned the flames in Sudan is suddenly preoccupied with threats at its own doorstep, a reminder that those who profit from chaos rarely get to control it for long. For Sudan, this distraction may provide some respite. No matter what, the Sudanese people — tenacious, resourceful, unbreakable — are here to stay.
We remember what we lost. And we will make this rubble home again.
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