Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) What We Saw in Cuba Shocked Us
By Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan L. Jackson, May 11, 2026
Ms. Jayapal, of Washington’s Seventh Congressional District, and Mr. Jackson, of Illinois’s First Congressional District, are Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Constanze Han
Alejandro, a premature baby born in Havana’s Eusebio Hernández Pérez maternity hospital, weighed only two pounds when we met him in April. We watched him as he lay in an incubator, one of the few in the building whose delicate electronic components hadn’t been damaged by the high-voltage electricity surges that follow nationwide blackouts. Far-reaching U.S. sanctions make importing replacement parts for the other, broken incubators nearly impossible.
Touring the hospital, we saw women in the final days of their pregnancies trudging up flights of stairs, the elevators inoperable without power. The hospital staff members struggle to get to work without fuel for their cars. During blackouts, doctors sometimes have to manually pump ventilators to keep babies alive. They say the hospital has managed to avoid an increase in infant mortality over the past several months, but other facilities around the country have not been so lucky. From 2018 to 2025, as U.S. sanctions grew more punitive, Cuba’s once-impressive infant mortality rate skyrocketed by 148 percent.
As members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, we spent five days in Cuba in April to better understand the humanitarian impacts of America’s monthslong energy blockade of the island. We came away shocked by the inhumane effects of the policy, whose goal appears to be strangling the economy until the Cuban people are brought to ruin and the country is available, as President Trump put it, for the “taking.”
With the exception of one Russian oil tanker carrying 10 to 14 days’ worth of oil, fuel deliveries to Cuba have been blocked for more than four months, as other countries have feared having their tankers seized in open waters by U.S. military vessels. The resulting daily indignities have rippled across Cuban society. We returned from our trip certain that if the American people knew the full extent of what is happening on the ground in Cuba, they would demand an end to the blockade immediately.
The U.S. blockade of fuel to Cuba, on top of the longest embargo in modern U.S. history, defies the norms of international law that provide for state sovereignty, nonintervention in domestic affairs and the right of nations to trade freely. It amounts to an economic assault on the basic infrastructure of Cuba, designed to inflict collective punishment on the civilian population by manufacturing a humanitarian crisis in which health care, running water, agriculture and transportation are no longer available.
During our visit, we spoke with a wide range of Cuban citizens — political dissidents, religious leaders, entrepreneurs and members of civil society organizations and humanitarian aid groups. We also met with the families of Cuba’s political prisoners. Everywhere, there was agreement: America’s blockade must end, and a U.S. invasion must not take place.
We saw for ourselves how Americans could benefit from normalized relations with Cuba in a few key ways. Under different circumstances, Cuba would be a natural U.S. trade partner. Several agricultural secretaries of both red and blue states have visited the island to explore opportunities to export U.S. agricultural products to Cuba, hampered only by the United States’ own financial restrictions under the embargo.
The Cuban health care system, for decades a global model of public health, has produced important advances that could extend to Americans, including promising treatments for Alzheimer’s and lung cancer. And both Cuba and the United States could benefit from a boost in tourism. When President Barack Obama moved to normalize relations with Cuba, hotels, restaurants and shops flourished around the island and fueled the liberalization of the Cuban economy and an emerging independent civil society.
The Cuban government can and must do more internally to improve political and civic rights, including ending arbitrary detention and mistreatment of political prisoners, which we conveyed in our meeting with President Miguel Díaz-Canel. But it has taken some important steps, including announcing the release of 2,010 prisoners in what the country’s state-run newspaper called a “humanitarian and sovereign” gesture. Cuba’s move to authorize an F.B.I. investigation of a recent deadly maritime shootout involving Cuban Americans was another important show of transparency and good will.
Many of the economic changes the Trump administration has claimed it wanted throughout the blockade are already underway. The government recently allowed Cuban American entrepreneurs to invest in private businesses. Small and medium-size businesses now account for large parts of the economy and work force.
But liberalizing reforms cannot counteract a deliberate U.S. campaign to destroy the Cuban economy. Over the past few weeks Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sweeping new sanctions targeting Cuba’s economy under the pretext that the island poses a threat to U.S. national security.
These measures reiterated that the biggest obstacle to improving the daily lives of Cubans continues to be the United States’ outdated, Cold War-era policy of economic coercion and military pressure, whose only upshot has been isolation and suffering for the Cuban people. Further destruction in Cuba, including military action, would lead only to greater economic collapse and more Cubans fleeing the island.
The United States and Cuba can turn the page and enter real negotiations if they are based on mutual respect and aim to benefit the people of both countries. This is what we believe to be in reach — a real chance for children like Alejandro and the next generation of Cubans who deserve to know the generosity of the American people and to live with hope for the future.
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2) The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians
Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, reporting from the West Bank, May 11, 2026
Suhaib Abualkebash. Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.
Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”
And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.
There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”
Al-Sai was blindfolded, he said, and heard someone say in Hebrew, which he understands, “don’t take photos.” That suggested to him that someone had pulled out a camera. One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and joked, “these are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.
The guards left him handcuffed on the ground, and he smelled cigarette smoke. “I realized it was their smoking break,” he said.
After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.
Al-Sai said that he had been asked to become an informant for Israeli intelligence, and he believes that the purpose of his arrest and imprisonment under the administrative detention system was to pressure him to agree. Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused.
I’ve had a career covering war, genocide and atrocities including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards or settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, 100,000 women may have been raped. Mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.
Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.
I became interested in reporting on sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist sometimes called “the Palestinian Gandhi,” told me when I previously visited that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.
By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.
“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.
It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.
I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.
Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected American organization, surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been released by Israeli authorities after the Oct. 7 attacks. Three percent said they had been raped, and 29 percent said they had endured other forms of sexual violence.
The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women. Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate Israeli assaults against Palestinians. Netanyahu has denounced “baseless accusations of sexual violence” made against Israel.
Israel’s Ministry of National Security declined to comment for this article. The prison service “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse, said a spokesman who declined to be named, adding that complaints are “examined by the competent authorities.” The spokesman declined to say whether any prison staff member had ever been fired or prosecuted for sexual assaults.
The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.
One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.
Conservative social norms also inhibit discussion: Two victims told me that a prisoner who acknowledges being raped would harm the ability of his sisters and daughters to find husbands.
One farmer initially agreed to let me use his name in this article. Released early this year after months in administrative detention — with no charges filed — he related what he said happened one day last year: A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.
Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more, again with the metal baton.
“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down completely. I was crying.”
After being returned to his cell, he said, he asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.
“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?” one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a third time that day, he said.
He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more to put in your complaint.”
A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble, and he also feared that his family would react badly to the attention.
“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”
Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”
Bashi said her organization has filed hundreds of complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees — and not in a single case did these lead to charges filed. Impunity, she said, creates a “green light” for abusers.
One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not its heroic fighters,” he said.
Bashi described the outcome this way: “I would say that dropping the charges — that’s giving permission to rape.”
That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries. The acquaintance said that the former prisoner declined to be interviewed.
Prosecutions and public attention can curb such violence. In 1997, police officers in New York City raped a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a stick so brutally that he required hospitalization and surgeries. New Yorkers were outraged, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Louima in the hospital and police officers were prosecuted in a landmark case. That sent a powerful message throughout the police force: Those who assault detainees may be punished. And that’s the message that must be sent throughout the Israeli security forces.
If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.
How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict has taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar, and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, called detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and boasted of making prison conditions harsher for Palestinians. When such attitudes prevail, sexual abuse can become one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on Palestinians.
Ben-Gvir declined, through a spokeswoman, to comment on sexual assaults by security services.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, documented “a grave pattern of sexual violence” toward Palestinians. It cited the account of a Gaza prisoner, Tamer Qarmut, who said he had been raped with a stick. Torture, B’Tselem said, “has become an accepted norm.”
A former Israeli officer in a prison infirmary described in testimony to the Israeli group Breaking the Silence what that kind of acceptance means in practice: “You see normal, pretty ordinary people reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything. For fun, to have something to tell the guys, or revenge.”
Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.
For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.
“They had their hands all over my body,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t know if they raped me,” she said, because she sometimes lost consciousness from the beatings.
The aim of the abuse was twofold, she thinks: to crush her spirit and also to let Israeli men molest a naked Palestinian woman with impunity.
“I’d be stripped and beaten several times a day,” she said. “It was as if they were introducing me to everyone who worked there. At the beginning of each shift, they would bring the guys to strip me.”
When she was about to be released from prison, she said, she was called into a room with six officials and given a stern warning never to give interviews.
“They threatened that if I spoke up, they would rape me, kill me and kill my father,” she said. Not surprisingly, she declined to be named in this article.
Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
So why was he willing to speak?
“There are moments when remembering feels unbearable,” he said. “My heart felt it might stop while talking to you about it just now. But I remember there are people still in there. So I speak up.”
Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.
One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”
The other boys told very similar stories of sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.
Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”
In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike, stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and yanked.
“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”
Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.
“For six months I couldn’t speak about it, even to my family,” said Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian official who told me that settlers stripped him, beat him and poked him with a stick in the buttocks while talking about raping him. During the attack, the assailants posted a photograph on social media of him blindfolded and stripped to his underpants.
With time, Matar decided to speak out to try to break the stigma. He now keeps a blown-up print of the settlers’ photo of him on the wall of his office.
To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.
“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”
“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.
So we return to the point I noted at the beginning of this column: Supporters of Israel were right in 2023 that whatever our views about the Middle East, we should be able to repudiate rape.
“Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu asked the international community then, demanding that it condemn sexual violence committed by what the Israeli government has called the “Hamas rapist regime.”
Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”
Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
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3) A Water Doom Loop Is Coming
By Gary Ferguson, May 11, 2026
Mr. Ferguson is the author of “The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West.” He wrote from Tucson, Ariz.
Nick Larsen for The New York Times
In much of the Southwest, the ponderosa pine is the one and only truly big tree, thriving in dry heat and poor soils. The painter Georgia O’Keeffe captured the beauty of a stately ponderosa north of Taos, N.M., in one of her most stunning works, “The Lawrence Tree.” The creators of the television show “Yellowstone” were so taken with ponderosa forests that they did much of their filming within one far from Yellowstone in western Montana.
But after about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of million of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.
Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.
One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.
Lands that are no longer covered by snow also absorb more heat from the sun, drying them out and leaving them more vulnerable to large wildfires. Those fires in turn put more carbon into the atmosphere, warming the climate even more. In 50 or so years, by some estimates, snow could virtually disappear from the West, making life there exceedingly difficult.
There are two culprits behind the loss of the Southwestern forests. The first has to do with the drought conditions humans have helped create by putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. With insufficient moisture, bubbles can form in columns under tree bark, leading to a collapse of the tree’s entire system. Drought also weakens trees, leaving them easy prey for tree-boring insects, as well as blight and parasitic dwarf mistletoe.
The other culprit is our disastrous efforts for much of the 20th century to suppress all wildfires. Without regular, low-intensity fires, fallen trees and branches and other natural debris accumulate, becoming fuel for much hotter, more devastating conflagrations.
The 70-year war on wildfire also meant that young trees, which sometimes grow in tight bunches, were no longer being thinned out by small low-intensity fires. As a result, an acre of ponderosa forest that in the late 19th century might have contained 150 large, mature trees may today be packed with 1,500 far smaller and more vulnerable trees. Take this tight bunch of trees, stress them with heat and a shrinking supply of water, then wait for the pine beetles to attack. When the beetles have moved on, wildfire can come with ferocity that sometimes even seasoned firefighters can barely comprehend and decimate whatever is left.
There are certainly efforts underway to help the forests. Land management agencies have been using intentional, or “prescribed,” burns to clean debris and thin overcrowded trees. Some are even partnering with Native Americans who embrace this ancient practice on their lands in an effort to learn the finer points of prescribed burning.
But in any given year, forest managers are able to burn only a tiny fraction of the forests that need the fire. Meanwhile, tree nurseries have been doing their best to grow more ponderosa seedlings to replant at least some of the forests that can no longer regenerate on their own. Just the task of growing hundreds of millions of seedlings is overwhelming. At full production, the nation’s nurseries typically manage to grow only a small proportion of the seedlings needed.
The government should treat this situation as deeply threatening to the habitability of the West. But as heat and drought battered the region this spring, the federal government, utterly dismissive of climate change, was shredding an astonishing number of forest-related conservation efforts. At the end of March, the Trump administration introduced a reckless plan to restructure the Forest Service, gutting much of the scientific research into how we might mitigate the effects of climate change on public forests. The threatened (or in some cases, abandoned) studies looked at climate-related insect and tree disease and wildfire behavior essential to public safety.
Efforts to make prescribed burns more effective in the face of climate change have also been slashed. Designated roadless areas are poised to be opened for giant commercial logging operations, further degrading the natural healing capacity of the land.
Given the ponderosa’s striking reputation for resilience, it’s possible that in a century or two some of these lost forests might make a comeback. But that depends on whether we humans can muster some resilience of our own. It will mean keeping alive our commitment to find more sustainable ways of living: increasing solar and wind power, retrofitting commercial buildings to make them more energy efficient and transitioning to electric vehicles.
But we also need the kind of resilience to reject politicians who endanger science. We need to build a resilience tough enough to push back against those who would abuse the ecological systems that give life to us all.
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4) A Single Infusion Could Suppress H.I.V. for Years, Study Suggests
A study of a few patients, to be presented this week, showed promise for a type of therapy that has already cured some blood cancers.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, May 11, 2026
A study led by an H.I.V. expert at the University of California, San Francisco, could offer a path toward a lasting H.I.V. treatment. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
For about a decade, scientists have had remarkable success curing some blood cancers by modifying a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and kill the malignant cells.
That same approach may help control H.I.V., among the wiliest of viruses, scientists will report on Tuesday. After a single infusion of immune cells engineered to recognize the virus, two people in a new study have suppressed their H.I.V. to undetectable levels, one of them for nearly two years.
The data is scheduled to be presented at a gene therapy conference in Boston, but the researchers shared an early copy with The New York Times.
The treatment is years, if not decades, from being widely available, but the study offers what scientists call “proof of concept,” and the tantalizing hope that a single shot could one day offer lifelong relief from H.I.V.
“It is inspiration and a potential road map to get to where we need to go,” said Dr. Steve Deeks, an H.I.V. expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the trial.
Other scientists were enthusiastic about the milestone.
“It’s truly amazing that they were able to accomplish this,” said Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem, an oncologist and gene therapy expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, who was not involved in the study.
H.I.V. requires lifelong control because the virus hides out in deep recesses of the body, and comes roaring back when it sees an opportunity. It also mutates easily to evade its attackers.
More than 40 million people are living with H.I.V. worldwide. About three-fourths of them take daily oral pills to keep the virus in check, and a much smaller proportion now receive injections every month or two. Several companies are developing longer-acting options, including weekly and monthly pills, and shots that could be given just once a year.
But scientists still aspire to develop “functional cures” that would effectively control H.I.V. over a lifetime, even if they do not eliminate it.
“People are really working hard on trying to cure it, and we’re making progress,” said James Riley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is also modifying immune cells to control H.I.V.
Since the 1990s, many scientists have tried to modify immune cells called T cells to attack H.I.V., but those efforts were mostly unsuccessful. Some research teams lost interest after the arrival of powerful antiretroviral drugs soon after.
Cancer researchers soldiered on and succeeded in using the approach against blood cancers like leukemia.
“Cancer will always probably be the pioneer in this stuff, because of the incredible unmet medical need,” Dr. Riley said.
In the new study, scientists at Caring Cross, a nonprofit focused on developing affordable immunotherapies, engineered immune cells from each study participant to carry two molecules on the cell surface. Both molecules bind to H.I.V. and kill infected cells, but one also prevents the immune cells from becoming infected.
“It’s this dual nature of targeting — killing and protecting — that we think is the missing piece in terms of how this therapy works,” said Boro Dropulić, the executive director of Caring Cross, who developed the method.
The researchers extracted immune cells from each participant, modified the cells, then injected them back in. The participants stopped taking antiretroviral drugs the day of the infusion.
If a person does not take antiretroviral drugs, their H.I.V. levels typically soar within two weeks. But one person in the trial partially suppressed the virus for 12 weeks before rebounding. Two others were still in remission, 92 and 48 weeks after their infusion.
All three had begun receiving antiretroviral therapy within months of being infected. Three others who had lived with H.I.V. for longer before they were treated did not respond and needed to resume antiretroviral therapy. (A seventh participant showed signs of control seven weeks after infusion.)
Those details may be important. Those who were treated early in infection may have less H.I.V. sequestered in their body. Their immune system may also be less ravaged by the virus, and therefore more likely to rally when infused with the modified cells.
“Three out of three people with early disease doing some degree of control, to me, is the most provocative finding here,” Dr. Deeks said.
The two people with long-term response did show some blips of viral replication that quickly died down. That is to be expected as H.I.V. emerges from its reservoirs and is quashed by the immune cells.
Still, the results were exciting, several experts said.
The numbers in the study are very small but “these n-of-ones are so powerful because they encourage further research,” said Dr. Mike McCune, the head of a division at the Gates Foundation that supports innovation in H.I.V.
“For us, what what’s important is to make sure that we can go from an n-of-one to an n-of-a-million or more,” he said. “And the only way to do that is to engage companies that know how to make products.”
The foundation has not invested in work that involves removing immune cells and reinfusing them back into the individual. That approach is too invasive and expensive to reach the millions who will need it, Dr. McCune said. But it is actively pursuing scalable options.
Cancer researchers are already showing success altering the immune cells while they are still in the body, which should eventually be cheaper by orders of magnitude.
The direct injections could be produced “for less than $10,000 and then be off-the-shelf, meaning you can have them ready when a patient or person living with H.I.V. comes in,” Dr. Kiem said.
Other groups are working on broadly neutralizing antibodies, rare molecules that can disable a wide range of H.I.V. versions by targeting parts of the virus that do not mutate.
“If we can combine these two approaches, that really may be synergistic and provide a pathway to deliver something close to a functional cure long term,” Dr. Riley said.
Anticipating long-term needs, Caring Cross is working with organizations in Brazil, India and elsewhere to manufacture the products for cancer at much lower costs. The team is also refining the tools and approach for H.I.V. and plans to begin a bigger study later this year.
“This is a first-in-human approach,” Dr. Deeks said. “We often come up with new theories as we do this, and that’s what’s happening as we speak.”
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5) As Coal Rebounds, More Toxic Mercury Is in the Air
Coal-burning power plants released more mercury last year, according to an analysis by The Times. It reverses a downward trend of emissions of a metal that interferes with brain development.
By Irena Hwang and Hiroko Tabuchi, May 11, 2026
“The Trump administration estimated that loosening limits on pollution would save the industry about $120 million a year in compliance costs. … Public health experts say savings for the industry ignore the economic impact of additional pollution, including health care costs associated with cardiovascular disease and developmental problems in children; researchers at Harvard had calculated that keeping stricter limits on mercury pollution from lignite plants alone would have resulted in $200 million a year in public health benefits in just the first year. ‘The economic arguments are very flawed, because they don’t capture the public health costs,’ said Elsie Sunderland, a professor of environmental chemistry at Harvard, who conducted the research. She said the Trump administration’s policy rollbacks threatened to reverse decades of progress, for example, in lowering concentrations of mercury in the blood of American women of childbearing age, which would in turn affect fetus’s brains.”
Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant near Cartersville, Ga., is one of dozens of coal operations to receive presidential exemptions from meeting stricter emissions rules. Mike Stewart/Associated Press
Coal-fired power plants across the country released more mercury last year as power demand surged, reversing a yearslong downward trend in the emissions of a toxic metal that impairs brain development.
Mercury emissions from coal-burning plants increased by roughly 9 percent in 2025, compared with a year earlier, totaling more than 4,800 pounds, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency.
At the same time, the Trump administration launched a series of moves that experts say may make those emissions climb even higher this year and beyond.
The administration has encouraged the burning of more coal, which emits more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than other fossil fuels, while also blocking tighter pollution controls on coal-burning plants that were supposed to take effect by 2027. It has directed the Pentagon to buy more coal-powered electricity and reopened millions of acres of federal land to mining while working to stymie nonpolluting energy, like wind and solar power.
It also ordered some coal-burning power plants to scrap their plans to close, compelling them to remain open instead.
Most were set to close at the end of 2025. But the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan, which should have retired on May 31, 2025, was ordered by the Energy Department to keep operating. From June through December last year, it emitted 36 pounds of mercury.
After years of progress, mercury emissions rose last year
Mercury emissions increased by more than 400 pounds, as the United States relied more heavily on energy from coal.
Under President Trump, the E.P.A. also canceled the more stringent limits the Biden administration had sought to place on emissions of mercury and other heavy metals from coal-fired power plants by 2027, maintaining a set of looser restrictions that took effect in 2012 under President Barack Obama.
At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill two weeks ago, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the weakening of pollution limits on power plants that burn coal.
Representative Josh Harder, Democrat of California, said Mr. Trump’s rollback would pump up to 1,500 additional pounds of mercury into the air. He cited E.P.A. data that compared emissions under Mr. Trump to the levels that would have been if Biden-era standards had stuck.
Mr. Zeldin said that number wasn’t accurate. “Rip it up,” he told Mr. Harder. “Have your dog pee on it.”
Before last year, mercury emissions from coal plants in the United States had been on a decline since 2018, the earliest year for which complete data was available. The only exception was 2021, when economic activity surged following the worst of the Covid pandemic lockdowns.
The rise of mercury emissions in 2025 was driven by an increase in the amount of coal burned. Experts said that demand from power-hungry data centers, as well as volatile natural gas prices, had spurred utility companies to burn more coal.
Coal’s resurgence has contributed to a rebound in emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide, as well as hazardous pollutants like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide, which can harm the lungs.
But an increase in mercury is particularly alarming.
A potent neurotoxin that settles into waterways and accumulates in the food chain, particularly in fish, mercury can cause premature cardiovascular mortality in adults. In children and fetuses, it can cause developmental delays and permanent I.Q. deficits.
The toxic metal was once used in household items like batteries, paint and thermometers, but was phased out in the 1990s and 2000s, leaving coal plants as the largest industrial source of airborne mercury pollution in the United States.
As the head of the environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Mr. Trump’s health secretary, campaigned against mercury pollution from coal plants. He has talked about being diagnosed with mercury poisoning, most likely from eating tuna contaminated with the dangerous metal. In testimony before Congress, Mr. Kennedy called mercury “the most powerful neurotoxin we know of in the universe.”
President Trump, on the other hand, frequently praises what he calls “beautiful, clean coal.” And Mr. Zeldin has argued that tougher limits on mercury pollution would have regulated the coal sector “out of existence,” destroying “reliable American energy.”
In a statement, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said President Trump remained “committed to restoring and strengthening the coal industry which has been viciously attacked by climate activists for years.”
Where coal plants emit mercury
Coal plants emitted over 4,800 pounds of mercury last year. Mercury that accumulates in the food chain can pose serious health risks.
Lynn R. Goldman, a pediatrician and professor of environmental and occupational health, called the rise of mercury emissions “shocking.”
“A tiny amount of mercury goes a long way,” Dr. Goldman said. “Mercury is magnified in the food chain, and so it ends up getting more and more concentrated as it moves up into, say, fish that people eat.”
The result, she said, are changes to intellectual development and behavior in children that might not be noticeable in the doctor’s office.
The E.P.A. first regulated mercury from coal plants in 2012, and mercury emissions from the power sector dropped by 86 percent within five years, according to the agency.
At that time, a subset of coal plants that burn lignite, the dirtiest coal, were allowed to meet looser limits after the coal industry argued that effective pollution controls didn’t exist.
In 2024, the Biden administration rejected that argument and moved to require lignite coal-burning plants to meet the same standards as other coal plants. That would have lowered lignite plants’ legal emissions limit by 70 percent. The Trump administration has repealed those restrictions for lignite plants.
In 2025, mercury emissions from lignite plants appeared to decline moderately. Carlos E. Romero, director of the Energy Research Center at Lehigh University, said the amount of mercury released by a coal plant could be affected by a range of reasons, including the mercury content of the coal itself. Lignite plants continued to make up for a disproportionate amount of mercury emissions, contributing more than 20 percent of total mercury emitted last year, though they accounted for less than 5 percent of electric power generated at coal plants. They are expected to remain a significant source of mercury emissions.
The Trump administration estimated that loosening limits on pollution would save the industry about $120 million a year in compliance costs.
Dr. Romero, an expert on pollution controls, said that some plants had invested in controls ahead of the tougher Biden-era standards, and were expected to keep those controls running. But units without the most stringent mercury controls could see their emission rates drift upward.
Antelope Valley Station in North Dakota is one of dozens of coal-burning plants that no longer has to meet stringent pollution standards by 2027. Mercury emissions recorded for that power plant increased by 14 percent in 2025 as it generated more power.
The Basin Electric Power Cooperative, the operator of the Antelope Valley plant, had argued that complying with the stricter rules would require expensive new equipment and could force it to scale back operations, hurting grid reliability and threatening national security.
Andy Buntrock, a spokesman for Basin Electric, said its plants complied with state and federal regulations.
A coalition of environmental groups has taken the Trump administration to court over its regulatory rollbacks.
The rise in mercury “adds to the growing evidence that, as the administration has made a significant effort to bring back coal, it is making us sicker,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has also analyzed the data.
The biggest increase in mercury emissions came from a decades-old Rockport Generating Station in Spencer County, Ind., on the banks of the Ohio River. There, mercury emissions surged to 73 pounds in 2025 from 28 pounds in 2024, an increase of more than 160 percent as the plant generated 90 percent more electric power.
Indiana has seen an expansion of large artificial intelligence data centers that require constant power, which has driven up demand for coal. The Rockport plant is scheduled for retirement in 2028, which environmental groups said diminished incentives to invest in pollution controls.
Scott Blake, a spokesman for American Electric Power, Rockport’s operator, said the plant’s pollution control equipment met legal obligations. He also noted that one of the plant’s units was off line for maintenance in 2024 and then returned to service the next year, increasing the amount of coal that was burned.
Public health experts say savings for the industry ignore the economic impact of additional pollution, including health care costs associated with cardiovascular disease and developmental problems in children; researchers at Harvard had calculated that keeping stricter limits on mercury pollution from lignite plants alone would have resulted in $200 million a year in public health benefits in just the first year.
“The economic arguments are very flawed, because they don’t capture the public health costs,” said Elsie Sunderland, a professor of environmental chemistry at Harvard, who conducted the research.
She said the Trump administration’s policy rollbacks threatened to reverse decades of progress, for example, in lowering concentrations of mercury in the blood of American women of childbearing age, which would in turn affect fetus’s brains.
Mira Rojanasakul contributed reporting.
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6) They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’
The Justice Department ended a deal that had helped fund a solution to the sewage crisis in rural Alabama. “Almost like we are starting all over again,” one activist said.
By Bernard Mokam, May 11, 2026
“Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet through her backyard, discarding it outdoors. Three or four times a year, a spell of heavy rain forces the excrement back up into the house. … The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits. Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. … Three years ago, the Biden administration concluded in its first-ever environmental justice investigation that Alabama officials had failed to adequately address the sanitation crisis disproportionately affecting the Black residents of Lowndes County. The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil. But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it ‘illegal DEI.’”
Bernard Mokam spoke to more than a dozen residents in Alabama’s Black Belt region.
Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet into open ground. Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet through her backyard, discarding it outdoors. Three or four times a year, a spell of heavy rain forces the excrement back up into the house.
It is a plight that has long plagued residents across Alabama’s Black Belt, a stretch of largely rural counties so named for its dark soil and history of slavery. Cotton flourished in the region for the same reasons that conventional septic tanks fail there: The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits.
Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Three years ago, the Biden administration concluded in its first-ever environmental justice investigation that Alabama officials had failed to adequately address the sanitation crisis disproportionately affecting the Black residents of Lowndes County. The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil.
But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it “illegal DEI.”
The administration also scuttled a separate $14 million E.P.A. grant that had been earmarked to install new systems and provide work force training across Lowndes, Hale and Wilcox Counties.
Community activists fear the region may be doomed to enduring wastewater challenges forever.
“We thought we had a solution,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founder of the Alabama-based Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, who has helped put a spotlight on the crisis. “It is almost like we are starting all over again.”
The funds have been filtering through the Alabama Department of Public Health to local nonprofit groups, which have taken on the responsibility of installing the systems.
Now, though, the money that flowed from the settlement will expire in October. So the groups are turning to whatever other funds they have and telling some homeowners that they may have to keep waiting for relief.
In interviews, many Black Belt residents said they had never heard of D.E.I. One woman even wondered whether the term originated with the president.
Some questioned what role race had actually played in their wastewater challenges. “I don’t think it’s a race issue,” said Ms. Anderson, noting that the leadership of Wilcox County was predominantly Black. She was one of the homeowners who would have gotten a new septic tank and is now out of luck.
But others tied the sanitation struggles to the legacies of slavery and segregation, linking the persistent poverty in the Black Belt to systemic racism.
The agreement that Alabama had reached with the Biden administration stopped the state from leveling fines and other penalties against Lowndes County residents who violated sanitation laws. It also ensured that the state would be an active participant in the solution — requiring it to track the number of residents without reliable sanitation, disseminate information about the health risks from raw sewage exposure, and seek funding sources to comply with the agreement.
In a statement, the Alabama Department of Health denied that it had discriminated against Black residents and said that it would continue “to expend grant funds associated with the installation of wastewater systems until funds expire.”
Some leaders fear the Supreme Court’s recent blow to the Voting Rights Act may further diminish political support for the majority-Black region.
“We cannot return to a time when the basic needs of these communities were ignored,” said Representative Terri Sewell, who represents the region in Congress and had championed the 2023 federal agreement.
Across the Black Belt, circumstances vary. Some homeowners have straight pipes snaking behind their homes, where the untreated waste creeps over their property line onto their neighbor’s land. Others purchased conventional septic tanks decades ago, which have since failed and deteriorated into cesspools and lagoons.
The flies and odor can prevent homeowners from spending time in their backyards. One day in March, a property owner had a swarm of gnats perched on the walls of his bathtub that appeared to be waiting for waste to rise through the drain.
State researchers estimate that up to four million gallons of raw sewage enter the region’s water system per year.
The burden of installing septic systems falls on property owners if they live outside the limits of a municipal sewer system, as many in the Black Belt do. But many residents cannot afford the costly, engineered systems that are needed to withstand the impermeable clay soil. And local counties do not generate enough tax revenue to help.
In Lowndes County, for example, the poverty rate hovers around 30 percent, almost three times the national average.
Several nonprofit groups have taken on the work of installing septic tanks in the county. But two of them do not regularly share information, and one has implied that the other has committed fraud.
Still, the groups admit that the system would benefit from more collaboration. Some activists have faulted state officials for making local nonprofits play such a vital role.
“There needs to be an overseeing body,” said Carmelita Arnold, president of the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program.
And the groups agree that without federal aid, the issue will persist.
“If the current administration doesn’t change their mind about funding, it won’t be solved,” said Sherry Bradley, the executive director of the Black Belt Unicorporated Wastewater Program. We have a solution, she added, “but it takes funding.”
Ms. Bradley worked at the state health department for four decades and oversaw the wastewater issue as the agency’s bureau of environmental services director.
She said she knew back then that there had been raw sewage on the ground, and had even issued violations in Lowndes County. But she said that she was not aware of the full extent of the crisis until 2017, when a United Nations report compared the conditions in the county to those in the developing world.
For many Black Belt residents, land has been passed down through generations.
Andrew Rives, 83, still raises horses and goats on the 40 acres that his grandfather purchased many years ago near Tyler, Ala., in Lowndes County.
He was proud of owning the land. After the Civil War, the government reneged on its promise to give emancipated people 40 acres and a mule, but Mr. Rives said his grandfather was determined to buy the 40 acres.
Waste flows from his mobile home through a 50-foot pipe into a trench near a creek. When it rains, he said, the waste ends up in the watershed.
Mr. Rives signed up for a new septic tank two years ago, but it is unclear if he will get one before the funding expires. The Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program has installed around 35 septic tanks since 2024. The group still has around 140 homeowners on its list and Ms. Arnold, the president, hopes to install 30 more systems by October. But slow permit approval could get in the way, as could bad weather.
The organization has also been hampered by a lack of cash reserves to be able to pay for the work upfront. Last May, it took out a $1 million loan from a local bank in order to make progress.
Murline Wilson, 67, has been promised a new septic tank at her home in Wilcox County. She’s eager for her grandchildren to be able to play in the backyard, but she feels terrible for the dozens of homeowners who won’t get one now.
Community outreach officials in the county have whittled a list of 100 homeowners hoping for septic tanks down to 20 by drawing 13 names from a hat, and then giving seven others priority because they signed up first.
“It is really sad. This is one of the poorest counties in Alabama, and we need them,” said Ms. Wilson, referring to the septic tanks. “I was just blessed to get funding.”
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7) Cursive Club, Where Students Learn With a Flourish
Students are practicing cursive in clubs after school and in libraries after it was cut from the Common Core curriculum. Some states are reintroducing it into schools.
By Rylee Kirk, May 11, 2026
Chris Kobara practices writing his name in a cursive writing club at the Urban Assembly Early College High School of Emergency Medicine in Manhattan. Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times
Chris Kobara stood in front of an electronic white board in his New York City high school, practicing with a swoop of his pen the connection between the “a” and “r” in his name.
He stepped back and looked at the board with Suzanne Finman, his English teacher, who had been coaching him.
“If it’s readable, it’s something,” he said, displeased with his effort.
Mr. Kobara, 18, was one of six students who gathered after school in Ms. Finman’s classroom at the Urban Assembly Early College High School of Emergency Medicine on a recent afternoon to practice signing their names in cursive.
The students, all of them high school seniors, filled sheets with their names, at times comparing the flourishes they added to their letters.
The club is one of several that have been established in recent years at schools and libraries across the country where children are learning cursive in extracurricular clubs.
Cursive was eliminated from the Common Core standards in 2010, and now many children can’t sign their names, write checks or read historical documents written in cursive, such as the Declaration of Independence.
In a 2016 interview with Education Week, Sue Pimentel, who helped shape the Common Core state standards for English and language arts, said a higher priority had been placed on students learning how to use technology than learning cursive.
While some states have restored cursive writing to their curriculums, some students in states where it remains excluded have sought ways to learn the skill outside school.
“Knowing how to write your name in script is really important,” Mr. Kobara said. “Everybody should know how to write in script.”
He’s been practicing his signature for several weeks after school, perfecting a loop in the “C” of his first name, and plans to write thank you notes to teachers in cursive.
It started with the students’ curiosity.
“When students see me take my own notes in cursive, they immediately ask me to write their name in cursive and then they ask me to teach it to them,” Ms. Finman said. “This has happened a lot over the years, so I asked, ‘Could I teach you this in a cursive club?’”
While some students are learning in extracurricular clubs at school, others are finding their penmanship lessons at libraries.
Mandi Whipple, a librarian who specializes in young adult books at the public library in Blackstone, Mass., was inspired to start a cursive club last year after one of her colleagues observed that her grandchildren couldn’t read cursive writing.
Now, a group of students meets at the library for an hour every Thursday to practice the looping script of their letters.
“The ones that have stuck with it are now writing full sentences,’ Miss Whipple said. “They’re really into it.”
A cursive program at Abington Community Library in Clarks Summit, Pa., has a defined curriculum that children follow for eight weeks, focusing on a few letters each week.
“We show them how to do it and they can copy us on paper,” Leigh-Ann Puchalski, the children’s librarian said. “Then we do practice where they practice on worksheets. Then, to make it fun, we add different types of sensory elements.”
The children can trace letters in salt with their fingers, use magnetized drawing boards called Magna Doodles, and write in gel pens to make it fun, Mrs. Puchalski said.
The program has been so popular that it has had a wait-list, she said.
With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this year, Mrs. Puchalski is emphasizing the historical side of cursive and having children trace the Constitution.
“For one of the sessions we’ll use parchment paper,” Mrs. Puchalski said. “I did actually order the refillable fountain pens.”
In Pennsylvania, cursive won’t be a relic of the past much longer. Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a bill in February to reintroduce it in schools, joining at least 23 other states that have started to require that it be taught in schools. New Jersey is reintroducing cursive for the 2026-27 school year. Idaho brought it back last year.
Cursive is not just for signing checks. It also has a scientific advantage.
“When you form those intricate letters, those motor patterns on paper, it actually requires much more of the brain, and the brain is much more active and it’s more stimulating for the brain than to type letters on the keyboard,” said Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher and professor of psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Dr. van der Meer conducted a study of 140 students who were quizzed after a lecture by their professor. Those who took notes by hand scored better on the quiz than those who typed their notes, she said.
For Jasmyn Rios, 17, learning cursive is a point of pride.
“My I.D. signature looks crazy, it’s a mess,” she said, while writing her name repeatedly on a piece of paper. “I wanted to come so when I do have to sign those professional documents, I’m not embarrassed.”
Ms. Rios said that she’s had to sign her name several times as she prepares to go to college, and that she was concerned about how her handwriting would look once she is in the professional world, she said.
Cursive “should be taught fundamentally in elementary schools,” she said. “I think it covers a lot more than just having professional writing — just being confident in what you’re writing when you’re writing it.”
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8) Consumers Lean on a ‘Hamster Wheel’ of Credit to Manage Rising Costs
As prices increase for gas, groceries and other staples, more and more households are borrowing to get by.
By Stacy Cowley, May 10, 2026
Alex Watts at a gas station in Hilliard, Ohio. To keep up with rising costs, Mr. Watts said, he and his wife are driving less to save money on gas and have stopped putting away money for savings. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
On paper, Alex Watts’s household looks financially stable. He and his wife together earn a bit more than $140,000 a year; own their home near Columbus, Ohio; have great credit scores; and stay on top of their bills. When an unexpected expense hits, like a car repair or a hospital trip, they always find a way to cover it.
But amid the ever-growing costs of groceries, gasoline and electricity, their monthly expenses are running into the red and their monthly credit card balances have gotten larger. To pay them down, they drive less to save money on gas and have stopped putting away money for savings.
“I’m working between eight and 12 hours of overtime every week,” said Mr. Watts, 36, a hospital nurse raising three young children. “We’re cutting even, at best, but sometimes we’re spending more than we’re getting.”
The Wattses are among an increasing number of households leaning on credit to make ends meet as the costs of essentials — including housing, health care, utilities and food — keep rising. Credit card balances reached a record $1.3 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s latest quarterly study of household debt, and more and more people are applying for new credit cards. Applications for credit rose in February to their highest level since late 2022.
The strain from this increasing debt load is starting to show, with the percentage of after-tax income that households spend paying down debt ticking up since early 2025, according to Federal Reserve data.
Banks say they are not seeing signs of serious distress. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, said late last month that consumer borrowing habits looked “fundamentally healthy.”
But across all consumer debts, the share that is delinquent rose to 4.8 percent, the highest tally since 2017. For the first time in more than a decade, the national average credit score dipped last year, according to data from Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus.
The data may also understate some of the strain, as more borrowers take on debts that rarely show up on their credit reports, like “buy now, pay later” loans. Unlike most loans, these pay-later products usually do not involve a “hard inquiry” on the borrower’s credit report — the kind that can lower credit scores — and lenders often don’t report short-term loans to credit bureaus.
The Trump administration has noted the spike in consumer borrowing.
“Credit card spending is through the roof,” Kevin Hassett, a top White House economic adviser, said on Fox Business last Wednesday. “They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else, too.”
Mr. Hassett attributed the spending surge to people having “so much more money in their pockets.”
But many consumers are not expressing optimism. The University of Michigan’s latest U.S. consumer sentiment index reading, released Friday, dropped to a record low in May, even below the levels recorded during recessions.
For the Watts family, higher gasoline costs are one factor pushing up their spending. The cost of a gallon of gas near their home rose 70 cents overnight one day late last month. Their home energy bills have also soared: Mr. Watts’s gas bill, which is normally under $100, was almost $400 in February.
That’s compounding the stress that inflation has inflicted on his family’s budget. His grocery bill is more than $1,000 a month higher than it was a few years ago, and the strawberries and other fruits his children love have jumped in price in recent weeks.
“The secret sauce to keeping everything spinning is financial engineering,” said Mike Pierce, the executive director of Protect Borrowers, an advocacy group. “What happens when the music stops?”
With credit increasingly serving as the glue holding daily life together, the consequences can be dire if that safety net disappears.
Davette Ceasar, 27, had relied on a Fidelity-branded card as her go-to card. Issued by Elan Financial Services, a division of U.S. Bank, the card carried a hefty credit line and a promotional zero-percent interest rate.
But last month, Ms. Ceasar discovered that her credit score had plunged almost 50 points because Elan slashed her credit limit by nearly $10,000, to just a tad more than her existing balance on the card. That spiked her credit-utilization rate, a major factor in credit scoring.
Ms. Ceasar called Elan and Fidelity seeking answers about the reduction. She was told that she had a late payment, which she thinks was a mistake — she is certain she made the payment online before her due date. Fidelity agreed to waive the late fee, but Ms. Ceasar has been unable, after weeks of calls to customer service, to get her former credit limit restored.
Ms. Ceasar, who lives in Maryland, had been looking for a new apartment to rent. Now, she worries her lower score will be an obstacle.
Medical debt pushed Opal Mattila, 42, a high school math teacher in rural Minnesota, over the financial edge. Ms. Mattila, who earns around $70,000 a year, pays $1,200 a month for a health insurance plan for herself and her 7-year-old son that carries a $3,500-per-person annual deductible. A cascade of health ills in recent years — essential dental work for herself and her son, followed by the costs of treating him for a broken arm — left her buried in bills for out-of-pocket costs she could not afford to pay down.
She filed for bankruptcy last year. In the bankruptcy process, the balances she had on her credit cards were discharged — and those accounts were closed.
“If something horrible were to happen, I don’t know how I’d pay for it,” she said.
The tangle of affordability challenges created by health care and inflationary pressures is already having crossover effects.
Vicki Morris, 53, is a middle school speech therapist in a Chicago suburb. For more than 20 years, she has run a small business on the side, operating a clinic that offers a range of therapeutic services for children. It has usually been profitable, giving her a bit of extra income to supplement her public-school salary.
But her clients are facing the same financial pressures that Ms. Morris now feels in her own household. As health insurance costs rise and the Trump administration slashes Affordable Care Act subsidies, millions of people have lost their coverage, and even those with insurance are cutting back on medical appointments they can no longer afford.
Increasing numbers of patients have stopped coming for treatment and left her with unpaid balances, totaling thousands of dollars. Keeping her business running and her staff paid is now stretching her own finances to the edge. She’s turning to debt to hold it together.
“Car repairs definitely are going on credit cards. Household repairs are going credit cards,” she said. “It’s the hamster wheel of the debt cycle. Every time you feel like you’ve met a milestone, you get hit with something else.”
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9) Steel Tariffs Are Harming Tin Can Makers and Lifting Food Prices
The cost to put food in cans remains high because manufacturers must still import steel from overseas. U.S. Steel plans to reopen a tin-plate factory.
By Peter Eavis, Visuals by Ross Mantle, Reporting from Yorkville, Ohio, May 12, 2026
Rolls of steel at the Ohio Coatings factory in Yorkville. The company imports around three-fourths of its thin, uncoated steel, on which it must pay tariffs.
The simple tin can is proving to be one of the toughest tests for President Trump’s tariffs.
Just over a year ago, Mr. Trump imposed high tariffs on steel to try to stifle imports of the metal and bolster domestic production.
But imports of the kind of steel used to make cans surged in 2025, and American can makers say they will remain heavily dependent on foreign supplies — now made more expensive by the tariffs — for a long time.
“We have to import all this tin plate,” said Scott Breen, the president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, referring to the thinly rolled steel that is coated with tin and used to make cans. “There’s not any more being produced here than there was before.” The institute is a trade group representing some of the largest can makers in the United States.
Unlike some of Mr. Trump’s other tariffs, which have been overturned by courts, the steel levies have strong legal standing, according to scholars, which means they are unlikely to go away anytime soon.
They were imposed under a national security provision called Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act — and, at 50 percent, are higher than many of Mr. Trump’s other import taxes.
A can makes up about a third of the wholesale price of canned fruits or vegetables. And as Mr. Trump’s tariffs pushed up the cost of tin plate, canned food prices have risen, burdening households that rely on such staples as corn and beans.
In March, canned fruits and vegetables cost 5.7 percent more than they did a year earlier, compared with a 2 percent increase for all food consumed at home, according to government data.
Over 80 percent of the tin plate used in the United States last year was imported, according to Harbor Intelligence, a metals markets analysis firm. Tin plate is produced in much lower volumes than the steel used to make cars and buildings, making it a less attractive business for large steel companies.
Still, U.S. Steel, the biggest U.S. producer of tin plate, recently announced that it was planning to make more, by restarting production next year at a facility in Gary, Ind. — a potential sign that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are spurring investment.
A spokesperson for the Commerce Department, the agency behind the steel tariffs, said that tin plate mills closed under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and that Mr. Trump’s policies were improving the business environment for tin plate makers, pointing to U.S. Steel’s plans for its Gary plant.
But even with the new supply from U.S. Steel, American can makers are likely to import over two-thirds of their tin plate in the coming years, steel executives and analysts said.
The current challenges affecting the tin plate market are not lost on Dave Luptak, the chief executive of Ohio Coatings. His company buys steel rolled as thin as a business card and coats it with tin at its factory in Yorkville, Ohio.
Workers at the facility, most of whom are in the United Steelworkers union, make the tin plate by running the thin steel, known as blackplate, through a line that coats it with tin via a chemical-electrical process. Last year, the factory produced 162,000 tons of tin plate for its can making customers.
Mr. Luptak said he supported Mr. Trump’s tariffs because they protected the American steel industry from foreign factories, particularly in China, where production is heavily subsidized. But Ohio Coatings imports around three-fourths of its blackplate, on which it must pay tariffs.
Mr. Luptak said the imposition of the tariffs did not mean the company was paying 50 percent more for the foreign blackplate. That’s because, he said, Ohio Coatings’ suppliers had cut their price to offset some of the tariff. He also said the company had raised what it charged its customers by a “single-digit” percentage last year. Still, Mr. Luptak said that Ohio Coatings had absorbed some of the cost of the tariff and that its profits had taken a hit.
“Our margins are challenged,” he said.
Ohio Coatings has asked the Trump administration to consider temporarily waiving the tariffs on blackplate. This, Mr. Luptak explained, would give his company and other American steel makers time to set up new lines to make tin-plate steel and reduce the United States’ reliance on imports.
A decade ago, American producers made over 60 percent of the tin plate, blackplate and another type of packaging steel used in the United States, according to Harbor Intelligence. But last year they produced less than 20 percent. In recent years, American steel companies shut down tin plate lines. They said they couldn’t compete with imports, and other types of steel production had better margins. That left Ohio Coatings and U.S. Steel as the only producers of tin plate. U.S. Steel also makes blackplate, some of which it sells to Ohio Coatings.
U.S. Steel didn’t say how much tin plate — the finished product — it might produce after restarting production at its Gary factory. “It will depend on a number of factors,” said Amanda Malkowski, a spokeswoman for U.S. Steel.
Last year, as part of a deal to sell U.S. Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel, the U.S. government obtained a “golden share” in the American steel producer that gives it significant influence over the company. Because of the golden share, some analysts said, it is possible that the Trump administration leaned on U.S. Steel to restart tin plate production at Gary.
“It’s kind of hard to know what’s economics and what’s politics there,” said Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the Cato Institute, a research organization that favors free markets and opposes many tariffs.
Ms. Malkowski said reopening the factory “was a business decision.”
Cleveland-Cliffs, an American steel company, decided to stop producing tin plate after it lost an “anti-dumping” case at the International Trade Commission in 2024. The company had sought high duties on tin plate imported from Canada, China, Germany and South Korea.
Despite Cleveland-Cliffs’ defeat, U.S. Steel said last month that it was bringing its own case to the trade commission, alleging tin-plate dumping of products from China, Taiwan and Turkey. In its petition, U.S. Steel said those imports were taking sales from domestic producers “by offering aggressively low prices.”
But the petition does not show imports getting significantly cheaper.
In the petition, U.S. Steel said imported Turkish tin-mill products on average cost $1,057 a ton last year, roughly the same as $1,083 a ton in 2023. But while U.S. Steel said the Turkish products cost 8 percent less than the American ones in 2023, it said they were 75 percent cheaper last year.
In explaining how the discount could have grown so much in two years, a person familiar with the petition said U.S. Steel had increased its tin-mill prices to what it believed was a fairer level.
As tariffs push up the cost of American canned goods, imports of foreign canned goods are rising. That’s in part because they benefit from a loophole that puts American canned products at a disadvantage: Imported foreign cans are exempt from the steel tariffs when they contain food.
The Can Manufacturers Institute, the trade group, called for the steel tariffs to be imposed on imported food-filled cans, but the Trump administration did not do so when it revamped the steel tariffs last month. In a news release, the trade group said the administration’s failure to act would open “the floodgates to more foreign-filled cans on grocery store shelves.”
Mr. Lincicome said it would be “lunacy” to put tariffs on food when affordability was a concern of many voters. And he said he was not surprised that imports of foreign canned goods were rising.
“When you raise the cost of making stuff in the United States, which in this case is making canned foods, you make production here less competitive globally,” Mr. Lincicome said.
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10) We Should Take Hantavirus More Seriously
By Zeynep Tufekci, May 12, 2026
Ms. Tufekci is a contributing Opinion writer.
Beatrice Salomone/Connected Archives
There’s no question that another pandemic will strike, but no one knows when or which virus will be the cause. What we can determine with pretty good clarity is how ready we’ll be, how well we’re constructing obstacles to slow the path of emerging threats and how fast we’re learning lessons from painful experience.
As the final remaining passengers disembarked from the MV Hondius cruise ship, on which at least seven people were confirmed to have been infected with hantavirus traveled, the answers are becoming increasingly clear: We’re still leaving a lot to chance, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.
Consider the history of the Andes strain of the hantavirus. According to a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, in 2018, a hantavirus outbreak with this strain — the same strain linked to the Hondius cruise — began in Epuyén, Argentina. It started after one infected person attended a birthday party with about 100 guests. He had a fever and was feeling tired, and he left after about an hour and a half. Five people who were in the room — but not necessarily all even sitting right next to him — later sickened.
One of those five partygoers most likely went on to infect six more people, including his spouse, and died 16 days after he became ill. During his wake, 10 more people became infected, from the spouse. It was about then that the public health authorities, realizing how dangerous the situation was, started enforcing strict quarantine measures. That seems to be how it finally died out.
Yet in recent days, the World Health Organization has reassured the public that hantavirus can be transmitted only through “close and prolonged contact” and that, as a result, it is unlikely to spread widely among the population at large. “The one thing with this one is that it’s much harder to catch,” President Trump said on Monday, echoing W.H.O. and U.S. public health officials. “It seems like it is not easy to spread.”
We know fairly little about the Andes strain of the Hantavirus, with an estimated 3,000 human cases over three decades. How could that assertion about it not being easy to spread be true given what we know about the 2018 superspreading event?
I reached out to Gustavo Palacios, the senior author of the study about the Epuyén outbreak. He seemed as baffled by these pronouncements as I was. He told me that the paper he and his fellow researchers wrote used the phrase prolonged or close contact but he explained that, as they had written in their article, they didn’t mean solely physical or bodily contact. He told me that they believed that the virus spread via respiratory secretions. Looking at the same study, an airborne transmission expert, Linsey Marr, told CBC/Radio Canada that “it’s strongly suggestive that airborne transmission is happening.”
Dr. Palacios also said that he and his co-authors had calculated the median reproduction number of the Andes virus to be 2.1 — meaning that one sick person infected about two other people. That’s more than enough for sustained human transmission. That reproduction number is not much lower than the initial strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, as calculated in February and March of 2020, by the way, so I’m not feeling great about the reassurances from health officials that this will not become a pandemic. How do they know?
Dr. Palacios was also worried about the differences between the previous Andes strain outbreak setting and the current one. Containing an outbreak in a tiny isolated rural village in Patagonia, Argentina, during the dry season is a different prospect than containing one on a cruise ship with ocean humidity conditions or with people traveling onward in planes.
At the same time, authorities keep insisting that only symptomatic people can spread the virus. In Dr. Palacios’s study, the transmission events that the researchers could trace had indeed occurred while people were displaying symptoms. But he’s also said that 48 hours before the onset of symptoms should be considered a high-risk period as well. He told me that people’s viral loads rise before symptoms break out, so it’s reasonable to assume there is some risk earlier. Besides, with a single study done after the fact, he and his team hadn’t been able to pinpoint every exact moment that a person passed the virus to another — many unknowns remained from that outbreak.
The last twist was that his paper shows that the incubation period (the time between virus exposure and symptoms) can be as long as 40 days. Some people get sick more than a month after being exposed, which is an unusually long stretch of time. That’s a big deal because it makes managing the outbreak much more challenging.
On April 25, a Dutch cruise passenger took a flight from St. Helena to South Africa while ill, collapsed at the airport after arrival and died soon after. While W.H.O. officials have claimed the risk of spread during the flight or on the ship was low, that incident was just 17 days ago — if incubation can be as long as 40 days, there are 23 days before we’ll know if all her contacts are in the clear. As of Monday, South Africa’s health minister said that the authorities had identified 97 possible contacts in the country exposed to the hantavirus and that 90 of them had been reached and advised that they were being monitored. Based on South Africa’s guidelines, this meant asking people to perform daily temperature and symptom checks and to contact authorities immediately if they get sick. It’s unclear if everyone on the plane has been reached, and we can only hope this is sufficient.
Meanwhile, photographs of crew members while still on the ship show many of them hanging around together in a hallway while waiting to be interviewed by health authorities, covering their mouths and noses with only flimsy masks. In photos that have circulated, one person who had just left the ship can be seen on a bus, still clad in protective gear, but having removed their mask, seen dangling over one ear.
After the Covid pandemic, after the 2002 SARS epidemic, after the Epuyén hantavirus outbreak, we really have learned too little. One key lesson from both SARS and Covid was how much superspreading can play a role. Early on, many infected people spread the virus to few people, which generated comforting statistics on average. But when the circumstances aligned, it turned out that a single person could infect a large number of people all at once, setting off chains of transmission that were difficult to control.
We still don’t fully understand why some people superspread and others do not. But if it can happen once, as it did in Epuyén, it can happen again.
During a press conference last week, a W.H.O. official addressed people who had disembarked, asking them to present themselves to health care authorities if they were developing symptoms. W.H.O. officials also kept defining transmission as happening through close prolonged contact — intimate partners, household members. Encouragingly, over the weekend, the W.H.O. published new technical documents to clarify its definition of the type of contact that could cause the spread of hantavirus. It now includes “close proximity exposure” as well as “exposure in enclosed or shared spaces.”
But even these definitions still suffer from a lack of learning from the Covid experience, such as limiting exposure to being within about six feet for a cumulative period of more than 15 minutes. We know from the study of airborne transmission that that guidance may be too rigid and fail to capture the full risk profile of the virus. The Epuyén outbreak doesn’t seem to fit that framework. Still, I would say this is better than nothing, and much better than how slow things were in 2020 and onward. But these guideline changes were done too quietly.
How are people who may have been exposed supposed to protect themselves if they are not told of the modes of transmission and the stakes accurately and loudly, including when the definitions evolve? Public health officials, from the W.H.O. to U.S. officials, would be more helpful if they stopped constantly reassuring people about the likelihood of future events they can’t accurately calculate — like the odds of a pandemic occurring or how long this outbreak could last — and just told us more details about the things that matter: mode of transmission, lengthy period of incubation and the inevitable uncertainty of something for which there is little actual knowledge.
If we’re lucky, this hantavirus outbreak will peter out, or resemble the 2002 SARS outbreak: It dies out with the help of safety measures and because the virus doesn’t adapt fast enough. If we are unlucky? It should be unthinkable, but here we are. And this time Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be in charge of the U.S. response.
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11) Inside the Hantavirus Isolation Unit Where 15 Americans Wait
The National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska is now the temporary home for many of the Americans who had been passengers on the MV Hondius.
By Sonia A. Rao, Reporting from Omaha, May 11, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/nebraska-quarantine-hantavirus-ship-americans.html
The Davis Global Center, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha, houses the National Quarantine Unit. Dylan Widger/Getty Images
They arrived around 2:30 in the morning on Monday, their government plane stopping on the pavement at the Omaha airport. One by one, they shuffled out, wearing masks and carrying plastic bags holding a small set of their belongings.
They were quickly assessed by a team of doctors, loaded onto shuttle buses — with adequate distance kept between them — and driven to the National Quarantine Unit, the only federal center of its kind in the country.
For 15 of the 18 American arrivals who had been on the cruise ship MV Hondius and were possibly exposed to the hantavirus — a pathogen that can be deadly and for which there is no widely available vaccine — this was now their home, at least for a while.
Three of the roughly 150 passengers from various countries on their ship, which departed Argentina in April with a destination of the Canary Islands, died from the virus, and several others became ill or tested positive, officials said.
Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, was one of the doctors who greeted the Americans at the airport. “They were really pleasant, in good spirits and grateful to be home,” he said. But he also said, “They were very tired.”
The National Quarantine Unit, part of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, was designed to safely isolate and monitor people who have been exposed to infectious diseases. It opened in 2020, when it hosted around a dozen Americans who tested positive or had been exposed to the coronavirus on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan.
The unit consists of two hallways with 20 single-occupancy rooms, each with a specialized air pressure system designed to prevent contaminated air from flowing out. Every 300-square-foot room has a full bed, exercise equipment, a window, Wi-Fi and video technology. It also has an autoclave, a machine designed to sterilize waste. The unit is staffed by Dr. Wadman and a team of more than 100 doctors and nurses, who slept very little this weekend as they prepared for the passengers’ arrival.
A building across the street houses the biocontainment unit, which is designed to treat people with symptoms of a disease or who have an actual illness. That unit, which can fit a maximum of 10 people, was activated in 2014 to treat patients who had come from West Africa with Ebola.
The biocontainment unit is one of 13 such centers in the country. And it is hosting one of the Americans from the cruise ship who tested positive for the hantavirus. The other two U.S. passengers who arrived on Monday, one person experiencing mild symptoms and that person’s partner, were transferred to a hospital in Atlanta, in case more people in the quarantine unit begin to show symptoms.
The patients are not wearing masks, but the doctors interacting with them are wearing full personal protective equipment, covered head to toe — including air-purifying respirators, full coveralls and shoe covers, said Dr. Angela Hewlett, director of the biocontainment unit.
As of Monday afternoon, all the patients in the Omaha units were doing well, their doctors said. The group, ranging in age from late 20s to 80s, had been assessed for any immediate medical needs and were recovering from the long journey. None were showing symptoms of the hantavirus, which can include headache, nausea, coughing and congestion. The one person in the biocontainment unit had been tested again and was awaiting results.
Their quarantine period could last up to 42 days, but health officials said at a Monday news conference that, once the passengers had been fully assessed, it was likely that they could choose to leave early and quarantine at home if they wanted. But it was unclear when exactly they would be allowed to make that choice.
For now, they are not allowed visitors, aside from the doctors and nurses monitoring them. A psychologist will facilitate virtual meetings with the group so people can talk about what they have experienced; the first one is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
One thing that Dr. Wadman has noticed about these individuals, he said, is their adventurous spirit. The MV Hondius was a less traditional cruise than most, he said, with passengers looking to be involved in birding or other wilderness activities. The passengers he has spoken to so far have told him they were craving physical activity after being cooped up on the cruise ship for so long.
“They’re an active group,” he said.
And one of them, at least, is pleased with the accommodations. Angie Vasa, the director of isolation and quarantine for special pathogens at Nebraska Medicine, a health care network that helps operate the units, said that one man who was in quarantine expressed surprise at the quality of his quarters.
“‘I’m so glad that these rooms are so nice,’” she recalled him saying.
Her response: “Welcome to Nebraska.”
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12) Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War
By Thomas B. Edsall, May 12, 2026
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.
That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.
As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.
Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.
What gives?
The Clean Economy Works Project Tracker maintained by E2, an organization that describes itself as “a national, nonpartisan group of business leaders, investors and others who advocate for smart policies that are good for the economy and good for the environment,” working in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, found that during the Biden administration 10 renewal energy projects were canceled, closed or downsized in 2023, with an investment value of $1.02 billion and 2,122 lost jobs; in 2024, it was 15 projects, with a value of $2.47 billion and 8,346 lost jobs.
In 2025, Trump’s first year back in office, the number of closed, canceled or downsized projects rose to 61, with a value of $34.76 billion and 38,031 lost jobs.
The barrage of executive orders and memorandums Trump issued on Jan. 20, 2025, demonstrated the intensity of his prioritization of fossil fuels while gutting federal support of clean, renewable energy.
In a presidential memorandum, Trump ordered the withdrawal “from disposition for wind energy leasing all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” and the “temporary cessation and immediate review of federal wind leasing and permitting practices.”
In a separate executive order, Trump declared that “it is the policy of the United States” to
“encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf, in order to meet the needs of our citizens and solidify the United States as a global energy leader long into the future.”
The new official policy was also to eliminate the “electric vehicle mandate” and terminate “where appropriate, state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.”
The order did not stop there. It rescinded 12 executive orders issued by President Joe Biden calling for the adoption of pro-environmental and pro-renewable energy policies and for reducing dependence on oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels.
Another executive order issued that day declared that the national policy of the United States was to “expedite the permitting and leasing of energy and natural resource projects in Alaska” while rescinding all Biden actions calling for protection of Alaskan land.
And to “prioritize the development of Alaska’s liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) potential, including the sale and transportation of Alaskan L.N.G. to other regions of the United States and allied nations within the Pacific region.”
Trump clearly took office fully armed to conduct his attack on clean energy. He issued another executive order calling for the immediate withdrawal of the United States “from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
The attack has been relentless.
Last July 4, Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which terminated over time seven clean energy tax credits while phasing out tax credits for wind and solar projects and clean hydrogen production.
Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California-Santa Barbara who calculated the total household cost I mentioned earlier, replied to my queries with a detailed accounting of how she reached the $1,508 per household cost of Trump’s energy policies and concluded her email by saying:
“The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.
“I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.”
Among the increased household expenses Stokes listed:
“Electricity bills: Trump’s war on clean energy is raising energy costs for American families. Princeton’s REPEAT Project projects annual household energy costs rising up to $415 by 2035. Electricity prices rose more than twice as fast as overall inflation in 2025.
“Keeping uneconomical plants online: In some regions of the country, Trump has jacked up electricity bills even more by keeping old, expensive and dirty coal plants running when they were supposed to shut down. Using emergency grid powers, Trump has ordered utilities to keep uneconomical coal plants running that were slated for retirement.
“Already, $308 million has been spent keeping these plants online. The Campbell coal plant in Michigan alone costs $615,000 a day to keep running. Indiana plants forced to stay open are costing utilities roughly $200,000 a day. In Colorado, the Craig plant was already broken down when the order was issued; Grid Strategies estimates it will cost $85 million per year to keep running. If the administration extends these orders to more plants, Grid Strategies estimates the total cost to customers is $3-6 billion per year. Trump has issued a government mandate to keep expensive, outdated, dirty plants alive — and then sent households the bill.
“Gas. According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, everyday people have already paid an extra $37 billion for gasoline and diesel — about $285 per household — because of Trump’s war.”
In addition to direct increases in household expenditures, Stokes described a wide range of adverse consequences brought about by Trump’s energy policies, including:
“Investment: $29 billion in canceled manufacturing investments and more than 39,000 jobs lost in 2025 alone. E2’s Clean Economy Works Project Tracker, which includes deployment projects beyond manufacturing, estimates $34.8 billion canceled in 2025, with nearly three dollars canceled for every one dollar newly announced.
“China: The United States is ceding leadership in solar, batteries, E.V.s and grid storage at the same moment China is doubling down on clean technology through its new Five-Year Plan. China announced 101 new clean-tech demonstration projects in March 2025.
“Tariffs: Trump’s tariff policy is raising costs in both directions — blocking cheap clean energy while making it more expensive to build. Tariffs on solar cells and modules from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia — which together supplied roughly 80 percent of U.S. solar photovoltaic imports — now range from 14 percent to 3,500 percent. At the same time, tariffs on transformers, cables, and grid equipment are driving up utility capital costs that get passed directly to ratepayers.
“Climate damages: Trump’s policies will add an extra seven billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere through 2030 compared to the U.S. Paris Agreement target. Using the Biden EPA’s own social cost of carbon, that will result in $1.6 trillion in global climate damages.”
Jeff Colgan, director of the Climate Solutions Lab and a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown, added another cost to Trump’s attacks on clean energy: diminished national security.
“For the second time in five years,” he wrote by email:
“geopolitics is creating a crisis for fossil fuels — but the price of sunshine and wind remain free. Renewables have a national security advantage over fossil fuels, in addition to environmental advantages. People talk about renewables as “unreliable” because they are intermittent (no sun at night, variable wind speeds) but it sure looks like geopolitics makes fossil fuels less reliable rather than more.”
Atlas Public Policy, a consulting firm that advises clients on clean and renewable energy strategies and infrastructure, released a report this month, “The Race for Clean Energy Leadership.”
A subhead clearly states what Atlas found: “China Builds Clean Manufacturing While the United States Falls Further Behind.”
China, according to Atlas:
“has built enormous manufacturing capacity domestically, and increasingly, grown production abroad to skirt trade restrictions and assert itself as the global leader in the future of energy. After China ($509.7 billion), the United States ($236.1 billion) is second for announced investment.”
The analysis cited the 2024 annual report issued by the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by (and reports to) Congress.
The commission report found that not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:
“The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.
“Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.”
The United States, the report continued, “has seen a drop in clean manufacturing investment in recent years,” which “coincides with Congress removing demand-side incentives such as tax credits for electric vehicles, solar and wind turbines as well as the Trump administration terminating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund and reorienting the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office toward fossil fuels.”
A May 10 Substack post by Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, where he heads the energy program at the Environmental Change Institute, reveals the stubborn shortsightedness of Trump’s policies.
While America's energy costs surge, over the past quarter century the wholesale cost of energy in Spain has fallen from the top ranks in Europe to the lowest ranks. How so?
“Twenty-five years ago, a third of Spain’s electricity came from coal. Today, coal is effectively gone. Gas, which surged in the 2000s as the replacement, peaked above 30 percent of generation in the late 2000s and has since been pushed back to roughly 19 percent. Nuclear has held steady around 19 percent, hydro and bioenergy together around 14 percent and the remaining capacity” — around 45 percent — “has been steadily filled by wind and solar.”
Rosenow concluded:
“This is the clearest example in Europe of the price effect that renewable advocates have been describing for years finally arriving in the data. More wind and solar on the grid means fewer hours when gas is the marginal plant. Fewer of those hours means a wholesale price that is decoupled from the gas market for most of the day. And a wholesale price decoupled from gas, in 2026, is a cheap one.
“Spain is now a working demonstration that you can take an electricity system that was 33 percent coal a generation ago, 30 percent-plus gas a decade ago, and run it on roughly 44 percent wind and solar with the resulting wholesale prices among the lowest in Europe.”
What makes Trump’s energy policies so egregious is that there is no credible justification for them.
Instead, three factors appear to be driving his decisions.
The first is Trump’s “deal” (his word) with the fossil fuel industry in April 2024 that he would gut Biden administration policies restricting the oil, gas and coal industries if the companies and their executive ponied up $1 billion for his election campaign.
The second is that Trump and many elected Republican officials see green energy as a liberal attempt to weaken oil and gas industries, or, as Trump put it, “This is all a scam, a giant scam.”
The third is the most petty. From 2006 to 2014, Trump bitterly fought plans to install wind turbines a mile from his Scotland golf course in Aberdeen. At an April 2012 hearing before the Scottish Parliament, Trump warned:
“Windmills are so unattractive, so ugly, so noisy and so dangerous that, if Scotland does this, I think that it will be in serious trouble. I think that you will lose your tourism industry to Ireland and lots of other places that are laughing at what Scotland is doing.”
In February 2014, a Scottish civil court judge, Lord Doherty, ruled against Trump and granted approval for Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm Ltd. to go forward with the project. The ruling left a deeply bitter taste in Trump’s mouth that lingers on.
He was unable to block the wind turbines in Aberdeen Bay, but he is determined to make such projects here as difficult and costly as possible.
A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.
In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.
Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”
Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s science office, elaborated:
“Trump’s efforts to block clean energy solutions could not have come at a worse time for American consumers. With surging electricity demand and higher costs at the pump due to a war in the Middle East, Americans need access to low-cost, efficient and clean energy options now more than ever.
“The administration’s war on clean energy has undermined U.S. energy independence (making the country more vulnerable to the kinds of oil price shocks we’ve seen these past two months), contributed to higher energy costs for U.S. households and weakened the country’s global standing and industrial competitiveness.”
Why has Trump been so focused on undermining the electric vehicle industry?
Michael Gerrard, a law professor at Columbia who focuses on climate, environmental and energy law, provided the rationale in an email responding to my queries:
“The greatest threat to the demand for oil is electric vehicles. Trump has — through the One Big Beautiful Bill — eliminated the tax credits for E.V.s and charging stations.
“Through the Congressional Review Act, he has killed (for now, at least) the California waiver — the use of a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows California to adopt stronger emission standards than the federal standards.”
Gerrard suggested another motive behind Trump’s energy policies:
“He sees the fossil fuel industry as central to American dominance, and its workers as the heart of his base; he loves to pose in front of coal miners, see here, and calls them to many of his bill-signing ceremonies.
“He sees fossil fuels as manly and renewables as woke.”
Where does all this leave the country?
Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.
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