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 to Know About the Mideast Standoff
Negotiations to end the war are at an impasse over Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz, which remains mostly shut.
By The New York Times, Published April 26, 2026, Updated May 3, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/world/middleeast/us-iran-peace-talks-pakistan.html
Supporters of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, at a government-organized march in the capital, Tehran, on Wednesday. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Negotiations to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz are still at a standoff, after President Trump suggested he was likely to reject Tehran’s latest proposal, a day after he had rejected an earlier one.
“I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but can’t imagine that it would be acceptable,” he said on social media on Saturday, adding that Iran had not “yet paid a big enough price for what they have done.”
Two semiofficial Iranian news outlets reported earlier on Saturday that Tehran had sent a 14-point proposal to Pakistani mediators in response to a nine-point U.S. proposal, but they offered few details about what it said. It was the latest exchange in a dizzying saga of diplomatic efforts.
On Thursday evening, Tehran had sent a proposal to the mediators, state media reported. Mr. Trump rejected that offer on Friday, saying, “I’m not satisfied with it,” without elaborating on what his objections were — comments that echoed what he had said about yet another earlier proposal.
The two sides remain at an impasse, and Mr. Trump called off talks in Islamabad last weekend. He has repeatedly insisted that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, while Iran has rejected American proposals that it suspend its nuclear program and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Without a clear way forward, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively shut. Both the U.S. Navy and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have stringently limited which ships can use the waterway, reducing the flow of oil, natural gas and other crucial materials out of the Persian Gulf to a trickle and causing ripple effects for the world economy.
On Saturday, a senior Iranian general said that renewed confrontation between Iran and the United States was possible, according to a report from the Fars news agency. In comments to reporters on Saturday night, Mr. Trump also suggested it was possible that military strikes could resume.
What’s the latest?
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, issued a rare statement on Thursday vowing that Iran would manage the Strait of Hormuz under “new legal frameworks” and retain its nuclear capabilities.
“The bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America,” said Mr. Khamenei, who has been in hiding since the war began.
Shipping companies fear that Iran has mined the main channels in the strait and could attack commercial vessels. That has deterred most of the hundreds of ships in the Persian Gulf from trying to leave.
Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the suggestion that Iran could eventually make money from the strait, after Iran included a plan to charge fees to passing tankers in a proposal last weekend.
“This is not the Suez Canal, this is not the Panama Canal, these are international waters,” said Mr. Rubio, adding that the United States would not tolerate a “system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”
In an earlier offer, Iran proposed suspending uranium enrichment for five years, followed by five years of very low-grade civilian enrichment. Under that proposal, half of Iran’s 972-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have gone to Russia, an ally, and the other half would have been available to international inspectors.
The United States, which has demanded that Iran suspend all nuclear activity for 20 years and hand over its highly enriched uranium, rejected the offer.
Pakistan has been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end the war. After a first round of negotiations collapsed, Mr. Trump said last week that he was maintaining the U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and indefinitely extending the cease-fire.
Iran’s nuclear program
Iran insists it has a right to enrich nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he will not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. But he is also confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal” to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.
That Obama-era agreement — formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. — would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. After Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree, leaving them closer to producing a bomb than ever before.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level close to what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal.
A clash of negotiating styles
Mr. Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.
In dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, he has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay.
“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.
Leo Sands, Farnaz Fassihi, David E. Sanger and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
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2) Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like.
By Samuel Granados, Abdi Latif Dahir and Sanjana Varghese, May 3, 2026
An entire street is leveled. Houses and shops are flattened, including a popular cafe. This is what is left of the town of Bint Jbeil, just a couple of miles from the Israeli border, nearly two months after Israel relaunched its ground offensive in southern Lebanon.
The destruction of this town, a Hezbollah stronghold, is repeated again and again across southern Lebanon, a lush region of undulating vistas, where Israel has razed border villages as part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a larger occupation.
The approach, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said, was modeled on tactics the military used in Gaza, where the Israeli military reduced entire neighborhoods, buildings and streets to rubble.
After the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited in early March, when Hezbollah attacked Israel in solidarity with Iran, Israel established a several-mile-deep “buffer zone” that it says it will continue to occupy until the threat from Hezbollah is contained.
An analysis of satellite images, along with photos and videos shared online and verified by The New York Times, shows the scope of that campaign. Widespread demolitions have flattened expanses of at least two dozen towns and villages near the border, with damage to government offices as well as civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and mosques.
Villages are now blurred into ash, with the white of rubble marking town after town.
“I feel like I am going to break from anger and sadness,” said Nabil Sunbul, 67, who works in a bakery in the town of Bint Jbeil. He has now fled to Beirut with only a few belongings.
Satellite imagery shows that the area where Mr. Sunbul lives and works has been severely damaged, though it was unclear whether his home was completely destroyed.
Since the war began, Israeli strikes have killed more than 2,600 people in Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, including journalists and medical workers, and destroyed infrastructure such as bridges and gas stations. More than a million people have been displaced. The fighting has continued despite a U.S.-mediated cease-fire, which has now been extended through mid-May.
The Israeli military says it is targeting infrastructure and positions belonging to Hezbollah. The Iran-backed group has launched hundreds of drones, rockets and anti-tank missiles at Israel and has killed at least 17 Israeli soldiers since early March, according to the Israeli military.
Legal experts and human rights activists say targeting civilian infrastructure or destroying it without a valid military justification constitutes a war crime. They also expressed concern over Israeli officials’ statements that they would model the destruction in southern Lebanon on Gaza, given the scale of devastation and loss of life in the strip.
“Deliberately and extensively destroying civilian objects or property, absent any military justification for wanton destruction, is a war crime,” said Ramzi Kaiss, the Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The Israeli military said its troops were operating “in accordance with international law,” and that its directives permit the demolition of structures used for Hezbollah’s military purposes or when deemed operationally necessary.
One video circulating on social media and verified by The Times showed an excavator destroying solar panels near the village of Debl in late April. The solar panels supplied the town with electricity and powered the water station, according to Lebanon’s state news agency.
The Israeli military said in a statement to The Times that such actions did not meet the standards it expected of its soldiers. “Following an inquiry into the incident, command measures were taken against the reserve soldiers involved,” the statement said, without elaborating on what those measures were.
Across southern Lebanon, many towns were already devastated during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024. More than 10,000 structures, including homes, mosques and parks, were damaged or destroyed in at least 26 municipalities, according to Amnesty International.
The destruction now appears far more extensive, with fresh rubble visible in satellite imagery spanning wide swaths of terrain.
“Our home was the fruit of our lives’ work,” said Fatima Abdallah, 46, a mother of five from the town of Houla near the Israeli border, who is now staying in a tent inside a stadium in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Satellite images show her town was heavily hit, and her home, which she and her husband built two decades ago, appears to have been destroyed.
Videos show Israeli soldiers are using similar methods of destruction to what they employed in Gaza, including the use of controlled demolitions, in which soldiers enter the targeted structures to place explosives.
Soldiers then pull the trigger from a safe distance, said Barbara Marcolini, a visual investigator with Amnesty International who previously worked for The Times. The blasts send plumes of dust and debris skyward. As a result, entire streets are now moonscapes of white rubble and shattered concrete, with little left to mark where homes or businesses once stood.
Israel says its operations are aimed at dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, which it says is embedded in civilian areas. Hezbollah has long denied placing military assets among civilians.
Other videos and photos, including photos taken from the Israeli side of the border, show demolitions being carried out by bulldozers and excavators in heavily damaged areas.
Experts say this mirrors what Israel did in Gaza, leaving vast areas uninhabitable and preventing those displaced from returning home.
“This is basically the same pattern that we documented back in Gaza, then in southern Lebanon. And now it’s southern Lebanon again,” Ms. Marcolini said. “It is a strategy that they have, and they have been doing this consistently throughout the region.”
There is damage across the south, but the most severe destruction in the south is concentrated in Shiite villages. Shiites, who are from the same sect as Hezbollah, form the majority of the population in southern Lebanon, though some towns in the no-go zone near the border are predominantly Christian or Druse. Israel has told some Christians and Druse they can stay if they expel Shiite Muslims from southern towns.
Satellite imagery shows a stark contrast between these areas. In images taken near the border in April, the majority-Shiite villages of Aita al Shaab and Hanine appear as expanses of gray rubble, while far less damage is visible in the nearby predominantly Christian village of Rmeish.
For the families who fled, there is no clear sense of when they will return. For now, they rely on messages and calls from displaced friends and neighbors, piecing together fragments of news about what remains of their homes and lives.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Abdallah invoked a Lebanese phrase — “with stones, not with people” — to express that although their home had been reduced to rubble, her family members were at least unharmed.
“Only Allah can compensate us,” she said.
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3) Behind Voting Rights Case, a Clash Over the Reality of Racism
The Supreme Court ruling said there must be proof that a racial group was “intentionally” disadvantaged. The dissent called it “well-nigh impossible.”
By Richard Fausset, May 3, 2026
In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, it did not take much detective work to discover how some of the South’s most powerful white politicians felt about their Black neighbors.
Senator James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi who wanted to kill the landmark legislation, once openly stated that Black people were an “an inferior race.” During his 1963 inauguration speech, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a Democrat, infamously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
These days, such racism, at least when directed at Black people, is rarely openly expressed by white Southern politicians, who consider it to be immoral, bad politics, bad manners — or all of the above.
But a question central to the Southern experience lingers: Has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court strode once again into this fraught territory with a decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that allowed many Black Southerners to finally participate in American democracy after decades of systemic oppression and exclusion.
At issue was the way in which the courts should determine whether a legislative map is racially discriminatory. Writing for the six-judge conservative majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito stated that from now on, anyone who wished to challenge a map on such grounds must show proof that the map makers had “intentionally” drawn legislative districts to disadvantage a given racial group.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberal minority, argued that under the ruling, a plaintiff would have to show “that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose,’” which was contrary to the “clear text and design” of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress has long known, she wrote, that trying to find smoking-gun evidence of racist motives is “well-nigh impossible.”
Indeed, such proof may be harder than ever to find. For Gerald A. Griggs, a civil rights lawyer in Georgia, the old measures of racism — some stomach-turning tally of crosses burned, of people lynched — does not apply so much anymore. Mr. Griggs, who is Black, said that subtler discriminatory forces have “gotten into the system and corroded the arteries of the system,” and will require particularly nuanced legal challenges to “ferret out.”
“What we’re dealing with now is less overt racism,” said Mr. Griggs, a past president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P.
Some Black Southerners still feel that kind of racism deeply. But proving it in a courtroom is another matter.
The Supreme Court’s requirement that there must be some proof of an intent to discriminate has taken form in other areas of the law — with serious implications in the South and beyond, said Stephen B. Bright, who teaches law at Georgetown and Yale.
Mr. Bright, the former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, noted that in a closely watched capital punishment case in 1987, the court rejected the appeal of Warren McCleskey, a Black man who had been sentenced to death in Georgia for killing a white person.
Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers presented the court with a study of the state’s justice system showing that a defendant who had been accused of killing a white person in Georgia was four times as likely to receive a death sentence as someone who had killed a Black person. But the court ruled that this was not enough to help Mr. McCleskey. To win his case, the court said, he needed to show that he had been personally subject to discrimination.
The problem of “proving” racial discrimination has also bedeviled the South when it comes to racially lopsided juries, Mr. Bright said. In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court established that a judge must find “purposeful discrimination” to determine that racial discrimination had been present in the jury selection process.
“You have to prove that the prosecutor, in using peremptory strikes, intentionally discriminated,” Mr. Bright said. “You can’t possibly know that unless the prosecutor tells you.”
This is one reason, he said, that all-white juries remain common in many parts of the South — “even in places with very substantial African-American populations.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday nullified a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, one of two in the state. The district, long and intermittently bulbous, had been created by state lawmakers who felt pressured by the courts to draw a map that carved out two districts with a majority of Black voters, in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.
Justice Alito, writing the decision, made the case that the South had come a long way since 1965, particularly on Black voter participation, an assertion that is highly contested.
“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he wrote.
Some conservative African Americans this week welcomed the ruling, viewing it a fitting response to real racial progress in the United States. To them, the Voting Rights Act, which often forced state legislatures to draw majority-minority districts around the country, had merely put Black Americans into archaic race-based boxes.
Among those approving of the ruling was Josh Williams, a Republican state representative of a majority-white district in Ohio.
“The idea that Black Americans need special districts carved out just for them is complete nonsense,” Mr. Williams posted on social media this week, noting that he was currently running for Congress in a district that is also majority-white. “It’s a violation of the law and blatantly unconstitutional.”
Wednesday’s ruling is of a piece with the Supreme Court’s decisions to move to what some justices have called a “colorblind Constitution.” In 2023, the court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
The second Trump administration, meanwhile, has used its executive power to try to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors.
The stakes in the voting-rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, are arguably bigger, potentially reconfiguring the very architecture of national political power just as a polarized country is barreling toward the midterm elections. Some states are already considering whether to redraw their maps.
The ghosts of the past still inform Southern politics at the most elemental level. Decades ago, many Black voters migrated from the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to the Democratic Party, impressed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign to usher in a new era of civil rights. Today, many Black Southerners are committed Democrats.
Many white Southerners were coaxed away from the Democratic Party, starting in the 1960s, thanks in part to a Republican “Southern strategy” that exploited their resentment over Mr. Johnson’s push for civil rights and desegregation. Today, many white Southerners are committed Republicans.
In today’s redistricting efforts, it has been a struggle, at times, to tease out whether a redrawn electoral map is a result of partisanship or old-fashioned racism. Complicating matters is the fact that the Supreme Court, in 2019, ruled that federal judges have no power to hear challenges to gerrymanders carried out purely for partisan advantage.
Stephen Menendian, an academic researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has described the mess as “the problem of entanglement.” In a 2023 law review article, he warned of a big risk: “that unconstitutional racial gerrymanders will escape judicial review under the cover of partisanship.”
The court’s conservative majority sees it the opposite way. In the opinion, Justice Alito wrote that plaintiffs could challenge a partisan gerrymander by claiming it is actually a racial gerrymander. Mr. Alito warned that litigants should not be able to get around the rules “by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”
Quin Hillyer, a white conservative opinion writer who lives in Alabama, believes that these days, Republican map makers would welcome any Black voters into a district if it would bolster their party’s strength.
“If there were an enclave, or a neighborhood, that was 100 percent Black, but that voted 80 percent Republican,” he said, “I think that the white Republicans would gladly take those people.”
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4) Lauren Sánchez Bezos and the Fashion End Times of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’
By Robin Givhan, Ms. Givhan is a contributing Opinion writer, May 3, 2026
Photo illustration by The New York Times
When I look at photographs of Lauren Sánchez Bezos I see someone who loves fashion, although not at all in the way I do. My affection for it is rooted in respect for its beauty and creativity and in a fair amount of skepticism because of its stumbling acceptance of its social responsibilities. Her version of fashion exudes personal indulgence and broad disregard.
A plutocrat by marriage, she represents the industry’s ultimate customer, with its ever-rising prices and shrinking sales. Fashion is pricing all but the most astoundingly wealthy out of the market.
In the just-opened film “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Justin Theroux plays a dastardly acquisitive tech titan named Benji Barnes, with clear echoes of her husband, the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Barnes character happens to have a girlfriend who might remind you of Mrs. Sánchez Bezos. Their thirst for clout helps drive the film’s plot.
On Monday, Mr. Bezos’ real-life hundreds of billions of dollars will propel Mrs. Sánchez Bezos up the grand Fifth Avenue staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past a gantlet of photographers and into the Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala, over which she and he will preside as honorary co-chairs. The institute’s exhibition this year, “Costume Art,” is made possible by the Bezos largess. But the couple is so broadly unpopular in the fashion world and beyond that there were calls for a boycott of the gala.
Beyoncé is also supposed to be there, serving as an official co-chair, along with Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour. But Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is the star of the Met Gala because she represents what fashion, buffeted by social and technological change, has surrendered to: economic inequality in human form, with pink, glossy lips, cinched up in a couture corset.
Taste is one more part of the culture for ruthless tech titans to attempt to optimize for their benefit. With Ms. Wintour’s determined gatekeeping and the Costume Institute’s intellectual concerns about human creativity, the Met Gala is the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money.
Both “The Devil Wears Prada” and its sequel stage fictional versions of the Met Gala for the cameras and star Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fictional version of Ms. Wintour. The first film captured the fabulousness of the fashion world. It also worked to give viewers the sense that its haughty, judgmental inhabitants were hard at work helping to make small lives feel bigger by the decisions they made huddled in a room going through “a pile of stuff.”
I think about how the sharp-tongued Miranda might view Mrs. Sánchez Bezos: A corset? In an evening gown? Groundbreaking. The sequel depicts Miranda with her power and influence slipping. She’s confronting the same tidal wave of financial challenges that the real-life fashion ecosystem is navigating.
Onscreen, the upheaval comes by way of data-driven technology, an awkward tycoon with no sense of style and the fashion-loving woman he aims to please. As Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel, says, he’s reduced to creating “content that people scroll past as they pee.” In real life, fashion magazines — and publications in general — are in trouble, and they’re hoping the right billionaire will bail them out. (The Bezoses have been rumored to be considering buying Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent company; when asked about it, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told the writer Amy Chozick in The Times, “I wish!” and then, “No.”)
With her donations, scholarships and grants, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos offers the industry some support beyond her expensive shopping habit. The Bezos Earth Fund awarded $34 million in grants to institutions developing environmentally neutral fabrics, and she directed $6.25 million from the Earth Fund to the Council of Fashion Designers of America to support innovation and education in sustainability. The industry readily grabs on. Some people are betting that she’s the right billionaire.
According to Ms. Chozick’s recent profile of her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos just wants to be happy. And whenever she steps in front of cameras, dressed in a remarkable array of finery, she looks delighted. In an era of extreme economic inequality and financial instability, when California is looking to institute a billionaire tax and a tax on second homes in New York City is under consideration, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos moves about with ostentatious pleasure. She counts her 10-figure blessings, and wears her windfall on her back for all to see.
Her taste veers outside a palette of beige and gray cashmere — the approved sensibility of well-mannered, quiet money. She is willing to flash a wide smile or offer a pouty stare for the cameras rather than stare them down with an expression of bashful reserve or detached ennui, which is what serious women are supposed to do. She does not have the body of a 6-foot-tall 12-year-old boy, which is how high fashion still insists on defining an elegant female physique.
She defies these expectations — something that could be lauded. But she simply embraces a different cliché, an extreme version of femininity that’s defined by a snatched waist and a cantilevered bosom.
She laments how little the public really knows about her. But provided the opportunity to tell her critics more, she refrains.
“I am not talking politics,” she told The Times. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”
It’s reasonable to believe that since she sat in a place of honor behind President Trump during his inauguration, she might have a few thoughts about the current administration. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who once worked in broadcast news, acknowledged the importance of journalism but offered no thoughts on her husband’s drastic staff cuts at The Washington Post, which he owns (and where I used to work).
But she is willing to express her exasperation that the white lace bra readily visible under the Alexander McQueen suit she wore to Mr. Trump’s swearing-in caused an online kerfuffle. She defines the problem as a scandal about lace, not her disregard for the dignity of an official function.
To draw the cameras, it helps that she has hired one of the best stylists money can buy, Law Roach, and collected an impressive array of very expensive stuff. She’s done so from a feast of options. Costume not as art, but as merchandise. Perhaps she even scrolled past some of it while she was indisposed. As Miranda deftly shivved a would-be white knight, “You’re not a visionary; you’re a vendor.”
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ clothes don’t demand that the public pay attention to her story. Or even the stories of the designers she wears. Or really, even fashion.
She has assembled a tote board of Bezos wealth. And if it tells any story at all, it’s his.
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5) Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before
By Amy Odell, April 30, 2026
Ms. Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter and “Anna: The Biography.”
Lola Dupre
If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t look like this before because people naturally can’t look like this.
Models in a Paris Fashion Week show for the luxury brand Matières Fécales last month caricatured the 1 percent by wearing prosthetics that resembled post-op faces, including grotesque under-eye bulges, skin pulled up from their temples and lips that appeared unnaturally inflated and stitched at the edges. “South Park” depicted Kristi Noem with a face so Botoxed, it melts off and scurries away. From the Met Gala to the Oscars and every red carpet in between, these rich faces are everywhere.
A “rich face” is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat. Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future. In “The Hunger Games,” residents of the capital city who revel in luxury and excess at the expense of other impoverished districts often wear sculpted, altered faces. In “Doctor Who,” a wealthy socialite from the distant future has gone through so many face-lifts that she becomes little more than a stretched face on a thin sheet of skin mounted on a frame, maintained with constant moisturizer.
The ultrawealthy seem less and less concerned with hiding their excesses. They’re richer than ever, and figures like Lauren Sánchez Bezos and President Trump give them permission to flaunt their neo-Gilded Age spoils. After all, the unspoken appeal of cosmetic work is that it’s not just about looking “better” or “fixing” something or trying to remain competitive in ageist workplaces. It’s about indulging in a particular kind of experiential self-care that is infinitely customizable and accessible to only a select group. It signifies extreme wealth and belonging to an elite, all-powerful clique that gets to operate under a different set of societal norms and rules.
Status signaling used to be the purview of the $18,000 cocktail dress or the $50,000 designer bag. Now, the small number of Very Important Clients who account for 40 percent of luxury sales seem to be shifting more of their highly desired dollars to their faces. Today’s cleverly marketed aesthetic treatments include “global facial micro-optimization,” which involves numerous procedures to tweak everything from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw, and costs between $150,000 and $300,000. There are also “forever 35,” “Diamond mini” and “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”
The masses want in. Millennials who say they cannot afford homes are spending on their faces instead. Magazines such as Vogue and Allure are no longer just advising readers on nail polish colors and designer sandals for spring, but also when — not if — they should get face-lifts. Rhinoplasties, face-lifts and blepharoplasties (eyelid surgeries) were the three most popular facial procedures of 2025, and the number of facial procedures overall increased by around 19 percent. The luxury sector, meanwhile, contracted by 2 percent last year.
Designer fashion seems to be viewed as more cringe than cosmetic procedures — a feeling that the journalist Sujata Assomull calls the “luxury ick.” Many designer brands raised prices significantly in recent years, at around twice the rate of inflation, without any apparent improvement in quality. (A Chanel flap bag can now cost upward of $11,000 — almost double what it did in 2016.) And some have been caught up in sweatshop scandals. The Row’s sample sale in New York City inspired a slew of viral parody videos. The thriving market for secondhand goods, dupes and counterfeits dim the glamour of it all. And when brands like Celine and Chloé are reissuing old handbag designs, why bother shopping for something new?
In earlier decades, the roles were reversed: Plastic surgery was a punchline. “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware,” Joan Rivers once joked. Now Ms. Rivers seems ahead of her time. Procedures are a sign of making it in the most Kardashian-coded way — get rich, then buy a face. Stars such as Kris Jenner go viral for their cosmetic work. Asked if she’d had “the seemingly ubiquitous new style of face-lift,” Jennifer Lawrence told The New Yorker, “No. But, believe me, I’m gonna!”
Social media has turbocharged the normalization of cosmetic work. One plastic surgeon said that his Gen Z patients take selfies at their appointments “as if it’s a concert or a ‘get ready with me’ video. They want everyone to know.” Like haul vlogs, it’s a way to say, “Look what I just bought.”
Of course, rich face has regional variations. Bravo’s “Real Housewives” from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons have a subtler look than their counterparts on Netflix’s “Members Only: Palm Beach,” who dream of access to Mar-a-Lago. Whether stars admit to their work or not, endless internet speculation provides valuable P.R. to both them and the surgeons who treat them. Many of these doctors — such as Steven Levine, who lifted Ms. Jenner’s face — are celebrities themselves. All of this media hooks viewers by inviting them to wonder when lips were last injected and if jawlines look more “snatched” than they did the previous week.
Sometimes, of course, procedures can go wrong. Sharon Osbourne once called a face-lift “the worst thing that I ever did,” and said that she “looked like Cyclops.” Khloe Kardashian has said that filler made her look “crazy.”
Designer bags may be silly, overpriced and quite often unethically made. But at least there’s little to no chance they will disfigure you. Perhaps the risk of a grisly outcome is part of the appeal for the ultrawealthy, who have the ability to pay for the best care, along with more treatments if things go wrong. The luxury of viewing your face-lift less as a major, potentially ruinous surgery and more as a routine to-do list item is the ultimate status symbol.
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6) Abortion Providers Forced to Adapt After Court Blocks Pill Access by Mail
The Fifth Circuit court’s ruling, which is being appealed, reinstates a requirement that patients visit a health care provider in person to obtain mifepristone, upending abortion access in the United States.
By Maggie Astor, Chris Hippensteel and Pam Belluck, Maggie Astor reported from Washington, May 2, 2026
If the court’s temporary ruling stands, patients would have to make an in-person visit to obtain the abortion pill mifepristone. Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
More than a hundred reproductive health physicians were gathered in Washington, D.C., on Friday afternoon, listening to an update on the shifting legal landscape of reproductive health care.
The presentation was delivered by Molly Meegan, the chief legal officer of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who had no idea that another ruling on the abortion pill mifepristone had arrived as she spoke, temporarily blocking the drug’s prescription by telemedicine and delivery by mail.
“This is not a ruling based in evidence, science or best interests of women,” she said, after learning of the decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The order is already being challenged, but if the Supreme Court lets it stand, it would upend access to a means of abortion that has been steadily growing in recent years. The ruling has also thrust abortion into the national spotlight in advance of the midterm elections, as organizations that provide and support abortion services and those that oppose abortions unleashed a flurry of responses.
“This decision represents the most sweeping threat to abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. “If allowed to stand, it would severely restrict access to mifepristone in every state, including those where abortion is broadly legal and where voters have acted to protect abortion rights.”
Louisiana, which has a near-total ban on abortion, went to court to stop distribution of the drug by mail. The appeals court said that while that lawsuit proceeded, the Food and Drug Administration needed to reinstate a requirement that patients visit medical providers in person to obtain mifepristone.
A mifepristone manufacturer filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Saturday asking it to restore full access to mifepristone. A second mifepristone maker said it would file a similar appeal. The Trump administration has so far declined to comment on the ruling or what steps it might take.
Anti-abortion groups celebrated the ruling. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the court’s decision “a huge victory for victims and survivors of Biden’s reckless mail-order abortion drug regime.”
Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said in a news release that the ruling “recognizes that the FDA cannot simply sweep legitimate safety concerns aside in favor of politics.”
Abortion opponents have argued that the F.D.A.’s decision to allow abortion pills to be available by mail posed safety risks to women and violated the sovereignty of states that had banned abortion. Major medical organizations and supporters of reproductive rights have pointed out that more than 100 studies have found the pills to be safe and effective, with serious side effects being rare.
Medication is now the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States, and is typically delivered in the form of a two-drug regimen through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The first of those drugs is mifepristone, which was approved in 2000, and blocks a hormone needed for a pregnancy to develop. The second drug, misoprostol, has many other medical uses and was not affected by the Fifth Circuit ruling.
Typically, misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to a miscarriage, is taken 24 to 48 hours after mifepristone. But several providers said they were prepared to continue telemedicine services prescribing only misoprostol, which can be used on its own for abortion, although it is considered somewhat less effective and more likely to have side effects.
Earlier on the day of the ruling, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York had announced an expansion of its telemedicine abortion service. After the Fifth Circuit decision, the organization said it would continue to provide telehealth abortion with misoprostol.
“In the wake of yesterday’s harmful decision by the Fifth Circuit, Planned Parenthood Direct is mailing misoprostol-only prescription kits,” said Jacquelyn Marrero, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York.
Telemedicine abortion has steadily increased since the F.D.A. began allowing it in 2021. As of the first six months of 2025, more than one-fourth of abortions in the country were provided via telemedicine, according to a report from a reproductive rights research group.
Although abortion is currently banned or restricted in 20 states, over 100,000 patients per year in those states have been receiving pills through the mail. Those pills are prescribed and shipped by medical practitioners in states that have abortion shield laws. Officials in those shield-law states are prevented from obeying subpoenas, extradition requests and other legal actions that states with bans take against abortion providers.
The laws are being tested by several cases that are expected to lead to a constitutional showdown over whether states must honor one another’s abortion laws. Some abortion providers said they had anticipated the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, given the court’s conservative leanings, and many had already developed contingency plans.
Julie Burkhart, who runs Wyoming’s only abortion clinic, said that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was “devastating, but it’s not surprising.” Ms. Burkhart said her clinic had temporarily suspended telehealth medication abortion appointments in response to the decision, but hoped to quickly reopen them.
“We’re trying to move very quickly to get something into place so we can have that continuity of care, but we want to be also thoughtful and intentional, so that we are giving the best possible care to our patients,” she said.
Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which operates under that state’s shield law, said in a statement that her organization was consulting legal experts about the ruling’s implications and that the group would “do everything in our power to continue providing care to people in all 50 states.”
Dr. Jodi Abbott, a specialist in high-risk pregnancies who is a consultant to the Massachusetts project, said that like some other providers, the organization would shift to prescribing and mailing only misoprostol for abortions. “We have no concerns about its safety or efficacy,” Dr. Abbott, who is also a clinical professor at Boston University, said of using misoprostol alone. “But we also know it’s not optimal.”
Kate Zernike contributed reporting.
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7) Trump Backed Forced Treatment for Homeless People. Utah Shows the Challenges.
State lawmakers declined to back a Trump-inspired plan to move 1,300 homeless people to a campus on the edge of Salt Lake City, but supporters are trying to keep the plan’s spirit alive.
By Jason DeParle, May 4, 2026
A Utah proposal to move 1,300 homeless people to a campus on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, many to face forced treatment for addiction or mental illness, has been set aside amid fears about costs, civil liberties and inadequate planning for a site that critics called a detention camp.
On the surface the plan’s demise is a setback for the Republican governor, Spencer Cox, as well as for President Trump, who campaigned on a similar plan and exhorted states to follow his lead.
But even as the state’s Republican-led legislature adjourned this spring without giving the plan a vote, lawmakers gave Mr. Cox significant new money and discretion to provide the services he wanted at the campus, including programs that emphasize or compel treatment.
The closely watched effort advances the conservative goal of promoting treatment over housing aid, and the campus could yet re-emerge.
“We’re still moving in the same direction to make sure we’re providing appropriate treatment,” said Tyler Clancy, the state’s new homelessness coordinator. He added that “the governor has always said it’s not compassionate to leave people on the street to die.”
The zigzagging story of the Utah campus shows the uncertainty in homelessness policy as Republicans assail the status quo but struggle to design and pay for a system to replace it.
Conservatives criticize the predominant approach, enshrined in federal law and regulation, which emphasizes long-term housing and makes behavioral care voluntary. They say that approach, called Housing First, fails to address root causes. Led by Mr. Trump, Republicans would sharply cut housing aid and require more people to accept treatment for mental illness and addiction.
But behavioral care is scarce, expensive and uncertain to work. Absent housing subsidies, even people who recover after treatment may remain homeless. With a court blocking Mr. Trump’s effort to shift about $4 billion from Housing First programs to short-term efforts that promote or demand treatment, Utah provides a showcase of his ideas.
Utah began considering a centralized site several years ago, amid a surge in unsheltered homelessness. But the work accelerated — and its emphasis shifted to mandatory treatment — after Mr. Trump issued an executive order last summer denouncing “vagrancy” and “disorderly behavior.”
As a candidate, Mr. Trump had pledged to forcibly move homeless people to distant “tent cities” for treatment or placement in mental hospitals. His executive order championed camping bans, cuts in long-term housing, and expanded use of civil commitment — court-ordered mental health care. With the order suggesting money for states that complied, Mr. Cox asked state planners for “a strategy that aligns” with Mr. Trump’s.
Utah soon announced it would build a campus on 16 undeveloped acres on the edge of Salt Lake City. The chairman of the state’s Homeless Services Board, Randy Shumway, proposed that it include an “accountability center” where hundreds of people would face compulsory treatment for mental illness and addiction.
“An accountability center is not voluntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” he said in an interview last year.
While confining homeless people was bound to draw scrutiny, the state seemed unprepared for the pushback. Neighbors said the complex would import crime and lower property values. The Democratic leader of the Utah House called it an “internment camp.”
Mr. Shumway said the services could offer a “pathway to human thriving,” but the state could not answer questions as basic as whether the people moved to the site would sleep in buildings or tents.
While officials said the site would cost $75 million to build and $34 million a year to run, skeptics warned the price would be higher (construction costs could be nearly twice as high, a new report found) and faulted the lack of clinical planning.
“What do we mean by mandatory treatment?” said Heather Hogue, co-chair of the Utah Homeless Network, an organization of advocates and service groups. “Mandatory for whom? Who makes the determination?”
Conservative priorities collided, as tax cuts championed by Mr. Trump cost the state $300 million and Medicaid cuts loomed. By the time the State Legislature convened in January, the campus was all but dead.
“If in one of the reddest states in the nation it falls completely flat, there’s a lesson there,” said Jen Plumb, a Democrat in the State Senate. “You can’t just throw out a lot of rhetoric—‘put ’em in camps’ and think you’re going to solve homelessness.”
With the campus shelved, the Cox administration instead sought funding for a group the campus would have served — “high utilizers” of services, like jails and emergency rooms, who often wind up on the streets.
Lawmakers approved about $45 million to serve people in that group, increase shelter and housing capacity, and expand mental health care. The move, aided by a tobacco tax, could raise state spending by 50 percent, but only if localities agree to match state aid.
“It’s not a campus-based approach, but it’s in a similar vein,” said Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, a Texas group that advises the Trump administration and celebrates Utah’s action as a break with Housing First.
“What matters most is that we’ve centered treatment in this conversation,” rather than unconditional housing aid, he said. “That to me feels like a success.”
With the details of Utah’s plans yet to emerge, it is not clear how forcefully the state will move to coax or compel treatment, with options running a spectrum from intensified casework to court orders.
Two scenarios seem plausible. One is that with the campus on hold and money to spend, left-right divisions will ease.
That is the outcome Mr. Clancy foresees. He notes the elected leaders of Salt Lake City and surrounding Salt Lake County, both Democrats, share the concerns about “high utilizers.” Both have initiatives to get them into treatment.
The city program, Project Connect, identified the 50 people most frequently arrested (on average 18 times in the previous year, mostly for misdemeanors) and assigned social workers to help them find services, including housing and care for mental illness and addiction. Compliance is voluntary, but intense casework promotes it, and the state calls the effort a potential model.
Salt Lake County hired a former Miami judge, Steven Leifman, to help adapt a jail diversion program he designed there. His recommendations include the expanded capacity for civil commitment — inpatient and outpatient — for people unsuited to voluntary care.
Mr. Clancy sees these efforts to coax or push troubled people into treatment as evidence that the issue is less polarized than it seems.
“For too long this debate has been housing versus casework versus mental health care,” he said. “We’re trying to say yes, yes, and yes — it’s all of the above.”
With many people under civil commitment facing long waits for treatment, he said, the new money is more likely to expand the capacity to serve people already in the system than to expand the courts’ reach.
A second scenario for Utah is that the programs Mr. Clancy designs, which must be approved by a legislative committee, accelerates the shift toward treatment mandates and what critics call the criminalization of homelessness.
Before leaving the State Legislature this year, Mr. Clancy sponsored a law that makes it easier to place homeless people with five or more misdemeanors under the watch of state probation officers. The goal, he said, is to give them access to a state system that is richer in services than local probation. But critics fear the move pushes people with petty offenses deeper into criminal justice supervision.
Likewise, a Utah Department of Corrections plan, the ARCH program, will move as many as 200 homeless “high utilizers” to halfway houses, to face “supportive accountability,” such as compliance with drug treatment and mental health plans.
Mr. Clancy said the effort does not criminalize homelessness because it serves people already convicted of crimes and provides a prison alternative. But critics see the main features — confinement and treatment — as a backdoor version of the campus plan.
Will the state try again to build the campus?
“If the opportunity comes up and we can identify the funding, great,” Mr. Clancy said. “But we don’t want to wait around to address the crisis.”
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8) Once Detained by ICE, Mariachi Brothers Open for Kacey Musgraves
The teenagers, who had faced deportation after a high-profile detention, took the stage on Sunday thanks to an invitation from one of country music’s biggest stars.
By Edgar Sandoval, Reporting from New Braunfels, Texas, Published May 3, 2026, Updated May 4, 2026
The crowd went wild when the three Gámez-Cuéllar brothers and their father took the stage on Sunday night.
It was no ordinary concert. Two months ago, the brothers and their father, all musicians, were being held in federal immigration detention centers. Now, dressed in black mariachi suits, they were opening for the country music star Kacey Musgraves in New Braunfels, Texas.
Just before they went on, the family uttered a prayer of thanks. “Thank you, Father, for giving us this great opportunity,” Antonio Yesayahu Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, addressed God, as he stood next to his 15-year-old brother, Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar; their 12-year-old brother, Joshua Gámez-Cuéllar; and their father, Luis Antonio Gámez. “We ask you, Father, to protect us and bathe us in your light.”
In early March, the Gámez-Cuéllar family became snarled in President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Their detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents drew widespread and bipartisan outcries that led to the family’s release from an immigration facility in Dilley, Texas. The oldest sibling, Antonio, was released from a separate detention center near the border.
Shortly after the family was released, Ms. Musgraves extended an invitation to the brothers on Instagram: “great so come on the road with me.”
Antonio and Caleb, along with their younger brother, Joshua, all renowned mariachi players from McAllen, Texas, jumped at the opportunity to open three shows for Ms. Musgraves with their father. The performances on her Middle of Nowhere tour began Sunday and will continue for two more days at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, northeast of San Antonio. The venue is a whitewashed building that resembles a small church and considers itself the oldest continuously operating dance hall in Texas.
“We were honored to be invited,” their mother, Emma Guadalupe Cuéllar López, said. At the concert, Antonio belted out a Spanish-language rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to applause and cheers.
Moments earlier, he whistled Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller,” as he helped his younger brother Joshua adjust his bright red moño charro, a mariachi tie. Their father kissed Joshua’s forehead as encouragement.
“It is wild to believe that we went from being in such a dark place to opening a show for one of country’s biggest stars,” Antonio said.
Last June, Representative Monica De La Cruz, Republican of Texas, invited the brothers to perform at the U.S. Capitol with their bandmates and then visit the White House. Antonio was crowned the best mariachi trumpeter in Texas earlier this year.
For the last three years, the family lived a version of the American dream, in a part of the country where mariachi music is central to public education and border culture.
The Gámez-Cuéllar family entered the United States in 2023 at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, on an asylum claim and settled in nearby McAllen. Mr. Gámez, the father, said his family had fled San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where cartel members had kidnapped him.
Their immigration status remains in limbo, pending future court dates, he said.
The family members said they had followed the law by attending every court date and had a check-in with ICE officials in January. Initially, they said, they were told to return in June, but then the family received an unexpected call from ICE saying that they needed to check in on Feb. 25. They were swiftly detained.
In interviews before the show, family members described being held in deplorable conditions at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a sprawling jail fashioned out of trailers that serves as the country’s largest family immigration detention site.
Mr. Gámez said he tried not to think about the moment his oldest son was handcuffed and transferred to another detention center near the border, “like if he was a criminal,” he said. “It was very painful.”
“We are happy to be together again, far from there,” Ms. Cuéllar Lopez added.
The detention center in Dilley, where most of the family was held, was shuttered by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2024 and reopened by President Trump last year. The center has since become an often-criticized symbol of the crackdown on immigrant families. It was where Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy detained by federal agents in Minnesota, was held with his father until a similar outcry led to their release.
After they performed four songs, the family members returned to their green room and collapsed on the couches. Mr. Gàmez said he was happy with their numbers. “It was a great experience,” he said.
They hope it’s not the last one. On a recent day in April, the Gámez-Cuéllar family said the brothers were focused on the future. Antonio, who is graduating from high school this year, plans to attend the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and join its mariachi team. His brothers intend to keep playing for their school bands.
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9) This Is the Biggest Culprit for High Health Care Spending
By Zack Cooper, May 4, 2026
Dr. Cooper is an associate professor at Yale’s School of Public Health and its Department of Economics.
Nolan Pelletier
There is boiling rage at health insurers among the public — for instance, over the fact that premiums for a family health plan can exceed $27,000 a year, even as patients routinely get their care denied. Such is the rage that when an insurance executive was murdered in 2024, one poll found that 41 percent of American voters under 30 perversely thought the killing was acceptable.
Republicans and Democrats have been eager to haul insurance executives to hearings and grill them. President Trump tried to justify removing subsidies for Americans to buy health insurance — a policy that will lead to 4 million people losing coverage and thousands of deaths — by arguing it would mean less money going to insurers.
Responding to the wrongdoing of insurers is imperative, but it won’t do much to address the unsustainable cost of health care. We are directing our anger at the part of the system that is most visible and frustrating (insurers’ restrictions on care) while ignoring the part of the health system that is most responsible for high costs and economic pain: hospital prices. At a time when two-thirds of the public are worried about the price of health care — a greater share than are worried about affording groceries, gas or housing — we need to have an honest conversation about what is driving high premiums and how to lower them.
Americans receive a similar amount of care as people in other countries, but we pay much higher prices for the care we receive. Take hip replacements. Hospitals in the United States earn $29,000 on average for a replacement covered by private insurance and $16,000 for one covered by Medicare. In Germany, the public system of nonprofit insurers, which covers 90 percent of the population, pays hospitals $9,400.
Hospital prices are the leading driver of the 320 percent increase in insurance premiums that Americans have experienced over the past 25 years. Since 2000, prices at hospitals have grown faster than prices in virtually any other sector of the economy. They have grown three times as fast as inflation and twice as fast as prescription drugs and doctor visits.
The reason hospital prices are so high: hospitals’ accumulation of market power, which brings them more bargaining heft when they negotiate prices with insurers. Since 2000, there have been more than 1,300 hospital mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals. When hospitals that were once competitors merge, prices go up, often by double-digit percentages, with no measurable improvement in patient outcomes. Even though we rely on competition to determine hospital prices, 21 percent of hospitals are effectively monopolies — they have no competitor within a 30-minute drive — and an additional 24 percent face only one competitor.
Insurers, in the business of making money, pass on higher hospital prices to their customers in the form of higher premiums. Hospitals argue that their mergers create jobs, but my research shows they destroy more jobs in their communities than they create. That’s because in our employer-based health care system, higher hospital prices — and, by extension, higher insurance premiums — make it more costly for companies to keep workers employed. The workers losing their jobs are usually those earning less than $100,000 a year — one reason hospital mergers fuel income inequality.
What we spend on health care is a function of the volume of care that gets provided and the price of that care. There’s a reason insurers have adopted policies that target volume, like prior authorizations, high out-of-pocket costs and claims denials: They are incentivized to lower health spending, but in many markets don’t have the ability to put meaningful pressure on hospital prices.
Politicians from both parties have called for reining in insurance denials. They’re right to. Such denials, and the bureaucratic processes that accompany them, are stressful for patients, and, in the worst cases, lead to patients missing out on lifesaving care. Likewise, research shows the high out-of-pocket costs included in many insurance plans can drive up death rates. We need to lower out-of-pocket costs and make insurance less bureaucratic. However, unless we pair such reforms with a focus on addressing hospitals’ rising prices, rolling back insurer restrictions on care risks driving growth in health spending that, in turn, will slow economic growth and drive job losses among low-wage workers.
If hospital prices are such a key driver of rising costs, why aren’t elected officials doing more about them? Partly the answer is politics. Hospitals are the largest or second-largest employer in many counties in America, and a formidable lobbying force — spending more than $100 million annually in Washington, often more than health insurers spend, to protect their interests. Politicians who represent places with dominant hospital systems are not eager to pick a fight with these institutions. Moreover, when an insurer denies your claim, you know it immediately. When a hospital merges and its prices go up, the harms — slower overall economic growth and job losses outside the hospital sector — are real but diffuse.
Another reason so little has been done about hospital prices is the chronic underfunding of the Federal Trade Commission. Each year, there are approximately 20 potentially harmful hospital mergers, but the cost of pushing back on all of them would potentially exceed the agency’s entire budget for antitrust enforcement across all sectors of the economy.
Addressing this issue would require regulating the prices for at least some hospitals. Economists generally prefer to rely on competition to determine what companies get paid. But in hospital markets that are effective monopolies, regulation isn’t a departure from sound economics — it’s the only tool left. Congress should cap the prices monopoly hospitals can negotiate with private insurers, using Medicare rates or prices in other competitive markets as benchmarks.
Perhaps more than anything else, what makes hospital prices so hard to confront is that the relationship we have with our health care providers is very different from the transactional relationship we have with our insurers.
The physician and scholar Jay Katz spent his career writing about how vulnerability, fear and gratitude make it difficult to hold doctors and hospitals to the kind of scrutiny that we apply to other powerful institutions. We lean on hospitals when our children are born, when our parents get sick and when we approach life’s end. That kind of reliance requires trust.
But we should still push back on a merger in Terre Haute, Ind., that will cost 500 workers their jobs, and scrutinize an industry in which 25 years of price increases have left care unaffordable. Holding that tension between the immense good that hospitals do and the economic harm their market power creates is what it will take to address the rising cost of health care.
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10) With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank
Israel has failed to arrest a wave of violence against Palestinians, prompting military officials to urge the government to intervene.
By Natan Odenheimer, David M. Halbfinger and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from across the West Bank, May 4, 2026
“Over the past two decades, 93.6 percent of police investigations ended without an indictment, according to the Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din.”
When Israeli settlers attacked his West Bank village, Moatasem Odeh saw his son Amir, 28, fatally shot. Then he was stabbed repeatedly and beaten unconscious.
The attack in Qusra, on March 14, was one of many in a wave of brutal violence in the West Bank over the past two months.
Villagers might have once driven the attackers away by throwing stones, said Mr. Odeh, 46, but settlers now routinely carry guns. “We are helpless,” he said, “and they know it.”
With the world’s attention focused on the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and its proxies, extremist settlers acting with seeming impunity have intensified their attacks on Palestinians across the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Their campaign of violence and intimidation is emptying out entire villages and leaving countless Palestinians fearing what each nightfall might bring.
In the Jordan Valley, masked men sexually assaulted Suhaib Abualkebash, 29, and brutalized his extended family, children included.
In Deir Dibwan, east of Ramallah, Odeh Awawdeh, 25, was fatally shot when he tried to stop settlers from stealing his family’s sheep, according to his family and local authorities.
Thaer Hamayel, 28, was shot dead fending off Israeli settlers raiding his village, Khirbet Abu Falah.
“I’m afraid of being in my house, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I leave it,” said Maleeha Al-Omari, 40, standing outside her home just steps from where Mr. Hamayel was gunned down.
“No one protects us from the settlers,” she said. “We are on our own.”
Between the start of the war on Feb. 28 and April 27, 13 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in attacks, hundreds injured and 622 driven from their homes, according to data compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In all of 2025, the office counted as many as 15 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers.
Put simply, experts say, extremists have seen the war as an opportunity.
“It’s a chance to escalate pogroms on Palestinians while the world is distracted,” said Idan Yaron, an anthropologist who has spent years studying Israel’s radical nationalist groups, including long stretches with extremist settlers. “Their goal is to expel Palestinians from their lands and make them their own.”
The violence, often involving beatings, arson, theft and vandalism, has become routine. The attacks — an average of nearly seven a day — showed no sign of slowing after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary cease-fire on April 8.
Extremist settlers even publicize their violent attacks. One online group boasted that, in the Hebrew month ending in April, the fight “against the Arab enemy in the Holy Land” had seen attacks in 40 Palestinian communities, including 79 people injured, 63 cars and 32 buildings torched, and hundreds of olive trees uprooted.
The responses of the Israeli authorities have generally ranged from unkept promises to address the problem, to blame shifting, to outright denial.
The Israeli police, who investigate crimes committed by Israelis in the West Bank, said that they had opened investigations into some of the more egregious incidents since Feb. 28. They said they arrested seven men in the sexual assault case in Khirbet Humsa and one man, an army reservist, in the killing in Qusra.
Yet the police also denied that settler violence had surged in that period, without providing any data to support that assertion.
The force has long failed to bring settlers to justice. Over the past two decades, 93.6 percent of police investigations ended without an indictment, according to the Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din.
The police force is overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, who made his name as a lawyer defending settlers who had attacked Palestinians. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who did not respond to requests for comment, was once convicted of inciting racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization.
As the occupying power in the West Bank, the Israeli military is supposed to maintain order and protect civilians. Its leadership has repeatedly sounded the alarm about rising settler violence since the start of the war.
Military officials say they worry that the wild attacks could spark a Palestinian uprising that the army could struggle to contain.
Yet the military has exerted little force in stopping settler violence. Soldiers, often the first authorities in the West Bank to arrive at the scene of an attack, seldom detain settlers until the police can arrive. And though they sometimes bulldoze illegal outposts, those are often rebuilt within hours.
Senior and midlevel commanders, speaking to The New York Times on condition of anonymity to discuss military issues, say that they struggle to make their troops act against the settlers; some soldiers, the commanders say, sympathize with the settlers. In many cases, soldiers have stood by as settlers attacked Palestinians, according to Palestinians and Israeli activists and officials. Some soldiers even take part in the violence.
Asked about such cases, the military said in a statement that instances in which troops failed to follow orders were “examined thoroughly and disciplinary measures are taken accordingly.”
Top army commanders have gingerly suggested that the problem is much broader and extends beyond the military. Settler violence, they say, is supported, or at least condoned, by Israeli politicians — and, increasingly, by the public that they represent.
“I’m calling on you — public leaders, rabbis, educators, parents, and youth — open your eyes,” Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, the army’s commander for the West Bank, wrote in an open letter published on March 19. “Don’t encourage it. Don’t be silent.”
Israel’s right-wing government, which has overseen a record expansion of West Bank settlements, has minimized the surge of violence, when it has discussed it at all.
It announced on March 24 the creation of a unit in the Defense Ministry to address at-risk youth, as officials often refer to the young men and teenagers perpetrating violence in the West Bank. It would do so by encouraging them to stay in school, play sports, serve in the army and get jobs.
The government has also allocated more money for providing security equipment to settlers, like drones and off-road vehicles. Those are purportedly to help settlements protect themselves but are often used by settlers to harass and attack Palestinians.
An 18-year-old settler was driving one such vehicle when he was killed, last month, in a collision with a car driven by a Palestinian. The driver said it was an accident, but extremist settlers did not wait for the police to investigate.
For nights after, scores of settlers marauded through villages across the West Bank, attacking Palestinians and torching their cars and homes. The police said a handful of people had been arrested but did not respond to questions about whether any had been charged. The collision is now being investigated as a possible terrorist attack by the Palestinian driver.
Critics of the government’s response to settler violence say it has amounted to gaslighting and tacit support.
Senior Israeli officials have suggested that claims of settler violence are simply made up, despite abundant evidence of widespread and organized attacks. Or they shrug off the attackers as few and their crimes as minor.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has described settler violence as the work of “a handful of kids.”
The actual number of settlers participating in violence is not known, but the most authoritative estimates are in the hundreds. Dr. Yaron, who studies Israeli extremists, said the core group regularly terrorizing Palestinians ranges from hundreds to about 1,000, with a similar number joining in sporadically. All told, that is a small fraction of the roughly 700,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements.
Emboldened, some extremists now speak openly about their goals and methods.
In a recent podcast interview, Elisha Yered, 25, a leader of a group of young settlers who call themselves the “hilltop youth,” talked about wanting to drive Palestinians out of their lands.
“There’s an enemy here waiting for the day he can kill me,” Mr. Yered said of Palestinians, adding, “I’ll do everything I can to remove him, to harm him, or at the very least, to deter him for the time being.”
He rejected the term “settler violence,” saying, “It’s self-defense,” but added that “the best defense, as you know, is offense.” This meant always pushing the Palestinians — with land grabs or attacks — to the point at which they feel they must fight back, he said. “We provoke clashes, and we take pride in it.”
Few settlers are so outspoken. More typical was the response of a group of eight young settlers to Times reporters who tried to interview them at their hilltop outpost opposite Qusra — the village where Amir Odeh was killed and his father stabbed.
Within hours of the attack, the Israeli military said that it had evicted the settlers and dismantled their outpost. The next day, they were back.
Three of them tried to block the paths of Times reporters approaching the hilltop. Israeli soldiers watched the confrontation play out from a distance.
Asked about the violence the day before, none of the settlers said a word.
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11) What to Know About Orphines, a New Class of Deadly Opioids
The drugs are 10 times more dangerous than fentanyl. They are showing up in street drugs in the South and the Midwest, and will most likely spread to other regions.
By Jan Hoffman, May 4, 2026
A Knoxville, Tenn., police officer at the scene of a suspected overdose last month. The greater Knoxville area has seen a startling spike in overdose deaths driven by the presence of orphines. Brett Carlsen for The New York Times
Since last fall, new and deadly synthetic opioids called orphines have begun appearing in street drugs in the United States. They are far more potent than fentanyl but cannot be detected by standard toxicology tests.
Orphines are still much less common than fentanyl, but they are proliferating quickly. As of last month, they have been found in 14 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest. Law enforcement officials and public health officials are trying to assess the gravity and endurance of the threat they pose.
Here are answers to some basic questions.
What are orphines?
They are a class of opioids that was created in the 1960s by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor and pharmacologist, whose teams investigated rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery. As part of that effort, they also developed fentanyl.
Dr. Janssen and others discovered that orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive. Within a few years, the research on them was halted.
Researchers characterize orphines as 10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains. They can be lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid. Sometimes the classic signature of overdose, “the foam cone” — froth from the nostrils and mouth — does not even have time to bubble up.
Fentanyl Overdoses: What to Know
Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose.
Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy.
Talk to your loved ones. The best way to prevent fentanyl use is to educate your loved ones, including teens, about it. Explain what fentanyl is and that it can be found in pills bought online or from friends. Aim to establish an ongoing dialogue in short spurts rather than one long, formal conversation.
Learn how to spot an overdose. When someone overdoses from fentanyl, breathing slows and their skin often turns a bluish hue. If you think someone is overdosing, call 911 right away.
Buy naloxone. If you’re concerned that a loved one could be exposed to fentanyl, you may want to buy naloxone. The medicine can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose and is often available at pharmacies without a prescription. Narcan, the nasal spray version of naloxone, has received F.D.A. approval to be sold over the counter.
Still, it is possible for people overdosing on orphines to be revived with naloxone, the opioid reversal medication. But numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl.
Why did orphines start showing up in United States?
Orphines are among the synthetic opioids that started to appear in the street drug supply in the wake of global crackdowns on fentanyl.
In 2018, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a temporary ban on all fentanyl-related substances, called analogs. That same year, an article in The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry addressed the challenge of developing opioids without toxic side effects and offered orphines as cautionary examples. It described them as dangerous, because they are so powerfully addictive and may affect breathing.
Researchers speculate that rogue chemists, seeking illicit drugs that can evade international drug laws, may have been inspired by the article to develop orphines. By 2019, brorphine, an early orphine, was detected in Europe.
Around that time, another class of cheap, synthetic opioids called nitazenes had been circulating in Europe and the United States, alarming law enforcement and public health officials. But in July 2025, China, a key manufacturing source of chemicals for nitazenes, banned them.
Nitazenes began to fade but, within months, orphines popped up in the American illicit drug supply.
In what form are orphines sold?
The most common orphine is an analog called cychlorphine (also known as N-propionitrile chlorphine). It seems to be circulating in counterfeit pills or as a powder, bulking and boosting fentanyl. Overdoses and fatalities may occur because the user did not know that the intended drug — such as the stimulant methamphetamine — had been adulterated with the orphine.
Cychlorphine is so new, so difficult to seize that researchers believe it is often being delivered by international mail. In addition to the United States, it has been detected in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, France and Germany, where, cheap and available, it has been nicknamed “poor man’s fentanyl.”
There are indications in Europe that cychlorphine is being used on its own, not just to adulterate other drugs. Medical examiners in the United States are starting to surmise this as well because a few overdose fatalities do not test positive for conventional illicit drugs, like fentanyl and benzodiazepines. When further toxicology tests have been done, cychlorphine shows up as the only deadly drug on board.
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12) Guns vs. Butter—It’s Our Choice
By Bonnie Weinstein, May/June 2026
In an April 2, 2026, New York Times article titled, “Five Takeaways From Trump’s Address on Iran,” by Luke Broadwater and Tyler Pager, Trump declared:
“Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
This declaration exposes the essence of capitalism— nothing is more sacred than private profits and massive accumulation of wealth—even if it means bombing the world back to the stone age.
And in an April 3, 2026, New York Times article titled, “Trump’s Defense Spending Request Could be Offset in Part by Steep Cuts to Domestic Programs,” by Tony Romm:
“With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House said on Friday that it would ask Congress to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history. The request, which arrived on Friday as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent bump from what the United States spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration said it would couple the proposed increase with a call for $73 billion in cuts across domestic agencies, including the elimination of some climate, housing and education programs. … Some of the proposed cuts would target programs that serve minority groups and their communities, under the presumption that the spending—meant to expand access to lending, bolster minority-owned businesses and combat housing discrimination—is ‘woke,’ ‘weaponized’ or facilitates ‘cultural Marxism.’ … The administration signaled it would reserve its most significant increases for law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent increase.”
Just how wealthy are the wealthiest 0.1 percent?
A March 2, 2026, New York Times article by Katie Benner and Steven Rich, titled, “Five Takeaways on America’s Boom in Billionaires” included these facts:
· Supercharged by Trump-era tax cuts and other policies that favor the rich, America’s wealthy minority has more power over the country than at any time in the last century.
· The richest Americans saw their net worth soar by 120 percent from 2017 to 2025
· The top one percent of American households, which have a minimum net worth of $11.1 million, now collectively own about $25.6 trillion worth of stocks and mutual funds, the same amount as the remaining 99 percent of the country, according to the Federal Reserve.
· Of the $25.6 trillion worth of stock owned by the one percent, more than half is in the hands of the top 0.1 percent.”
· And as for corporations, “Typically, fewer than one percent of corporations now account for more than 90 percent of corporate profits.”[1]
But let’s put these figures in perspective
As of March 2026, there is a record-breaking 3,428
billionaires worldwide, according to Forbes’ 2026 World’s Billionaires List.[2] That’s only 3,428 people—from the capitalist class—that owns the wealth of the entire world! That’s 3,428 people in power over 8.3 billion[3] people who actually do the work to create all that wealth!
As of early 2026, the United States has the highest number of billionaires in the world, with a record high of 989. Another recent report indicates that number could be as high as 1,135, with a combined net worth of roughly $5.7 trillion. The U.S. leads billionaires globally ahead of China and India, with the majority concentrated in California.[4]
And what about millionaires?
As of late 2025/early 2026, there are approximately 58 to 60 million millionaires worldwide out of 8.3 billion people. This affluent group represents about 1.5 percent of the global adult population. The United States leads significantly with over 22–24 million millionaires, accounting for roughly 40-41 percent of the global total. The top countries with the most millionaires are the U.S. (23.8M), China (6.3M), France (2.9M), Japan (2.7M), and Germany (2.7M).[5]
And what does world capitalism plan to do with all this wealth?
According to an April 5, 2026, New York Times article by Sheera Frenkel, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, titled, “Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race:”
“Russia, China and the United States are all building A.I. arms as a deterrent and for ‘mutually assured destruction,’ Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, said in an interview in February. The buildup has been compared to the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1940s, when the atomic bomb’s destructive power forced rival nations into an uneasy standoff, leading to more than four decades of nuclear weapons brinkmanship. But while the implications of nuclear weapons are well understood, A.I.’s military capabilities are just beginning to be known. The technology—which does not need to pause, eat, drink or sleep—is set to upend warfare by making battles faster and more unpredictable, officials said. … Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ Mr. Xi said in 2024 that technology would be the ‘main battleground’ of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the U.S. military to adopt A.I., saying they needed to ‘accelerate like hell.’”
The capitalists’ only goal is to build up their global war machines in competition for the world’s resources—so that the most powerful military will rule the world. The USA is already at the top of that list, and it certainly intends to remain at the top at any cost—including bombing the world back into the stone age.
But who creates the wealth that this tiny, capitalist minority owns and controls?
The vast majority of the workers of the world—we, the 8.2 billion rest of humanity—workers and professionals of all kinds—farmers, teachers, doctors, nurses, health workers, builders, shippers, delivery workers, rail, bus, train and airplane workers, factory workers, restaurant workers, sales people—everyone who must collect wages to live, we are the ones who create all the wealth in the world. The capitalists—the tiny minority of humanity—own the means of production and all the wealth and profits created by our labor.
We get only a small portion of the wealth we create by our work, and we have to fight tooth and nail to get barely enough to feed and house ourselves and our families.
And all over the world, masses of people are being bombed, starved and driven from their homes by this tiny minority of wealthy despots who steal the resources of the world only to blow it up again to protect their dictatorship over the wealth that we create—all 8.2 billion of us.
We can be divided no more!
The capitalist minority has done a great job of pitting worker against worker everywhere and for every reason they can think of—race, religion, national origin, language, sexual orientation, economic standing, education—any kind of difference they can think of to divide us and keep us ignorant of the tremendous power we can have if we had democratic control over the means of production and all the wealth we create.
If we are united, we have the power to end private profits for capitalists altogether—to take the ownership of the means of production out of their hands and into our hands and for the good of all.
The world has no use for capitalism whatsoever. We have no use for war, borders, armies, or police—we could share the wealth of the world equally.
With a completely democratized workforce—we can make sure everyone has all the necessities and joys of life—housing, healthcare, education and ample free time to explore all our talents to the fullest.
We can do away with the production of war machines and turn our production towards supplying the needs of all based upon freedom, democracy and economic and social equality and rational planning.
We, all 8.2 billion of us, can create the kind of world we want to live and raise our children in. We know how to create the things we need and want—things of quality for everyone. All we have to do is end the capitalist dictatorship—and leave all the decisions to us, the majority of humanity.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/business/dealbook/corporate-profits-record.html
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2026/03/10/2026-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures/
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=World%20Population%20Clock:%208.3%20Billion%20People%20(LIVE%2C%202026)%20%2D%20Worldometer.
[4] https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/what-we-know-about-americas-billionaires-1-135-and-counting-98d22268
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire
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13) No Kings
A Socialist Viewpoint Editorial
By Carole Seligman
The No Kings protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday, March 28, 2026.
An estimated eight million people attended the March 28, 2026, No Kings protest demonstrations that took place in over 3,100 towns and cities across the United States as well as in some other countries. This was probably the largest mass demonstration in U.S. history, and it was a profound rebuke to President Trump and the government as a whole, especially the Republicans who have supported Trump’s reactionary agenda wholeheartedly. But the Democrats did not escape the ire of masses of the millions of demonstrators who were angry about the new war on Iran as well as the attacks, arrests, and deportations of immigrants, the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter Jr. and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, the deaths in immigrant detention jails, the heavily armed occupations by ICE agents in L.A., Chicago, and especially Minneapolis, and the threats to continue these occupations in other cities.
It is critically important that a mass movement in the streets to oppose this war on Iran is built, and the No Kings protests were a good start for that endeavor. Likewise, the massive, localized response to the arrests, detentions, and deportations of thousands of immigrants by masses of mobilized people, especially in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Chicago, is setting the example for the country as a whole of what must be done in all communities. The No Kings mobilizations all across the country was a big supportive boost for those actions as well.
While it is true that organized Democratic Party elected officials, leaders, and operatives supported the March 28 actions, and are in leadership roles in Indivisable, 50501, ACLU, and other liberal organizations, I don’t think you can say that they were in tight control of the No Kings actions. In many areas, speakers sharply criticized both Republicans and Democrats for ineffective response to Trump, for enabling the genocide of Palestinians, for providing huge military budgets for war, for applauding the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, for threats to “take” Cuba, for failing to protect voting rights and the courts. While the No Kings protestors were unanimously in opposition to Trump and his cabinet, large numbers of protestors on March 28 were protesting the U.S. government as a whole—both capitalist political parties, the whole administration, both houses of Congress, and courts—that have allowed the administration to enact part of the Trump agenda, particularly the Supreme Court.
So, while the No Kings protests are definitely not advocating a new independent political party nor a socialist revolution—both of which are needed to begin to solve the escalating problems of capitalism—they definitely are important indicators of mass opposition to the system and a willingness to march in the streets for change.
True, Democrats will try to make the midterm congressional elections the focal point for ongoing opposition to Trump, but there is a real desire by masses of working-class people to act and not just vote.
This is the time to promote the ideas of working-class independence from the political parties that are controlled by the billionaires. It is also the time to promote united mass action against war and for the human rights of immigrants, of women, of Black and Brown people, and the working class as a whole.
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14) Supreme Court Temporarily Restores Access to Abortion Pill by Mail
A lower-court ruling had reinstated a Food and Drug Administration requirement that patients visit a health care provider in person to obtain mifepristone.
By Ann E. Marimow, Ann E. Marimow covers the Supreme Court, May 4, 2026
The Supreme Court on Monday restored nationwide access to a widely used abortion medication in a temporary order that will, for now, allow women to once again obtain the pill mifepristone by mail.
In a brief order, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. paused a lower-court ruling from Friday that had prevented abortion providers from prescribing the pills by telemedicine and shipping them to patients, causing confusion for providers and patients. The one-sentence order imposes a pause until at least May 11. He requested that the parties file briefs by Thursday, and then the full court will determine how to proceed.
The state of Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration to restrict access to mifepristone, saying the availability of the medication by mail has allowed abortions to continue in the state despite its near-total ban.
Medication is now the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States, and is typically delivered in the form of a two-drug regimen through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Friday’s ruling from the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily reinstated an F.D.A. requirement that patients visit medical providers in person to obtain mifepristone while the litigation continues. That rule was first lifted in 2021.
Two manufacturers of mifepristone, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, on Saturday asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In court filings, they said the Fifth Circuit ruling would cause chaos for providers and patients — and upend a major avenue for abortion access across the country. About one-fourth of abortions in the United States are now provided through telemedicine.
Justice Alito’s order, known as an administrative stay, was provisional and expected, but an important interim step for women seeking to obtain mifepristone in the next week. The order does not signal how the full court may eventually handle the case.
Justice Alito acted on his own at this stage because he is the justice assigned to handle emergency applications from the region of the country covered by the Fifth Circuit.
The Trump administration has defended the F.D.A. in court, but has not said whether it supports keeping in place the regulations that make it easier for women to obtain the pills. The F.D.A. is conducting a review of mifepristone, and the administration had asked the lower court to put the litigation on hold until that review is complete.
The case over access to the abortion pill puts the Trump administration in an awkward political position in the lead up to the midterm elections because many of President Trump’s allies and supporters oppose abortion. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., declined to comment on Saturday, citing the “ongoing litigation.”
After the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion, Republican-led states like Louisiana imposed strict bans. In response, many Democratic-led states passed shield laws that protect abortion providers who prescribe pills by telemedicine and send them to patients in states with abortion bans.
Louisiana and abortion opponents have asserted in court that the F.D.A.’s decision to allow abortion pills to be available by mail posed safety risks to women and increased health care costs for states that had banned abortion.
Major medical organizations and supporters of reproductive rights have pointed to more than 100 studies that have found the pills to be safe and effective, with serious side effects rare.
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