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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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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons
Scientists shared transcripts with The Times in which chatbots described how to assemble deadly pathogens and unleash them in public spaces.
By Gabriel J.X. Dance, April 29, 2026
Vanessa Saba
One evening last summer, Dr. David Relman went cold at his laptop as an A.I. chatbot told him how to plan a massacre.
A microbiologist and biosecurity expert at Stanford University, Dr. Relman had been hired by an artificial intelligence company to pressure-test its product before it was released to the public. That night in the scientist's home office, the chatbot explained how to modify an infamous pathogen in a lab so that it would resist known treatments.
Worse, the bot described in vivid detail how to release the superbug, identifying a security lapse in a large public transit system, Dr. Relman said, asking The New York Times to withhold the name of the pathogen and other specifics for fear of inspiring an attack. The bot outlined a plan to maximize casualties and minimize the chances of being caught.
Dr. Relman was so shaken he took a walk to clear his head.
“It was answering questions that I hadn’t thought to ask it, with this level of deviousness and cunning that I just found chilling,” said Dr. Relman, who has also advised the federal government on biological threats. He declined to disclose which chatbot produced the plot, citing a confidentiality agreement with its maker. The company added some safety guardrails to the product after his testing, he said, though he felt they were insufficient.
Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection.
The U.S. government has long planned for powerful adversaries unleashing deadly bacteria, viruses or toxins in the American population. Since 1970, there have been a few dozen, fairly small biological attacks around the world, such as the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans in 2001. Despite perennial warnings, a major catastrophe has not happened and remains unlikely, most experts say.
But even if the probability is low, an effective biological weapon could have an enormous impact, potentially killing millions of people. Dozens of experts told The Times that A.I. is one of several recent technological advances that have meaningfully increased that risk by expanding the pool of people who could cause harm.
Protocols once confined to scientific journals have been salted across the internet. Companies sell synthetic bits of DNA and RNA directly to consumers online. Scientists can split up sensitive aspects of their work and outsource the tasks to private labs. And all of those logistics can now be managed with the help of a chatbot.
Kevin Esvelt, a genetic engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared conversations in which OpenAI’s ChatGPT explained how to use a weather balloon to spread biological payloads over a U.S. city. In another chat, Google’s Gemini ranked pathogens by how much they could damage the cattle or pork industries. Anthropic’s Claude produced a recipe for a novel toxin adapted from a cancer drug. Other chats contained information that Dr. Esvelt — known in his field as something of a Cassandra — felt was too dangerous to share.
A scientist in the Midwest, who requested anonymity because he feared professional reprisal, asked Google’s Deep Research for a “step-by-step protocol” for making a virus that once caused a pandemic. The bot spit out 8,000 words of instructions on acquiring genetic pieces and assembling them. While the response was not entirely accurate, it could have still significantly helped someone with malicious intent, the scientist said.
The Trump administration, resolved to lead the world in A.I. innovation, has dialed back oversight of the technology’s risks. What’s more, several top biosecurity experts — including the leading scientist on the National Security Council — left the executive branch last year and have not been replaced. Federal budget requests for biodefense efforts shrunk by nearly 50 percent last year. (A White House official said that the administration was committed to keeping Americans safe and that some staff on the N.S.C. and several agencies were focused on biodefense.)
The technology’s proponents argue that it will transform medicine for the better, speeding up experiments and crunching enormous data sets to discover new cures. Some scientists believe the upside for humanity easily outweighs any incremental new risks. Chatbots, the skeptics say, present information that’s already available on the internet. And making a deadly virus requires years of hands-on expertise.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google said they were constantly improving their systems to balance potential risks and benefits. The chats shared with The Times, they said, did not provide enough detail to allow someone to cause harm. (The Times is suing OpenAI, claiming that it violated copyright when developing its models. The company has denied those claims.)
A Google spokeswoman said the company’s newest models would no longer answer the “more serious” inquiries, including the one asking for the virus protocol. A new report found that Google’s latest model was worse than other leading bots at refusing to answer high-risk biological prompts.
One of the country’s loudest voices of warning comes from the A.I. industry itself. Anthropic’s chief executive, the trained biologist Dario Amodei, wrote in January about the risks he saw in A.I. development, including autonomous weapons and threats to democracy. One risk outweighed the rest.
“Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about, because of its very large potential for destruction and the difficulty of defending against it,” he wrote.
‘Historically Catastrophic’
Dr. Esvelt has for years warned scientists, journalists and lawmakers about the dangers of synthetic biology if left unchecked. In 2023, he helped craft a stunning demonstration of how chatbots had raised the stakes.
He asked ChatGPT to help him assemble a pathogen that could cause mass death. The bot provided accurate instructions, even outlining which raw materials to buy. He put the unassembled biological pieces into test tubes and packed them in a box, which a colleague then brought to a White House meeting on biological risks.
Dr. Esvelt has continued to probe leading chatbots, sometimes posing as a crime writer seeking plausible methods of spreading viruses, or as an ethicist trying to educate others. Often he plays a version of himself: a scientist exploring the intricacies of virology.
He and other scientists worry about publicizing these risks in news articles that could draw a road map for bad actors. But they also hope that public scrutiny will encourage companies to make their products safer.
“Anything where there isn’t an expert warning them, they can’t fix,” said Dr. Esvelt, who has consulted for Anthropic and OpenAI. He said the industry should censor a wider swath of biological information and share it only with approved users.
He shared transcripts showing how the bots paired scientific rigor with strategic reasoning.
Gemini, for example, gave Dr. Esvelt a list of five pathogens that could harm the cattle industry and estimated the potential economic damage of each. One of the threats, it said, was “historically catastrophic.” In a different conversation, the bot told him how to get a biological weapon through airport security without being detected.
The Google spokeswoman said that its team of biology experts determined that the chats, made with an earlier model of Gemini, presented information that was publicly available and not harmful.
Anthropic’s Claude offered Dr. Esvelt a recipe for a new toxin that would sterilize rodents. He said that it would be relatively easy for a biologist to adapt the toxin to people.
Alexandra Sanderford, a safety leader at Anthropic, disagreed: “There is an enormous difference between a model producing plausible-sounding text and giving someone what they’d need to act.” She acknowledged, however, that A.I. posed risks, and said that Anthropic had set aggressive refusal thresholds for biological prompts, “accepting some over-refusal out of an abundance of caution.”
Dr. Esvelt asked ChatGPT about using weather balloons to drop substances from high altitudes. At first, the bot repeatedly warned about the dangers of this activity.
“I’m not going to help you model or optimize dispersal of biological material (seeds, pollen, spores),” ChatGPT said, explaining that the information would be “too easy to repurpose for harm.” It then ignored its own warning and modeled the airborne spread of pollen grains over a large Western city.
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that this example did not “meaningfully increase someone’s ability to cause real-world harm.” The company works closely with biologists and the government to add appropriate safeguards to their products, she added.
The leading models are also vulnerable to so-called jail-breaking, in which people feed the bots specific prompts known to bypass safety filters. After The Times attempted a standard jail-breaking approach, ChatGPT discussed details of the lethal virus that was the focus of the White House demonstration nearly three years ago.
The models’ safeguards are “like a flimsy wooden fence that is easy to overcome,” said Dr. Cassidy Nelson of the Center for Long-Term Resilience, a British think tank. OpenAI’s spokeswoman said that the company regularly monitored for jail-breaking vulnerabilities.
Even when A.I. models are updated with safer controls, the older versions are often readily available.
For example, Dr. Esvelt said that Anthropic adjusted Claude’s filters so it would refuse to discuss a specific agricultural threat. When The Times asked certain questions about the same microbe, the bot refused to answer — and suggested switching over to a previous version to continue the conversation. Ms. Sanderford said this was an intentional strategy because older models were less likely to provide harmful information.
Still, the older model went into detail about the “optimal conditions” needed for the pathogen to decimate thousands of acres of a crucial crop.
A Range of Risks
The Times shared the transcripts with seven experts in virology and biosecurity.
Dr. Moritz Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that some of the chatbots’ proposed strategies to spread infection were “remarkably creative and realistic.”
Dr. Jens Kuhn, a bioweapons expert who once worked at one of the most secure laboratories in the U.S., said that the chats offering logistical details — such as the weather balloon instructions — could help skilled biologists brainstorm and refine their plans of attack.
“A major problem that experienced actors have is not necessarily making the virus but turning it into a weapon,” Dr. Kuhn said.
Others cited recent research suggesting that A.I. models could be misused for biowarfare. One study, for example, asked leading chatbots difficult questions about a range of laboratory protocols. The results shocked the field: ChatGPT outperformed 94 percent of expert virologists.
Another, published in Science last year, focused on companies that sell synthetic DNA. Many use software to screen orders for genetic sequences linked to toxins and pathogens. But the study found that A.I. tools came up with thousands of variant sequences for dangerous agents that the screening software could not detect. (The researchers suggested a fix to improve the software.)
Still, A.I. users would need some real-world expertise to follow a bot’s instructions. Some research, including a study backed by A.I. companies, has found that while chatbots can help novices learn certain lab skills, the technology isn’t particularly helpful for carrying out the range of complex tasks needed to make a virus from scratch.
Viruses are complex machines, similar to the world’s finest clocks, said Dr. Gustavo Palacios, a virologist at Mount Sinai in Manhattan who once worked at a Department of Defense laboratory. “Do you think that a do-it-yourself person could disassemble a Swiss watch and then reassemble it?”
He said he was concerned, however, about A.I. in the hands of experienced actors.
A recent terrorist attempt in India suggests that malicious actors are already using the technology. In August, the Gujarat police arrested a 35-year-old physician, saying he was plotting an attack on behalf of the Islamic State. He was accused of trying to extract ricin, a lethal toxin, from castor beans. The doctor had sought advice on his preparations from A.I.-powered Google searches and ChatGPT, a lead investigator told The Times.
The OpenAI spokeswoman said that, based on public reports, the doctor sought “information that’s already accessible online.” The Google spokeswoman said the company did not have enough information to comment.
Skeptics note that restricting the biological capabilities of A.I. models could stifle lifesaving advances, such as discovering new drugs. Scientists at Google shared a Nobel Prize in 2024 for developing an A.I. model that could predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins — crucial building blocks of a cell — and create new ones.
“There is tremendous upside to the technology,” said Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford. Last year, he used an A.I. model called Evo to design a virus that destroys harmful bacteria.
The latest version of Evo, he said, can design beneficial proteins to fight cancer — but also has the potential to invent lethal toxins no one has seen before.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
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2) San Antonio Is Booming. But Poverty Hasn’t Budged.
The city’s rapid expansion brought new jobs and investment, but decades of low wages and limited access to education and housing have kept many residents from reaching the middle class.
By Edgar Sandoval, Photographs and Video by Tierney L. Cross, Reporting from San Antonio, April 29, 2026
Kayla Miranda with her son, De’Andre, at their home in the Westside neighborhood of San Antonio.
Olivia Cruz hopped carefully off a bus in an upscale San Antonio enclave framed by oak-lined streets.
On a recent day in April, Ms. Cruz brushed off a leg injury with the help of a new cane and tried to focus on the $120 payday needed to cover the rising cost of raising two grandchildren.
“You go to the grocery store to buy meat or vegetables, and the bill comes up to more than $100,” said Ms. Cruz, 68, as she limped toward her client’s home to clean. “I’ve been poor for as long as I can remember, but it feels like it is harder to be poor these days.”
Ms. Cruz’s story underscores what economists describe as the defining tension of this moment: an economy that appears strong by some measures but has failed to deliver a sustained sense of progress. San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country in part because of its relative affordability compared with other major Texas cities. It has drawn new residents from across the state and country but unlike Austin or Dallas, the city has struggled to generate large numbers of high-paying jobs, with much of its economy anchored in lower-wage service work. The rising cost of securing a middle-class life has made opportunity feel more distant, feeding a growing belief that the economy is not working for many in the nation’s seventh-largest city.
San Antonio ranks as the third poorest among the top 25 largest U.S. metro areas, behind only Houston and Detroit, according to the latest U.S. census. In 1980, 20 percent of residents lived below the poverty rate. Today it hovers around 17 percent, higher than the state or national averages, said Monica Cruz, a special research associate with the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
San Antonio’s economic woes are tied to longstanding societal setbacks that have gone unresolved by past administrations, critics say. Those setbacks include a reliance on low-wage workers; low rates of higher education; and limited access to homeownership, one of the most common ways to amass generational wealth.
Rogelio Sáenz, a professor of sociology and demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said the region’s poor neighborhoods had struggled to recover from redlining, a Depression-era practice in which federal housing policies and lenders labeled Black and brown neighborhoods as too risky for investments.
The practice was formalized through color-coded maps that shaped where banks issued loans, creating pockets of deep poverty and racial and economic segregation in the process, he said.
“If you don’t have the financial means to be able to purchase your home, you never build that wealth up from owning a home, and then you don’t pass that on to your children,” Mr. Sáenz said. “You see the unequal funding of education. You continue to see the inequality taking place.”
In 1968, a CBS documentary titled “Hunger in America” shocked the nation through its depictions of extreme poverty in four corners of the nation, including the west side of San Antonio, which is known today for its taquerias, small stores known as tienditas, and murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe and folklore singers who reflect the neighborhood’s Mexican American history.
Nearly six decades later, Kayla Miranda, 45, a housing activist and a mother of four children, two of whom are autistic, said the community remained stuck in a persistent pattern of poverty because of a legacy of discriminatory policies that had deprived low-income neighborhoods of investments.
“The money goes to millionaires and billionaires instead of giving money to extremely low income,” Ms. Miranda said. “A lot of people here are a car breakdown or health emergency away from becoming homeless.”
Ms. Miranda said she became stuck in this cycle after a death in the family and the temporary deportation of her children’s father forced her home into foreclosure. She became homeless for a year and a half. She has since rebounded and now lives in public housing where she cares for her two disabled sons full-time.
“I can’t hold a normal job because I have to take care of my sons,” she said. “There is this horrible stigma that people have that you are poor because you want to be.”
She said she hoped the city would address the longstanding failures that had left families like hers struggling. “The mayor and the council inherited this problem,” she said. “It was passed down to them.”
Former mayors of San Antonio like Julián Castro, who served from 2009 to 2014, and Ron Nirenberg, who left office last year after four two-year terms, said they had enacted policies that were aimed at tackling systemic poverty, knowing they would not see all of the outcomes during their tenures.
Mr. Castro championed a prekindergarten education program, tax breaks to incentivize the construction of new homes and jobs in renewable energies.
“There has been significant progress in the last couple of decades in diversifying the local economy, increasing the number of good-paying jobs,” Mr. Castro said. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Ms. Miranda pointing to her neighborhood on a map.
Mr. Nirenberg, who is running for county judge in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, said he was playing the long game. While in office, he worked to support economic initiatives for early and college education, access to health care and affordable housing.
If he were elected as county judge, a role similar to the mayor’s at the county level, Mr. Nirenberg said he planned to work with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who was sworn in less than a year ago, to see his old policies through.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Jones said she was working to expand affordable housing away from decaying public housing and attract large companies in the artificial intelligence space, biotechnology and other industries to San Antonio. She recently led a delegation to Taiwan to urge businesses to invest in San Antonio.
“What I have found in speaking with companies is, they know Austin, they know Houston, they know Dallas, but they don’t know San Antonio as well,” she said. “I think we have to be much more aggressive in our economic development outreach. If they don’t know about us, then we’ll go there and share our story.”
One person familiar with San Antonio’s story was Ricardo Martinez, 46, a real estate agent from Austin who moved to the city during the pandemic in search of a home for him and his husband.
“We couldn’t find anything within our price range in Austin that wasn’t another condo,” Mr. Martinez said.
They couple found a 2,000-square-foot home for about $300,000.
“In Austin, that would have gotten us a closet,” he said. “San Antonio is a lot more affordable.”
The affordability that has attracted newcomers has not eased concerns about whether the city’s growth will translate into meaningful gains for its poorest residents.
Letty Sanchez, a prominent community activist and chair of the Historic Westside Residents Association, said she was disappointed to see some of the city’s new ventures move downtown and to other wealthier neighborhoods. Even though voters narrowly approved a proposition for an expansive sports and entertainment area known as Project Marvel during the March primaries, Ms. Sanchez said most of the jobs generated from the project were likely to be in concessions, restaurants and retail.
“It doesn’t help to lift people out of poverty,” Ms. Sanchez said. “It is not a living wage.”
Ms. Cruz, the grandmother who cleans homes, said she was unsure if she would see a prosperous San Antonio in her lifetime.
“I think we have to be much more aggressive in our economic development outreach," Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said.
On that day in April, she knocked on the door of the house she was cleaning and was greeted with concern by her employer of many years, someone she considers part of the family, who noticed her cane and her limping.
“Are you OK?” the homeowner asked. “Are you able to work today?”
Ms. Cruz dismissed her concerns with a smile and quickly picked up a rag to start wiping a dresser by the door.
“I can’t afford not to work, even if my foot hurts,” Mr. Cruz said moments later. She had hurt herself on a rock while walking a dog.
“The bills don’t care if you are in pain,” she added with a bittersweet chuckle.
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3) Stalled Taxis, Postponed Weddings: War in Iran Hits African Families
Despite the fragile cease-fire in the Middle East, many Africans say they are bracing for tougher times ahead and making difficult decisions about the future.
By John Eligon, Golden Matonga and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, John Eligon reported from Johannesburg, Golden Matonga from Lilongwe, Malawi and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from Nairobi, April 30, 2026
A girl using a solar-powered light to study during electricity rationing in Juba, South Sudan, last month. Jok Solomun/Reuters
As the globe convulses over the economic fallout from the war in Iran, many African nations say the ripple effects of the conflict are exacerbating longstanding challenges at home, like the lack of manufacturing on the continent and its heavy reliance on imports and foreign investment.
The standoff over the Strait of Hormuz has sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Global shipping has been pushed to a breaking point, limiting access to medicine, fertilizer and other major commodities. President Trump’s tariffs and the withdrawal of U.S. foreign assistance had already set many African economies back.
Analysts say Africa is particularly vulnerable to such external shocks because of its longstanding dependence on goods produced elsewhere. “We as a continent need to focus on internal resilience,” said Abi Mustapha-Maduakor, the chief executive of the Africa Private Capital Association.
Despite the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran, many Africans say they are bracing for tougher times ahead. They are making difficult calculations about how much to feed their families, whether to plant crops, how to pay for transportation and how to manage shortages.
The unwed taxi driver
Francis Kazembe, a taxi driver in the Malawian capital of Lilongwe, made the difficult decision to postpone his wedding in May, he said. The money to pay for it just isn’t there.
Mr. Kazembe, 28, said his typical daily earnings of 50,000 Malawian kwacha (about $30) have plummeted. Because of the fuel shortages, he has to spend hours, or sometimes days, waiting for fuel, so he can’t drive his taxi as much. Some days, he does not earn the 30,000 kwacha he is required to pay the taxi owner for the use of the vehicle, he said.
When he falls short of that amount, he has to give whatever he earns to the boss and goes home with nothing. And the lines at gas stations are so long, he said, that he is unable to drive his taxi on some days.
“In the past four days, I have twice slept at the filing station,” he said in an interview in April.
Malawi’s government announced in April that it had completely run out of fuel reserves and that it was negotiating with international lenders for emergency funding. There are concerns that rising fertilizer and seed costs could ruin harvests for small-time farmers and push many people in the country toward malnutrition.
“Year in and year out, there’s some problem,” said Pamela Kuwali, the Malawi country director for Care International, a development and humanitarian organization. “When global shocks hit, they don’t land on spreadsheets, they land in kitchens.”
Pounding corn with a mortar and pestle
The war is also choking a vital economic lifeline for African families: remittances from relatives working in the Persian Gulf states.
Many of the Africans working there have had their employment interrupted, analysts said. More than 200 million Africans rely on financial support from people working abroad, according to the United Nations. In 2023, Africa received $100 billion in remittances, or nearly 6 percent of the continent’s gross domestic product, according to the United Nations.
Hampered by their own budget constraints and impoverished populations, many African governments are struggling to find a way forward. The governments of the West African nations of Senegal and Gambia announced restrictions on foreign travel for government officials to save costs. The Ghanaian government announced the removal of some fuel taxes and charges to offset increasing gas prices.
Diesel shortages in Zambia in March forced hammer mills that grind corn into flour to shutdown in the Mafumba ward in the country’s southeast.
That forced women, who bear most of the labor burden in the area, to resort to the old-school, backbreaking method of manually pounding the corn with a mortar and pestle. That cut into the time the women had for their various other responsibilities like farming and child care, said Collins Mweemba, a resident of the area.
The economic challenges are also spurring political tensions that some analysts fear could lead to further instability.
Fuel supplies are so limited in Ethiopia, the second-most populous country on the continent, that the price of black-market diesel has increased by up to tenfold. That in turn has affected not just the price of goods, but also the amount of food getting to towns and cities outside the capital, Addis Ababa.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has been increasingly outspoken in recent months about the need for his country to have its own port, leading to fears of a renewed conflict involving the neighboring coastal country of Eritrea. The fuel price shock has served to intensify Ethiopia’s demands for port access.
A mother with mouths to feed
Before the war, many African households spent more than half of their income on food and energy, and more than 80 percent in extreme cases, according to an article by Tobias Heidland and Ann-Marie Verhoeven published by Megatrends Africa, a research organization.
“These regions are disproportionately affected by the economic consequences compared to the rest of the world,” they wrote.
Zainab Usman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy in Washington, said data suggested that Africa was not uniquely affected by the shocks of the war in Iran, but the war has added urgency to long-overdue conversations on domestic and regional energy security in Africa.
“Dependence on imports of essential commodities from regions of the world that might be unstable, that might be vulnerable to volatility is just not sustainable anymore,” she said.
Nurses working at public health facilities in Zimbabwe have been using the price increases linked to the war to highlight why they deserve raises they have long demanded.
Mitchel Londiwe, a nurse at Mpilo Central Hospital in the western city of Bulawayo, said she had been told that the cost of the driver who takes her two children to school will double to $160 a month when schools reopen from break in May.
Ms. Londiwe is 36 and earns $540 per month. She said she was considering sending her children to live with her mother in a rural area, where they would walk about five miles to school every day, to save on transportation costs.
The rising cost of food has also led them to change their nutrition habits, she said. They now usually eat bread for breakfast, corn meal with vegetables for dinner and no longer have meat because she cannot afford it, she said.
“Soon, we will look malnourished,” Ms. Londiwe said. “I’m afraid.”
Reporting was contributed by Jeffrey Moyo in Harare, Zimbabwe, Rabecca Lungu in Lusaka, Zambia and Saikou Jammeh and Ruth Maclean in Dakar, Senegal.
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4) Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer
After months of upheaval, many are attempting to get on with their lives while quietly grappling with grief, economic stress and a loss of hope.
By Yeganeh Torbati, April 30, 2026
An emotional goodbye on Iran’s border with Turkey before an Iranian family headed to Australia for work, not knowing when they would reunite with loved ones at home. Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
On the surface, Iranian society appears to be functioning normally, at least for a country that weeks ago was under heavy bombardment.
Hip young people gather outside street cafes in Tehran, smoking and chatting with friends. Tickets to a high-profile rock concert in the city sold out in minutes. And people still travel outside Iran for leisure and for work.
That is all a veneer, many Iranians say, masking the painful and precarious conditions that they are living with. Four months of traumatic, world-shaking events — a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests followed by a devastating war — have dashed hopes for the future, and left large parts of society in grief, feeling powerless.
“People are living their lives,” said Sara, an Iranian woman in her 40s living in Turkey, who had traveled to Tehran in the winter and returned to Turkey in late April. But, she said, the apparent calm was misleading: “Everyone’s morale is terrible.”
Like most of the two dozen or so Iranians interviewed for this article, Sara declined to be fully named, fearing reprisals from the government. Others declined to be identified at all.
Sara was in Iran for some of the worst weeks of the war, and said that Iranians outside the country were more anxious about what was happening inside than those actually living there, who may be more resigned. “Everyone is hopeless, or some have hopes in something that is illusory,” she said.
For those opposed to the country’s Islamic authoritarian government, mass protests in January brought thrilling hopes of political change — only for that to curdle into grief, rage and shock as security forces killed thousands of demonstrators.
Since then, Iranians of all political persuasions have been affected by the destruction and death wrought by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Basic food items are increasingly difficult for even the middle classes to afford, and a continuing government-imposed internet shutdown has largely isolated the country from the outside world. Until very recently, Iranian airspace was closed to civilian flights.
And yet, people are also pursuing their passions and careers despite immense obstacles.
That was apparent from interviews at a land border crossing and train station in eastern Turkey in late April. A theater troupe came by bus, bound for Europe to rehearse a new play. A young woman with dyed magenta hair crossed the border to see a favorite band in Istanbul. And a man in his 30s came to Turkey to complete a critical step on the path to pursuing his education in Italy.
“I don’t know why Iranians are like this, but no matter what happens, even if there are high prices, still life goes on,” said Melika, 28, who was visiting Turkey with a friend and sister in late April for an exam. The three had just disembarked from a 23-hour train from Tehran to Van, in eastern Turkey, and they planned to continue on to Istanbul. “Iranians are very flexible — they adapt themselves,” she added.
During the war, she said, restaurants were packed, even as much of the economy came to a standstill. She speculated that people were choosing to enjoy the money they had, rather than bothering to save it for a car, house or other life goals.
“Now those things are out of reach for a large portion of society,” Melika said. “So they say, ‘Why should we be hard on ourselves? Let’s at least have a nice meal.’”
By contrast, Shahrzad, 57, who was boarding a train in Van to return to Iran, said she was choosing to save her money and cutting spending on unnecessary items, even though she considered herself well-off.
Shahrzad said that, during the war, bombs seemed to fall constantly — 20 to 30 a day, at all hours of the day and night. Still, she was sanguine: “We got used to it,” she said, as she chatted and joked with a man and woman waiting in line with her.
Her generation, which experienced the instabilities of the 1979 revolution and lived through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, had learned over the decades to endure upheaval, she said.
Iran’s teenagers and 20-somethings, she said, had a different approach, with far less patience for the difficulties they were experiencing, and most were opposed to the government.
“Gen Z, nobody can handle them,” she said. “We are more peace-seeking. The young people are more radical.”
Several Iranians at the border said they felt like they were at the mercy of world powers and their own government, with no agency to determine events in their own lives.
One man, a day trader who had come to Turkey to use the internet for work before returning to Iran said that people seemed to have stagnated, following the news and waiting to see what happened. He himself had little hope that things in the country would change for the better.
“I think it’s all a game,” said Sara, the woman in her 40s, when asked about the cease-fire between the United States and Iran. “We’re just being played with.”
Kiana Hayeri contributed reporting.
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5) Some Black Southerners Say Voting Rights Ruling ‘Missed the Mark’
Veterans of the civil rights movement and others said the Supreme Court decision felt like a bleak end to decades of gains in Black representation in the region.
By Audra D. S. Burch and Emily Cochrane, April 30, 2026
Audra D.S. Burch reported from Hollywood, Fla., and Emily Cochrane from Nashville.
A commemoration of the 1965 voting rights march known as Bloody Sunday for the violence inflicted upon activists. “I just never in my wildest imagination ever dreamed that we would be, in 2026, where we are now, based on what happened in 1965,” said Dr. Leslie B. McLemore, 85. Rita Harper for The New York Times
Dr. Leslie B. McLemore remembers the fear that simmered in the air as he went door to door as a young college student working to register Black voters in rural Mississippi in the early 1960s. The threats. The gun brandished in his face by a patrol officer along a highway.
It made the celebration even more joyful as he joined other students crowding around a television when the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. On Wednesday, he grappled with different emotions after the Supreme Court dealt it its latest blow.
“I just never in my wildest imagination ever dreamed that we would be, in 2026, where we are now, based on what happened in 1965,” said Dr. McLemore, 85, one of the few surviving veterans of the civil rights movement. “It’s a historic, sad day.”
Given the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and other rulings that had chipped away at the Voting Rights Act over the years, Wednesday’s decision did not entirely surprise voting rights groups or Black leaders across the South, where the landmark law has led states to create several majority-Black voting districts.
But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in writing for the majority, took some aback with his assertion that the nation had undergone “vast social change” since the law’s passage. He pointed in part to increased voter registration and turnout by minorities.
“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” he wrote.
The ruling was cheered by conservatives across the country, many of whom had objected to the law’s focus on race. The path forward, said Amir Hassan, a Black Republican running for Congress in Michigan, is for people to align themselves ideologically, rather than by “who has melanin and who doesn’t have melanin.”
“It’s upsetting, the fact that people think I want the same thing as another person just because of our skin tone,” said Mr. Hassan, who is running in a district where most voters are white.
Black Americans, especially in the South, have historically backed Democrats. So if the ruling leads G.O.P.-led state legislatures to eliminate majority-minority congressional districts, dividing those voters among Republican-safe districts, the political ripples will be significant.
For some Black Southerners, the Supreme Court’s reasoning amounted to a debatable assessment of racial progress.
“He can write those words,” said Dr. McLemore, who pledged to keep talking about the struggles that civil rights veterans had endured to secure passage of the Voting Rights Act. “But he has no idea and no appreciation for what Black people and what people of color have gone through in this country.”
The gains in Black representation across the country since the act passed have been particularly meaningful in the South.
As recently as 2024, Alabama and Louisiana each sent two Black representatives to Congress — the result of litigation over new congressional maps. At least one of those seats — in Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District — is now in jeopardy, given that a majority of the Supreme Court found the new map to be an illegal racial gerrymander.
“I’m somewhat depressed about the ruling. No way is it better,” said Delores Suel, 77, who is Black and owns a child-care center in Jackson, Miss., part of the state’s lone majority-Black district. “The Supreme Court missed the mark.”
Elsewhere in Jackson, Tyra Dean, 55, who is Black and owns a taxi company, said that “discrimination still exists.”
“I feel what they are doing now will lead to more discrimination,” she continued.
The suggestion that the standing of Black voters in the South had improved enough to warrant changing the framework courts use to assess compliance with the Voting Rights Act rankled some Black elected Democrats.
“I want to be crystal clear — that is not the experience that most people of color have in the South, whether we’re talking about politics, education, housing, access to health care or the professional world,” said Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator in Tennessee and the chamber’s minority leader.
For some national civil rights leaders who watched what they describe as the rise and fall of the Voting Rights Act over time, Wednesday’s decision felt like an abrupt end to decades of political progress.
“The majority opinion is illogical when racially polarized voting in the South is real; when the racial wealth gap, the educational achievement gap and health outcome gaps are real; when discrimination claims in employment are still rampant,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
Press Robinson, an activist in Baton Rouge, La., who was involved in challenging past congressional maps, said he feared the ruling could have ramifications not just for the makeup of Congress, but for all levels of government.
“Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all,” he told reporters in a news conference on Wednesday.
Mr. Robinson, who grew up in South Carolina during segregation, predicted that the Republicans who control the government in Louisiana — and in nearly every other Southern state — would move aggressively to reshape the political landscape from the local level on up, wiping out Black representation.
“They are determined to see to it that we don’t have a voice at all,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Michelle Baruchman, Jimmie E. Gates, Clyde McGrady, Bryant K. Oden and Rick Rojas.
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6) Transgender Idaho Residents Sue After State Criminalizes Use of Bathrooms
The lawsuit seeks to block a state bathroom law that is the nation’s most restrictive, with penalties that could include a five-year prison sentence.
By Amy Harmon, April 30, 2026
The law passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature last month, largely along party lines. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Six transgender Idaho residents asked a federal judge on Thursday to strike down a new state law that makes it a crime for people to use the bathrooms in public buildings and private businesses that do not match their sex at birth.
Violating the law would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony, carrying up to a five-year prison sentence. Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal filed the suit in federal court in Boise, where several of the plaintiffs live. The plaintiffs are also represented by attorneys at Munger, Tolles & Olson and Alturas Law Group.
After learning that Idaho lawmakers had approved the legislation last month, Diego Fable, 37, a transgender Boise resident, asked his employer if he could keep his job should he move to Colorado. Mr. Fable, who has a full beard and has been using bathrooms designated for men since he transitioned six years ago, said the law made everyday life outside his own home seem impossible.
“Do I comply and use the women’s restroom and risk drama?” Mr. Fable said. “Do I drive all the way home” to a toilet, he asked, “and then come back?”
“How do I navigate going skiing or going birding out in the park?” he continued. “How do I navigate playing Dungeons and Dragons for six hours? The safest route feels really isolating, which is to just stay home.’’
Before the passage of the new law, 21 states, including Idaho, already restricted transgender people from accessing bathrooms that align with their gender identity in public schools and, in many cases, government-owned buildings and public places like parks or airports, according to a database maintained by the Movement Advancement Project, a research organization that tracks state-level legislation on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
Idaho’s new law is seen as the most restrictive in the nation. In addition to publicly-owned properties, it applies to privately-owned settings such as restaurants, retail stores, business offices, or game stores that host Dungeons and Dragons tournaments. Unlike other state laws that apply only to multi-user restrooms, Idaho’s law covers even single-user bathrooms designated for male or female occupants. Idaho is also the only state where violations could lead to a felony charge.
The law passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature largely along party lines. Its supporters said the ban was necessary to protect the privacy, safety and dignity of women and girls, as well as for consistency in the way the state defines who falls into the categories “men” and “women.”
“This bill protects Idaho’s cultural decency,” said Senator Josh Kohl, a Republican from Twin Falls.
But in an interview, plaintiffs in the suit spoke of the complexity of compliance. Zoey Wagner, 30, a transgender woman who uses female-designated bathrooms, said she feared harassment should she use one designated for men. Amelia Milette, 50, who is transgender and was born and raised in Idaho, said her job requires her to visit a range of offices on different days. The new law would require her to plan a route somehow that would include gender-neutral bathrooms. Mr. Fable’s employer told him that to work out of state he would need to be reclassified as a contractor, which will affect his health insurance and other employee benefits.
In the complaint, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the law fails the constitutional requirement that the state have a rational basis to enact it. They cite the testimony of the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police that existing Idaho laws, such as criminal trespass statutes, already addresse inappropriate or disruptive behavior in restrooms.
“Transgender people are being targeted in the state of Idaho,’’ said Barbara Schwabauer, senior staff attorney for the A.C.L.U.’s L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V. Rights Project. “That is the only explanation for a law that has this vast of a penalty and sweeps this broadly.’’
The plaintiffs claim that the law violates their guarantee of equal protection and their due process right to avoid disclosing private information. Because of its penalties, they argue, the law needs to clear a high bar for clarity, and that the language that allows access to single-user facilities if an individual is in “dire need” or if theyare the only ones “reasonably available” render the law unconstitutionally vague.
The law is set to go into effect on July 1. The plaintiffs have requested a preliminary injunction to stop the state from enforcing it while the case is being decided. They are not challenging the portion of the law that covers locker rooms and showers. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Idaho could bar transgender students from using locker rooms and changing areas that aligned with their gender identity, citing the state’s interest in not exposing students to “the unclothed bodies of students of the opposite sex.”
But the appeals court has not ruled on the challenge to the bathroom portion of that law. Challenges to laws regulating the use of bathrooms by transgender people in Kansas, South Carolina and Oklahoma are also making their way through the courts.
Seamus Hughes and Anna Griffin contributed reporting.
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7) Israel Intercepts Aid Flotilla Heading to Breach Naval Blockade of Gaza
Activists said the Israeli military boarded and disabled boats carrying humanitarian assistance to the territory in international waters near Greece.
By Isabel Kershner, Lynsey Chutel and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, April 30, 2026
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Lynsey Chutel from London and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
Boats carrying activists and humanitarian aid bound for Gaza, as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, in Barcelona, Spain, this month. Joan Mateu Parra/Associated Press
The Israeli military intercepted a flotilla of boats challenging the country’s naval blockade of Gaza in international waters near Greece, Israeli officials and the activist group behind the mission said on Thursday.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, the protest group in charge of the boats, has repeatedly tried to breach Israel’s decades-old naval blockade of Gaza and deliver aid.
The group stepped up its activity after Israel imposed severe restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza following a deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, which ignited a devastating two-year war in the coastal enclave.
On Thursday, the Israeli navy boarded multiple boats in the flotilla of more than 80 vessels, which was sailing from Barcelona to Gaza, the group said in a statement.
“After smashing engines and destroying navigation arrays, the military retreated intentionally leaving hundreds of civilians stranded on powerless, broken vessels directly in the path of a massive approaching storm,” it said on social media.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to the activists’ claims that their boats had been disabled.
The group also blamed the Israeli military for jamming communications on multiple vessels, “severing their ability to coordinate or signal for help.”
The Israeli foreign ministry described the flotilla as “a PR stunt” and “a provocation without humanitarian aid” in a statement on social media. It referred to the mission mockingly as “the condom flotilla,” and said it found contraceptives and drugs aboard at least one of the vessels.
The group said it was delivering “large-scale humanitarian aid, including food, baby formula, school supplies, and medicine” and has not addressed the Israeli claim regarding contraceptives and drugs. The group also said it wanted to create a “civilian-operated maritime route to Gaza to ensure unimpeded access to food, medicine, and essential supplies,” and to assert Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza’s waters.
In the past, the Israeli authorities have said that flotillas intercepted on their way to Gaza were found to be carrying only limited amounts of aid.
The Israeli foreign ministry said on Thursday that about 175 activists from more than 20 boats had been detained at sea and were being brought to Israel.
The ministry also released a video that showed people it said were activists playing games and doing cartwheels on the deck of a ship, with the caption: “The activists enjoying themselves aboard Israeli vessels.”
At least 20 Turkish nationals were among those detained, according to news reports.The Turkish government said Israel had violated “humanitarian principles and international law.”
“This act of aggression further represents a breach of the principle of freedom of navigation on the high seas,” the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement.
The Israeli foreign ministry said Israel was “committed to the freedom of navigation.”
“Due to the large numbers of vessels participating in the flotilla and the risk of escalation, and the need to prevent the breach of a lawful blockade, an early action was required in accordance with international law,” it said in a statement. “The operation was carried out in international waters peacefully and without any casualties,” it added.
A fragile cease-fire took effect in Gaza in October. The Israeli military controls about half of the territory and Hamas controls the rest of the enclave, including the area along the coast. Hamas has said it is prepared to relinquish the administration of the territory but has resisted Israeli calls to give up its weapons, stalling international plans for reconstruction.
Israeli restrictions on aid have eased over the past six months. In a report this month, the United Nations office that coordinates humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank said that although major impediments persist, aid entry into Gaza had “surged considerably” between April 14 and 20, compared with the previous week. It partly attributed the increase to the reopening of an additional crossing for goods to enter along Gaza’s northern boundary with Israel.
Israel imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza in January 2009 during a military offensive against Hamas, the Islamic militant group that seized control of Gaza in 2007 after ousting the Western-backed Palestinian Authority a year after winning legislative elections.
Israel has justified the blockade on security grounds, saying it is needed to prevent weapons from being smuggled into Gaza and militants from moving freely.
An Israeli government commission that examined a deadly raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza in 2010 argued that Israel had acted in accordance with international law when its military enforced the naval blockade by intercepting ships in international waters.
The United Nations described Israel’s naval blockade in a 2011 report as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea. Other U.N. reports, however, have criticized the restrictions as a form of collective punishment.
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8) Since Congress Let Obamacare Subsidies Expire, Millions Are Dropping Coverage
Americans can’t afford the higher health insurance premiums that resulted from Congress’s refusal to extend federal tax credits.
By Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, May 1, 2026
The reporters have been covering the Obamacare markets for more than a decade.
Although the government has not yet reported enrollment numbers, insurers and analysts are estimating overall declines of about 20 percent compared with last year. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Millions of Americans appear to be dropping Obamacare coverage in the months since Congress failed to extend the generous subsidies that had become a defining feature of the Affordable Care Act.
Initial sign-ups had already fallen by about 1.2 million people. But insurance companies, state officials and industry analysts are reporting that many more have lost Obamacare coverage now that people are facing long-term higher costs. The federal government has yet to report current enrollment data.
Many insurers and analysts are estimating overall declines of about 20 percent, dropping to around 19 million from the 24 million who were covered under the A.C.A. last year. Other indications suggest there could be even larger potential losses by the end of the year, a deep retrenchment for Obamacare coverage and a reversal of significant gains in the last several years.
The rising cost of health care has shown up as a top concern among Americans in several public opinion polls. Premiums are rising for Americans who get insurance through work, too, as health care costs have been increasing nationwide. Out-of-pocket costs are growing too, as plans with high deductibles have become popular.
Though health care has faded somewhat as a priority for the Republican-controlled Congress since lawmakers hit a stalemate over the subsidies at the end of 2025, it is likely to figure prominently in the midterm elections this year.
One analysis, by Wakely Consulting Group, a firm with access to detailed insurance industry data, estimates that coverage in the marketplaces will drop by as much as 26 percent this year compared with last year’s average enrollment.
In Georgia, where coverage had nearly tripled since Congress first authorized the extra financial help in 2021, state data show enrollment has fallen by more than a third, according to information obtained by the news organizations The Current GA and The Georgia Recorder.
The Georgia state insurance department did not respond to a request for comment.
Some Blue Cross plans lost 20 to 30 percent of customers this year. And many people are switching to plans with lower premiums but much higher out-of-pocket costs, said David Merritt, a spokesman for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. “We are waiting on official data like everyone else,” he said.
The insurers and state officials said early retirees with middle-class incomes, who faced the largest increases in premiums, appeared to be among the hardest hit. In some markets, the cost of insurance for this group rose by $1,000 a month or more.
In many states, around 10 percent of people who are still insured have chosen less generous coverage by picking so-called bronze plans, which carry deductibles as high as $10,600 a year.
The Trump administration has downplayed the losses. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the marketplaces, have characterized the current enrollment as a success. “The marketplace remains strong and resilient, continuing to provide millions of Americans with access to high-quality, affordable health care coverage options,” said Chris Krepich, the agency’s director of communications.
In testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nation’s health secretary, attributed the initial reductions to an administration crackdown on fraud.
Mr. Kennedy also emphasized the low cost of much of the insurance for most people who are buying it. He said 87 percent of people enrolled in Obamacare in January owed less than $96 a month, numbers contained in a federal report in March.
But a swath of Americans are paying much more. The escalating cost of insurance — and the expected coverage losses — was a major Democratic theme this winter, and Democratic lawmakers’ effort to extend the financing was a central demand during the record 43-day government shutdown.
Many consumers are still eligible for financial help to buy Obamacare. But additional money Congress authorized in 2021, which expired this year, lowered the costs for nearly all who bought their own insurance. The subsidies made insurance free for the lowest-income customers, and provided new assistance to those who earned more than around $63,000 a year.
The maps below show how costs of a typical plan have changed for people who now earn just too much to qualify for subsidies. The increase depends on customers’ age and where they live. The first map illustrates age 27 instead of a round number like 20 because many younger adults get coverage through their parents until age 26.
When Joyce Rena Bumbray-Graves, a 63-year-old home care worker from Woodbridge, Va., saw premiums for her husband and herself more than double, from $544 a month to over $1,300, she had to give up her insurance. Ms. Bumbray-Graves, a member of the Service Employees International Union, recently appeared before Congress to talk about her experience.
Her husband switched to coverage through his job, but adding her was too expensive. She says that she is relatively healthy, although she is struggling to pay for prescriptions and doctors’ visits. “I’m just hoping I don’t get sick or anything,” she said in an interview.
Megan Burkett, 49, a nurse practitioner in Arroyo Grande, Calif., dropped coverage for herself, her husband and her son in the face of escalating costs. She is working three part-time jobs, none of which offer health insurance. Her husband, a contractor, is self-employed and also does not have coverage from work. When she went to sign up for A.C.A. coverage for this year, she found the policy for her family would cost roughly $2,500 a month, in line with her mortgage payment. That contrasts with the $307 a month she paid when she qualified for a federal subsidy last year.
“On paper, I have a really good job and salary,” Ms. Burkett said. “I can’t afford a second mortgage every month.”
Jessica Altman, who runs the Covered California marketplace, said she had seen real declines in enrollment among customers with incomes like Ms. Burkett’s. The state is offering extra subsidies to help poorer residents, but not this higher income group.
“I’m not surprised,” she said, about the numbers. “It doesn’t make it any less sad to see.”
Estimates provided earlier this year about enrollment declines were incomplete. Customers who were automatically renewed into insurance are given a 90-day grace period before they lose coverage for failing to pay their premiums. Now that those 90 days have run out in most states, another large group of Americans who have lost coverage is becoming evident.
The federal government has not reported any complete data on nationwide enrollment since that grace period ended. In a normal year, the next such report would be published in July. But reports from states that run their own marketplaces are already showing larger declines. Even among those states, the impact of the lost funding has been uneven.
Some states have reported increased coverage, but those outliers are places where state programs are making up the lost federal financing or where unemployment has increased and more people need to buy their own coverage. New Mexico, which passed legislation to pay extra insurance subsidies to replace the lost federal payments, has been a particular bright spot for enrollment. Marketplace coverage has also increased in Washington, D.C., where around 220,000 federal workers lost their jobs last year.
Insurers have begun reporting enrollment declines in their quarterly earnings reports. Centene, which offers marketplace coverage in 29 states, told investors this week that it had two million fewer customers at the end of March than it did a year ago, a drop of more than a third. Other insurers, including UnitedHealth, also reported significant drops. Some of those declines could come from customers switching carriers. Cigna, a smaller player, announced on Thursday that it would leave the market altogether next year.
A recent survey by KFF, the health research firm, found that 22 percent of people who had marketplace coverage last year had found another source of health insurance. Nine percent had become uninsured.
Coverage could continue to erode throughout the year. Some people who are paying premiums now may stop if they encounter financial difficulties. Others who might qualify for coverage midyear, by losing a job or getting married, for example, may decide against it. Movement in and out of the marketplaces happens every year, but some analysts worry there may be more attrition than usual with the higher prices.
“I think we haven’t seen the full impact of all of these changes,” said Hemi Tewarson, the executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, which recently convened a meeting of state marketplace leaders.
Alicia Parlapiano contributed reporting.
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9) As Israel Entrenches, Frustration With Hezbollah Turns to Support
With the cease-fire fraying and Israel demolishing villages in the south, many Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon are putting aside their annoyance with the group and turning to it for protection.
By Christina Goldbaum, Visuals by David Guttenfelder, May 1, 2026
Christina Goldbaum and David Guttenfelder have traveled extensively in southern Lebanon to record the effects of the latest war on civilians.
Zeinab Baz balanced herself as she stumbled through the wires and debris littering the courtyard of her home in the village of Jouaiyya. “The destruction this time is equal to three years of war,” she said.
From their hilltop village in southern Lebanon, gravediggers watched black smoke curl up from the opposing ridgeline. Just a mile away, Israeli forces were blowing up buildings on Lebanese land, under a newly planted Israeli flag.
Days into Lebanon’s fragile cease-fire, its collapse already seemed inevitable. Israeli forces were entrenching their positions in the occupied south while Hezbollah members prepared for the next round of fighting in areas still under their control. In the cemetery in their village of Majdal Zoun, the men were digging 20 graves — nine for Hezbollah fighters already killed, the rest for those expected to die in the battles ahead.
“Just listen to the sky above us,” said one of the men, Muhammad Ali, 50, as the thrum of an Israeli drone buzzed overhead. “This war is not over.”
When the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel was struck on April 16, an uneasy calm settled over southern Lebanon, a region that has been battered in the latest war.
Thousands of people displaced from the south flooded the highways to return home. But unlike the last wars between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and 2024, this was no jubilant homecoming or celebration of a self-proclaimed victory for Hezbollah. The pause offered people only a moment to take stock of the destruction and search for summer clothes they had left behind.
With the booms of Israeli demolitions echoing across the hillsides, the highway was soon again filled with cars — this time driving north.
Now, the initial pause in fighting has given way to a simmering conflict in southern Lebanon, leaving the country at the risk of all-out war once more.
My colleagues and I traveled across southern Lebanon over the first 10 days of the truce, including to the northern edge of the so-called “yellow line,” a new Israeli-declared boundary separating the Lebanese territory now under Israeli occupation from the rest of the country. We spoke to rescue workers, municipal workers, residents who returned and the few who had remained behind during the war that broke out after Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, fired at Israel in solidarity with Tehran.
This was Hezbollah’s second major war with Israel in two years, and among Lebanese returning south, there was some disenchantment with the group’s leadership. A consensus appeared to be emerging among the Shiite Muslims who make up Hezbollah’s support base that they need a new political vanguard in Lebanon, a country with a fractious political and social mix of sects.
But their frustration stopped far short of any abandonment of Hezbollah. With Israel declaring plans to occupy the south and Lebanese government forces making no move to counter Israeli troops, people saw Hezbollah fighters as their only hope of keeping their homes and land.
“What is this life?” Zeinab Baz, 53, cried as she stumbled across a jumble of wires and twisted sheet metal, all that remained of her home. “Everything beautiful is gone.”
The Homecoming
The homecoming after weeks of war had become an unwelcome ritual for those returning south. Most had been displaced before, when hostilities with Israel last escalated in 2024, then returned as that conflict ended and rebuilt their damaged homes.
When Hezbollah fired on Israel in March, many among its support base questioned whether the latest outbreak of war was worth the cost. And in the south, those costs came into plain view.
Scattered across the orange orchards and olive groves were villages that had been completely pulverized. Entire floors of buildings, their walls blown out, had keeled over onto their sides next to waist-deep mounds of cinder blocks and dangling wires. Outside one strip of shuttered stores, two abandoned brown horses stood awkwardly in the parking lot.
At a cemetery in the coastal city of Tyre, one woman, Suheila, 54, searched for the temporary grave of her son, Hussein, a Hezbollah fighter who was killed in the war. When she found it — marked by a photo of him propped up against a cinder block — she collapsed on her knees and began slapping the hardened earth with both hands. For her, there was no illusion that the cease-fire was a victory for Lebanese Shiites, secured by Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.
“What is this victory?” cried Suheila, who provided only her first name, citing security reasons. “What is this victory, Hussein?”
A few miles away in Qasmiyeh, Farida Ali Awila glowered as she sat on the curb of a gas station and waited to check on her home in the Shiite village of Touline.
Beside her, a Hezbollah member handed out fliers to cars passing by showing Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, that drivers could triumphantly display on their windshields.
Ms. Awila watched silently for a few minutes. Then her anger boiled over.
“We lost many men, they’re dying for what? For who? Iran?” she yelled. “Iran is doing deals behind our back and our men are dying for them?”
The posters were part of the group’s effort to give credit for the truce to Iran. But they were also among the most explicit acknowledgments of the group’s fealty to Tehran, which has wielded an even heavier hand with Hezbollah’s operations since its former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed by Israel in 2024.
His successor, Naim Qassem, does not inspire the same fervent loyalty among Lebanese Shiites as Mr. Nasrallah once did. The other main Shiite political party, the Amal Movement, commands less popular support and influence. Many Shiites longed for a strong political leader to advocate for them amid a war that few think will be won solely on the battlefield.
Under Mr. Nasrallah, “it was as if we were sleeping, but we knew there was someone guarding us,” said Khadija Ramez Ghozyel, 60, in Qlaileh, a village near the country’s Mediterranean coastline.
Now the Hezbollah fighters, she said, “are the only ones we have” to protect Shiites in the south.
Hezbollah’s Heartland
That sentiment was widespread across the southern hinterland, which is largely Shiite Muslim and delivers Hezbollah much of its support. Signs of the group’s reach abound. Billboards of slain fighters line the roads, with the men’s uniformed portraits placed in the center of the bright-yellow Hezbollah flags. After the truce went into effect, hundreds gathered each day in villages to mourn Hezbollah fighters killed in battle.
Ambulances arrived in towns with the bodies of dead fighters and civilians, which had been kept in morgues or temporary cemeteries. As emergency workers opened their back doors, giving mourners a final glimpse of their loved ones, women lunged into the vehicles and threw themselves on the bodies.
“They were heroes, they were protecting us,” said Rehab Tamara, 43, in Hallousiyeh, five miles inland, where she and hundreds of other residents gathered on Saturday for the funeral of three Hezbollah fighters.
For years, Hezbollah cast itself as the protector of Lebanon’s Shiite community, providing social services in peacetime and advancing the political and economic gains of one of the country’s most marginalized groups. But as the stakes of the latest war ratcheted up, Shiite reliance on Hezbollah for physical protection has come to the forefront.
Israeli forces have entrenched themselves in a newly occupied belt running six miles across southern Lebanon. Lebanese government forces withdrew from much of the south after the war broke out, and while the government has pursued a political resolution, it has little leverage over Israel.
“We are with the government but we want the government to protect us, and not just let Israel do anything it wants,” said Fatima Mowamis, 70, standing near her home in Hallousiyeh.
Israel has continued to launch strikes on what it describes as Hezbollah targets, citing the terms of the truce that allow Israel to act in self-defense. Hezbollah has responded in turn, sporadically launching rockets toward Israel and at Israeli forces on Lebanese territory, while reiterating that it will not lay down its weapons.
“I don’t feel safe at all,” said Hanan Hamze, 46, at she stood on a hillside in Majdal Zoun.
A week after the gravediggers had prepared the cemetery, hundreds in the village flocked to the hilltop to lay their loved ones to rest. Many looked in disbelief at the Israeli flag on the opposite ridgeline.
“It feels like the war will start up again,” Ms. Hamze said, “and when it does, it will be even worse than before.”
Hwaida Saad and Sarah Chaayto contributed reporting.
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10) Why U.S. Oil Companies Are Not Plugging the World’s Energy Gap
American producers are under pressure from investors to keep spending in check, and they are wary of drilling more wells because they are not sure oil prices will stay high.
By Rebecca F. Elliott, May 1, 2026
If there are any winners from the war with Iran in the business world, they are Western oil companies that are reaping the rewards of much higher energy prices.
But don’t expect them to invest their bumper profits into pumping a lot more oil and natural gas — at least not yet.
In fact, there were fewer rigs drilling wells in the United States last week than there were when the war started on Feb. 28, according to the energy company Baker Hughes. Domestic oil production might even fall in 2026, the Energy Department said last month.
There are a few reasons companies are being so conservative. It takes many months to drill a new well and extract oil from it. As a result, companies base their decisions far more on what they think the price of crude will be in six months or a year than on today’s price.
Plus, Wall Street analysts and investors would generally prefer that oil companies stick to their budgets rather than chase higher production and risk losing money if the Strait of Hormuz reopens soon and oil prices fall.
“Do you want to be the dumb guy that sees oil at $100, raises your budget 25 percent and then watches oil plummet?” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm.
The answer so far from U.S. oil executives has been a resounding “no.” The two largest U.S. oil companies — Exxon Mobil and Chevron — reported first-quarter results on Friday and said they would not drill a lot more than they had planned to before the war.
“We feel like we are producing the maximum amount that we can,” Neil Hansen, Exxon’s chief financial officer, said of the company’s work in West Texas and New Mexico.
Before the war, Exxon expected to increase output in that region by about 13 percent this year. Its overall production plans have taken a hit because the company has a lot of assets in the Persian Gulf, where it typically operates through joint ventures with state-owned oil companies.
Chevron, which set out before the war to expand its production worldwide by up to 10 percent, struck a similar tone.
“We’re not adjusting our plan,” Eimear Bonner, Chevron’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “It comes back to discipline.”
Exxon and Chevron are not alone in hesitating to change their drilling plans, according to a survey of oil and gas executives last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Most respondents thought U.S. oil production would be flat or rise this year by less than 250,000 barrels a day, or about 2 percent, because of the war in Iran — if it rose at all.
That would replace less than 3 percent of the 10 million barrels of oil or more that the world has lost each day the Strait of Hormuz has been closed. Iran and the United States are both restricting traffic in the shipping artery, which separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula.
Even slightly higher U.S. production growth would be “nothing compared to the size of the issue,” Kaes Van’t Hof, chief executive of Diamondback Energy, said at a Columbia University energy conference in April.
“Compared to the global problem, that’s like putting a garden hose into an Olympic-size swimming pool that’s been emptied,” said Mr. Van’t Hof, whose company is based in Midland, Texas.
That said, the United States is drawing from stockpiles to export a lot more oil and other fuels than it normally does, according to data from S&P Global Energy Commodities at Sea. Exxon and Chevron said they were running many of their oil refineries at full tilt. And there are early signs that domestic drilling activity may pick up this year.
On Thursday, ConocoPhillips, another large U.S. oil producer, raised its spending plans for 2026 and said it would add a new drilling rig in the Permian Basin, a prolific oil field that straddles Texas and New Mexico.
Still, Conoco said it was likely to pump less overall in 2026 than it previously estimated, partly because of disruptions in Qatar, where the company has a stake in natural gas projects that have been affected by the war.
First-quarter profits fell at Exxon and Chevron, largely for accounting reasons that masked how much the companies will eventually benefit from higher oil prices.
Exxon’s earnings for the first three months of the year fell 46 percent from a year earlier, to $4.2 billion. Chevron’s first-quarter profit slipped 37 percent to $2.2 billion.
Not all oil companies reported similar results. London-based BP said its first-quarter profit soared thanks in part to its commodities trading arm.
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11) We Should All Be Concerned About What’s Happening in India
By Arman Khan, Mr. Khan, a former executive editor at Vogue India, wrote from Mumbai, India, May 1, 2026
Allie Sullberg
A standup comedian in India posted a seemingly harmless Instagram reel in March, parodying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overly familiar behavior when he meets foreign leaders — the prolonged bear hugs, the verbal fumbles, the nervous bursts of laughter.
A couple of weeks later, after the video had amassed millions of views, it was blocked by Instagram. The same day, on X, several other accounts popular for their political satire and memes were blocked under Indian government pressure after they criticized Delhi’s handling of a cooking gas shortage caused by the U.S.-Iran war, or otherwise poked fun at Mr. Modi.
Satire, it seems, is the latest target of the Modi government’s systematic muzzling of public discourse in the world’s largest democracy. Since his Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, it has steadily eroded civil liberties and increased its grip across all layers of society, including neutering legacy media that has historically demanded government accountability. Now it is tightening control of the digital commons, weaponizing the threat of legal liability to ensure compliance from Big Tech players eager to maintain access to India’s massive user base.
The worldwide reach of platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook makes what’s happening in India a global concern. Mr. Modi’s government is building a potential template for other countries that seek to restrict online self-expression.
The Indian government’s main weapon is the Information Technology Act. Originally enacted in 2000, it empowers authorities to take down online content deemed to pose a threat to Indian sovereignty, security, public order or foreign relations. It has been used over the years by various Indian administrations to target content critical of them.
Mr. Modi’s government has wielded the act with increasing frequency and strengthened it in recent years with a series of amendments.
His administration has now proposed new ones that take even more explicit aim at ordinary internet users who post — or merely share — online content on news and current affairs. That means if I, as an independent journalist, put up an Instagram reel critical of Mr. Modi’s policies, the post — and perhaps my account — could be blocked. Both the platform and I could face legal repercussions. The Press Club of India and the Internet Freedom Foundation have warned that the amendments will have far-reaching consequences on free expression and social media platforms in India.
This is a logical extension of the ruling party’s throttling of free speech. Its intimidation of the once-rambunctious traditional Indian media has left bloggers, YouTube content creators, independent journalists and the average internet user to fill the gap in holding the government accountable. Now we, too, are being targeted.
In 2021 the government ordered Twitter to shut down accounts that criticized Mr. Modi over unpopular new agricultural laws and related widespread protests by farmers. The laws were eventually repealed. Two years later, the government blocked online access to a BBC documentary critical of Mr. Modi. Lately, the policing has intensified: Last year, a 19-year-old college student was arrested after sharing a post that questioned the official narrative of India’s brief military conflict with Pakistan in May 2025, and in the last few months new cases have resulted in independent digital news outlets and popular satirists being purged from social media.
This is sending a chill through society, forcing citizens to weigh whether speaking out is worth the risk. For many, it isn’t.
The stakes are particularly high for Muslims like me, who face constant pressure in Mr. Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist India to prove our patriotism even as the ruling party weakens our voting rights and otherwise marginalizes us. When I share a political post on Instagram, it is nearly always followed by a panicked call from my parents, worried about the legal repercussions. Every word I write, including in this essay, is tinged with fear. Like many others, I have become less vocal on social media. With each passing day, our voices are diminished.
Free speech in India is far from being completely extinguished. The political opposition proved its resilience in the 2024 elections in which Mr. Modi’s party lost its parliamentary majority, and someday, Mr. Modi will be gone. But even more liberal future governments might find it hard to resist the machinery of silence being installed.
And what’s happening in India may not stay in India. Freedom of online expression has been under long-term strain globally even in democracies like the United States, where the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to squelch critical news coverage and satirical content, and where Silicon Valley executives have shown an increasing willingness to please the president.
India is showing where this leads: Even in the world’s largest democracy, when people are afraid to express themselves, they don’t.
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12) Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace
By Linda Kinstler, May 1, 2026
Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan
When President Trump announced, last Friday, that Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff, his special envoys for peace missions, would be returning to Pakistan over the weekend to resume peace talks with Iran, the news was taken as a sign that the war might in fact be nearing an end. Stocks closed at record highs and relief from rising gas prices seemed in reach. That the two businessmen were merely boarding a plane seemed to calm the addled market.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump told the media that Kushner and Witkoff’s trip was off. “Nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight to go there,” he said he told the two men as they were preparing to leave. He referred to Kushner and Witkoff — his son-in-law and his longtime business associate — as “my people,” a nod to the strange role they have taken on as civilian proxies for the president. There is a long history of moguls and financiers meddling in matters of state, but Trump has taken the intermingling of private interests and public affairs to a new extreme.
Over the past year, Kushner and Witkoff have crisscrossed the globe as White House emissaries: They have met with Hamas and with Vladimir Putin, with Volodymyr Zelensky and with Iranian negotiators. Their near-universal presence at high-stakes negotiations suggests that Kushner and Witkoff, New York real estate developers who are now executive members of Trump’s Board of Peace, have been almost single-handedly tasked with realizing Trump’s desire to be remembered as the “president of peace.”
But these are businessmen first and diplomats second. Their approach to peacemaking is abundantly evident in the settlements they have brokered thus far. The October cease-fire between Israel and Hamas opened the door to Kushner’s aspiration to build a shiny special economic zone where there are now 60 million tons of rubble — with human remains and unexploded ordnance trapped inside. In this vision, the economic zone will house data centers, skyscrapers and advanced manufacturing and run on cryptocurrency. Their draft proposal for a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine included a provision that the United States would receive “50 percent of profits” from the “venture” of rebuilding Ukraine’s destroyed infrastructure. Their view seems to be that peace is an asset to be leveraged and maximized.
On the sidelines of the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in February, Witkoff announced an agreement between the United States and Pakistan to redevelop the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, just weeks after the Pakistani government signed a deal with a company affiliated with World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm run by Witkoff’s and Trump’s sons. In the months since, Pakistan has become one of the primary mediators between the United States and Iran.
The apparent entanglement of Kushner’s and Witkoff’s business interests and their public roles — and the many unanswered questions about their personal legal and financial status, as well as that of the Board of Peace itself — is both a cause and a symptom of the near-complete “fusion of peace and corporate governance,” as the scholar Teresa Almeida Cravo describes it, that has come to define Trump’s second term.
While both men are presidential appointees who do not draw a salary from the federal government, they are supported by an entirely new White House office that uses public funds. Witkoff has submitted a financial disclosure report that lists his extensive holdings around the world, but Kushner has not. (He told “60 Minutes” in January that “what people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships.”) Instead, Kushner has continued to raise funds for his investment firm, Affinity Partners, seeking $5 billion from Middle Eastern governments even as he participates in peace talks in the region. Saudi Arabia, one of his largest investment partners, urged the Trump administration to continue fighting Iran until the regime is destroyed.
The creeping privatization of both war and peace has been underway for some time. But Trump has pushed this trend to its logical conclusion: His administration has turned the delicate practice of peacemaking, previously handled largely by experienced diplomats, mediators and specialists, into a business for a select few stakeholders who are bound together by a thicket of financial affiliations and conflicts of interest.
Private Peace Entrepreneurs
In his inaugural address to the Board of Peace, Trump said that among the organization’s many functions would be “looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.” His message was that the board intended to strengthen the U.N. rather than supplant it. “Someday, I won’t be here,” he said. “The United Nations will be.”
The visual and legal language of the Board of Peace tells a different story. Its logo looks as if the U.N. logo had been dipped in gold vermeil, with the globe rotated to center the United States. The U.N. Charter explicitly states that the organization exists to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” The founding charter of the Board of Peace promises to “restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace,” and neglects to mention the principle of sovereignty or human rights.
Diplomats and scholars alike widely believe the United Nations is in need of reform. The Security Council has long been deadlocked, and the organization’s many commissions, agencies and funds have often fallen short of their lofty goals. The appointment of Iran as chair of the 2023 U.N. Human Rights Council Social Forum was, for many observers, a grave indicator of how far the organization had strayed from its founding charter.
In one sense, the creation of the Board of Peace might be viewed as an attempt to bring long-awaited reforms to the U.N. and to the web of international treaties and arrangements it supports, to jolt a sclerotic system back to life.
After all, contemporary international law owes much to another enterprising businessman who sought to reshape the world order. At the start of the 20th century, Andrew Carnegie, motivated by the belief that humankind had advanced beyond using physical violence to settle disputes, devoted much of his time and wealth to creating a “league of peace” that sought to alleviate rising tensions in Europe and, ideally, eliminate the possibility of war. Carnegie financed the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague, now the seat of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He represented the United States in diplomatic negotiations and lobbied foreign governments as a private citizen. His wife believed that he never recovered from the heartbreak of watching World War I unfold. He died in 1919, just after peace had been restored.
Carnegie stands out as the most prominent in a long line of businessmen who took it upon themselves to work to broker international agreements. These “private peace entrepreneurs,” as the scholar Lior Lehrs calls them, conducted “unofficial peace diplomacy” on behalf of their nations. The German shipping magnate Albert Ballin and the financier Ernest Cassel tried to broker peace between the U.K. and Germany before World War I; the Irish businessman Brendan Duddy was a critical back channel between Britain and the I.R.A. during the Troubles; Gavin Relly, the head of the mining company Anglo American, led a group of businessmen to meet with the African National Congress before the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Each had personal and financial interests in bringing these conflicts to an end, but these precedents now seem almost quaint. Carnegie’s vision of peace — premised upon the rule of law, the peaceful settlement of disputes and the preservation of national self-determination — doesn’t bear much resemblance to what’s on offer from the Trump administration. Rather than give away their wealth to build the international legal system, emissaries of the Board of Peace have been enriched by their relation to the White House. Their proposals for the extraction of wealth from war-torn regions have not received the consent of the governed in any real sense, and far from buttressing the institutions of international law, the administration has repeatedly tried to dismantle them.
The Normal Rules Do Not Apply
For the time being, the board’s logo stands for little more than the idea that the politics of peace can be married to capital interests and the belief that this alignment stands to benefit everyone involved. Kushner and Witkoff’s fellow executive board members include Martin Edelman, a corporate lawyer with extensive ties to the upper echelons of the United Arab Emirates, and Marc Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo Global Management. In May 2025, Apollo invested $100 million in the Witkoff Group; Edelman is the general counsel of G42, an A.I. company controlled by the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A New York Times investigation found that Tahnoon was involved in a deal that netted $2 billion in 2025 for World Liberty Financial, the crypto company owned by Trump’s and Witkoff’s sons.
In his January executive order establishing it as a public international organization, Trump wrote that the Board of Peace is covered by the International Organizations Immunities Act, which prohibits employees or agents of an international organization (and their immediate family members) from being sued for “official work.” But that same law defines an international organization as an entity that results either from a treaty or from an act of Congress — neither of which is true of the board.
“They didn’t send the Board of Peace charter to the Senate for advice and consent to a treaty, and there are no statutes that authorize U.S. participation,” said Michael Mattler, a former assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs at the State Department. Trump authorized U.S. participation in the board unilaterally and established himself — in his private capacity — as chairman, with no limits on his term. “This is an organization composed of states, but that by its own rules gives a private individual a controlling role,” Mattler said. That makes it a “uniquely structured organization,” he said, compared with other international groups.
Lawmakers are noticing the murky legal status. Several Democratic congressional investigations are looking into both Witkoff’s and Kushner’s financial records and international relationships. In mid-April, four Democratic senators announced a probe of the Board of Peace’s proposal to create a stablecoin for Gaza, pointing out that a number of its executives, including Witkoff and Trump himself, could stand to profit.
In a letter addressed to Kushner announcing a House Judiciary Committee probe of his dual role as an investor and a “volunteer” government representative, Representative Jamie Raskin wrote, “You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.” By continuing to do so, Kushner was effectively insisting “that the normal rules do not apply to you,” Raskin argued.
Under the Trump administration’s privatization of peace, the “normal rules” no longer exist at all. Yet exceptional wars require exceptional solutions. If the Board of Peace does bring stability and governance to embattled regions, it’s of course possible that in some quarters, all its flaws will be forgiven. An imperfect peace, or a fragile cease-fire, is better than nothing, even if survivors find themselves returning to territories that have been stripped of their autonomy and natural resources — if they are able to return at all.
But even this grim vision of peace still seems a long way off given the recent record of the Trump administration’s diplomacy. Some 800 people have been killed in Gaza since the October cease-fire; a settlement between Russia and Ukraine has only become less likely since the United States relaxed sanctions on Russian oil because of its war on Iran; ongoing negotiations with Hamas have repeatedly broken down; Kushner and Witkoff’s previous meetings with mediators on Iran have failed, by some accounts because they did not fully grasp the intricacies of nuclear issues, and the deal on the table would fall short of the administration’s stated goal of preventing Iran from ever producing a nuclear weapon.
Rising energy prices have begun to strain American households, but Trump and his “people” aren’t feeling the squeeze. Witkoff has said he is in the process of divesting from his real estate and crypto holdings; in 2024, Kushner said he would “try to pre-emptively avoid any conflicts of interests.” But both men have seen their wealth grow significantly since Trump returned to office. And the peace they have long promised remains out of reach.
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13) Pentagon Makes Deals With A.I. Companies to Expand Classified Work
The agreements with six technology companies come amid the Defense Department’s dispute with Anthropic.
By Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, May 1, 2026
Julian Barnes and Sheera Frenkel have been reporting on the Pentagon’s work, and disputes, with artificial intelligence companies.
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a debate over whether the company’s A.I. model could be used to pilot autonomous drones or work on domestic surveillance. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Pentagon announced on Friday that it had reached deals with some of the technology industry’s biggest companies in an effort to expand the military’s artificial intelligence capabilities and increase the number of firms authorized to be on classified networks.
The companies, according to the Defense Department, agreed to allow the Pentagon to employ their technology for “any lawful use,” a standard resisted by Anthropic, which was initially the only artificial intelligence model available on classified markets.
The Pentagon had previously confirmed deals with Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Google. In addition the Pentagon said it had reached deals with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, a start-up.
“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an A.I.-first fighting force,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Pentagon did not specify how it would use the new A.I. tools but said the agreement would help service members make faster and better decisions.
“Access to a diverse suite of A.I. capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give war fighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat,” the Pentagon said.
Defense Department officials hope the new deals will push Anthropic to drop its reservations about the military’s broad “any lawful use” standard.
President Trump has ordered the government to cut ties with Anthropic, but for now the company’s technology remains on classified networks and intelligence analysts still depend on the firm’s models. While the Pentagon wants to quickly move to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, there have been growing pains and technical problems.
Anthropic and the Pentagon are currently in federal litigation over the Defense Department’s decision to label the company a supply chain risk, a novel use of the government’s power to raise concerns about how corporations build their products.
White House officials, impressed and worried about the power of Anthropic’s newest model, Mythos, have been pushing for a compromise that would end the company’s feud with the Pentagon, or at least allow other parts of the government to work with the firm.
The deal with the companies was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
A Pentagon official said the new agreements would help prevent “vendor lock” and ensure that the military would not have to depend on any one company. The military also wants firms to agree to a single standard, and has been loath to give firms contractual guarantees about how their models will be used.
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a debate over whether the company’s Claude model could be used to pilot autonomous drones or work on domestic surveillance. The Pentagon says it does not intend to use the model for either of those activities, but the two sides have not agreed on contractual language, or if it is even necessary.
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