*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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-
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
 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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Articles
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) They Fled to Safety in Palestinian Territory, Then Settlers Attacked Again
Violent settlers are not merely clearing Palestinians from land under Israel’s control. They are attacking areas where Israel agreed to Palestinian self-governance
By Azam Ahmed, Photographs by Ivor Prickett, May 16, 2026
Reporting from Al-Awsaj, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
Muhammad Gawanmeh, 45, sat outside his family’s tent with his wife and two of his young sons soon after the attack in Al-Awsaj, northeast of Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank this past week.
Muhammad Gawanmeh, 45, sat outside his family’s tent with his wife and two of his young sons soon after the attack in Al-Awsaj, northeast of Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank this past week.
Muhammad Gawanmeh recognized the black pickup when it first pulled in front of his tent, trailed by an ATV carrying Israeli settlers he also recognized.
In January, he had fled his home of more than 40 years in the Israeli-occupied West Bank after violent settlers repeatedly attacked his village, wielding assault rifles and even setting up a base of operations in the middle of his neighborhood. Mr. Gawanmeh held on until the very end before he uprooted his wife, children and extended family, the last of more than two dozen households to abandon hope.
With nowhere else to go, he erected a tent in the safest place he could find in the hamlet of Al-Awsaj, a sun-bleached stretch of land carved from stony hillsides, deep in territory that is indisputably under Palestinian administration.
And yet last weekend, here were the same settlers again, seven men in all, sending a current of fear through the recently displaced families who cowered in their tents as Mr. Gawanmeh, 45, stood outside.
The attack began right away.
Settler violence has grown commonplace in the West Bank in recent years, part of a campaign of harassment, abuse and forced displacement. Since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, more than 700,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank among more than three million Palestinians.
Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, violent settlers, emboldened by a right-wing government, have forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Palestinians are forbidden from carrying weapons, while the settlers are often heavily armed.
The Israeli military and police not only routinely fail to stop the violence, but a New York Times investigation found that they also often intervene on behalf of the Jewish settlers.
In the attack last weekend, the masked settlers used pepper spray on Mr. Gawanmeh, he said, temporarily blinding him. A few of them beat him while others stood on lookout, according to a video of the attack captured by his family and shown to The New York Times.
When Mr. Gawanmeh’s eldest son, Ahmad, 22, began to shout for help, the settlers fled the scene.
But the assault was not over.
They circled the area in their vehicles, watching. When they realized the family was alone, with the other men working in the farms nearby, they returned.
Mr. Gawanmeh said he considered fighting back. But he knew better.
“They would shoot me, or I would be the one to go to jail,” he said hours after the attack, his shirt and pants still covered in blood. “So I let them beat me.”
The settlers hurled a stone that struck Mr. Gawanmeh in the back of the head, he said, knocking him nearly unconscious. Afterward, he said, they used a baton with nails driven through it to batter him on the ground, tearing a large wound in his leg. Both injuries required multiple stitches.
Family members said the settlers also threw stones at Mr. Gawanmeh’s wife, Alia, 43, injuring her foot, and even struck their 4-year-old son, Obaida.
The settlers fled, firing gunshots in the air, only when they spotted Mr. Gawanmeh’s brothers racing up the hill, the family said.
Asked about the attack, the Israeli military said it strongly condemned the violence. The statement added that Israeli soldiers were deployed to the area following a report of violence involving several Israeli civilians who entered privately owned Palestinian territory, threw stones and fired into the air.
When they arrived, the soldiers searched the area, but found no suspects, the military said.
Israel police, forensic teams and soldiers collected testimonies and evidence and the military was investigating, the statement said.
In the past, some Israeli officials have minimized the seriousness of settler violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has dismissed some perpetrators as a “handful of kids” from broken homes.
Settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have grown worse since the start of the most recent war with Iran, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which recorded an average of seven attacks a day in the past few months.
The past weekend was particularly brutal, with Palestinian media reporting nearly 20 different attacks, a territory-wide blotter of arson, invasion and beatings.
On Wednesday, Israeli military forces fatally shot a teenage Palestinian amid a new rampage by violent settlers in the West Bank zone under Palestinian administration, Palestinian witnesses said.
The settlers, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, stormed several villages near the city of Ramallah. The settlers beat residents, stole livestock and tractors and smashed car windows, the witnesses said.
When some of the Palestinian residents tried to stop them, Israeli soldiers opened fire at them and killed the youth.
The Israeli military said soldiers opened fire after “a violent riot” with stone-throwing. Its statement said the Israeli forces were trying to prevent confrontation, extract the livestock, and escort all Israeli civilians out of the area.
Ayad Jafry, a witness, said no one was throwing stones.
But last weekend’s assault was a notable escalation, particularly in territory ostensibly under Palestinian control.
The settlers’ message could not have been clearer.
“There is nowhere safe for us,” said Naif Gawanmeh, Muhammad’s brother.
The Oslo Accords signed in the 1990s divided the occupied West Bank into three zones. Much of the violence in recent years has been concentrated in land designated as Area C, where the Israeli military is responsible for overseeing civilian administration as well as security.
Much of the land is rural, home to Bedouin communities whose villages of trailers, tents and corrugated sheepfolds are often draped along the undulating terrain. As more and more of that land is cleared of Palestinian life, the violent settler movement is pressing into once-unthinkable areas, along the edges of major Palestinian cities and into regions supposed to be under total Palestinian autonomy under the Oslo agreement.
Al-Awsaj, where the attack occurred last weekend, was designated as part of Area A, land that the Palestinian Authority administers — as close as it gets to sovereign territory.
The family of Yusuf Kaabna, the teenager killed on Wednesday, had also been displaced to Area A after their homes in another zone came under settler attacks, according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli activist who knows the family and documented the attacks where they previously resided.
The site where the Gawanmeh family now lives, a treeless mountainside northeast of the West Bank city of Jericho, is populated with recently displaced people.
Last summer, settlers moved into and then evicted hundreds of Palestinians from the village of East Muarrajat, which sits just a few miles southwest in the central Jordan River valley. The Palestinians’ abandoned homes and livestock shelters remain in the sloped valley like ghostly ruins.
But the settlers did not stop at East Muarrajat. Instead, they moved on to mount another offensive, in Ras Ein al-Auja, the family home of the Gawanmehs, which sits within sight of East Muarrajat. Over several visits to the area, New York Times journalists witnessed repeated harassment by settlers.
Residents said the settlers deployed the same terror campaign in both places, brutalizing villagers day and night, until residents had no choice but to flee.
This was how Mr. Gawanmeh said he recognized the settlers who attacked him last Saturday, and their vehicles. Even with their masks on.
The family had called for help as soon as the attack started, running down a list of agencies. The Israeli police did not answer, they said, nor did the Palestinian Authority, whose security forces have a large base a few miles away.
Asked about the incident, the Palestinian Authority said it does not respond to settlers attacks, citing the potential for political repercussions if the Palestinian authorities were to get into a confrontations with the settlers or the Israeli army.
When Israeli soldiers eventually turned up, they questioned witnesses. Mr. Gawanmeh’s son Ahmad told them he saw everything and had been attacked himself.
Rather than take Ahmad’s statement on the spot, however, the soldiers handcuffed and took him away for questioning, according to the family and activists who arrived on the scene immediately after the assault.
Her son’s fate uncertain, Mr. Gawanmeh’s wife limped out from under a makeshift awning, her right foot wrapped in gauze.
What will we do, she asked aloud. The settlers had stolen half their sheep before the family fled Ras Ein Al-Auja, she said, and she was certain they now wanted the rest.
“They will come back,” she said. “And they will keep coming until they’ve stolen everything we have.”
Her son was later released and returned to the camp.
David M. Halbfinger, Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) Trump Says a Top ISIS Leader Was Killed in a U.S.-Nigerian Mission
The leader, whom the State Department designated a terrorist in 2023, had been hiding in Africa, President Trump said.
By Francesca Regalado, May 16, 2026
President Trump announced the operation in a late-night post on Truth Social, his social media platform. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
President Trump said late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces had killed a top leader of the Islamic State who was hiding in Africa, where the United States has been targeting Islamic militants whom the president says are killing Christians.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump said he had directed U.S. forces in an operation on Friday night with the Nigerian military to eliminate the leader, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki.
Mr. al-Minuki was designated a terrorist and one of the leaders of the Islamic State by the State Department in 2023. He was a Nigerian citizen, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which had sanctioned him.
Mr. Trump said Mr. al-Minuki had been hiding in Africa but did not specify where he was killed or provide details about the mission, which he said was “very complex.”
“He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans,” Mr. Trump said in the post.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Nigeria said in a statement on social media that the mission had struck Mr. al-Minuki’s compound near Lake Chad, which is at the intersection of four countries, and killed several of his lieutenants. He did not specify the location of the compound.
Both Mr. Trump and the Nigerian military identified Mr. al-Minuki as the second-most-senior leader in ISIS, a position the military said he might have received “as recently as February 2026.” He had earlier overseen “ISIS-linked operations across the Sahel and West Africa,” the military said.
Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. al-Minuki had been responsible for recent attacks against the military in the country’s northeast. A spokeswoman for the United States Africa Command said it did not have anything to add to Mr. Trump’s statement.
The U.S. military has launched a number of attacks against Islamic jihadists in Nigeria since December, when a U.S. missile strike killed terrorists in two ISIS camps in the country’s northwest. That operation was done in coordination with the Nigerian military, the United States Africa Command said at the time.
Thousands of Christians and Muslims have been killed in Nigeria in land disputes, sectarian violence and terrorism, which Christian activists and Republican lawmakers in the United States have viewed as the persecution of Christians. There is no clear evidence to show that Christians are attacked more frequently than any other religious group in Nigeria, analysts say.
Earlier this year, a U.S. official said that the Pentagon would send about 200 troops to Nigeria to help train its military to fight Islamic militants but that U.S. forces would not be involved in combat operations.
Saikou Jammeh contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Long Island Rail Road Strike Shuts Down Busiest U.S. Passenger Rail Service
This is the first strike on the service in more than 30 years. It comes after three years of failed contract negotiations, two federal interventions and a volley of last-minute bargaining.
By Stefanos Chen and Ashley Southall, May 16, 2026
The last Long Island Rail Road strike was in 1994, when a two-day suspension shut down the service. Ryan Murphy for The New York Times
Thousands of workers for the Long Island Rail Road walked off the job early Saturday morning, staging the first strike in more than 30 years for America’s busiest passenger railway and grinding service to a halt.
After three years of failed contract negotiations, two federal interventions and a volley of last-minute bargaining, unions representing about half of the work force decided to take to the picket line to protest what they called insufficient wage increases.
Five unions representing more than 3,500 workers — including engineers, signalmen and machinists — called the strike after contract discussions with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the railroad, fell apart.
Kevin Sexton, a vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, one of the unions, said the two sides could not agree on raises in 2026, or on issues like health care contributions.
“We are truly sorry that we’re in the this situation,” Mr. Sexton said at a midnight news conference outside of M.T.A. headquarters. “But this is why you have to take collective bargaining seriously.”
More than 270,000 daily riders rely on the service to travel between New York City and Long Island, a sprawl of suburbs and bedroom communities where many of the region’s workers live.
At the Kew Gardens-Union Turnpike subway station, a transfer point for passengers traveling from Long Island, there was no sign of the strike’s affecting travel on Saturday morning.
Alex Najjar, 56, who owns the All Star Newsstand next to the station entrance, said none of his customers were talking about the strike. That was in contrast to the noisy early-morning scene at the railroad station near his home in the Richmond Hill neighborhood in Queens.
“There were people walking down the street holding signs and people driving by honking their horns,” Mr. Najjar said.
The strike comes as Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, seeks re-election later this year. The governor, who lost Long Island in the previous election, is being challenged by the Nassau County executive, Bruce Blakeman, a Republican with close ties to the region.
Ms. Hochul said in a statement that while her administration has made investments in the Long Island Rail Road, the unions’ demands could force her to increase taxes or raise fares by as much as 8 percent.
“The L.I.R.R. is more stable now than it has been for generations,” she said. “The decision by some unions to strike over demands that would threaten that progress is reckless.”
Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the M.T.A., said the authority was willing to increase its offer for higher wages but the unions were unwilling to compromise. He said the M.T.A. could not make a deal that “implodes” its budget.
To mitigate the shutdown, the M.T.A. said it would provide free shuttle buses between six locations on Long Island and two subway stations in Queens.
But the service will be unable to accommodate all the riders who rely on the railroad, and it won’t begin until Monday, leaving many scrambling for weekend travel alternatives.
On Saturday, the New York Mets are set to face the Yankees at Citi Field in Queens, where thousands of Long Island-based fans are expected to arrive by rail.
If the strike does not end by Monday morning, buses will shuttle riders between the Bay Shore, Hicksville and Mineola L.I.R.R. stations, as well as Hempstead Lake State Park near the Lakeview station, and the A train stop at Howard Beach-JFK Airport. And buses from the Huntington and Ronkonkoma stations will take riders to and from the F train stop at Jamaica-179 Street.
The buses to Queens are expected to run every 10 minutes from 4:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., and afternoon shuttles back to Long Island could run from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. They will be able to handle up to 13,000 riders during the morning rush and another 13,000 in the evening.
There will be a limited number of buses running in the non-peak direction at some of the stations.
Mr. Najjar, the newsstand owner, said he thought the unions should settle instead of inconveniencing riders.
But Rashad Morshed Delvalle, 35, an M.T.A. bus driver, was more sympathetic. He compared the striking workers to bus drivers who were treated poorly during the coronavirus pandemic while doctors and nurses were showered with praise.
“They don’t feel appreciated enough,” he said. “The M.T.A. and the union reps had enough time to negotiate. They should’ve come to an agreement. They had three months.”
The Long Island Rail Road carried 82 million customers last year. Most were weekday commuters on their way to jobs in New York City, but an increasing number of passengers were using the service on weekends.
This is the first strike on the railroad since 1994, when a two-day suspension shut down the service.
The state comptroller’s office said on Friday that the strike could cost the region $61 million a day in lost economic activity.
Discussions between the unions and management broke down on the final day of negotiations.
The unions were seeking a retroactive 9.5 percent wage increase covering the last three years — the same deal the M.T.A. offered several other transit and civil service unions in recent months. But they were also seeking a 5 percent raise in the current year, a demand that exceeded what the M.T.A. has offered to other unions.
The M.T.A. countered with a 3 percent raise for 2026, plus a lump-sum cash payment, which it said would avoid upending negotiations with more than 80 other unions.
By Friday afternoon, the two sides were about 1 percentage point apart on wage increases, but were unwilling to compromise further.
Leaders of the negotiating unions have argued that their workers don’t make enough money to keep up with the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas. They have not received raises since 2022.
Cash compensation for members of the five holdout unions averaged over $136,000 in 2025, according to M.T.A. figures, making them among the highest-paid rail workers in the nation.
Earlier in negotiations, the M.T.A. had also sought to eliminate a number of work rules that often require higher pay for certain tasks. The unions declined to do so.
For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day of pay.
These penalty payments added almost 15 percent to the average engineer’s compensation in 2024, the M.T.A. said.
The Long Island Rail Road has an annual operating budget of $2.2 billion, and labor accounts for nearly three-fourths of that budget.
Unlike much of the M.T.A. work force, which is prevented from striking because it is governed by different rules, Long Island Rail Road workers are covered by a 1926 federal law called the Railway Labor Act.
The law was designed to prevent major service disruptions by requiring mediation and an extended review period before a strike is authorized.
But in an unusual move, the federal agency that oversees such disputes, the National Mediation Board, last year released the unions from mediation, a decision that cleared the path for a possible walkout.
Ms. Hochul said on Saturday that she blamed the Trump administration for cutting the mediation short, and increasing the likelihood of a strike.
A strike was postponed twice within the past year, after the unions requested the intervention of two federally appointed review panels. The three-person panels, which were appointed by President Trump, said the unions should be paid more than what the M.T.A. was offering, but their suggestions are not binding.
The unions on Saturday declined to say how long the strike might last. Workers were preparing to picket at a number of stations over the weekend.
“This is an open-ended strike,” Gilman Lang, the general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said in a statement.
“We don’t know when it will end. It shouldn’t have begun.”
Ellen Yan contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Rival Protests Begin in London, With a Major Security Effort
The police have deployed thousands of officers, partly to keep far-right and pro-Palestinian marchers apart. The events are expected to draw tens of thousands to London.
By Megan Specia, Reporting from London, May 16, 2026
The streets of the British capital hosted an ideological split-screen on Saturday as separate, far-right and pro-Palestine demonstrators competed for attention in dueling protests.
Marching through central London, tens of thousands of far-right protesters wearing “Make Britain Great Again” hats and draped in Union flags demanded support for white culture and an end to migration.
Along another route, similar numbers of pro-Palestine and anti-fascism demonstrators decried racism as they carried signs and banners calling for freedom for Palestinians in Gaza and an end to the genocide they said was taking place there.
The groups largely stayed separate, with few reports of arrests or violence, after what London police said was an “unprecedented” security operation designed to keep the protests from descending into a riot.
Police said 4,000 police officers, as well as helicopters, armed vehicles and drone teams, were deployed Saturday. By 5 p.m., the police had reported 31 arrests but said the groups had largely stayed on their assigned routes and “both protests have proceeded largely without significant incident.” The FA Cup final, a major soccer competition, was also held on Saturday afternoon, bringing large crowds to the city and adding to the complexity.
“The scale of the operation is unprecedented in recent years,” said Cmdr. James Harman, the deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, in a Wednesday news briefing ahead of the protests. “The planning for it has been ongoing for months.”
Protesters carrying flags and banners began arriving early in the morning as they made their way along London’s streets to the meeting points for the competing marches.
The far-right demonstration was organized by Tommy Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, under the banner, “Unite the Kingdom.” Mr. Robinson, who has several criminal convictions and has served several stints in prison, has said it was a demonstration for “national unity, free speech and Christian values.”
“We have been in a culture war for a long time,” Mr. Robinson told the crowd on Saturday. He said the march represented a movement that was “thinking about how we can create a cultural revolution in this country.”
Along the protest route, several marchers echoed that sentiment.
“I’m just supporting being British,” said Corina Short, who came to the rally from Kent, about an hour away from London. “It means I can fly my flag with pride without feeling as though it’s a crime.”
Marchers waved signs that said “Stop the Boats,” a reference to asylum seekers who arrive on Britain’s shores, and chanted derisive slogans about Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a center-left politician and the head of the Labour Party.
“He says we’re causing division, he’s causing division,” Paul Gibson, from Nottingham, said of Mr. Starmer. “He protects the criminals, the Muslim gangs, the Islamic extremists, but when it comes to us, he blames us.”
In a video posted on Friday on social media, Mr. Starmer said the organizers of the march, “including convicted thugs and racists, are peddling hatred and division.”
The competing protest on Saturday was an annual Nakba Day demonstration, commemorating the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War.
Organizers said it also stood “united against Tommy Robinson and the far right.” That rally was organized by a coalition of groups, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Stop the War Coalition and others, and was joined by “Stand Up To Racism,” a group opposing Mr. Robinson’s march.
Protesters carried signs declaring that “It’s Not a Crime to Stand Against Genocide,” “Stop Gaza Genocide” and “Freedom For Palestine.” Many waved the black, white, green and red Palestinian flag.
At one point, the crowd broke out into chants of “We are all Palestinians.”
Apsana Begum, a Labour member of Parliament who spoke at the rally, told the crowd that there were differences between the two marches.
“We know that the far right marches because our solidarity with the Palestinian people threatens their cause,” she said, according to PA Media, the British press association. “We will not be divided by the far right. We will not be silenced by any government, and we will not go quietly while crimes against humanity continue and are committed with impunity.”
Many people in the march appeared to be as focused on British politics as they were on the Middle East. Several carried signs that said “Stop Racist Reform U.K.,” a reference to the right-wing populist political party in Britain headed by Nigel Farage. His party made huge gains in elections in England, Scotland and Wales last week.
Both London demonstrations took place against an increasingly tense political backdrop, with the country’s terrorism threat level increased in recent weeks amid rising antisemitism, Islamophobia and extreme right-wing sentiment.
The bulk of the policing operation on Saturday was on keeping the two marches apart. At one point, the rallies converged on the same area of the city, near government buildings — at their closest, separated by just over 500 yards.
“We can’t ask a counterprotest to be in a completely different area of London,” Commander Harman said during the briefing on Wednesday. “They have to have an amount of proximity in order to make their point. We think we’ve come up with the right policing plan to keep people safe on the day, although it’s challenging.”
Protesters were required to stick to prearranged routes and to disperse by a designated time, or face arrest. The police also extended powers to arrest any speakers who used the events “as a platform for unlawful extremism or for hate speech,” Commander Harman said, noting that it was the first time these restrictions had been imposed for a rally of this type since the powers were enacted recently. It was not clear on Saturday whether any speakers had been arrested under these restrictions.
Live facial recognition technology was used for the first time in policing a protest, in a part of the city where people taking part in the right-wing rally are expected to gather beforehand. The technology compared those walking by with “the faces of those on a specific watchlist” of people wanted for suspected criminal offenses, Commander Harman said.
Officials said two of the 31 arrests occurred near the train station where the far-right demonstration began.
“One of the two men was arrested in connection with the incident in Birmingham where a man was run over,” the police wrote on X. “The second arrested man was wanted for a separate offense which involved encouraging people to attack a police officer.”
Some foreign far-right activists were also barred from entering Britain for that demonstration, the government announced this week.
“We will not allow people to come to the U.K., threaten our communities and spread hate on our streets,” Mr. Starmer said in a speech on Monday. “This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation.”
Britain late last month raised its national terrorism threat level to “severe” from “substantial,” the fourth of five levels on its scale, meaning officials assessed that an attack was highly likely in the next six months. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, which is responsible for the assessment, announced the change after a stabbing attack on two Jewish men in the north London neighborhood of Golders Green and a series of other antisemitic attacks.
The center said the increase was “not solely a result of that attack,” but also of broader concerns about an “increasing threat of Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorism in the U.K.”
Ahead of the protests, “fears in Jewish communities are particularly heightened, but we’ve also seen increased concern more broadly, including in Muslim communities,” Commander Harman said.
The police are well aware of the risks the opposing demonstrations could pose. In September, Mr. Robinson and his supporters gathered in London in a protest that devolved into violence when several people involved clashed with the police. At that time, antiracism protesters had also gathered in a counter-demonstration elsewhere in the city, and around 1,000 police officers had set up barriers between the dueling protests.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) For Trump, Soaring Prices Test Voters’ Finances and Patience
Just months before another election that may hinge on the economy, the war in Iran has sent gas and other goods soaring.
By Tony Romm and Ben Casselman, May 17, 2026
Tony Romm reported from Washington and Ben Casselman from New York.
Swept into power by voters who were frustrated with the nation’s economic trajectory, President Trump promised at his inauguration to “bring prices down.”
But that was January 2025, more than a year before the White House would forge ahead with an agenda that has sent inflation roaring back, testing the patience — and the finances — of a cost-wary American electorate once again.
For Mr. Trump, the nation’s political and economic strains are laid bare in a series of dour reports released over the past two weeks. Consumer prices last month rose at their fastest clip in about three years, outpacing workers’ wages, while businesses saw their costs increase at a rate not seen since 2022.
Americans are racking up more debt. Families are saving less. And a key measure of consumer confidence dipped to an all-time low this month. The anxiety has bled into recent political polls, which have registered broad public disapproval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy.
At the heart of matter is the war with Iran, which sent the average gallon of gasoline to about $4.52 nationally, according to AAA. That is a more than 40 percent jump from a year ago, an uptick that has cut across the global economy, affecting everything from the cost of workers’ daily commutes to the prices of goods at grocery stores.
Yet the president has largely dismissed those recent signals, telling reporters at one point last week: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
Mr. Trump had been asked about the extent to which the economy factored into his plans to end the war, and responded that disarmament was his sole concern. Otherwise, the president has maintained that the U.S. economy is strong and will rebound quickly once the war concludes, precipitating a rapid fall in gas prices in the United States.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised Mr. Trump, said the recent turbulence was not a “surprise.” But he acknowledged that voters might not be forgiving come November’s midterm election, given that the president promised he would bring down the cost of living.
“Republicans could face a tsunami election in November if inflation continues to stay high,” said Mr. Moore, who described gas prices as “the chief gauge people use to determine how the economy is doing.”
The jump in fuel costs is only the latest blow for American families, who have suffered through years of rising prices, high interest rates and a softening labor market — as well as much longer-running concerns about the affordability of housing, child care and other essentials.
Add on mounting concerns that the arrival of artificial intelligence could yield mass job losses and Americans have plenty of reason to be worried about their financial well-being, said David Tinsley, an economist at the Bank of America Institute.
“It’s one thing after another, and I think that is why people feel so bad,” he said. “It’s quite hard to point to things that people would feel great about, that would inspire a lot of optimism, unless you’re at the top of the income distribution.”
At the start of the year, Mr. Trump seemed ready to hit the 2026 campaign trail and claim credit for an economy on the upswing. In some of its earliest forecasts, the White House believed that its agenda, particularly its recent round of expensive tax cuts, would seed the conditions for higher wages, more jobs and new investments over the coming year, yielding benefits that voters would remember once they arrived at the ballot box.
But then Mr. Trump began to bomb Iran in February, which upended the global economy by snarling its energy supply. Far from the boom once envisioned, analysts have since broadly revised their projections, anticipating that sky-high oil will slow growth, worsen unemployment and raise prices, meting out the greatest damage to families that earn the least.
“These are the exact kind of spikes that are going to hit low-income people the hardest, at the exact same time that their incomes are slowing the most,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy for the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive group that focuses on cost-of-living issues. “I totally understand why people are really mad right now.”
Mr. Jacquez served under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who strained early in the 2024 election to convince Americans that the economy was good when their gas and grocery bills said otherwise. Stung by the downturn of the Covid-19 pandemic, voters did not accept that argument, and they returned Mr. Trump to office.
During the presidential race, Mr. Trump promised to bring down inflation and restore a sense of normalcy after years of economic tumult. Once elected, however, he began unleashing chaos of his own making, chiefly through his eye-watering tariffs, which caused import prices to rise. And just as those effects had started to calm, the president commenced a war that drove up the cost of gas, the one product where the price is posted in giant numbers alongside every highway in America.
“They’re the two major decision points of his presidency, and their impact on domestic prices is to unequivocally make them higher,” Mr. Jacquez said.
Despite the mounting challenges, the White House has remained bullish about the nation’s economic course. Last Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, mused on Fox News that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its output, could top 6 percent this year. (Most private forecasters expect the economy to grow at less than half that rate.)
Mr. Trump and his aides have also pointed repeatedly to the stock market, which has posted a series of record trading days during the war, primarily driven by optimism around artificial intelligence. So, too, has the White House found reason for celebration in the labor market, after employers added 115,000 jobs last month, surpassing expectations.
Pierre Yared, the acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, predicted last week that consumer prices would “go back down” once the war ended. That, he added, would relax pressure on families, who would see wages continue to grow “following the tailwinds of the economy.”
“Consumers are continuing to spend, and they do seem to be looking through the shock,” Mr. Yared said. “It looks to us like consumers understand the situation is temporary.”
There is little evidence so far that Americans’ anxiety about the economy is causing them to pull back their spending. Retail sales were solid in April, data released on Thursday showed, continuing a pattern of resilience that has repeatedly defied forecasters’ predictions of a slowdown.
But that strength is being driven, at least partly, by wealthy households, which have been insulated from economic headwinds by a steadily rising stock market. Lower- and middle-income households are the ones bearing the brunt of slower wage growth and rising prices. Larger tax refunds have helped many families offset higher costs, but that effect is fading.
“There is a bit of a buffer from increased tax returns,” said Justin Weidner, an economist at Deutsche Bank. “The consumer has a bit of a buffer in the near term, but the longer gas prices remain high, the more precarious the situation could get.”
Taken together, the conditions have left investors convinced that the Federal Reserve is not going to slash interest rates this year, as Mr. Trump has vigorously sought. Even after securing a new chair for the central bank — Kevin M. Warsh, who was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday — policymakers seem inclined to wait out the current uncertainty before resuming their cuts.
“We think there is a narrow path to being able to get a cut in, but I would say it is very slim,” said Josh Hirt, a senior economist at Vanguard, adding that it “would definitely depend” on a swift unwinding of the war with Iran.
Yet the president’s aides have appeared to dismiss investors’ conclusions about the Fed. In an interview on the sidelines of trade talks in China, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, told CNBC that inflation would moderate quickly, allowing Mr. Warsh to cut rates soon.
“I actually think he’s going to be in a very good position,” the secretary said of Mr. Warsh, “because we may get a series, one or two more hot inflation numbers, but then I think we’re going to see substantial disinflation.”
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Mr. Trump’s approach to the economy had been baffling, especially coming off the experience of the Biden administration.
“I’ve been struck, even before the Iran war, with the degree to which President Trump is making the same mistakes as President Biden,” Mr. Strain said. “We’ve had two presidents in a row who have seen consumer prices going up on their watch, who have dismissed those price increases out of hand as temporary, transitory, not real in some measure.”
Both presidents had also “politically chosen to downplay the importance of price increases in the lives of voters,” Mr. Strain added.
“There have been an astonishing number of own goals in the last year and a half,” he said.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages
By Katya Ungerman, May 17, 2026
Ms. Ungerman writes the newsletter default.blog under the pen name Katherine Dee.
Brecht Vandenbroucke
In 2024, Tucker Carlson revealed that he had been physically attacked in his bed by a demon — “or by something unseen.” The entity left four claw marks on each of his sides and on his left shoulder, he said. He was bleeding when he woke. Catholic and Orthodox clergy weighed in publicly, with an Orthodox priest lamenting that Mr. Carlson’s Episcopalian faith left him ill-equipped to respond to such an attack.
More recently, Gregg Phillips, the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, made news for claiming that he had once been teleported, by forces beyond his control, to a Waffle House 50 miles away in Rome, Ga. The Times sent a reporter to track down the workers and regulars at all three of Rome’s Waffle House locations, but nobody remembered Mr. Phillips.
In a less esoteric vein, this past Easter, Catholic priests in dioceses across the country welcomed the largest classes of converts they had seen in 15 or more years. Eastern Orthodox parishes are also reporting a surge in growth, particularly among young men.
“In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America,” one Antiochian Orthodox priest told The Times, “this has never been seen.”
The backdrop of all this is the peculiar atmosphere of contemporary public life — claustrophobic, faintly hallucinatory, where what we know as real feels like sand shifting under our feet. The first lady, Melania Trump, walks a humanoid robot down a White House red carpet and later tells the audience to imagine a future humanoid educator named “Plato.” A former intelligence official testifies under oath that the United States has been secretly retrieving and reverse-engineering crashed U.F.O.s for decades, and that nonhuman “biologics” have been recovered.
Demonic vexation, teleportation, increased interest in religious practice — those phenomena are all signs that life feels, to many, increasingly charged with unseen forces. You might say it has been re-enchanted. There’s a widespread feeling that the material explanation is no longer sufficient; that something uncanny, maybe even numinous, is diffused into the texture of ordinary American life.
Pew found in 2024 that 30 percent of Americans consult astrology, tarot cards or fortune tellers at least once a year. New age practices are even more popular among some demographics, like younger women and L.G.B.T.Q. adults. During my first pregnancy I received a reiki, or energy healing, treatment for my unborn son. It’s now offered at major hospitals across the country.
What is going on? Why is the world re-enchanting itself now?
In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that a long process of rationalization, culminating in modernity, was eliminating “mysterious incalculable forces” from the world. Science would explain; technology would master; and magic would disappear. For a brief stretch of modern history, he seemed right: The enduring human instinct to believe in the otherworldly declined as empiricism, common evidentiary standards and, for the shortest period of all, mass media produced a rough consensus about what was real. Now we seem to be sliding back.
Three changes in both the kind of information we receive and the way we receive it may help explain what’s going on.
The first is that, in the era of digital technology and the endless scroll, the mind is being asked to do more than it comfortably can. The brain is a pattern-matching machine. Most of the time, it’s like a piece of software running in the background, synthesizing information without your noticing. You walk into a room and instantly read the mood; you glance at a friend’s face and know something is wrong before they tell you. Today, there’s just too much information — and we’re noticing patterns that don’t exist.
This mental overload is how you get from “that’s an odd coincidence” to “nothing is a coincidence.” It’s the same type of thinking that produces QAnon and other conspiracy theories. It’s what happens when a stranger on TikTok tells a million viewers this video was “meant” to find them, and many of them, despite being vaguely aware of how recommendation algorithms work, take it as a sign that supernatural forces are at work.
The second change has to do with proof and evidence. Doctored photographs predate A.I. and even the digital camera. But fabricating proof used to take work.
A.I. has removed that friction — any claim can now be furnished with evidence on demand, evidence increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing. And since so much evidence can now be fabricated, any piece of evidence can be dismissed. When nothing is verifiable, then everything is permitted.
Finally, there’s institutional decay. The paranoid explanation keeps turning out to be partly right. To give just one high-profile example, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, spent decades downplaying how addictive its product was, even as it fueled an overdose epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
When events like that one happen often enough, people lose confidence in institutional authority. There goes “the science,” or “the church,” or “the official story.” Demonology, astrology or conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile cabals ruling the world fill the gap.
The result of all of those conditions is that life has begun to feel governed by forces beyond our understanding, by knowledge that is unverifiable and by authority that is distant and suspect. It is, in a word, beginning to feel medieval.
I do not believe that re-enchantment, in itself, is the main problem. After all, re-enchantment doesn’t mean “irrational,” or “untrue,” or “conspiracy,” though it can lead there. Rather, it’s the re-emergence of one of the oldest and most durable features of human experience, the sense that the world is bigger than what human knowledge can, at a particular moment, measure. It’s not a coincidence that many of our most famous scientists were obsessed with ideas that we’d now find crazy. Thomas Edison, for example, claimed to be working on a device that would try to receive the voices of the dead.
But enchantment mutates when it’s untethered from a foundation, from a community that acts as a check on the most wild and destructive instincts.
In a Rolling Stone article about A.I.-induced spiritual crises, the writer Miles Klee spoke to an unnamed source whose partner had messaged extensively with ChatGPT. Eventually, the partner came believe he was God. He had an ecstatic experience with a product that has a stake in keeping him engaged; his story might have ended differently inside a spiritual community, where someone could have told him to slow down.
The world we’re moving into will look more like the one before the modern era than like the one we grew up in. It will be saturated with the supernatural. Everyone will believe in something. The question is in what.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) What A.I. Did to My College Class
By Theo Baker, May 17, 2026
Mr. Baker is a college senior and the author of “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.”
Maxime Mouysset
At Stanford University, where I am a senior, tech chief executives are something like rock stars. When the Nvidia founder Jensen Huang showed up to give a guest lecture late last month, students mobbed him. They offered up their laptops and personal workstations, desperate for a signature from a kingpin of the artificial intelligence era. Last year, speaking to the same class, Mr. Huang gave out shining $4,000 graphic cards with his name autographed in gold ink — the ultimate dorm room status symbol.
Stanford has always been a haven for aspiring techies, but recent events have taken the school into uncharted territory. A.I. is everything. We talk about it at the dining halls and in history classes, on dates and while smoking with friends, at the gym and in communal dorm bathrooms. Nearly all of higher education has been overtaken by this technology, and Stanford is a case study in how far it can go. For the past four years, my classmates and I have been the subjects of a high-stakes experiment.
We are the first college class of the A.I. era — ChatGPT arrived on campus about two months after we did. When we graduate next month, this technology will have altered our lives in very different ways. For some, it has opened the door to staggering wealth. But for many who came to Stanford — just four years ago! — when a degree seemed like a guaranteed ticket to a high-paying job, the door has been slammed shut. For all of us, A.I. has permanently changed how we think and behave.
Stanford already had a shaky reputation for integrity when I arrived in 2022. It was the origin place of the Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (now serving a 10-year prison sentence), the crypto fraudster Do Kwon (now serving a 15-year prison sentence) and the founders of Juul (which was forced to pay billions for getting kids hooked on vapes). All of these scandals were in the news when freshman year began. Many of my classmates arrived idealistic and hopeful, but among the strivers seeking a path to fortune, hustle culture was the accepted way of life. Now A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before.
Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the “nuclear option” might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate “confidence in the honor” of students.
In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything. They would embezzle dorm funds to spend on their friends and lie about having Covid to get the UberEats credits that the school offered to those in quarantine. Some kids I knew published a paper that claimed a groundbreaking new A.I. advancement. Online sleuths quickly pointed out that it appeared to be just a stolen Chinese model, to which the two Stanford co-authors responded by blaming the plagiarism on the third author.
In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail. A friend of mine captured the school’s ethos while we were discussing the tech hardware and other items our student club neglected to return to corporate sponsors. It was all, I recall her saying, “just a little bit of fraud.”
About halfway through freshman year, some coding classes started requiring students to sign a declaration — “I did not utilize ChatGPT” — to submit each assignment. During the first term these attestations began to appear, I watched a freshman I knew sign the declaration that he’d done his homework without A.I. as ChatGPT was still open in the next window — while on the deck of a yacht party financed by venture capitalists. The incentive structures were not aligned toward honesty. One could get ahead, quickly, by cutting corners, by focusing on self-presentation.
The money is a big part of it. A.I. has merely accelerated a trend that was already underway at Stanford and has been reflected by many of the country’s most corporatized universities: Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently defined as a future windfall.
The first time our college class gathered together was for a convocation ceremony in late September 2022. As one of the speakers droned on, I remember looking around and seeing a number of my classmates slumped over in the shade, dozing off. One of those kids is going to become a billionaire soon, it occurred to me. I wondered who it would be, and how.
At first the answer seemed to be cryptocurrency, and then it was A.I.
Most of my friends remember where they were and what they were doing when ChatGPT came out on Nov. 30, 2022. I was nearing the end of my time in Stanford’s infamous computer science “weeder” course, CS107. Like organic chemistry for pre-meds, this was the class that filtered out the true coders from those without the requisite hustle (with lots of shameless public tears involved).
The velocity of change that began on the day ChatGPT entered our lives was stunning. A friend texted me a link to the research preview of OpenAI’s latest demo: “Have you seen this yet? It’s INSANE.” We began kicking around silly prompts, reveling as ChatGPT explained the bubble-sort algorithm “in the style of a fast-talkin’ wise guy from a 1940s gangster movie.” It’s “very good. Very very good,” I messaged my friend. Still, neither of us understood that this would mark the transformation of A.I. from a technology to a product.
Students were probably the earliest wide-scale adopters. After all, it was far and away the quickest route to an A. When I took CS107, the only viable way for people to cheat was to seek out a student who’d gone through the class before and beg for solutions to the notoriously difficult problem sets. There was no alternative to putting in a large amount of work. Even if one did obtain the answers from another student (engaging, by the way, in a social act, if nothing else), the students I knew who did this still spent hours sculpting their stolen code so as not to be caught.
Few cheated in this most overt fashion back then. But a month later, any student could instead turn to a chatbot, plugging in a prompt alone in a dorm room and mindlessly regurgitating the result. “I remember the first time I used it feeling an immediate sense of guilt,” a friend recently told me. “Now it’s just normal.”
Half of the laptops in any lecture seem to be open to ChatGPT or Claude. In the beginning, experimenting with models was a pastime for the nerds; showing off the early access you got to the next frontier large language model was a status symbol, and people would come pleading for your authorization keys to try it out for themselves. In just a few short years, however, A.I. has become a fact of life. “It’s all we talk about,” my ancient Greek art history professor remarked recently.
In April 2026, the proctored exam policy finally went into place. Because of A.I., most of us now take our tests by writing in blue books, like students a century ago, scribbling out answers by hand under keen observation. Meanwhile, we wonder constantly what will happen next.
Many students view these large language models as a job threat. The machines have gotten so much better at coding that junior engineers can’t really compete. A Stanford computer science degree means something very different today from what it did when we set foot on campus — no longer is there a functional guarantee of an entry-level position.
But for those willing to dream up a company with “A.I.” in the name, there is a nearly surefire route to monetary gain. Perplexity, started right when my freshman year began, is an example of a “wrapper” start-up — in other words, a company that does not have its own proprietary A.I. and merely repackages existing models in a different form. It is a search tool, and loses money essentially every time a new user inputs a query. In April 2024, it reached a billion-dollar valuation; two months later, that number tripled. In May 2025, it announced that it was fund-raising at a $14 billion valuation, which had grown to $18 billion by July, and $20 billion by September.
Money in Silicon Valley has become a game of almost meaningless numbers bandied about in a breathtakingly casual manner. It contributes to the whirlpool effect students at Stanford have felt around tech and lucre — if your roommate can drop out and start a nine-figure company, why shouldn’t you profit, too? Why put all your energy into being a student when it seems like everyone around you is getting rich? One time during sophomore year, I was working on homework in my dorm common room with an acquaintance when she offhandedly remarked, “I bought a house in Las Vegas last week.” She continued, “It’s good for taxes.” It’s hard to put your earbuds in and get right back to your problem set when someone says something like that.
Yet the same Stanford dropouts who seem to be making the most money right now are often working on the very technology that is worsening life for their former college classmates.
Emerging research has begun to show what most people feel is obvious: Relying on A.I. for cognitive tasks can reduce one’s own intellectual capacity and resilience. It’s one thing to use it in the workplace, but in the classroom, difficulty is often precisely the point. Sure, a robot can lift 600 pounds much more easily than I can — but that doesn’t much help me if I’m trying to work out. The same goes for the thinking exercise of education. However, telling that to students is about as attractive a message as “eat your veggies” or “sleep eight hours.” It feels like scolding.
Even in the heart of the Silicon Valley techno-utopia, most people know that our tech is bad for us, or at least that it can be. A.I. is often a tremendous productivity boost, yet my friends increasingly refer to both short-form video and their A.I. chat logs in the language of addiction. It’s becoming baked in, shaping our generational character. We are a digital generation, growing only more attached to the virtual world.
The technology behind A.I. is wickedly clever, and back when large language models were still a research experiment — before they propped up the U.S. economy — my friends and I bubbled with excitement. I remember trying to explain to my grandfather, who has since died, that “backpropagation,” a technique vital to A.I., grew out of attempts to quantitatively prove Freud’s theories about the “flow of psychic energy.” I don’t think I really sold Gramps on why he should care — but to me, the development of A.I. was human genius at its finest, and I couldn’t wait to open the arXiv links people would text me containing the latest and greatest research. The output of a model didn’t matter anywhere near as much as how it was designed.
Now, the opposite is true. A.I. is an application that people actually rely on, and companies have become less and less transparent about its design. What counts is the immediate response you receive when you send a reading to ChatGPT to be summarized on your walk to class. Most students call OpenAI’s model “Chat.” Many refer to it familiarly, consulting with Chat repeatedly over the course of a day, letting it decide how to text a situationship and confidently repeating hallucinated assertions while in line at the coffee shop. For years, online livestreamers have used the word “Chat” to interact with their audiences, asking commenters to tell them what choices to make in video games. That students now use the same name for A.I. feels appropriate. What really is the distinction between a nameless, faceless human you’ll never meet except over the internet and a statistical approximation of the same thing?
The internet has already allowed us to feel more connected than ever while becoming lonelier than ever. A.I. lets us cut out the human part of human interaction entirely.
When I was sitting in a recent class on love in French fiction — exactly the kind of course that a senior takes before it all comes to an end — I listened to the first student presentation, entitled: “Applying the Gale-Shapley Algorithm to ‘The Princess of Clèves.’” The enterprising presenters sought to resolve the contretemps of the 1678 romantic novel through a computer science matching algorithm. Love was something to “be optimized.” Next to me, one student scribbled on a branded notepad from Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm where fresh graduates can earn upward of $600,000 a year. Another had a sticker on her laptop: “Practice safe C.S.” The class could not have felt more Stanford.
Living on campus for the past four years has been an eye-opening journey. Higher education was not equipped for the A.I. revolution. Someday in the future the fully autonomous Clawdbots or Moltbots (or whatever people call them) will laugh to themselves about this silly interregnum when universities seemed paralyzed, trying to bridge the gap between the liberal education of yore and the future in which humans have no monopoly on intelligence.
For us, this was college.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) In Iraqi Desert, Two Israeli Outposts Were Kept Secret for Months
Israel spent over a year preparing a covert site in Iraq for its operations against Iran, regional officials say. Iraqi officials later confirmed the existence of a second base.
By Erika Solomon and Falih Hassan, May 17, 2026
The truck rattling by at 2 p.m. on March 3 was a familiar sight to residents of the Bedouin encampment in Iraq’s rugged western desert — a local shepherd’s pickup, en route to the nearest town of al-Nukhaib.
Its return a few hours later, flaming and riddled with bullets, was anything but routine.
A helicopter was chasing the truck, three witnesses from the camp said, firing on it repeatedly until it jerked to a halt in the sand.
The deadly attack, which has not been previously reported, took place after Awad al-Shammari, 29, set off on a grocery trip, his cousin, Amir al-Shammari, told The New York Times. Instead of making it home, the shepherd stumbled upon a closely guarded Israeli military secret, hidden in the Iraqi desert. His family believes it cost him his life.
Mr. al-Shammari’s discovery would ultimately reveal how Iraq had played host to two covert bases operated intermittently by Israel, a hostile state, for well over a year.
Sometime between starting his ill-fated trip and its gruesome end, Mr. al-Shammari had contacted Iraq’s regional military command to report what he had seen: soldiers, helicopters and tents clustered around a landing strip. Israel was operating a base there to support its military operations against Baghdad’s regional partner, Iran, according to senior Iraqi and regional officials.
The presence of an Israeli outpost in Iraq was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. Iraqi officials told The Times there was another undisclosed second base also in Iraq’s western desert.
The base Mr. al-Shammari came across predated the current war between the United States, Israel and Iran, the regional security officials said, and was used during the 12-day war against Tehran in June 2025.
Israeli forces began preparing to build the makeshift base as far back as late 2024, one of the regional officials said — identifying remote sites from which to operate in future conflicts.
Israel’s military declined repeated requests for comment on the camps or on Mr. al-Shammari’s killing.
The witnesses to Mr. al-Shammarri’s death spoke on condition of anonymity, citing concerns for their safety. Most of the officials who discussed the Israeli bases insisted on anonymity to discuss a highly sensitive security matter.
The information they shared indicates that at least one of the bases — the one Mr. al-Shammari stumbled upon — had been known to Washington since June 2025 or possibly earlier. That would most likely mean Baghdad’s other key ally, the United States, had withheld from Iraq the fact that hostile forces were on its soil.
“It shows a blatant disregard for Iraqi sovereignty, its government and its forces, as well as for the dignity of the Iraqi people,” said Waad al-Kadu, an Iraqi lawmaker who attended a confidential parliamentary briefing about that base.
The U.S. role in Iraqi security was part of Israel’s calculations in deciding it could safely operate clandestinely in Iraq, the regional officials said.
In both the brief war last year and the current conflict, two Iraqi security officials said, Washington compelled Iraq to shut down its radars to protect U.S. aircraft, making Baghdad more reliant on U.S. forces to detect hostile activity.
The disclosure of the bases raise uncomfortable questions for Iraq, too. Among them: Were its forces really unaware of a foreign presence until a shepherd exposed it? Or did they know, but chose to ignore it?
Either possibility reflects how Iraq, long trapped in a tug of war between Washington and Tehran, remains unable to exercise full control over its territory.
“The position of our security leaders is shameful,” Mr. al-Kadu said.
Maj. Gen. Ali al-Hamdani, commander of the Iraqi military’s Western Euphrates Forces, said the army had suspected an Israeli presence in the desert for over a month before the shepherd’s discovery.
“Until now,” he said, “the government has been silent about it.”
Iraq’s government, for whom acknowledging Israeli outposts is fraught, has still not acknowledged the Israeli bases. Iraq has no diplomatic relations with Israel, and its population sees Israel as an enemy. Lt. Gen. Saad Maan, a spokesman for Iraq’s security forces, told The Times that Iraq “has no information regarding the locations of any Israeli military bases.”
Growing outrage in Iraq over the revelations could threaten U.S. efforts to curb Iranian influence in the country, even as the war’s outcome remains uncertain.
Two regional security officials said the base Mr. al-Shammari exposed was used by Israel for air support, refueling and to provide medical treatment.
The outpost was made to shorten distances Israeli aircraft had to fly to reach Iran. It was intended as only a temporary presence to assist with military operations — like those in the June 2025 war, during which, the two regional officials said, the base proved extremely useful.
In a speech after last year’s war, Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said the success of Israeli operations was made possible “among other things, by integration and deception carried out by air forces and ground commando forces.”
The Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, declined to comment on Israeli operations in Iraq, referring questions to the Israel Defense Forces.
But former top U.S. military commanders, Pentagon officials and American diplomats who served in the region said it was inconceivable, given the U.S. military’s close ties with the Israeli military, that Central Command did not know about the Israeli presence in western Iraq.
A dangerous secret
For weeks, Bedouin communities in Iraq’s western desert had been reporting unusual military activity to Iraq’s regional command, according to General al-Hamdani, the regional commander.
The army decided not to approach, he said, and instead conducted “surveillance monitoring” from afar of what commanders suspected were Israeli forces. They requested information from their U.S. counterparts, but got no response.
On the day Mr. al-Shammari stumbled upon the foreign forces, he too contacted the local authorities, according to his cousin and Maj. Gen. Fahim al-Gurayti, the spokesman for the regional Karbala Operations Command.
Shortly after that, General al-Gurayti and Mr. al-Shammari’s family said, the army and his relatives lost contact with him.
His family searched two days before finding the Bedouin residents who had witnessed his killing, learning what had become of him.
“We were told that a burned-up pickup truck the same as Awad’s was out there, but no one dared to go there,” the cousin, Amir, said. “When we got there, we found the car and body burned.”
His family shared photographs of his bloodied corpse, his head and fingers blackened, and his charred pickup truck. They buried his body next to the vehicle, beneath a simple gray tombstone.
A day after the shepherd’s report, Iraq’s regional command dispatched a reconnaissance mission, according to General al-Gurayti and General al-Hamdani.
As the units approached the area, they came under fire, according to a statement released a day later by Iraq’s Joint Operations Command. One soldier was killed, two were wounded and two vehicles were bombed before the units decided to retreat.
Top Iraqi security officials in Baghdad were struggling to understand what had happened.
Two senior officials said their efforts were repeatedly frustrated by top military commanders, who played down the incident.
In public, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command announced “foreign” forces had attacked their soldiers, and said it had raised complaints at the U.N. Security Council.
In private, the chief of staff of Iraq’s armed forces, Gen. Abdul-Amir Yarallah, called his counterparts in the U.S. military, according to General al-Hamdani and the two senior Iraqi officials. “They confirmed the force is not an American force,” General al-Hamdani said. “So we understood it was Israeli.”
Four days after the attack on the Iraqi soldiers, on March 8, the Iraqi Parliament compelled military leaders to provide a confidential debriefing. Lawmakers who were present said they could not divulge details. But one of them, Hassan Fadaam, told The Times that Israel had established at least one other outpost inside Iraq.
“The one in al-Nukhaib is just the only one that was found out,” he said.
A second Iraqi official confirmed the existence of a second base, without giving a location other than saying it was also in a western desert region.
Official protocol requires Washington to inform Baghdad of any activities on Iraqi soil, according to a former and a current senior Iraqi official.
That meant Washington either concealed the Israeli activity, these officials said, or informed Iraq’s top command of the operations, who kept them confidential. The officials thought it was extremely unlikely, however, that Iraqi leaders knew the presence was Israeli until the exposure by the shepherd, and most likely assumed the sites were American.
The balancing act
Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Baghdad has struggled with a political balancing act between its former occupier, Washington, and its powerful neighbor, Iran.
The Trump administration has put immense pressure on Iraq to curb Iranian influence. In particular, Washington wants Iraq to disarm militia figures aligned with Iran, and block them from roles in the government and security forces.
For years, Iraqi leaders were either unable or unwilling to do that, raising tensions with Washington.
The Israeli bases in Iraq put an already wobbly equilibrium at greater risk, said Ramzy Mardini, founder of Geopol Labs, a Middle East-based risk advisory firm.
“Engagement with the U.S. now risks being framed as alignment with Israel,” he said. “If the war with Iran resumes, it could provide a pretext for more direct Iranian military involvement in Iraq.”
It could also give Iran-aligned militias grounds to refuse to disarm, he said.
Today, the Israeli base in al-Nukhaib is no longer operative. The status of the other Israeli outpost in Iraq is unknown.
The family of the shepherd says his killing has been ignored.
“They demand the government investigate this incident and why it happened,” his cousin, Amir, said. “They want his rights respected.”
Aaron Boxerman, Sanjana Varghese, Eric Schmitt, Christoph Koettl and Devon Lum contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) W.H.O. Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency
Just a day after the announcement, cases were confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. There is no approved vaccine for this species of Ebola.
By Yan Zhuang, Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Apoorva Mandavilli, Matthew Mpoke Bigg reported from Juba, South Sudan, May 17, 2026
A man is carried from an ambulance on Saturday as he arrives at a hospital after confirmation of an Ebola outbreak in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Victoire Mukenge/Reuters
The World Health Organization declared on Saturday that the spread of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda was a global health emergency.
The announcement was made a day after Africa’s leading public health authority reported that an outbreak in a province in the northeast of the country was linked to dozens of suspected deaths.
By Saturday, cases had also been confirmed in Kinshasa, Congo, and in Kampala, Uganda, the capital cities of each country, the W.H.O. said.
In Congo’s Ituri province, where the outbreak was first identified, 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths attributed to the virus had been reported, although only eight cases had been definitively linked to the virus through laboratory testing. There is no approved vaccine or therapeutics for the Bundibugyo species of Ebola behind the outbreak, according to the W.H.O.
The scale of the outbreak could be far larger than has been detected and reported, the W.H.O. said in declaring a “public health emergency of international concern.” It added that there were “significant uncertainties” about the precise number of people infected and the “geographic spread.”
The W.H.O.’s declaration signals a public health risk requiring a coordinated international response, and is intended to prompt member countries to prepare for the virus to spread and to share vaccines, treatments and other resources needed to contain the outbreak.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has played a major role in containing previous outbreaks, but last year it was shuttered by the Trump administration. It is unclear how that might have affected the response to this outbreak. The administration also cut funding for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading public health agency in the country. It also withdrew in January from the W.H.O.
The outbreak does not meet the criteria of a pandemic emergency, the highest level of alert, that was applied to the Covid pandemic, the W.H.O. said.
Some global health experts were alarmed that the first reports of the outbreak emerged so late in its development. A surge in cases is typically picked up much earlier by the W.H.O., other health organizations or by news reports, said Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
In Kampala, two confirmed cases, including one death, were not apparently linked, but they were identified within 24 hours of one another in people who had traveled from Congo, the agency said. The Ugandan authorities had earlier said they had identified a single case of a 59-year-old Congolese man who was admitted to a hospital in Kampala on May 11 and died three days later. A confirmed case in Kinshasa involved a person returning from Ituri, the agency said.
In Ituri, the 246 suspected cases have been reported across at least three health zones, including Rwampara, Mongbwalu and Bunia, the province’s main city, the W.H.O. said. The agency added that unusual clusters of community deaths had been reported across several health zones, and that suspected cases had also been reported in neighboring North-Kivu province.
The risk of the outbreak spreading is exacerbated by a humanitarian crisis, high population mobility and a large network of informal health care facilities in the area, the agency said.
Containing an Ebola outbreak depends on the speed and scale of the public health response. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, putting family members and caregivers at particular risk. Tracing people who may have come into contact with sufferers, isolating and treating victims promptly and safely, and burying the dead properly are all viewed as critical steps.
The political context in Ituri makes all of those things harder, according to experts. President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo declared a state of siege in the province in 2021 following attacks by insurgent groups, including the Allied Democratic Forces, an organization that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, and the Cooperative for the Development of Congo, a militia group.
The state of siege amounts effectively to martial law, which limits fundamental freedoms. In addition, the armed groups have committed massacres in recent months that have not been stopped by the government or by U.N. peacekeepers, according to Clémentine de Montjoye, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The effect has been reduced public trust in the authorities in terms of health and basic rights, she said.
“Civilians have already been exposed to extreme violence and the failure of the state to protect them and to provide them with access to basic services,” she said. “This has been compounded by U.S.A.I.D. cuts and a reduction of international aid that has affected health care providers and forced certain clinics to close.” Ituri borders Uganda and South Sudan, making frequent cross-border movement another challenge. In one example, Uganda is set to hold an annual Catholic festival on June 3 which typically attracts worshipers from across the border.
Uganda’s health minister, Jane Ocero, said on NTV Uganda, a commercial broadcaster, on Saturday that the country had a well-developed system of community health workers who go door to door, acting as surveillance officers, who then report through an electronic health system to emergency operation centers in every region.
“We have built up a very strong system of identification, detection and response to these outbreaks and the systems start from the grass roots,” she said.
Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia were hit by an Ebola epidemic in 2014 and 2015 that killed more than 11,000 people and sickened more than 28,000 across 10 countries, according to estimates by the W.H.O. Responders initially failed to recognize the extent of the outbreak and did not take sufficient steps to prevent its spread.
Since then, there has been a string of outbreaks, mainly in Congo and Uganda. But they have been contained, largely because public health officials have reacted quickly, drawing on knowledge and experience gained during previous outbreaks.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., said in a briefing on Friday that the organization was notified about suspected Ebola cases on May 5 and had sent a team to Ituri to investigate. Initial samples tested negative for the virus because field equipment could detect only the Zaire species of Ebola, the only species for which a licensed vaccine exists, he said.
Samples were later sent to the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, which confirmed on Thursday that some had tested positive for Ebola, Dr. Tedros said.
The Doctors Without Borders charity said on Sunday that it was preparing to rapidly scale up its medical response in Ituri.
“The number of cases and deaths we are seeing in such a short time frame, combined with the spread across several health zones and now across the border, is extremely concerning,” said Trish Newport, an emergency program manager for the charity.
The spread of the outbreak to the capitals of Congo and Uganda could pose an added challenge for public health workers because infectious diseases can spread more rapidly in dense urban settings.
Musinguzi Blanshe contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
