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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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols 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) High Gas Prices Are Squeezing America’s Food Banks
The organizations that feed millions were already dealing with cuts, inflation and more people seeking help. Now the war in Iran is forcing groups to make hard choices.
By Chris Hippensteel, Photographs by Jordan Gale, May 20, 2026
Every morning, semi trucks from the Oregon Food Bank’s fleet load up at its central warehouse in Portland, carrying tons of canned goods, frozen meats, and fruits and vegetables to supply food pantries across the state. Some of their nearest destinations are churches and soup kitchens just miles away. The furthest is along the Idaho border, a six-hour drive away across mountains and shrub lands.
Those delivery runs have become more expensive since the war in Iran sent the cost of diesel soaring, said Andrea Williams, president of the food bank, which has had to budget for roughly $20,000 extra in monthly fuel costs. And the additional expense is starting to affect how much food her organization can afford to place on those trucks.
“It’s an opportunity cost,” Ms. Williams said. “It could be going to food for people, but instead it’s going into the price of gas.”
Most Americans have already felt the war’s impact at the pump. But as rising fuel costs ripple through the economy, the effects are appearing in less-obvious places — including food banks helping supply pantries nationwide.
Annually, as many as 50 million Americans need emergency food assistance and turn to their local food pantry or soup kitchen for help, according to a 2024 Feeding America report. Those organizations rely heavily on the support of food banks, which acquire and deliver food to vast swaths of rural America.
Much of that operation runs on diesel fuel, which, compared with normal gasoline, has seen even steeper price increases.
Before the war, one food bank serving northern New Mexico faced a monthly fuel bill of around $10,000. Now, it’s $22,000.
Food bank directors from across the country say those spikes have forced them to weigh difficult trade-offs, including the amount and quality of food they provide.
In West Virginia, a food bank’s chief executive said she was planning to substitute meat and other protein sources — which are costly, and often have to be shipped in — with low-cost local produce.
In eastern Arizona, a food bank is slowing its plans to bring in more fresh fruit across the U.S.-Mexico border. It was initially a cost-saving measure, but the price of gas has made those shipments expensive enough to reconsider.
And in Montana, a state food bank network — whose deliveries can take several days — is reducing the amount of food it orders and how often it sends out trucks.
“It touches us in so many different ways,” said Brent Weisgram, vice president and chief operations officer of Montana Food Bank Network. “You could almost call it a perfect storm.”
Brian Barks, president and chief executive of Food Bank for the Heartland, which covers much of Nebraska and western Iowa, said cutting the amount of food provided would be a last resort.
But, he said, apart from defraying costs through additional donations, there are generally only two other places food banks can look to meaningfully trim expenses: staff and food.
The spike in fuel prices has hit at what was already a perilous time for these organizations, as the rise in the cost of living has contributed to more people seeking help over recent years.
Last year, the Trump administration slashed funding for programs supporting food banks around the country. Major cuts to the federal food stamp program followed, blocking millions of Americans from assistance, a change that food bank leaders insist their organizations can’t make up for.
High fuel prices have left Americans with even less to spend on other essentials like groceries. Already, some are turning to food pantries to make up the difference, said Milt Liu, president and chief executive of St. Mary’s Food Bank, whose coverage area extends from Phoenix to Arizona’s northern border.
“It feels like gas prices have kind of put folks over the edge,” Mr. Liu said.
For now, Mr. Liu said, his food bank has opted not to cut back on service, instead pulling more from its savings to weather the higher prices.
“That’s not sustainable year over year over year,” he said.
The costs could worsen as more companies pass higher gas prices on to their consumers. Already, some food bank directors said they were paying more for the food they acquire.
Dan Parks, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Food Bank, said fuel costs haven’t cut into his budget, at least so far. Instead of relying on semi trucks, his staff members typically deliver food by public ferry to the isolated island communities they serve. Still, he’s bracing for a hit when supplies run low and he has to order another shipment of food from down south.
But cutting back on food doesn’t seem like an option. In April, the pantry his food bank operates served 500 people per week, a new high, he said, which was especially concerning for this time of year, when the spring thaw normally brings tourists who bolster the region’s economy.
“At some point, food banks are just not going to be able to keep up,” Mr. Parks said. “And we’re getting closer and closer to that point every day.”
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2) Doctors Asked Officers to Unshackle a Patient. They Refused for 26 Days.
A lawsuit challenges the police practice of shackling mentally ill arrestees in New York, sometimes for long periods, while they await arraignment in locked psychiatric wards.
By Andy Newman, May 20, 2026
A homeless man with a long history of mental illness was kept shackled to a bed by the police at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx for 26 consecutive days while awaiting arraignment, his lawyers say. Mark Vergari/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK
One May afternoon in 2024, a 49-year-old homeless man with a long history of mental illness stood in the middle of a street in the Bronx, talking to himself, screaming at traffic and nearly getting hit by cars.
The police were summoned, checked his record and found he had three outstanding warrants, including one for felony weapon possession. The man was arrested after resisting, court records show, and was taken to a locked psychiatric ward at Jacobi Medical Center, a city hospital in the Bronx, to await arraignment.
There, the man, identified in the records only as Louis M. to protect his privacy, was handcuffed to the bed, shackled at the legs and guarded by a police officer.
His arraignment was delayed, but the restraints stayed on. After three days, his psychiatrist asked police officers to remove them; they declined, repeatedly. He remained chained to his bed around the clock, except for one or two bathroom trips a day.
His lawyers say it took 26 days after his arrest for his restraints to finally be removed. Several months later, all the criminal charges against him were dropped.
The length of Louis M.’s immobilization was unusual. But shackling mentally ill people awaiting criminal arraignment has long been standard police procedure in New York City.
The Police Department’s patrol guide instructs officers: “Do not remove handcuffs or leg restraints, unless requested by attending physician.” Such requests are almost never granted, legal service lawyers and psychiatrists say.
The practice is being challenged in a suit to be heard in Albany on Wednesday at the State Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. The suit argues that it is unnecessary for the police to shackle people in locked psychiatric wards because the wards are already set up to deal with potentially violent patients.
More than that, the suit says, the practice is psychologically and physically harmful, and violates patients’ due process rights and state mental hygiene law, which places strict limits on shackling.
Keeping Louis M. chained to a bed for weeks “offends the most basic notions of justice,” says the suit, brought on his behalf by the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, a state agency that represents psychiatric patients.
While people who are arrested are supposed to be arraigned before a judge within 24 hours, the legal service says longer delays are routine. A recent analysis by the Legal Aid Society found that arrestees held in hospitals were disproportionately likely to face delayed arraignments, for a variety of reasons.
In court filings, the city maintains that hospital wards “are designed for different purposes than holding cells focused on preventing the flight of someone accused of a crime.” It argues that keeping arrestees in restraints is a necessary safety precaution, and that limits on shackling do not apply to the police.
The suit raises fundamental questions of jurisdiction. An arrestee held involuntarily in a psychiatric ward is simultaneously in the custody of the police and the hospital. Each is subject to different rules and laws. What happens when the two dominions clash?
The suit predates the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a pledge to sharply reduce the police’s role in dealing with people suffering from severe mental illness. A spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, Sam Raskin, said on Tuesday that the mayor’s administration could not comment on the specific circumstances of the case, but that it was “committed to improving the city’s approach to helping New Yorkers facing mental health challenges by advancing an all-of-government, holistic approach to the issue.”
The policy laid out in the patrol guide applies equally to people accused of murder and those charged with burglary or simple drug possession. The legal service said it had one client who was shackled for a week after her arrest on charges of sending a threatening text message to her sister.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, two senior psychiatrists at Mount Sinai Medical Center with a combined 40 years’ experience in emergency psychiatric units identified “exactly one instance” in which they remembered police officers agreeing to remove a patient’s shackles.
The brief cites the case of a 60-year-old woman with a urinary tract infection who was shackled in 2020 and “frequently urinated on herself and constantly cried over the odor and embarrassment” because officers were slow to take her to the bathroom.
According to the suit and psychiatric literature, extended shackling can cause PTSD, “general mental state deterioration,” bedsores, bleeding, blood clotting and infection. The Mount Sinai psychiatrists write that the practice can “cause immense and severe physical and psychological harm to patients and impact clinicians’ abilities to provide appropriate treatment at a time of acute and particular need.”
Dr. Elizabeth Ford, a psychiatrist who in recent years oversaw New York City hospitals’ care for people under arrest, said that shackles are so stressful to patients that they cause the very outbursts they seek to control.
“There’s this general sense that if you take the cuffs off, someone is going to be more aggressive,” she said. “My experience has been the opposite.”
Formally, the lawsuit being argued on Wednesday appeals a judge’s denial of a writ of habeas corpus, the basic legal safeguard for challenging improper detention.
Louis M.’s lawyers filed the habeas motion in 2024 against the Police Department and Jacobi Medical Center to seek his unshackling. Two lower courts held that habeas did not apply because the motion sought only release from restraints, not total release from the hospital.
After Wednesday’s hearing, the Court of Appeals is not expected to rule for weeks, at least.
The city notes that when Jacobi initially sought a court order to have Louis M. involuntarily held, a psychiatrist testified that he had a history of aggression and paranoia that could recur. He also grew “extremely angry” when asked why he had stopped taking medication, according to court records.
But the legal service says that while Louis M. was in the ward, his clinicians found him “calm and cooperative.”
State mental hygiene law and guidelines say that psychiatric patients should generally be restrained only on a doctor’s orders. Restraints must typically be removed after two hours, and kept off except for patients who are making “overt gestures” threatening themselves or others.
Marcia Richard, a woman with a history of mental illness and drug addiction, said in an interview that she was often shackled by the police in locked wards in New York City, for periods of up to a week.
“When I went into the bathroom, that’s the only time they took the handcuffs off, but they’d keep the shackles on,” said Ms. Richard, 56, who now works as a peer counselor. “I showered in the shackles. I washed up in the shackles.”
Sometimes, she said, the restraints injured her: “I had cuts on my wrists, I had cuts on my ankles. Sometimes they were too tight, and your feet are swollen.”
The city argues in its court papers that shackling prevents patients from being violent to hospital staff.
But Louis M.’s lawyers argue that locked, guarded psychiatric wards are “staffed and equipped to manage behavioral outbursts.” Techniques used in these wards to calm patients include verbal de-escalation, medication and seclusion.
Laureena Novotnak, the Mental Hygiene Legal Service lawyer who is arguing at the Court of Appeals on Wednesday, said that by definition, people are placed in locked psychiatric wards because they’re “having trouble controlling their behavior.”
She added, “Maybe it would be safer if you chained all the patients around the clock, but nobody would ever get better.”
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3) Trump Just Took Us Somewhere the Country Has Never Been Before
By Noah Shachtman, May 21, 2026
Mr. Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, writes frequently about government corruption.
President Trump with a model of his arch at the White House in October. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about his place in history. That’s one of the reasons, according to recent reporting by The Atlantic and The Times, why he’s paying so little attention to his plummeting popularity and so much attention to remodeling Washington in his own image. But there’s no arch high enough, no ballroom gilded enough, to distract from the mountain of corruption he’s constructing.
This week’s announcement of a $1.8 billion government slush fund — ostensibly for victims of what Mr. Trump has called the Justice Department’s “weaponization,” but almost certainly destined for his allies — guarantees it. The president may wish to be considered in the same class as Napoleon or Alexander the Great, but he is in danger of turning himself into the next Mobutu Sese Seko or Mohamed Suharto: a kleptocrat remembered not for his ideas, not for his power, but for his greed.
Mr. Trump has devoted a large portion of his second term to enriching himself and his family with foreign and private funds: the crypto deals, the rapid-fire stock trades, the Boeing 747 he accepted as a gift from Qatar. But until recently, there was no evidence that his most brazen capers involved taking actively, directly from you and me. That changed when he, two of his sons, and the Trump family business sued the U.S. government for $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns.
In effect, Mr. Trump, the private citizen, was suing President Trump, the head of the executive branch. He didn’t bother to pretend it made sense: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he quipped to reporters. Surprise, surprise, that settlement was really sweet. The 10-figure “anti-weaponization fund” is a new low: Mr. Trump plunging his bruised hands into public accounts and scooping out money.
Trump supporters convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6 riots could get large spoonfuls. But the Trump clan looks to be the biggest beneficiaries of all: As part of the settlement, the U.S. government is barred from prosecuting or further auditing the taxes of the Trumps or their family business. That saves the Trumps from penalties that some estimate could have reached as high as $100 million or beyond. More than that, it functionally puts the family beyond the reach of the law in these tax cases. The order is intended to last, according to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, “FOREVER.”
As the details of the arrangement were being announced, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court quit.
“Just in terms of sheer dollars, this is the most corrupt action in American history,” says Brendan Ballou, a former Justice Department special counsel. He’s representing a pair of police officers injured during the Capitol riots who are suing in federal court to stop the fund. “This may be the most infamous thing that Donald Trump does beyond Jan. 6, 2021.”
Mr. Trump is the defining political figure of the last decade. But despite his enormous influence, he’s had relatively few legacy-making accomplishments. As the Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Mr. Trump has preferred, especially in this second term, not to enact sweeping policies, but to make small-bore deals — especially if those bargains require the other side to bend the knee. He’s bullied specific schools, rather than remaking the educational system; and cut bargains with a few drug retailers, rather than recasting the U.S. government’s relationship with Big Pharma. He hasn’t been able to break NATO, not yet. And thankfully, his administration is a long way from millions of deportations. (So far, only Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and their warped decisions have amounted to truly historical changes.)
But openly monetizing the presidency — that’s a true Trump innovation. You have to go back at least a hundred years, to the administrations of Warren Harding or Ulysses Grant, to find anything remotely similar. And no one ever accused President Harding of minting memecoins. “This isn’t the ‘honest graft’ of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement,” the Times’ Jamelle Bouie noted. “It is petty theft.”
Mr. Trump has already pardoned convicted criminals after receiving donations on their behalf. The electric car executive Trevor Milton gave nearly a million dollars to a pro-Trump group before getting the good news. The convicted tax cheat Paul Walczak’s successful pardon application cited his mother’s fund-raising for Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, a cottage industry has arisen of Trump cronies who leverage their access on behalf of people seeking presidential pardons or commutations. The top entertainment executive Tim Leiweke was pardoned after the Fox News host Trey Gowdy and an attorney for Mr. Leiweke brought up Mr. Leiweke’s case over a round of golf with the president.
This new slush fund — set up with minimal guardrails, not even a definition of what constitutes “weaponization” — could take all the ethical disasters of the pardon market and multiply it by, well, 1.8 billion. Just think what people might be willing to do to get this money, and what Mr. Trump might get in return.
This fund would institutionalize that ethical disaster. Forget the one-off deals or the handshakes at the 18th hole. This would make cronyism an official function of the federal government, a U.S. Agency for Corruption.
MAGA die-hards like the election-denying MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell and the political operative Michael Caputo are already expressing interest in cash from the kitty. Some of Mr. Trump’s most dangerous supporters are likely to jump in behind them.
“The primary risk is that this money is going to be used to fund paramilitary organizations that are loyal to the president,” Mr. Ballou said. “The financial support for violence, that is going to be the most important thing, and it’s fundamentally new and different from, say, the Qatari jet.”
That could include the five members of the Proud Boys who sued the government for $100 million last year, claiming “political persecution” after their conviction for their role in the Jan. 6 riot in which 140 law enforcement officers were injured. It could also include the heads of the Oath Keepers, a group with an even longer record of violence.
The self-described “American terrorist” Andrew Paul Johnson was convicted of his role in the Capitol riots, pardoned by Trump and subsequently found guilty of molesting two children. To silence his victims, he is said to have promised them a share of the millions he said he was about to get from the federal government for being a “Jan. 6er.”
On Tuesday, Democratic senators asked Mr. Blanche for assurances that an abusive felon like Mr. Johnson or an extremist group like the Oath Keepers would be barred from receiving payments from the $1.8 billion fund. Mr. Blanche declined, saying the decision would be up to a five-person commission. (All five members will be appointed by him, Mr. Blanche noted, and Mr. Trump has the power to fire any at will.)
If political violence committed in the president’s name is not only tolerated but actively rewarded, it could take this already bleak timeline somewhere much, much darker.
What could stop such a scenario from coming to pass is how legally questionable it all appears to be. As a former deputy assistant attorney general, Harry Litman, has pointed out, federal lawsuits require a conflict between two parties, a hurdle the “conflict” between Mr. and President Trump wouldn’t seem to clear. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution bars the government from paying “any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States,” which would appear to bar payments to people who attacked the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election. The Hyde Amendment of 1997 allows for people who have prevailed against malicious charges by the government to sue and recoup funds, but “it can’t apply to the insurrectionists who were all rightly convicted,” said Jason Manning, a former Justice Department prosecutor who tried both Jan. 6 and fraud cases. Hence the value to Mr. Trump, Mr. Manning said, of “a slush fund divorced from law.”
So maybe this particular scheme gets blocked by the courts. Either way, Mr. Trump’s scheming will define him and his family. When he leaves office, the Trump name will most likely be stripped from the Kennedy Center. The challenge coins he’s affixed to the White House doors will no doubt be stripped away. His “enhancements” to the Oval Office may eventually be remodeled away. All that will be left is his reputation. Mr. Trump has made that synonymous with corruption forever.
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4) Trump to Ease Restrictions on Climate ‘Super Pollutants’
The administration will delay a phase out of hydrofluorocarbons, potent planet-warming chemicals used in air-conditioning and refrigeration.
By Lisa Friedman, Reporting from Washington, May 21, 2026
President Trump will announce Thursday that his administration is easing restrictions on the potent planet-warming chemicals used in air-conditioners and refrigerators — restrictions put in place because of a bipartisan law Mr. Trump signed during his first term in office.
The move would slow plans to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, synthetic substances sometimes referred to as “super pollutants” because of their enormous effect in driving climate change.
Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, is expected to join Mr. Trump at the White House Thursday to announce new regulations that would relax existing requirements for grocery stores, air-conditioning companies, semiconductor plants and others to reduce production and use of the chemicals, which are known as HFCs.
“Today, the Trump E.P.A. is fulfilling President Trump’s promise to lower costs,” Mr. Zeldin said in a statement provided by the White House. “Our actions allow businesses to choose the refrigeration systems that work best for them, saving them billions of dollars. This will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices.”
The administration says relaxing the restrictions on HFCs would save businesses and families more than $2.4 billion. Mr. Trump faces growing political pressure to address the cost of living, especially as the war in Iran has driven up gas prices.
The regulations that are being eased stem from a 2020 law that was seen as a rare bipartisan success in tackling climate change. It was broadly supported by industry.
But the administration is blaming the Biden-era regulations for raising grocery prices as well as making it more expensive to transport refrigerated goods to grocery stores and restaurants.
HFCs are a huge contributor to human-caused global warming. While they linger in the atmosphere for a shorter time than carbon dioxide, they are hundreds to thousands of times more potent at trapping heat.
Phasing out HFCs worldwide could avert up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century, which would go a long way toward keeping the worst consequences of climate change from becoming reality. More than 190 nations, including the United States, agreed to sharply reduce the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons.
The Biden administration aimed to cut the production and consumption of HFCs by 85 percent by 2036. Doing so would eliminate the equivalent of about three years’ worth of climate pollution from the electricity sector.
But Mr. Zeldin has said that regulation did not give companies enough time to switch to other refrigerants. He said the industry had faced shortages that left families sweltering without air conditioning in the summertime. The E.P.A. also maintained that if fully implemented, the Biden-era rule would make it impossible for grocery stores to afford equipment to store perishable foods and would cause semiconductor manufacturing to come to a halt.
The air-conditioning industry has said the Trump administration’s claims of shortages were exaggerated. “Our industry is watching this development with concern,” said Francis Dietz, vice president of public affairs at the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute.
One rule expected to be finalized on Thursday would extend deadlines for phasing out the use of HFCs and make a wider variety of refrigerants available to businesses.
“This added flexibility will be felt by supermarkets, in home AC systems, the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, and in the transportation of medical supplies,” the E.P.A. said in a news release.
A second change would exempt the refrigerant transportation sector from a separate Biden-era rule that sought to reduce leaks of HFCs.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chemical lobby and the air conditioning, heating and refrigeration industry had all supported the original restrictions, saying less harmful chemicals were already available and that a shift toward those alternatives was already underway. It also was seen as a win for American companies like Honeywell and Chemours that produce and sell alternatives to HFCs.
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5) Nimitz Aircraft Carrier Enters Caribbean as Trump Pressures Cuba
The carrier arrived in the southern Caribbean on the same day that the Justice Department announced charges against Raúl Castro.
By Eric Schmitt, Published May 20, 2026, Updated May 21, 2026
The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz in Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, earlier this month. Credit...Pablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships entered the southern Caribbean Sea on Wednesday and will remain in the region for at least a few days as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Cuban government, according to the military’s Southern Command and a U.S. official.
Right now, the administration intends to use the Nimitz, and its wing of fighter jets, as a show of force, not as a platform for major military operations, as the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford did during the commando raid to seize President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in January, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The Nimitz has spent the past several weeks sailing along the South American coast on a previously scheduled training deployment, in recent days conducting exercises with the Brazilian navy.
Still, it hardly seemed coincidental that the Pentagon timed the arrival of the carrier into the southern Caribbean on the same day that the Justice Department announced charges against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba.
“Welcome to the Caribbean, Nimitz Carrier Strike Group!” the Southern Command posted on social media Wednesday. “U.S.S. Nimitz has proven its combat prowess across the globe, ensuring stability and defending democracy from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf.”
Much of firepower the Pentagon amassed in the Caribbean for the Maduro raid left the region soon after to form the backbone of American might in the Iran War. But the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima remains in the region, according to the Navy.
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6) A Powerful El Niño Is Forming. If History Is a Guide, It Could Hit Hard.
The biggest episodes of the past have altered the course of human events, according to researchers. An emerging one is drawing historic comparisons.
By Chico Harlan, May 21, 2026
An illustration published in 1877 depicted a scene in southern India. Millions died from a famine that coincided with an El Niño that year. Dea/Biblioteca Ambrosiana, via Getty Images
Well before it was understood, the El Niño phenomenon was leaving its marks on humanity.
El Niño is the name given to powerful shifts in Pacific Ocean winds and water temperatures that can drastically transform global weather patterns. Over the centuries these natural patterns have sparked epic droughts and heat waves, and have intensified epidemics.
Some academics even claim to see the fingerprints of El Niño on political and economic crises in ancient Egypt, or on the downfall of the Moche civilization in present-day Peru, more than 1,000 years ago. And in 1877 and 1878, a famine fueled by El Niño killed millions of people across the tropics, hardening inequities that, as one research paper put it, “would later be characterized as the ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”
Right now, the world is entering a new El Niño phase. Researchers are warning it could be one of the strongest on record and are invoking this history as an admonition that natural forces, when they reach their highest magnitude, can lead to profound volatility and hardship.
Of course, the current El Niño is in the early stages of formation and might not live up to the hype. But if the forecasts prove accurate, it would be a whopper and its consequences would play out across a world that has grown far more resilient but also has new vulnerabilities.
Compared with those early times, countries today track El Niño events with oceanic gauges and early warning systems. Agriculture is far more sophisticated, and many countries vulnerable to food shocks hold strategic grain reserves. Nobody is predicting large-scale famine.
But experts say an El Niño would add pressure to an already precarious global system. Fertilizer shortages caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz are straining farmers. Rising energy prices resulting from war in Ukraine and Iran are eating into countries’ budgets. And a longstanding safety net has been weakened by cuts in foreign aid to poorer countries by the United States and other nations.
There’s possibility for “a perfect storm of factors,” said Laurie Laybourn, who leads the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, a think tank based in Britain. “You could see an increase in poverty, malnutrition, conflict, indebtedness, and all of the domino effects that come from that.”
If history offers any lesson, it’s that strong El Niño events, like the one that started in 1877, play upon existing weaknesses. That El Niño led to punishingly dry conditions that spanned the world, including Brazil, southern Africa and China.
Few places were hit harder than southern India. Contemporaneous accounts describe stick-thin people trying to survive on roots and even selling off children they couldn’t afford to care for.
But for all the power of nature, man-made factors very likely raised the death toll, which ultimately rose to tens of millions of people. At the time, India was under British colonial rule, and the historian Mike Davis, in his 2001 book “Late Victorian Holocausts,” portrays Britain as prioritizing its imperial interests by maintaining huge grain exports from India even as Indians starved.
“Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread,” Mr. Davis wrote.
Of course, there was another factor complicating the response. People at the time had no idea why the monsoon rains had failed. Scientists in the 19th century theorized a link with weakened sunspot activity.
But a far better picture emerged in the 1960s, when Jacob Bjerknes, a meteorologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, pieced together the global consequences of the feedback between the ocean and atmosphere in the Pacific. Centuries earlier, Peruvians had noticed that sometimes tropical fish would unexpectedly show up on their shores around Christmas, a phenomenon eventually named “El Niño,” or “the Christ child” in Spanish. Dr. Bjerknes made the connection: The Pacific warming that the Peruvians had spotted was, in fact, altering weather patterns around the world.
“That was the big bang” realization, said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “He opened up a new universe of study.”
By the 1980s, scientists were on a vessel in the middle of the Pacific, anchoring buoys that enabled improved monitoring of ocean temperature. Separately, researchers sought out clues for El Niño’s place in human history, studying tree ring samples, coral reefs and sailors’ logbooks, and creating a crude timeline of its spikes.
The records weren’t sharp enough to measure past events with certainty. But they have led to speculation about the role of El Niño events across history, including that an El Niño in the late 1700s might have played a role in the crop failures that contributed to uprisings in the French Revolution.
For the 1877 El Niño, the one that hit India so hard, the documentation is better, but still involves guesswork. “Working with nineteenth-century sea surface temperature data is a bit like assembling a puzzle with many missing pieces,” Boyin Huang, a NOAA oceanographer who has studied the scale of the event, wrote in an email.
El Niño events are measured by looking at temperature levels in a vast rectangular zone in the central Pacific. In a moderate El Niño, temperatures might climb, say, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above a longer-term average. But in the biggest El Niños of the past 50 years — the ones that started in 1982, 1997, and 2015 — temperatures have soared 2 degrees Celsius or more beyond the norm. Each of those events levied a global economic toll.
This year, many forecasts say the temperature could increase by an unprecedented 3 degrees Celsius. Even the 1877 El Niño, by the best estimates, didn’t have that magnitude.
“A number of the models now show a real chance for a record-setting El Niño event,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “It is still too early to know for sure.”
El Niño events typically peak in strength late in a calendar year, and then cause warmer global temperatures on land in the months that follow. As a result, many scientists predict that 2027 will be the warmest year on record.
Every El Niño is distinct. But in general, it makes for wetter conditions in some parts of the Americas while suppressing the Atlantic hurricane season. The phenomenon raises the risk of dryness in South and Southeast Asia, Australia, and southern Africa.
In India, which tends to be drier during El Niño periods, the government has already held preparatory meetings. Vimal Mishra, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, said his country did not face risks on the same scale as it did more than a century ago. “If one year the monsoon fails, we won’t see famine,” he said. He cited India’s public distribution system, which guarantees access to basic staples at subsidized prices.
But Dr. Mishra said India, like other countries, still faced risk. If there is very little rainfall, people will draw down on savings. They’ll spend less. They’ll close down businesses. During droughts, school dropout rates rise. “It has a direct impact on the growth rate of India’s economy,” he said.
Dr. Mishra has studied India’s major famines and he draws a direct line between the one from the 1870s and the preparations India is now taking. “It gives us an idea of how to be better prepared,” he said. “It shows you, this is the worst that could happen.”
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7) Uganda Says It’s Not Aware of Ebola Clinics Promised by U.S.
The State Department said it would fund up to 50 clinics in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I don’t know the ones they are talking about,” a top Ugandan official said.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Lynsey Chutel, Matthew Mpoke Bigg reported from Juba, South Sudan, May 21, 2026
Checking a traveler’s temperature at a border crossing between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Bundibugyo, Uganda, on Monday. Badru Katumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The authorities in Uganda said on Thursday that they were not aware of U.S. plans to fund treatment clinics to fight an Ebola outbreak in the region, in a sign of confusion over the global coordination of efforts to stop the virus from spreading.
The State Department said on Tuesday that it was funding up to 50 clinics and covering “associated frontline costs” in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, through the United Nations office that coordinates humanitarian affairs, as part of a broader response to the outbreak.
The outbreak, which was first identified this month in Congo’s northeastern Ituri Province, has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization.
The State Department did not say exactly where the clinics would be established. It said on Tuesday that they would be “rapidly deployed” and were meant to “strengthen outbreak containment.”
But Uganda’s health ministry said on Thursday that it had had no communication with the U.S. government about the treatment centers.
“I don’t know the ones they are talking about,” Dr. Diana Atwine, the health ministry’s permanent secretary, said in an interview. “Maybe that is their future plan. Or maybe it’s for Congo, not Uganda. We are not aware.”
The authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the U.S. announcement.
The announcement followed criticism of the Trump administration by international health experts, who have argued that cuts to foreign aid and the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development have made it harder for the W.H.O. and countries affected by Ebola to combat the outbreak.
The State Department also said this week that it was sending $23 million to Congo and Uganda that would go toward protective equipment and other resources. It was not immediately clear whether the authorities in Congo and in Uganda had received or discussed that aid.
The confusion over the U.S. announcement comes as countries are ramping up efforts to fight the outbreak, which is suspected to have caused more than 130 deaths and nearly 600 infections, according to the W.H.O.
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the public health body of the African Union, urged member states to support efforts to curb the outbreak. South Africa’s government has pledged $2.5 million. Britain said on Thursday that it had set aside 20 million pounds, or over $26 million, to support the W.H.O. and nongovernmental organizations.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday that it was sending volunteers to go door-to-door among communities in eastern Congo, providing information about the virus.
“Families are also being advised not to touch or wash the bodies of suspected Ebola victims, as this remains one of the most common routes of transmission during outbreaks,” the organization said in a statement. “On the first day of activities, Red Cross volunteers reached 645 families.”
Western Uganda borders Congo’s Ituri Province, the epicenter of the outbreak, and many people cross that frontier each day. But the authorities in Uganda have insisted that the country is safe and prepared to deal with the virus.
In a statement on X on Thursday, the chief government spokesman, Alan Kasujja, said the only person being treated for the virus in the country was a Congolese national. An additional Congolese person had died of Ebola in Uganda after coming to the country for treatment.
“No Ugandan person or person living in Uganda has Ebola,” Mr. Kasujja said.
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, said on Sunday that the government had postponed an annual Catholic festival set for June 3 that usually attracts worshipers from across the border in Congo.
Many tourists undertake treks to look at mountain gorillas in southwestern Uganda, near the borders of Congo and Rwanda. The country’s tourism board said this week that while people should observe standard hygiene practices, Uganda remained “safe, open and welcoming for tourism, business and investment.”
Musinguzi Blanshe contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.
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8) I Survived Ebola. This Is What Scares Me Most About This Outbreak.
By Craig Spencer, May 21, 2026
Dr. Spencer is an emergency doctor and a professor at Brown. He contracted Ebola in 2014 after treating patients in Guinea.
As soon as I heard about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I knew it was going to be catastrophic.
On Friday, the D.R.C. reported 246 suspected cases. Most Ebola outbreaks end before they get that big. The same day, reports emerged that someone had died of Ebola hundreds of miles away in Kampala, Uganda’s most populous city. Less than a week after it was first declared, this is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak in history.
I’ve seen Ebola up close. I got it while treating patients in West Africa in 2014. I know how destructive the disease can be — and how unprepared we are for its return.
After the 2014 outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people, the world strengthened systems to catch and contain Ebola outbreaks early. Much of that infrastructure — surveillance networks, rapid response teams and diplomatic partnerships — has been dismantled over the past year, as the United States abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.
Ebola is often called a disease of compassion because it finds its victims among the people who stay close when loved ones or their patients fall ill. This means parents taking care of their sick children, family members who wash the bodies of their dead relatives and health care providers who take care of patients at the most contagious stage of their illness. When I was working in Guinea, I admitted seven members of one family into our Ebola treatment unit. Even as the parents battled Ebola, they spent all day taking care of their children. In the end, only the parents survived.
If the outbreak were caused by the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, we’d now be able to provide a recently developed vaccine to family members of infected patients and to health care workers. But we have no effective treatments or vaccines for the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola driving the current outbreak.
We’ll need to rely on bread-and-butter outbreak response measures, like contact tracing, isolation and community support. These are hard to carry out under ideal conditions. And the eastern part of Congo, where this outbreak is concentrated, is anything but ideal. Armed conflict has forced millions from their homes and left many health facilities damaged or destroyed. An Ebola outbreak in the region in 2018 took nearly two years to contain.
This time around, we have far less capacity to respond. In the first weeks of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk gleefully boasted about feeding the United States Agency for International Development into a “wood chipper.” The dismantling of U.S. foreign aid left clinics, community health workers and humanitarian organizations that formed the backbone of health care across eastern Congo without crucial funding.
Slashed alongside the agency was a specialized rapid response team — dozens of experts, including people with direct Ebola response experience, trained and ready to deploy for exactly this kind of moment. During previous Ebola outbreaks, these teams would fund efforts to train communities on safer burial practices to limit spread from highly contagious corpses and set up airport screening to prevent symptomatic travelers from boarding planes.
At a cabinet meeting weeks after his wood-chipper post, as an Ebola outbreak was developing in Uganda, Mr. Musk sheepishly admitted, “one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola and Ebola prevention,” but assured everyone that the funding had been restored.
We’re already seeing the fallout of these cuts. The New York Times reported that the delay in detecting the virus stemmed in part from the fact that samples had been transported to a lab in Kinshasa at the wrong temperature, something U.S.A.I.D. would have previously overseen. By the time U.S. officials learned of the outbreak, it had been nearly a month since the first death.
In his first term, President Trump dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security team, put in place after the 2014 Ebola epidemic, and now, in his second term, he has hollowed out the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which helps coordinate early response and contact tracing in a crisis like this — lost a quarter of its staff members in the past year and has had no permanent director for 15 of the last 16 months.
In 2015, after surviving Ebola, I returned to Guinea with Doctors Without Borders. I distinctly remember C.D.C. and World Health Organization colleagues working side by side, tracking the outbreak and chasing down new cases. Such collaboration would be much more difficult today; ever since the Trump administration withdrew from the W.H.O., C.D.C. staff members have been barred from working with the organization.
The United States cannot quickly reverse our abdication of leadership on the global health stage. But we can bolster our response to this crisis. There should be a steadfast commitment to working closely and coordinating with essential partners like the W.H.O. We need to mobilize funding and experts, speed up the development of new treatments, and increase resources for protective equipment and expanded testing.
I’ve responded to many outbreaks and conflicts, but treating Ebola patients was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Ebola is a cruel and horrific disease. I’d often speak to patients in the morning and come back in the afternoon to find them dead. In 2014 I treated two brothers, just 6 and 8 years old. After their mother died, their grandfather brought them to our treatment center. When I first met them, they were rambunctious and relentlessly smiling. We found them toys to play with, and every day I encouraged them to eat, drink and rest. Over the next week, both rapidly declined. I was in their room when they died. Weeks later, when I was in the hospital with Ebola myself, I thought of them every day. And 12 years later, I still start crying as I think about losing them.
Craig Spencer is an emergency medicine physician and an associate professor at the Brown University School of Public Health, where he is an affiliated faculty member of the Pandemic Center. He is also a faculty fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
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9) Stocks Rise, Oil Prices Wobble on Impasse Over Reopening Strait of Hormuz
By The New York Times, May 22, 2026
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz last month. Reuters
Stocks rose and oil prices fluctuated on Friday, with few signs of concrete progress in talks to establish a peace deal between the United States and Iran.
Nearly three months since the fighting began, disagreements remain over the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile and reports that Iran and Oman may impose transit fees on vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump administration has warned against charging ships for passing through the strait, a critical shipping lane for oil and gas.
Under a fragile cease-fire, negotiations over the points of an enduring peace agreement appear far from settled.
Oil prices waver.
· The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, nudged higher to around than $103 a barrel.
· West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, inched lower to around $96 a barrel.
Price of Brent crude oil
How much the international benchmark costs
Stocks gain.
· The S&P 500 rose 0.5 percent as stocks resumed trading in the United States on Friday. The index is on course for its eighth straight week of gains.
· Stocks in Asia, where countries import vast quantities of oil and gas, posted gains in most major markets. Japan’s Nikkei 225 and stocks in Taiwan rose more than 2 percent. Markets in mainland China, Hong Kong and South Korea were all higher.
· In Europe, stocks rallied. The Stoxx 600, a broad-index that tracks the region’s largest companies, gained 0.8 percent.
S&P 500 index
How stocks are trading in the United States
The bond sell-off subsides.
· The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield moderated somewhat, slipping to 4.54 percent on Friday. That was a small reversal after an extended rise that pushed yields to two-decade highs this week. The 10-year yield was around 4 percent before the war started.
· The run-up in yields has fed through to a wide range of loans, including mortgage rates. This week, the average for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage hit 6.51 percent, the highest rate since August, casting a chill on the U.S. housing market.
U.S. 10-Year Treasury Yield
Gasoline prices ticked lower.
· Gas prices fell by a penny on Friday, to a national average of $4.55 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. The increase has raised the cost for drivers by more than 50 percent since the war began.
· Gas prices don’t move in lock step with crude, usually trailing increases or drops by a few days.
· The average price of diesel also dropped by a cent to $5.65 on Friday, up 50 percent since the start of the war.
What they are saying: ‘What happens in Hormuz won’t stay in Hormuz’
· Analysts at S&P Global Ratings said that they assume the disruptions to traffic in the Strait of Hormuz “will ease in the second half of the year.” Still, the ripple effects will continue to be felt around the world for a long time — or, as they put it, “what happens in Hormuz won’t stay in Hormuz.”
· Even after a reopening, “later and lower volumes” of energy supplies traveling through the strait could put upward pressure on oil prices, which the analysts expect to average around $100 per barrel through the end of the year. Damage to oil infrastructure may also limit production beyond 2026, they note, resulting in “more persistent price pressures and deeper economic disruptions.”
· Instead of creating “clear winners and losers,” the energy shock has highlighted “varying levels of vulnerability” among the world’s economies, the analysts concluded, with implications for debts, deficits and credit ratings.
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10) With Deals Booming and Regulations Lightened, Bankers Are Back on Top
They played second fiddle to private equity and hedge funds for years, but 2026 is shaping up to be “the year of the bank,” one consultant said.
By Rob Copeland, May 22, 2026
“Banks are insulated from many current macroeconomic pressures, increasingly catering to richer customers, whose wealth is largely tied up in a stock market that keeps hitting records despite the fighting in the Middle East.”
It is a golden moment for banks.
Trading profits are at record highs, and so are employee bonuses. Mergers, acquisitions and other deals are piling up at the second-fastest pace in at least a decade, producing billions of dollars in fees. And after they operated for nearly two decades in what one banker described as a regulatory “straitjacket,” the Trump administration is making it easier for banks to expand and take more risks.
“The stars are aligning for banks in a way that hasn’t been seen in multiple decades,” Citi analysts wrote in a research note this month.
The good times for banks represent a flip of fortunes. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street’s biggest paydays have been earned by private equity and private credit firms, making often high-risk investments with the promise of high returns.
Lately, many of those private equity firms have struggled to raise money as the industry has delivered lackluster investment returns. At the recent Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, a confab popular with the private equity set, the chief executive of one giant investment firm compared the vibe, with some hyperbole, to the final days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
It’s also a tenuous time for many international businesses, with airlines going bankrupt, global ship traffic choked, inflation on the rise and artificial intelligence roiling industries.
Many banks, by contrast, have followed the trajectory of Citizens Bank, a once sleepy Providence, R.I., institution that has been expanding rapidly, and seen its share price rise by more than 50 percent over the past year.
“I feel great,” said Bruce Van Saun, Citizen Bank’s chairman and chief executive.
Citizens has been acquiring smaller specialist firms that are helping it to capitalize on a Trump-encouraged boom in corporate deal making, hiring up swaths of financial advisers that cater to the global well-to-do and opening up branches in wealthy neighborhoods.
Banks are insulated from many current macroeconomic pressures, increasingly catering to richer customers, whose wealth is largely tied up in a stock market that keeps hitting records despite the fighting in the Middle East.
In fact, the swings in oil prices and volatility in other markets caused by the war are benefiting the banks’ trading volumes, which brings in more fees. In the first quarter alone, nearly $50 billion in trading revenue flowed to the six biggest banks in America, including JPMorgan Chase and Citi, a record high.
“It’s interesting to see,” Matthieu Wiltz, co-chief executive officer for JPMorgan in Europe, Middle East and Africa, recently told Bloomberg Television, “that, for I think the first time, we have such a big conflict with limited impact on the market.”
Last week, JPMorgan announced that balances in its “prime brokerage,” which executes trades for wealthy clients, were at an all-time high.
Deals are also making a comeback after several sluggish years during the Biden administration, when mergers and acquisitions came under intense antitrust scrutiny. Big-money corporate deals are booming, as the Trump administration waves through company tie-ups and, increasingly, encourages them directly.
And after a yearslong fallow stretch for initial public offerings — the business of listing privately held companies on stock exchanges — banks are salivating at the prospect of billions of dollars in commissions from offering shares in private companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the A.I. giants Anthropic and OpenAI.
The good times are encouraging the newest generation of bankers. In past years, said Mr. Van Saun, the Citizens chief executive, new college graduates would join banks and almost immediately begin applying for jobs elsewhere — a pattern that became known as “two and out,” a reference to the mass resignations by junior bankers after two years. Often, those young bankers were taking jobs at hedge funds, at technology firms, in venture capital or in pretty much any other career more exciting or remunerative.
But now many young bankers are taking a look at what Mr. Van Saun calls “the travails” outside banking and increasingly staying put.
Banker pay is rising, too. Alan Johnson, founder of a namesake Wall Street pay consultancy, projects that investment bank employee bonuses this year will be 10 to 20 percent higher than in 2025, when New York’s finance set pulled in $49.2 billion in collective bonuses, with securities industry employees earning an extra $246,900 on average.
Mr. Johnson contrasted the imminent banker windfall with private equity pay, which he compared in many instances to “a lottery ticket that won’t be worth anything.”
“It is the year of the bank,” he said.
Although bankers are ebullient, that could change again.
One generator of the banks’ record profits are layoffs and attrition brought on by increasing uses of A.I. Last week, Goldman Sachs’s president predicted in a television interview that he would replace his firm’s “human assembly line” with digital agents.
And much of the wind behind the banking industry can be traced to ever-fickle Washington, where securities enforcers have dialed back scrutiny of everything from antitrust issues to crypto.
The Federal Reserve, the main bank regulator, has proposed easing the annual “stress tests” that banks are required to undergo. It also suggested that a core safety backstop, known as capital requirements, be slashed by around 5 percent for the largest banks and more for smaller ones. Even that modest change could mean billions more in lending.
Bank executives say that would free them up to make more loans — to individuals through mortgages and credit cards, to other Wall Street firms in areas like private credit or to finance sweeping construction projects like A.I. data centers.
But less regulatory scrutiny necessarily requires faith that the industry will police itself, noted Anat R. Admati, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who co-wrote a book warning of escalating problems in the banking system since the financial crisis.
“I don’t think anyone has a clue how much risk is being taken,” she said.
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11) Here’s the Easy Way to Tax the Rich
By Zachary Liscow, May 22, 2026
Mr. Liscow is a professor at Yale Law School.
The United States is seeing an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top and a worsening national debt. For many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move.
Ask tax policy experts how to do this, and you will often hear novel proposals to curb the many intricate ways the rich make and hide their money: A wealth tax. A tax on unrealized gains. A tax on the loans that billionaires take against their stock. These ideas, now common in progressive tax thinking, come with serious catches, legal or arithmetical. The tax code has structural flaws, and many of the ideas would be good in theory. But pursuing them could result in little or no new revenue for the government.
The boring truth is that Congress can accomplish a lot simply by raising the rates of the taxes already on the books.
Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has proposed a 2 percent annual levy on fortunes above $50 million, rising to 3 percent on those over $1 billion. There are serious constitutional and policy arguments for this idea, but the Supreme Court’s current members would probably strike it down. (A California proposal for a state-level wealth tax would not face the same legal barriers, but it would be a partial response to problems that are national in scale.)
Then there are proposals for a “mark to market” tax, which would tax unrealized capital gains — the appreciation in the paper value of assets such as stocks — every year, not just when an asset is sold. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, has proposed a billionaire income tax along these lines. Such a tax would raise a lot of money for the Treasury. But it faces its own constitutional hurdles. The Supreme Court has left the legal status of unrealized-gains taxes deliberately unresolved, and a mark-to-market tax’s chances at the court would be, at best, 50-50. Despite the proposal’s many appeals, building a generation of fiscal policy on a coin flip would be risky.
Another idea is imposing a borrowing tax, a policy aimed directly at the widely criticized “buy, borrow, die” loophole. The loophole allows the rich to take loans against their portfolios and use the money to finance glamorous lives. They pay no capital gains tax because they avoid selling the assets — often stock that has risen in value — that they use as collateral for the borrowing that sustains their lifestyles. When they die, they pass on their assets to their heirs, who, because of the “stepped-up basis” loophole in inheritance law, can avoid paying capital gains taxes even if they sell those assets. A borrowing tax would discourage the buy, borrow, die strategy and restore some fairness to the tax code. It’s a policy I like — I proposed my own version of it.
Except the wealthy are not using the buy, borrow, die loophole all that much. In work with Edward Fox of the University of Michigan, I looked at two decades of data measuring how much the rich actually borrow. The top 1 percent borrow an amount equal to roughly 2 percent of their economic income each year — defined broadly to include the gains on stocks they haven’t sold. Their unrealized gains over the same period were about 20 times that amount. At current tax rates, imposing a borrowing tax would raise about $50 billion over 10 years — a paltry number relative to the size of the federal budget. It’s just not where the money is.
Congress has a simpler, tried-and-true tax policy to choose from: raising the rates.
Current taxes already reach most of the rich’s economic income, which includes unrealized capital gains. The existing income tax captures about 60 percent of the top 1 percent’s economic income and roughly 71 percent after adjusting for inflation. Even for the top 0.1 percent, about 60 percent is taxed, adjusted for inflation.
Measured this way, the ultrarich mostly aren’t escaping the tax system through exotic loopholes. They mostly increase their fortunes with and spend regular taxable income — salaries, dividends, interest, business profits, realized capital gains — and they earn a lot of it.
This means the most powerful lever is also the simplest one. Restore the top marginal ordinary income tax rate to its pre-2017 level of 39.6 percent — which, but for President Trump’s tax cuts, would have applied to income over $546,750 this year. And raise the (much lower) top capital-gains rate. Increasing these rates would generate hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade. That is much more than a borrowing tax could plausibly raise, and without the legal risk that would come with a wealth tax or a mark-to-market tax.
Yes, higher rates can change people’s behavior, encouraging some to find ways to avoid paying more in income taxes. But revenue estimates already consider this effect.
In addition, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent toward the 35 percent it had been set at historically would add hundreds of billions in revenue for the government. Congress could bring in even more by ending the step-up basis rule, which allows heirs to inherit assets and owe nothing in capital gains taxes on the amount those assets have appreciated since they were purchased.
None of this would require defending untested constitutional theories or imposing complex asset valuation systems. We’ve done almost all of it before. True, raising rates is politically hard. But the other options on this list would arguably be harder to get through Congress, for an uncertain or modest payoff. A wealth tax that gets struck down or a mark-to-market regime tied up in years of litigation would raise zero dollars any time soon. A borrowing tax would raise some money but not much.
Public outrage at billionaire tax dodging is understandable. But the country cannot afford to spend huge amounts of political capital to pass experimental tax policy that is based on exaggerated stories about how the ultrawealthy avoid paying taxes or on wishful thinking about what the current courts will allow. Raising the rates — the simple, boring answer — is where the real money lies.
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12) There’s a Way to Stop Trump’s I.R.S. Slush Fund
By Jamie Raskin, May 22, 2026
Mr. Raskin, a Democrat, represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
These days it takes a spectacular burst of corruption to get the attention of our scandal-weary nation, but President Trump and his administration have managed, once again, to transfix Americans by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund in the Department of Justice that will undoubtedly be used to line the pockets of Mr. Trump’s partisans and foot soldiers — with your tax dollars.
The creation of this fund is a stupefying feat of self-dealing — part of a “settlement agreement” between the Department of the Treasury, which Mr. Trump controls, and the plaintiffs — Mr. Trump, two of his sons and their family business — who sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. It will very likely result in an undeserved windfall to a legion of Jan. 6 rioters who have already unjustly received pardons from Mr. Trump.
Every part of this farce is an affront to the Constitution. It usurps both the exclusive power of Congress to legislate programs and spend money and the power of the courts to decide specific cases and controversies.
It is, quite simply, a scam.
Only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” But Mr. Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seem to think they can conjure this giant slush fund into being without congressional approval.
Further, Article III, Section 1 states that the “judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Yet the settlement took Mr. Trump’s case out of the hands of the courts. And it calls for oversight by a five-member board, appointed by Mr. Blanche and whose members Mr. Trump can dismiss on a whim. Even if this fund were legitimate, that kind of setup wouldn’t be for Mr. Blanche to decide. Congress has never established a court, tribunal or board to hear pleas from people who believe they are victims of government “weaponization,” much less a fund almost certainly meant to reward supporters and allies of the president who feel they were wronged simply because their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were prosecuted.
No matter what you think about the events of Jan. 6, hundreds of rioters indisputably broke the law that day when they stormed the Capitol trying to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and the peaceful transfer of power.
As regrettable as it is that most of the rioters were pardoned, there’s no denying that as president, Mr. Trump has that power. But the same Constitution giving him that power also says that “neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection, and pardon or no pardon, no one can legally be compensated for taking part in it.
As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, a cardinal precept of our legal system is that “no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Here, Mr. Trump’s administration “settled” a case that he brought, effectively making him the judge in his own case. He not only concocted the fund, but his Justice Department threw in a sweetener: shielding him and his sons from audits of any tax returns they have already filed.
The $1.776 billion figure is obviously meant to invoke the year of our founding. But go back and read the Declaration of Independence, which includes a long list of accusations directed at George III. Among them is the charge that the British king “has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
And here’s the kicker: The nearly $1.8 billion will come from the Justice Department’s Judgment Fund, a fund created by Congress that the administration has already been abusing. The Judgment Fund was set up to allow the federal government to efficiently and promptly pay for final court judgments and proper legal settlements against the United States — a process that had once been enormously time-consuming and burdensome.
For 70 years, the Judgment Fund has served its original essential purpose of settling valid, good-faith claims: Two years ago, it paid out almost $140 million to dozens of young women and girls to resolve claims that the F.B.I. had failed to protect them from the actions of the serial predator Larry Nassar.
But Mr. Trump has treated this fund as a political piggy bank.
His Justice Department agreed to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle its wrongful death suit against the government. Ms. Babbitt was a Jan. 6 rioter who was fatally shot that day at the Capitol. Her death was certainly a tragedy, but the suit was without merit. Meanwhile, not a single dollar from the fund went to the families of the police officers wounded and injured on Jan. 6, nor to the families of several who died in the wake of the violence.
In March, the department agreed to pay around $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, for a case that had been dismissed.
In April, the department announced another million-dollar settlement, this time with Carter Page, a former adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mr. Page’s lawsuit contended that he had been unlawfully surveilled by the F.B.I. during its investigation of contacts between the campaign and Russia’s government. A federal judge dismissed his lawsuit in 2022 on statute of limitations grounds.
Around 400 Jan. 6 rioters have already filed lawsuits under the Federal Tort Claims Act, with most seeking $1 million to $10 million. Another group of rioters — including Proud Boys convicted of assaulting police officers — filed a class action demanding over $18 million, claiming that officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 caused them injuries. And five Proud Boys convicted of felonies including seditious conspiracy have filed a separate $100 million lawsuit. No one should be surprised if their cases wind up being swiftly “settled” via the president’s new MAGA gravy train.
But the “weaponization” fund is a rip-off on an unimaginably larger scale. This week, I introduced legislation to put a stop to this. It would bar the federal government from paying out monetary settlements to sitting presidents. It would also prohibit settlement payments for claims involving investigations or prosecutions related to Jan. 6 or foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Members of Congress must act to reassert the exclusive power that the Constitution vests in the legislative branch — or else we will have gone a step further toward making Mr. Trump a king.
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13) The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes
By Nikole Hannah-Jones, May 22, 2026
Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan
On May 7, amid the din of protesters, Tennessee’s Republican-majority legislature met to vote on a bill that would eliminate the state’s lone majority-Black and Democratic House district, divvying its voters up between three heavily white ones. Outraged, State Representative Justin Jones of Nashville stood in the hallway of the State Capitol and set afire a paper replica of the Confederate battle flag. The words “We will not go back” were printed along the top.
But going back is precisely what the legislature voted to do, as Tennessee became the first of the former Confederate states to create and approve new congressional maps since the Supreme Court’s recent decision to eviscerate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
A week and a day before the Tennessee vote, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, had finally achieved the right’s decades-long goal of nullifying what’s considered the most successful civil rights law in our nation’s ignoble racial history. After upholding unrestrained partisan gerrymandering in other recent decisions, the court now determined that creating congressional maps that sought to ensure political representation for racial minorities violated the Constitution.
For students of history, what Tennessee did on May 7 felt like a premonition. One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. As the historian Manisha Sinha writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” Tennessee “provided a template to other Southern states” for how to “overthrow Reconstruction.” Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out.
It was not just Tennessee that echoed history, but the Supreme Court as well. The case that felled the Voting Rights Act was Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana is the state where in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, another superlatively conservative Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to license segregation, setting off a race across the South to strip Black people of the franchise and codify their second-class citizenship.
The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of suspending the state’s U.S. House primary — in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots — so legislators could redraw the election maps. Though one in three Louisiana residents is Black, Republicans intend to jettison at least one of two Black-majority districts. “Well, the failed narrative is actually that people in Louisiana are racist,” Landry insisted, “that basically we won’t elect Black people. I mean, I disagree with that.” In fact, since the Plessy era, Louisiana has sent only four Black people to Congress, and a Black candidate has never won in a white district there.
Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And the governor of Mississippi — which has just a single Black U.S. representative despite having the nation’s highest percentage of Black residents, at 38 percent — announced his intent to do the same.
Voting and civil rights experts warn that America now sits at a familiar precipice. The Voting Rights Act helped transform the South: In 1965, the region had not a single Black representative in the U.S. Congress; today, it has 31. Now, Black representation may once again disappear in the South, where more than half of Black Americans live. This could lead to the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction. And just like then, what is at stake is no less than American democracy itself.
In 1901, Representative George Henry White of North Carolina delivered a farewell speech for his entire race to the U.S. House. White, a Howard University graduate whose mother was most likely born into slavery, was elected in 1896. By the time he left office, he was the last of a cadre of Black men who had, during Reconstruction, integrated Congress for the first time.
As White looked out across a now all-white Congress, he said he spoke on behalf of “an outraged, heartbroken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people — rising people, full of potential force.” His departure might be Black people’s “temporary farewell to the American Congress,” he said, but “phoenixlike, he will rise up some day and come again.” It took more than half a century.
The Reconstruction era that White was elegizing had been snuffed out with dizzying speed.
It began in the wake of the Civil War as new constitutional amendments transformed the South, then home to nearly the entire U.S. Black population. The 14th Amendment ensured legal equality for the formerly enslaved, and the 15th Amendment guaranteed Black men the vote. Black men who had been enslaved, or were born to parents who had been enslaved, flocked to the party of Lincoln, casting ballots and taking political office. Together, Black and white Republicans created representative governments that passed the most progressive legislation in the region’s history — establishing public education, investing in public infrastructure and social programs, and initiating land reform and labor protections.
But former Confederates, led by the Southern plantation oligarchy and consolidated in the pro-slavery Democratic Party, never accepted interracial democracy. Many white Southerners engaged in mass killings, assassinations, electoral fraud, terrorism and coups to overthrow it.
At first, the Republican Party tried to protect democracy. President Ulysses S. Grant created the Department of Justice in 1870, expanding the federal government’s ability to enforce Black Americans’ civil rights. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts, what Sinha calls the nation’s first federal hate-crime laws, to guard against the wanton violence of white supremacists. The laws allowed federal officials to supervise elections in towns where white supremacists were interfering and to aggressively prosecute the Klan.
But over the next two decades, starting in 1876, the all-white Supreme Court thwarted the federal government’s attempts to enforce equality. It struck down all or part of the Enforcement Acts; it nullified the part of a law that mandated punishing state and local officials who worked to deny Black voters the franchise; it asserted that the 15th Amendment did not guarantee Black people the right to vote, but only prohibited states from explicitly using race to discriminate against voters.
Then the court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which had outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. Using the same logic that today’s Supreme Court did when it gutted the Voting Rights Act, the court determined, a mere 18 years after the abolishment of slavery, that “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when” Black Americans must no longer “be the special favorite of the laws.”
White Southern officials, following the road map the court laid out for them, immediately adopted so-called race-neutral tools that could disenfranchise Black voters without ever mentioning race. They implemented poll taxes and grandfather clauses and literacy exams. And because nearly all Black Southern voters identified with the pro-civil-rights Republicans, and nearly all white Southern voters aligned with the Democrats, white racists knew they could attack Black citizenship by dismantling the Republican Party. They used partisan gerrymandering to dilute Black voting power and eliminate Black seats.
After a while, white politicians in the North grew tired of trying to enforce Black Americans’ rights, and Northern business interests saw opportunity in the South’s exploitable Black (and poor white) labor. A political deal was struck that ended Reconstruction in 1877 and along with it any federal enforcement of Black political rights.
With the assent of the Supreme Court and the ambivalence of the federal government, the South increasingly became, once again, a region with one-party, white-only and often minority rule.
White Southerners had their own name for the end of Reconstruction: Redemption. America would not see another Black man in Congress for nearly 30 years. And it would take an additional 41 years after that before a Black person represented the South again.
Black Americans would spend nearly a century after Reconstruction’s demise fighting and dying to restore the rights they had lost, especially the right that secures all others: voting. Most Americans know the culmination of this effort as the civil rights movement, which led to the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965 and 1968. But many scholars also describe this period as the start of the Second Reconstruction. If that’s the case, we may be witnessing the Second Redemption.
Today’s Supreme Court has thrown open the door for this, using the same logic as before — that efforts to ensure Black political representation illegally discriminate against white Americans.
A century and a half ago, Southern state legislatures knew partisan gerrymandering could provide cover for racist gerrymandering. While the party alignments are now reversed, the racial divide remains. “As long as Black folks have voted, there has been a party that’s basically pro-civil-rights and one that’s anti-civil-rights,” Theodore Johnson, a scholar of Black electoral politics and senior adviser at New America, told me. “Black folks have voted mostly uniformly against the party against civil rights. Most white people vote for the anti-civil-rights party.”
Since the end of Barack Obama’s second term as the nation’s first Black president, the racial partisan divide has only intensified, with Southern white voters moving even more fully into the Republican Party. White conservative politicians deeply understand this, though the court treats it as incidental.
The parallels to Reconstruction and Redemption are not perfect but they are conspicuous, the Yale historian David Blight told me. “You could argue here in big terms that Trumpism, in fact, that the modern conservative movement, has been a similar reaction to the modern civil rights revolution,” he said. Today’s rollback of civil rights relies largely on legal machinations rather than violence, but to Blight, its goal is no less radical.
Janai Nelson, who as president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund argued the Callais case before the Supreme Court, told me that the court had greenlit a sort of wink-and-nod colorblindness, where majority-Black districts are automatically suspect but a legislative body can create voting maps where no Black people are elected, and as long as they do not say they are doing that for racist reasons, the Constitution is fine with that. And it is not just in the South that Black representation is imperiled. Illinois’s Democrat-controlled State Senate was planning to put forward a constitutional amendment to protect so-called majority-minority districts. After the Louisiana v. Callais ruling, it halted the effort.
The consequences for Black representation, in Congress and state legislatures, but also on school boards and county commissions and in judgeships, could be catastrophic — not just for Black Americans but for everyone.
Black rights movements have always been democratizing movements, and history shows this country cannot deny one and maintain the other. When Redeemers stripped Black Americans of their franchise and political representation, white Southerners who did not align with the Democratic Party also lost the ability to choose their leaders. These all-white conservative governments then decreased funding for public education and public services, implemented regressive tax systems that favored the elite and helped crush labor movements.
“It needs to be emphasized again and again: What is happening is an assault on democracy, and they’re using the easiest vector, which is anti-Black racism, because it’s the easiest thing you could do, the laziest thing you can do,” Nelson said. “They are cementing absolute minority control because they do not represent a majority of this country. And when they — if they — get away with the heist, we will be locked out of multiracial democracy for at least a generation.”
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14) In West Bank, Latest Victim of Israeli Settler Violence Shocks in a New Way
A video of a Palestinian family’s dog being savagely beaten has spread widely in the days after the attack.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Atara in the West Bank, May 22, 2026
A dog being beaten by a settler in the West Bank village of Atara in May. Credit...Abu Rejalah family
Cruelty has become commonplace in the West Bank, where extremist Israeli settlers beat and shoot Palestinians, steal their sheep, uproot their olive groves and torch cars and homes. The settlers, outlaws in a multitude of ways, seldom face consequences for their actions.
But even for Palestinians living under the constant threat of being attacked, some violence retains the capacity to shock.
That was the case when a video went viral that showed a settler menacing a year-and-a-half-old dog with a club in each fist — and swinging hard, beating her over the head.
In the video, the dog, a Belgian Malinois named Lucy, squeals in pain and tries to scramble away. But she had been chained to an olive tree to keep her in the shade on a hot afternoon.
What follows, recorded by the dog’s owners, a Palestinian family in the village of Atara, is extremely difficult to watch, and to describe.
Until recently, the violence in Atara had followed a more typical playbook, aimed at driving Palestinians to flee for safety — abandoning their homes, pastures and farmlands to the encroaching settlers, so that Arab spaces shrink and Jewish spaces expand.
A group of young settlers established an illegal outpost, called Kfar Tarfon, last summer about three-quarters of a mile from the Abu Rejalah family’s home in hilly Atara, north of Ramallah.
They pelted Palestinians’ cars with stones along the main road into town, residents said. They harassed a Bedouin sheep farmer on the edge of Atara until he gave up and moved. Residents of the village said they felt too afraid last fall to harvest hundreds of olive trees just downhill from the outpost.
Then the settlers took an interest in the Abu Rejalah family, which is growing, and not fleeing, as the seven sons of Hassan Abu Rejalah, 50, begin to marry and have children of their own. Their expanding home, a three-story construction site, is visible from Kfar Tarfon across a small valley.
The settlers herded their sheep through the family’s small hillside plot, destroying crops, according to Mr. Abu Rejalah, two of his sons and other members of their extended family. They drove up to the family’s doorstep as if they owned the place, stealing harvested vegetables and disabling a driveway gate in plain view of surveillance cameras.
And they accused two members of the family of attacking them, according to Mr. Abu Rejalah. The family said the accusation was false. On Jan. 9, Israeli soldiers arrested his sons Ibrahim, 31, and Daoud, 26, who were beaten by soldiers, taken to an Israeli police station, imprisoned in a military prison for five days and then released without being charged, Ibrahim and his father said.
Asked about the arrests, the Israeli military confirmed that soldiers had detained Palestinians after an Israeli civilian reported that they had thrown stones at him. It did not address whether the Palestinians had been beaten. It said they were turned over to the police, who did not respond to questions about the incident.
Such experiences are all too familiar to Palestinians across the West Bank.
What was unusual was the cruelty to animals.
Last fall, a neighbor of the Abu Rejalahs’ who lives closer to the settlers’ outpost discovered a dead donkey hanging from one of his olive trees, residents said. It was cited as one of the reasons that villagers forsook the yearly olive harvest, a fixture of Palestinian life and important revenue source.
Members of the Abu Rejalah family said that on Feb. 18, they discovered a settler grazing his sheep on their property and throwing stones at another dog, Angel, a part-Malinois mixed breed. Two days later, the dog died from his wounds.
No one photographed that attack, but on May 14, when a lanky settler showed up at the family’s home and threw a stone at a window, Ibrahim recorded video from inside the house. He also called the Israeli police and Palestinian security services. Israeli soldiers soon arrived, he said, and sent the man away.
Ibrahim said that the Israeli and Palestinian officers had cautioned him: “As long as they’re around, don’t go outside.”
The same settler — whom the police said Thursday that they had identified — returned the next day at around 6 p.m. No one went outside. Two family members took out their cellphones and pressed record.
In the videos, which have been verified by The New York Times, the young man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, holds a wooden club and is accompanied by two white dogs of his own. He paces back and forth, scanning the windows of the house. Then he walks down to the olive tree to which Lucy is chained. Nearby, another dog, Cheetah, not on a chain, is keeping her company.
The man picks up a grapefruit-size rock and throws it at one of the dogs. Cheetah, bloodied, runs away. Lucy cannot.
The man, now holding a club in each hand, begins to beat her, hard.
The dog tries to put the tree between herself and the man. But he reaches around the tree to strike her. Seeing her wounded, he moves in.
He pummels her head, swinging both clubs. Once. Twice. Only on at least the 17th double-blow does the dog collapse.
The attacker doesn’t stop. He beats her nine more times.
Ibrahim Abu Rejalah said he called the Israeli police while the attack was still underway and was told that soldiers would be sent immediately. He said that police and soldiers only showed up days later, on Sunday.
Asked about the case, the Israeli police said in a statement on Thursday that it only learned of the incident after video of the attack went viral. It said its investigation had been “intensive,” and called on the attacker to “turn himself in, as the long arm of the police will reach him.”
In its own statement, the Israeli military added that Kfar Tarfon was an “illegal outpost” and was “expected to be evacuated.”
At the settlers’ outpost on Tuesday, two men approached by Times reporters both refused to comment.
“There’s nothing for you here,” one said in Hebrew.
When shown a still image from the video of the attack on the dog and asked to identify the attacker, the man said nothing and walked away.
The dog survived, somehow. Her skull was fractured in only two places, beneath a 10-centimeter gash, said Dr. Ashraf Shiban, a veterinarian in Rama, in northern Israel. Her treatment is being paid for by an Israeli animal-rescue group.
The dog was blinded in her left eye, but Dr. Shiban said Wednesday that she was already eating again. In time, he said, she should recover.
Members of the Abu Rejalah family said they feared further attacks from the Kfar Tarfon settlers, particularly now that they have spoken up publicly. They expressed little confidence that the attacker would be punished.
But they seemed just as disbelieving that the attack had even occurred in the first place.
“I worked for years inside Israel,” said Hassan Abu Rejalah. “Every house has a pet, a dog or a cat. They love pets.
“What would make them do such a thing, if not to scare off people?”
Fatima AbdulKarim, James McManagan and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
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15) ‘A Pyramid of Hate’: Why Racial and Religious Attacks Are Rising in Britain
Islamophobic, antisemitic and racist crimes are being fueled by online disinformation, global instability and divisive political rhetoric, experts say.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, May 22, 2026
Outside a mosque in Peacehaven, England, after an arson attack in October. Credit...Jamie Lashmar/Press Assocation, via Getty Images
On a cold October night in Walsall, England, last year, John Ashby followed a British Indian woman off a bus, broke into her house and then brutally raped and beat her.
During the attack, Mr. Ashby, 32, told the woman, “You are a Muslim, I know” — though she was, in fact, Sikh — and he ordered her to perform acts to degrade the Islamic faith, prosecutors said at his sentencing last month. Mr. Ashby pleaded guilty to rape, to religiously aggravated assault and to other crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.
The assault was one of a rising number of racial and religious attacks in recent years in Britain, where police data shows that antisemitic, anti-Muslim and racially motivated offenses have all increased. That reflects a broader trend in Europe, where countries including Spain have experienced anti-migrant riots and a recent election in France became a flashpoint for racial tensions.
Chief Constable Mark Hobrough, who leads the British police’s efforts to tackle hate crime, said in an interview that he thinks the problem has been fueled in part by online disinformation, combined with global instability and increasingly divisive political rhetoric.
He “passionately believes” in freedom of expression, he said, but warned of a “pyramid of hate” in which online vitriol and incitement “generate an acceptance” for real-world abuse.
Among recent attacks, a neo-Nazi teenager attempted to behead an Iranian Kurdish immigrant with an ax outside a barbershop in Bristol, southwestern England, in August. In another, also in Bristol, a 9-year-old girl was shot with an air gun in September in what the police said was a racially motivated assault. In October, a man who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State attacked a synagogue in Manchester, in northwestern England, leading to the deaths of two Jewish men. Two days later, an arson attack was carried out on a mosque in Peacehaven, on the southern English coast.
Last month, two Jews were stabbed in Golders Green, North London, and this week, a Jewish man in the same area said that he was kicked and beaten by a group of men who asked, “Are you Jewish?”
Religiously motivated crimes in England and Wales rose above 10,000 in the year ending March 2025, the latest period available. Almost 4,500 of those offenses targeted Muslims, while about 2,900 targeted Jews. (The smaller Jewish population in Britain means that equates to a far higher proportional rate.)
Racial hate crime also rose by 6 percent year on year, according to other government figures, with South Asian and Black people the most likely to be targeted.
Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a research organization in London that conducts polling on public attitudes, said that there had been a “significant change in the atmosphere” of how Britons talk about race over the past three years.
Mr. Katwala said that a lot of progress against overt racism and racial attacks was made in Britain during and after the 1990s, when the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black teenager in London, galvanized efforts to combat prejudice across society.
But he said that “strong social norms” — the consensus around what kind of language and behavior is acceptable in mainstream society — were now being undermined and that racists were becoming more “disinhibited” both in person and online.
Changes to content moderation policies on the social media site X after Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022 had contributed to an increase in the “visibility and the normalization of overt racial slurs,” Mr. Katwala said. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Law enforcement, legislators and extremism scholars have for years warned that algorithms on social media platforms amplify hateful and outrageous content because it drives attention.
At the same time, growing resentment over a rise in immigration before and after Brexit, combined with a cost of living crisis, has led to an increasingly hostile climate for asylum seekers in Britain, and in some places stoked violent protests against their government-funded accommodation.
Chief Constable Hobrough said that he had dealt with multiple cases in which false rumors spread online that the government was moving groups of asylum seekers into particular areas, leading to threats, abuse and protests against people on the basis of their skin color or appearance. “The biggest challenge I have is misinformation and disinformation,” he said, “and sadly that is a dynamic threat that is very hard to prepare for.”
He pointed to an episode in Wales in August, when a racially diverse group of teenage Scouts visiting an activity center were filmed by local residents who wrongly thought the site was being used as a migrant camp.
In another case, Chief Constable Hobrough said that after a Black church group in northern England moved its regular Sunday family picnic to a different park, a group of people wearing balaclavas and hoods attacked them and threw bricks. The assault, which one of the suspects is accused of inciting on Facebook, left one victim in a hospital.
“They were just an African church of U.K. residents going to one of their local parks to be together,” he said.
Last month, violent protests broke out in Epsom, a town southwest of London, after a woman reported being gang-raped outside a church. Rumors that the perpetrators were migrants were amplified by far-right influencers online. Protesters then attempted to find buildings supposedly housing asylum seekers in the area.
After an investigation, including examining CCTV footage, interviewing witnesses and forensic tests, the police concluded that no sexual offense had taken place and said the woman had made “a confused report” after a head injury.
Chief Constable Hobrough said that he was concerned that an “emboldening” of expressions of hatred and racial attacks would continue if “community cohesion” did not improve.
“I thought we were moving forward as a society,” he said. “But over recent times, it does feel like we’re stepping backward.”
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