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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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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member 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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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Cuba’s Fuel Crisis Brings Schools to a Standstill
The country’s already-struggling schools are ending the academic year early because of a crippling fuel shortage caused by the U.S. oil blockade.
By Ed Augustin and Frances Robles, Ed Augustin reported from Havana, June 22, 2026
Analeidis Arias Matos getting her son, Alejandro, ready for school last month in Santiago, Cuba. Lisette Poole González for The New York Times
Axisa and Aron Alfonso, 6- and 7-year-old siblings in western Cuba, are luckier than most of their classmates: Their father takes them on their one-mile commute to school on horseback.
The children and teachers who live farther away rely on a spluttering, yellow Soviet-era school bus that no longer shows up. Teachers often do not make it to class, so the Alfonso family and their horse, Chocolate, turn around and go home.
A U.S. oil blockade has set off an increasingly agonizing energy crisis that has brought transportation largely to a standstill. Fewer cars and buses are on the streets, and, as a result, fewer students and teachers are in school.
“My children rarely go to school. They go, but the teachers don’t come,” said Sergio Alfonso Vásquez, 33, a farmer and the father of Axisa and Arona. “I’m afraid because they aren’t learning anything.”
To save energy, the Cuban government in February cut school to half-days and resorted to Covid-era remote learning for college students.
Then Cuba decided to end the school year two weeks early and scrapped college entrance exams for high school seniors after acknowledging that sleepless nights without electricity and a lack of school meals were exhausting students and teachers alike.
The Cuban government’s measures are the latest blows to the country’s once vaunted public education system, which had long been a signature triumph of the country’s socialist revolution.
Schools were already reeling from Hurricane Melissa last fall, which damaged hundreds of buildings; a mass departure of teachers in recent years; and shortages of textbooks, uniforms and even pencils and paper.
The extreme gasoline shortage finally brought the strained system to a stop.
The Trump administration’s pressure campaign, including an executive order that prohibited countries from delivering oil to Cuba, is aimed at forcing Cuba’s government into making political and economic changes.
But experts say the damage to the educational system is a striking example of the negative consequences of U.S. measures on regular Cubans and that, in the case of schools, amounts to a serious long-term threat.
“Education in Cuba is at risk due to the current energy crisis,” Anne Lemaistre, the regional director of UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, said on Instagram. “It jeopardizes the future of an entire generation.”
All 240 of Cuba’s boarding schools had to close this semester, Ms. Lemaistre, who is based in Havana, told The New York Times.
The Cuban government did not respond to requests for comment, but government officials have publicly discussed the schools crisis.
“After a night without electricity, getting a kid to school, figuring out how to engage him, and the class itself, is a challenge,” Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, Cuba’s minister of education, said in February on state television. “And for the teachers, who also suffer just as much, without electricity or with the problem of whether or not they have water at home, concentrating on giving classes has been quite a challenge.”
Even before the Trump administration started imposing stricter measures against the Cuban government, the country had already been in a steep economic decline for several years.
The Cuban government said the school system was facing a shortage of roughly 26,000 teachers, many of whom had quit for better-paying jobs in the private sector.
In Camagüey, a city in eastern Cuba, nearly 1,000 teachers had left the country for good in recent years, state-run media reported.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, the country experienced a record-breaking exodus. More than a million people, including thousands of teachers who earned an average of $11 a month, left the country.
President Trump cut off international fuel deliveries in January and introduced a new package of aggressive economic measures aimed at starving the Cuban government of cash.
The Trump administration argues that the United States is not to blame for Cuba’s energy crunch, but instead faults Cuban officials for not investing enough in infrastructure while diverting “energy resources to line their own pockets.”
The State Department, in a statement, questioned why the Cuban regime claims it has no fuel for schools, while Interior Ministry officials who quash protests have enough gas to carry out their operations.
Remote learning for college students, one of the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government, has proved all but impossible. Blackouts stretch over 20 hours a day, and most students and teachers cannot pay for enough data on their phones to support remote classes.
Instead, professors have sent lessons using WhatsApp voice notes.
Leonard Gómez León, a third-year law student at the University of Havana, described the semester as “hellish.”
“The power outages have been constant, the lack of internet connection, and so on, and it’s truly terrifying to see how badly we students are doing,” he said. “I feel like this is almost a lost semester.”
Mr. Gómez, 21, is the vice president of the University Student Federation of Cuba, a state-run organization that has traditionally toed the government line. But he helped organize a protest in March outside the university, demanding the semester be canceled until in-person classes could resume.
The vice minister of education, Modesto Ricardo Gómez, told the protesting students that the Trump administration was “massacring an entire society.”
The collapse of education is a stark contrast to the gains the that country made after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator and seized power in 1959.
He made education a priority at a time when the illiteracy rate was higher than 20 percent and mobilized 250,000 students and teachers to teach adults to read, particularly in the countryside.
Illiteracy was all but eradicated. The island’s universal, free university system steadily expanded over the decades, churning out doctors and engineers.
But the government, which has a near monopoly on such professions, has for decades paid minuscule salaries, undercutting economic incentives to study or teach. And the quality of Cuba’s education has deteriorated since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country’s main benefactor, which led to budget shortfalls.
Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York’s Baruch College who has written extensively about Cuba, said the education system is now “a shell of its former self.”
University education in particular, she said, is largely on pause.
“What is happening online is very poor in quality,” she said. “There’s only one, or two, or less, hours of electricity a day, and people in that time are trying to do everything to survive from washing to cooking.”
Alejandro Paradero Almenarios, 20, had enrolled at the University of Guantánamo, hoping to become a biology teacher, but dropped out in January, five months into his freshman year. He decided the effort was not worth it given the paltry wages he would earn teaching high school, the equivalent of $7 a month.
“I was studying and studying for nothing,” he said.
He now works full time making charcoal, which people now rely on to prepare meals because cooking gas is unavailable.
Raúl Cabrera Oliva, 18, was in his last year at a vocational high school in Artemisa, west of Havana, that specialized in veterinary medicine.
With few transportation options for most students, the school closed.
“No transportation, no school,” Mr. Cabrera said.
The government’s push to reduce school hours to half a day caused another set of problems. By the time parents and children, many of whom hitchhiked, arrived at school, there was no time for parents to go home and then return in time for dismissal.
Mothers killed time waiting outside.
Yaymaris Rodríguez López said she would leave her house in a village in western Cuba every morning at 7 a.m. with her two sons, ages 12 and 4, and stood on the side of the road, hoping someone would drive by offering a ride to her children’s school.
Sometimes, 10 a.m. came and went, and they would still be waiting.
“What am I going to do? I have to take them to school,” Ms. Rodríguez said. “They can’t grow up to be dumb.”
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2) America’s Thirst for Gasoline May Not Recover After Iran War
People drove less and bought more-efficient cars when fuel prices surged, habits that could stick over the long term.
By Lydia DePillis, June 23, 2026
When gas prices started rising, Judy Vassallo, 89, started taking the city bus, which is free for seniors. Hannah Beier for The New York Times
Judy Vassallo, an 89-year-old retired art teacher who lives on her own in a leafy neighborhood just north of Center City in Philadelphia, used to take her 2002 Honda CRV to the suburbs for a visit with friends, or downtown for doctor appointments and Pilates classes.
But since gasoline prices shot up after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, she couldn’t stomach paying nearly twice as much to fill her tank. Instead, Ms. Vassallo started taking the city bus, which is free for seniors. She found that she liked it — saving on gas and parking tickets.
“Once it becomes a habit, it’s not an onerous thing, it’s built into the pattern of my behavior,” Ms. Vassallo said. “You’re going into the city, you’re going to take the bus. And I’m finding that it’s so much easier.”
Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21 percent from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1 percent lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.
Much of that response comes from people forgoing discretionary driving, like road trips and grandchildren’s traveling sports games, particularly those with lower incomes. But in recent years, Americans have also gained greater ability to adapt, as more employers have allowed for telecommuting and more electric vehicles have arrived on the market.
“There’s more flexibility within working situations,” Mr. Cinquegrana said.
Despite the car-dependent nature of most American cities, sticker shock does make a difference: After the 1970s oil embargo, oil consumption per person in the United States fell, and didn’t return to the same level for another 20 years.
Some of those changes can last. The energy crisis gave rise to federal fuel-economy standards that spurred gas-saving innovations in vehicle design, keeping consumption lower than it might have otherwise been even as driving recovered.
Over the past decade, studies have shown that gasoline prices affect consumption both when they are going up and when they are going down. According to one 2021 paper, drivers have become more responsive to high prices over time, potentially because of energy price shocks that have prompted them to try different forms of transportation.
One option that has become more available lately is battery power. Some popular models, like Toyota’s RAV4 and Camry, are now available only with hybrid engines.
According to Cox Automotive, hybrids have been flying off dealer lots since the war started. And even though Congress truncated Biden-era incentives for fully electric vehicles, enough of them are coming off subsidized leases to supply a healthy used market.
“We’ve seen a change in consideration,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox. “People who need to buy a car, they’re looking online at these options that are more fuel efficient.”
One of those motivated buyers was Karin Ranta-Curran, a university administrator in Denver, who had decided to buy a third car because her youngest son started needing to drive himself around more. The family had considered getting an electric vehicle, but held off because of the expense of installing a home charger.
The war in the Middle East changed that.
“We woke up that morning and Israel started bombing Iran, and we thought, ‘OK, this might be the time,’” said Ms. Ranta Curran, who found a good deal on a used electric Lexus and now drives it to work.
She’s happy with the car and not having to pay for gas, even if geopolitical circumstances made it necessary. “We’re certainly not early adopters, so this was a bit of a forced decision in some ways.”
That is not an option for most people. Vehicle prices have climbed steeply since the pandemic, interest rates remain high, and low-income workers are under pressure as wage growth slows. That’s leading consumers to hold off on big-ticket purchases, counteracting what might otherwise be a faster replacement cycle toward cleaner cars.
Even bicycle sales have declined substantially from last year, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association. It attributes the slowdown to an unsteady economy and tariffs that drove prices higher, although e-bike sales continue to grow.
Baylii Adams-Yates is among those who feel stuck. She attends college in Morgantown, W.Va., and works as a dental assistant. She owns a 2016 Jeep that gets about 13 miles to the gallon, and doesn’t think she could sell it for enough to buy a more efficient car. But having a car that’s so expensive to drive also means she can’t take jobs that are a little farther out of town, or make extra income by doing deliveries.
“I tried doing DoorDash for the week, and I drained my gas tank within a day, every day,” said Ms. Adams-Yates, 25. “I would love to be able to do that, but it’s not realistic.”
Other countries, particularly in Europe and Asia, are more affected by petroleum shortages than the United States has been. They also have access to affordable electric vehicles imported from China, and have taken more policy measures to reduce energy demand. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast last week that global oil consumption would decrease this year, rather than increase, as it originally had expected.
For many U.S. consumers, there’s no way to cut back on gas, and they just have to reduce spending in other ways.
Take Kjersten Oudman, who runs a farm with her husband outside Sioux Falls, S.D. They have no choice but to fill their tractors with diesel to plant in the spring, and no choice but to deliver boxes of vegetables to 130 farm share members once they’ve started harvesting, filling the pickup truck with gas about three times a week. Unlike big logistics companies, they can’t tack on a fuel surcharge; the subscriptions are paid at a fixed price.
“We’re going to have to eat it for the foreseeable future,” Ms. Oudman said. Shelling out an extra few hundred dollars a month means tightly budgeting on groceries, which she tries to keep to $80 a week for her family of five, and postponing investments in the business. They were hoping to insulate their wash-and-pack building to store vegetables for longer, but the extra fuel costs pushed the project off.
“We got about halfway done and were like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll have to wait now,’” Ms. Oudman said.
It’s not just gasoline. Oil heating is still common in some parts of the United States, and the cost has jumped far more than natural gas or electricity since the war started.
Jennifer Kewley moved in 2020 into the house her great-grandfather built in Milwaukee, and replaced the roof and the siding. But it still has an oil heater, and filling it up costs about double what it did before the war.
In March and April, she set the heat at 55 degrees and bundled up while working from home doing medical billing for a hospital system. She filled up the tank only halfway, for $600, and is hoping the price will drop by the time she needs the heat again in October. Over the long term, she’s thinking about how she might cobble together the money to replace the old boiler.
“I think that this is a situation that could happen again,” Ms. Kewley said. “I don’t think this is a one-off, where I could just go another 20 years like this.”
Whether oil and gas demand recovers also depends on the price of everything else, since consumers have to balance rising costs for food, utilities, insurance and other necessities.
Judith Awkerman already made one compromise, giving up the dream of moving into a nicer house once her children were through college because home prices have jumped around where she lives near Newport, R.I. She has also given up frequent visits to her two sisters, who live in other parts of the state. She’s not sure she’ll return to those longer drives, even if gas prices recede.
“I don’t think it’ll be like, ‘Yay, we can do whatever we want,’ because it’s cumulative with everything,” she said. “Car repairs, medical expenses, medications — it would take a whole system downgrade, where inflation is way down, which of course we won’t have for a while, I don’t think.”
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3) Those British Strawberries Are Being Picked by Central Asian Workers
Ten years after Brexit, most seasonal workers in Britain are from countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Without them, agricultural chiefs say, many farms would fail.
By Stephen Castle and Aigerim Turgunbaeva, June 23, 2026
Stephen Castle reported from the fields near Swanley, in Kent, southern England, and Aigerim Turgunbaeva from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Shukrat Djuraev at Homefield Farm, in Kent, England, this month. Andrew Testa for The New York Times
There were dozens of strawberry plants to prune, and Shukrat Djuraev was more than 3,000 miles from home, but he was not complaining as he worked his way down a giant greenhouse tunnel in Kent, in southern England.
“I like it here,” said Mr. Djuraev, 44, who is from Bukhara in Uzbekistan and is one of thousands of seasonal workers that British farmers rely on every year to get their produce into stores. “It’s good working here. It’s very steady and calm.”
Before Britain quit the European Union, many farm workers came from Eastern Europe. After Brexit, they lost the right to work in Britain — and many voters assumed, therefore, that fewer foreign workers would come.
Instead, 10 years after the Brexit referendum, British farmers have filled labor shortages by turning to a more distant region for seasonal workers, granted entry on six-month visas: Central Asia.
Immigration was an animating issue in the Brexit vote, with its promoters promising that leaving the European Union would allow Britain to “take back control” of the country’s borders. A decade later, it remains one of the biggest political pressure points, this time for the governing Labour Party.
One of the loudest voices behind Brexit, Nigel Farage, and his latest anti-immigration populist party, Reform U.K., have since become a dominant political force, leading in opinion polls and making significant gains in recent local elections. His party’s success has shaken Labour and contributed to the downfall of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation on Monday.
Immigration is a complicated picture in Britain. In the years after Brexit, net migration soared, driven by the admission of people fleeing Ukraine and Hong Kong, as well as of students and their relatives, and professionals eligible under new rules. It has fallen significantly of late after changes to the regulations. Regardless of the numbers, Labour and the previous Conservative leadership vowed to rein in immigration, knowing the political pitfalls of doing otherwise.
There has also been a mismatch between perception of migration and the reality of the country’s needs. Farms across the country say they would be unable to operate without seasonal workers from abroad, and the mix shifted after Brexit.
In the early years after the vote, many Ukrainians and some workers from Russia and Belarus took on seasonal work in Britain. Then war broke out in Ukraine, and British recruiters, who supply big British farms, started looking farther afield, landing on the Central Asian countries, where wages were relatively low.
By 2023, when more than 32,000 six-month seasonal worker visas were issued by Britain, the top four countries for recruitment were Kyrgyzstan (24 percent), Tajikistan (17 percent), Kazakhstan (15 percent) and Uzbekistan (13 percent) — nations that once sent much of their work force to Russia. They do not gain the right to stay in Britain.
Mr. Djuraev appreciates the money he earns at Homefield Farm in Kent, which has helped him to buy an apartment back home. He is even upbeat about Britain’s unpredictable weather, though that’s partly because he once worked as an oil and gas driller in Russia.
“Well, it’s not Siberia,” he said in Russian with a laugh, recalling his time as a qualified engineer and technologist working in Nizhnevartovsk and Surgut. “There, it could be 50 degrees minus.”
Tim Chambers, chief executive of WB Chambers, the firm that runs Homefield and 25 other farms in the region, said that without his seasonal workers, “it would be impossible to run the business; I would be losing so much money, I would have to stop.”
“If you took away that source of labor I would close immediately — it wouldn’t even cross my mind — all I could do to survive would be to double or triple my costs of production,” he added.
Mr. Chambers can trace his ancestral roots in Kent back to 1640. The family firm he runs was founded in 1952, and it sends about 3,500 tons of both raspberries and strawberries to British supermarkets every year.
Even if some of the packaging on that fruit features the British flag, here in the Kent countryside, it is the Russian language — widely used in Central Asia — that is spoken by most of the pickers.
Mr. Chambers said that in the 1990s his company hired many Britons but that none were tempted by seasonal work now. Without a permanent, year-round job, they are unable to obtain credit or a mortgage, he said.
Those without other work would lose welfare payments while picking fruit and would then have to reapply for state support when the season ended, making it not worth the trouble. The system, he said, was so inflexible it was “ridiculous.”
Britain’s minimum wage is 12.71 pounds, about $16.80, an hour, and seasonal workers are guaranteed 32 hours of work a week; some can earn about £700 a week, about $927, or more. By contrast, the average salary in Kyrgyzstan in 2024 was a little more than £300, or $397, a month.
Mr. Djuraev is living with four people from Tajikistan in a mobile home designed for six, and he says he hopes to return to Britain for at least three more seasons.
Previously, many Central Asian workers left to work in Russia, said Christopher Gerry, a British academic who is rector of the University of Central Asia, based in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
Given the economic volatility in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and reports of hostility toward Central Asians, Britain has become attractive.
“You’re looking at a very young population that’s more globally oriented, connected through Instagram, etc., looking at global labor markets and wanting to speak English,” Professor Gerry said, referring to the Kyrgyz work force.
Charities report that some seasonal workers in Britain have been exploited. Because visas last just six months, unscrupulous employers know that workers will soon have to leave and be unable to pursue any claim, said Daniyar Abdrakhmanov, who is from Kazakhstan and who worked on a farm in Northern Ireland.
“Can you imagine being a person coming to another country — where you don’t know the language — for the first time?” he said. “Maybe they borrowed money or took credit in their country and are coming here with debts.” And if a farmer treats workers badly, he added, “they have to be silent because they don’t want to lose their job.”
Dora-Olivia Vicol, chief executive officer of the Work Rights Center, a charity, said, “The exploitation of seasonal workers that our solicitors see is widespread. It is systemic, and it is enabled by a visa scheme that ties them to a single employer, leaving them with nowhere to turn when things go wrong.”
To workers who have a good experience, the program can open horizons.
Orozbek Saipidin, who is originally from the Batken region of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, said in an interview in Bishkek, where he now lives, that the prospect of working in Britain offered a real opportunity for him and his family. “In six months, I could change our lives for the better,” he said.
Mr. Saipidin, 34, said that he had never traveled abroad before and had initially found his first visit to Britain, five years ago, tough.
“Backs, arms and legs ached,” he said. “There were days when I would cry in the shower and curse myself, ‘Why did I come here?’ But after about three weeks I got used to it. We started earning decent money — 550 to 600 pounds a week.”
Mr. Saipidin was about to travel to England again in May to work at a farm in Cornwall, in southwestern England.
In Kent, David Catt, a partner in Ragstone Ridge, a vineyard, said his grapes were harvested with the help of a team of Central Asian workers.
“They are all from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Catt said, adding, “Communicating with them is tricky — you have to physically show them what to do — because my Russian is not too hot, to be honest.”
It was, Mr. Catt noted, just one of the consequences of Brexit.
“It’s just the way things are now,” he said. “When we were in Europe, it was so easy because labor could come and go as it suited.”
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4) Fans wear Palestinian emblems at a Jordan-Algeria match.
By Tariq Panja, Tariq Panja reported from Santa Clara, Calif., June 23, 2026
The scarves were everywhere, and with an unmistakable Palestinian accent.
Draped on the shoulders of fans, or wrapped around their heads, they were symbols of Palestinian solidarity at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., as Jordan and Algeria played their World Cup game Monday night.
Jordan had never previously qualified for the World Cup, and now that they are here, the team is representing more than the kingdom. Many Jordanians can trace their roots to Palestinian families, and more than 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees live in Jordan.
The feeling of fraternity toward the Palestinians was not limited to Jordan’s players. Algeria’s soccer team has become well known for integrating Palestinian emblems into its World Cup journey. The team even displayed the Palestinian flag on the field when it sealed its spot in the World Cup with victory over Somalia last October.
Soccer’s governing body, FIFA, typically does not allow political gestures at World Cup venues. But because the Palestinian soccer federation is one of FIFA’s 211 member associations, fans, officials and players alike are allowed to carry the symbols to venues across the United States, Mexico and Canada, the three nations hosting the tournament.
The Palestinian diaspora, estimated at more than six million people worldwide, includes significant populations in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, and also in places like Dearborn, Mich., and Santiago, Chile, where a soccer team is named for the Palestinian people.
Monday’s game became a magnet for Palestinians as much as it was for Algerians and Jordanians.
Hania Taha, a postdoctoral student, made the last minute choice to buy tickets and flights from Virginia to California on the morning of the game. Ms. Taha, born in Jerusalem, proudly wore colors associated with both Jordanians and Palestinians: On her head was a kaffiyeh, a black-and-white checked cloth that has become a badge of Palestinian identity. Draped over her shoulders was a similar one, but in the unmistakable red and white of Jordan.
“I’m Palestinian and I’m here to support Jordan,” said Ms. Taha, as she joined a group of fans serenading the team outside its hotel in San Jose. “That’s why I’m wearing both: Most of the Jordanians are originally Palestinians.”
The connections extend to the Jordanian royal family. The country’s ruler, King Abdullah II, made a surprise trip to the game, taking a corner box in the stadium, which suddenly exploded into celebration when Nizar Al Rashdan smashed Jordan into a surprise lead. Abdullah’s wife, Queen Rania, was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents.
His half brother, Prince Ali bin Al Hussein, whose late mother Alia was Palestinian, is the president of the country’s soccer federation. He was present on Sunday when Gazans who were injured in the war with Israel and were receiving medical treatment in the United States visited with Jordan’s players on Sunday.
The Israel-Gaza War was front of mind for some supporters, too.
Omar Khalid, 24, who was born in the West Bank city of Ramallah before moving to California wore a T-shirt featuring an image of Suleiman Al-Obeid, one of Palestinian soccer’s most revered players who died following an Israeli attack in southern Gaza in 2025. “He was a really good soccer player,” said Mr. Khalid, who came to the game with his father.
“We wanted to watch a game of two Arab teams going against each other, and we support both,” he added. “We are one.”
That spirit was clear as the teams lined up before the game, with fans of both teams cheering each others’ national anthems. At the Algerian team's last game, where they lost to defending champion Argentina, fans of Algeria went viral on social media after chanting in support of the Palestinians.
“We love both countries, we want both of them to win,” said Sal Judieh, a 22-year-old from San Francisco, whose family came to the United States from Ramallah before he was born.
The split loyalties between Jordan and Algeria extended to the royal household, too. Prince Ali’s wife, Rym Ali, is the daughter of Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and top United Nations official. Persuading his wife to support Jordan, Prince Ali said, was easier than with his father-in-law.
But this time, Algeria came out with the victory, coming from behind to win 2-1.
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5) Europe Created Heat-Wave Protections. Now Comes the ‘Crash Test.’
Searing temperatures in Western Europe are drawing comparisons to 2003, when a deadly heat wave sparked a reckoning.
By Chico Harlan, Reporting from Rome, June 23, 2026
A visitor to the Palace of Versailles in France on Monday, where temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Thibault Camus/Associated Press
After a heat wave 23 years ago caused 70,000 deaths across this continent, European countries took steps to try to minimize the suffering next time around.
They created early warning systems, organized cooling shelters and helped hospitals get better prepared. Paris built a registry of elderly and vulnerable residents, who get check-in calls when temperatures climb.
This week, the continent is being swept by intense heat that is drawing comparisons to the disaster of 2003. And while the earlier safety measures have helped Europe avoid a cataclysmic replay, today it remains vulnerable.
In Western Europe, which is the epicenter of this week’s early season heat, air-conditioning rates remain relatively low. The European Union’s demographics add to the challenge, with the absolute number of senior citizens rising 40 percent over the past two decades, effectively swelling the population most susceptible to extremes.
And meantime, as greenhouse gas emissions rise, the pace of heat waves keeps accelerating. Of France’s 52 official heat waves since 1947, half have occurred in the past 16 years. “We have adapted, but it is far from enough for what is coming,” said Pierre Masselot, an environmental epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The latest torrid stretch has brought Sahara-like conditions to tourist-filled capitals, with temperatures in parts of Western Europe rising 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. In France, several consecutive days will challenge all-time heat records. France put much of the country under red-level alert, meaning the potential of a “strong health impact.”
Britain’s Met Office issued extreme heat warnings and said June records would most likely be shattered. High temperatures at night will “make it very hard for people to recover from the daytime heat, exacerbating the heat stress,” said Mark Sidaway, the Met Office’s deputy chief forecaster.
Heat waves become deadlier as they go on, as strain builds up in bodies. Even when heat waves leave no glaring distress signals in real-time, they can levy an enormous toll. The World Health Organization says more than 200,000 people across Europe have died from heat over the past four years.
Those numbers would seemingly point to a mortality rate not so different from 2003. But Joan Ballester, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, said the death count from 2003 would likely be much higher if the same methodology were used as in more recent research of heat deaths. “So the magnitude in 2003 was much higher,” Dr. Ballester said.
A study published two years ago in Nature said that measures taken over the past two decades had “substantially reduced” heat-related mortality, particularly in the elderly. Heat-related deaths from 2023 would have been about 80 percent higher without the steps to adapt, the study concluded.
But that progress hasn’t prevented some withering critiques. Last month, an editorial in Le Monde, a French national newspaper, called France “unprepared,” noting that the government had relaxed rules aimed at improving buildings and homes. Paris has struggled to contend with its zinc roofs, which give the city its signature look, but direct powerful heat to apartment-dwellers below.
Then, there’s the matter of air-conditioning.
About one-quarter of French homes have the cooling units. In Italy, half are equipped. Those numbers have ticked up over the years, but they don’t approach the levels in the United States and East Asia. French policymakers have tended to encourage passive cooling for buildings, like shading and greenery, noting that air-conditioning taxes energy grids and contributes to emissions.
But it can also provide lifesaving refuge during a heat wave. A 2023 study published in The Lancet identified Paris as the city with the highest risk for heat. And overall, Northern European countries, which lack decades of practice dealing with extreme heat waves, tend to have the largest risk factors.
In France, the 2003 disaster is still invoked as the pre-eminent summer catastrophe and a moment when the dangers became apparent. That year, the heat wave hit in early August, a sacrosanct vacation period when politicians, health workers and many of the country’s young people were at the beach. But elderly and vulnerable people were stuck in Paris, roasting in hot apartments.
Eventually, the Paris morgue was overwhelmed. The city erected refrigerated tents to hold bodies.
Though France became the face of the disaster, excess mortality was comparably high in Luxembourg, Italy and Spain.
This time around, cities across France opened up cooling spaces in town halls, museums and libraries. Paris permitted swimming in the Canal Saint-Martin. Welfare coordinators did their check-ins. Hundreds of schools were closed.
Mathilde Pascal, an epidemiologist at France’s public health agency, who’d helped devise the country’s response, said the current heat wave was like the “crash test” after years of preparation. “We are better prepared,” Dr. Pascal said. She mentioned that schools had been canceled, sports events called off and many employees asked to work from home. “I hope the burden will be less than 2003, but I fear it will be high anyway,” she said. “It’s just so dangerous.”
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6) Trump Says Venezuela Is ‘a Happy Country.’ Its People Disagree.
President Trump says Venezuela, under U.S. oversight, has “never made the money” it is making now. But new oil revenue isn’t helping ordinary Venezuelans, and anger seems to be mounting.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, June 23, 2026
President Trump and Venezuela’s new leaders have portrayed their unlikely alliance as an unfettered success.
Mr. Trump said last week that Venezuela “has become a happy country” because of all the money from new trade with United States.
Freed from American sanctions, Delcy Rodríguez, his handpicked Venezuelan president, has been traveling the world and showcasing her meetings with global leaders.
But beneath the narrative of success, Mr. Trump’s Venezuelan partners face growing difficulties meeting the clashing expectations of the Venezuelan people, foreign investors and U.S. officials.
These tensions expose the fundamental challenge of Washington’s heavy-handed plan to create a resource-rich protectorate in Venezuela after capturing its previous leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January.
U.S. oversight has started to address the worst of the country’s chronic corruption under Mr. Maduro, but it has not yet made a difference for average Venezuelans. For most, life remains just as hard as it was before the U.S. attack.
Annual inflation, though falling, remains the world’s highest at 524 percent. Wages have increased, but remain at penury levels.
And Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has continued its collapse since Ms. Rodríguez took power.
On unofficial currency exchanges used by most Venezuelans, a dollar costs a quarter more than the official rate set by the government. This gap has fueled inflation and encouraged capital flight.
“Let them come here for three months without bodyguards and then go to a supermarket to see if this has improved,’’ said Álvaro Espinoza, 56, a jeweler in Los Teques, a commuter town outside the capital, Caracas, referring to American officials. “It’s all a lie.”
The slow pace of economic recovery is testing Venezuelans’ patience with Ms. Rodríguez.
Her approval rating fell to 25 percent in May, the third consecutive monthly fall, according to an online survey conducted by Brazilian pollster AtlasIntel for Bloomberg News.
U.S. officials say Venezuela’s economic changes are working, but need more time.
“We’re trying to normalize that place,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with Fox News last month. “For the first time in more than a decade, the wealth of the country is actually benefiting the people of Venezuela, but there’s more work to be done.”
Cooperation between the two governments is producing an economic recovery after a prolonged downturn under Mr. Maduro, a State Department spokesman said in emailed comments. He cited Venezuela’s monthly inflation in May, which rose at the lowest rate since 2024.
Venezuela’s communications ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that the U.S. is focused on securing Venezuelan oil for American interests. To keep the oil flowing, Mr. Rubio says he is pursuing a broader strategy aimed at stabilizing the Venezuelan economy and eventually creating the conditions for new elections.
This has led U.S. officials to wade into the country’s labyrinthine, distorted economy, which for decades has rewarded currency speculation over productive investment, according to people close to the Venezuelan government and banking and corporate executives.
Taking control of Venezuela’s finances has, for now, ended up concentrating the flow of dollars to a smattering of Venezuelan companies and their owners with bank accounts in the United States. Most of those dollars end up sitting in those accounts, rather than being put to work in the Venezuelan economy, people familiar with the money flow said.
Displays of U.S. power over Venezuela are causing growing dissent inside Ms. Rodríguez’s political party.
U.S. military aircraft landed at the American Embassy in Caracas recently and the Trump administration forced the Venezuelan government to hand over a top Maduro confidant without due process to face corruption charges in Miami.
Several members of Venezuela’s ruling Socialist Party, in private, called such actions humiliating, provoking discussions about backing an alternative candidate to Ms. Rodríguez should new elections be called.
The ruling party members and most other people interviewed for this article discussed sensitive topics on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Trump’s project to unlock Venezuela’s natural wealth has generated a flurry of investor interest but few binding deals.
The Trump administration has scrapped personal sanctions against Ms. Rodríguez, but has largely kept broader economic sanctions on Venezuela. It has instead issued special exemptions for companies interested in doing business there.
The strategy has helped the Trump administration keep Ms. Rodríguez in check and avoid a backlash from her opponents in the U.S. Congress. But uncertainty over sanctions has made investors cautious. Six months after Ms. Rodríguez took over, several large corporations have signed preliminary investment deals, but no company has publicly committed to bringing significant capital into Venezuela.
Ms. Rodríguez’s efforts to raise oil production is also putting pressure on the country’s broken electrical grid. The government must, in effect, choose between allocating scarce resources to keep the power on in its oil fields or in Venezuelan homes.
Power outages have worsened significantly this year, deepening popular discontent with Ms. Rodríguez. Electricity experts say the main problem is a drought that has reduced hydropower generation. But growing oil industry demands are intensifying pressure on the grid.
Ms. Rodríguez’s government has asked oil companies to generate their own power and has courted foreign investment to rebuild the grid. But U.S. sanctions and a global shortage of power equipment caused by data center construction have slowed down these efforts.
Frustrated Venezuelans are increasingly taking to the streets. During the first five months of this year, there were about 20 daily protests, roughly triple the number in the first five months of 2025, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, a nonprofit monitoring group.
Behind the scenes, Ms. Rodríguez has been making concerted efforts to improve her political fortunes.
She has conveyed to U.S. officials the risks of keeping her government on a tight economic leash, arguing that financial restrictions slow investment and growth, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Ms. Rodríguez has pushed for fewer restrictions on how her government receives and moves oil revenues. She has also lobbied for the elimination of U.S. sanctions, the people said.
Some senior U.S. policymakers, including Mr. Rubio, have been receptive to Ms. Rodríguez’s arguments, they added. But concerns over corruption has kept in place a selective approach to sanctions relief, the people said.
With U.S. support, Venezuela is selling more oil, its main export, and at higher prices. Oil exports rose for the third consecutive month in May.
About $5.5 billion entered Venezuela’s economy in the first five months of this year, a 44 percent increase over the same period last year, according to Venezuela’s central bank.
“We had a great victory in Venezuela,” Mr. Trump said in a speech on Saturday, referring to a military attack on Caracas that resulted in Mr. Maduro’s arrest. “Venezuela has become a happy country, because they have never made the money that they are making now.”
Yet only a fraction of Venezuela’s oil money actually stays in Venezuela, let alone filters to ordinary citizens, according to economists and people close the Venezuelan government.
The reasons are complicated, but ultimately stem from Venezuela’s decades-long policy to control its currency exchange rate.
At its simplest, well-connected individuals and companies that receive scarce dollars at the low official exchange rate can reap profits by reselling those funds at the higher unofficial rate to people excluded from the formal currency system.
The ease of this speculation diminishes the incentive to make investments like building a factory or hiring workers.
The gaps between the different exchange rates helps explain why the billions of dollars that have flowed into Venezuela since Mr. Maduro’s downfall have, so far, brought relatively limited economic benefit, according to people close to the Venezuelan government and several corporate executives in the country.
Under the current model, oil traders send money for Venezuelan crude to a Citibank account in the United States that the U.S. Treasury maintains on behalf of the Venezuelan government.
Those dollars are disbursed to Venezuela’s largest banks, which sell the hard currency to clients. The banks then give the proceeds in bolívares to the Venezuelan government, which uses the national currency to pay wages and debts.
But the bolívar’s collapsing value makes it attractive for the firms and people that receive dollars to keep them in bank accounts abroad, or resell them at the unofficial rate.
Ms. Rodríguez’s government has also benefited from the currency distortions.
It exchanges dollars for bolívares at private banks at a weaker exchange rate and then calculates its payments to workers and suppliers using a stronger exchange rate. On Friday, for example, the government received 692 bolívares for every dollar, but spent only 607 of them, helping it fund the budget.
At the losing end of this currency speculation are ordinary Venezuelans, whose salaries wither from inflation and currency devaluation.
Venezuela’s three largest private banks — Banesco, Banco Mercantil and BBVA Provincial — did not respond to requests for comment.
Under Mr. Maduro, the country’s oil wealth was divided among a group of allied oligarchs, relatives and generals. Today this system has been replaced by a new, more formal network of large banks and their corporate clients.
But the end result is still a closed financial club that does little to lift the fortunes of most Venezuelans, according to business and banking executives.
“They removed a pawn, but the structure remains,” said Tiotiste Herrera, a retired judge in Caracas, referring to Mr. Maduro. “The same problems persist. They have even worsened.”
Mariana Martínez and Isayen Herrera contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.
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7) Dark Smoke in a Sunny Place: Neighbors of L.A. Fire Struggle for Breath
The plume from the stubborn blaze in a cold-storage facility has dissipated, but people in the Boyle Heights neighborhood say they are in a toxic miasma.
By Orlando Mayorquín and Maia Spoto, Published June 22, 2026, Updated June 23, 2026
The towering plume of smoke dominated the Los Angeles skyline. Mario Tama/Getty Images
The smoke over Los Angeles has ebbed over the past five days as firefighters battle flare-ups at a fire at a cold-storage facility. East of the downtown skyline, what was a thick, black plume is now a diluted gray haze.
But neighbors near the blaze, in the city’s Boyle Heights area, could pay attention to little else. They struggled to breathe. They endured headaches and burning eyes, even indoors. During intense periods of smoke, residents described a dystopian scene, with streets shrouded in darkness and visibility no further than a couple of car lengths.
“It’s been hell,” Consuelo Granadas, 80, said standing outside her home in Boyle Heights on Monday afternoon. “You can’t breathe inside the home. The stink is never-ending.”
Ms. Granadas has stuck it out, she said, because she doesn’t want to leave behind her cat and two dogs.
Two blocks over, in the working-class Latino community of East Los Angeles, Mayra Grijalva, 60, donned a white N-95 mask and sunglasses before stepping outside during the lunch break of her remote job. The smell of smoke managed to seep past the taped door frames of her home.
Ms. Grijalva waited at her gate as a county worker with a clipboard emerged from a car parked in the middle of the street.
“Do you need an air purifier?” the woman asked, and Ms. Grijalva replied yes. The woman handed her a brown box and Ms. Grijalva filled out paperwork. Neighbors across the street stood outside wearing masks, waiting for the workers to make the rounds.
Ms. Grijalva said she had spent more than $600 to stay at a hotel where her pets were allowed. She couldn’t afford another expensive hotel stay, she said, and she was uncomfortable taking her pets to one of the emergency shelters that had opened.
Firefighters have made progress, according to Capt. Jacob Raabe, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. Because fire started to reach exterior parts of the warehouse’s thick, insulated walls, firefighters over the weekend were able to begin prying them open and shooting water at critical areas that were previously unreachable.
As of Monday, firefighters were still removing walls and using water cannons and high-pressure hoses, Captain Raabe said.
But around the neighborhood, there were frustrations that an industrial facility as large as the one burning could operate so close to homes.
The roughly 500,000-square-foot building is operated by Lineage, a Michigan-based warehouse company, and was storing about 42,500 tons of frozen food.
“We know many people living near our facility in Boyle Heights are deeply distraught about the fire that began on June 17, and rightfully so,” Lineage said in a statement.
The company said the building stores meat, bread and other foods — not hazardous materials. It said it has been helping the fire department bring in equipment from out of town and is providing air purifiers, masks and food for residents.
The company also said the fire was not caused by its operations or team, adding that it believes the blaze began when Altus Power, the owner of the rooftop solar array, was conducting tests. Altus Power said in statement that the cause of the fire has yet to be determined and that the company was cooperating with the authorities.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District extended a warning about poor air quality into midday Tuesday, and said “very unhealthy” air quality had been measured in Boyle Heights even as conditions had improved elsewhere.
Compared with the “garden-variety” air pollution that lingers in cities, smoke from a fire is likely even more dangerous, said Professor Suzanne Paulson, who teaches in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. And industrial fires can produce particularly potent smoke.
Air quality indexes are “set for kind of what we know well, which is normal urban air pollution,” she said.
“When we have smoke, it’s probably more toxic.”
Some residents said this was the kind of disaster that was to be expected in working-class neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. The sidewalks are more dilapidated than those in fancier areas of the sprawling city, and the weeds grow from their cracks a little taller.
In the heavily Latino neighborhood, residents fly both the Mexican and American flags and multiple generations cram inside single-family homes, scraping by to survive in one of the most expensive places in the country.
“It just seems unfair to build commercial buildings in residential areas where people are living where a crisis like this can happen,” said Adrian Rolon.
Mr. Rolon’s family lives next to the burning warehouse and he was concerned about his father, who has health problems. Mr. Rolon said that the smoke had become so unbearable that his brother went to stay with in-laws two hours away.
“A lot of people don’t have the resources to just up and leave,” Mr. Rolon said. “So they stay and they close their windows and pray for the best.”
Georgia Gee contributed research.
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8) Iranian Singer Sentenced to 74 Lashes for Performing Without Hijab
Parastoo Ahmadi and her band will also be barred from leaving the country or performing for two years, dampening hopes for a more moderate postwar regime in Iran.
By Zane Irwin and Shirin Hakim, June 23, 2026
A screenshot from a performance by Parastoo Ahmadi that was popular on YouTube.
An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a family member and state media news reports. The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.
The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced last week at a closed trial in Qom Province along with eight band and crew colleagues.
A video of the 2024 performance, in which the singer’s hair, arms and shoulders are uncovered, in defiance of Iranian law, went viral on YouTube.
Ms. Ahmadi and her colleagues were also banned from performing or leaving the country for two years, said the family member who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisal for speaking to the media. Two of the nine individuals sentenced were not in Iran when the verdict was announced, the family member said.
The sentencing came just days after Iran and the United States tentatively agreed to end a monthslong conflict that has killed thousands across the Middle East and sent shock waves throughout the global economy.
The government’s crackdown on artistic expression and women's dress has dampened hopes among some Iranians for a more moderate postwar order.
“Besides being an inhumane and humiliating punishment, the 74-lash sentence against Parastoo Ahmadi simply for singing without compulsory hijab is a dangerous signal that the regime, emboldened by the peace deal with the U.S., may intensify its crackdown on women,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights.
The strikes against Iran by the United States and Israel that began in February killed several key figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who oversaw the violent and repressive theocracy over nearly four decades.
President Trump justified the war, in part, by saying the United States intended to help Iranians overturn their leaders. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media in January.
That month, the Iranian authorities responded to widespread protests by killing thousands of people. Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, called it a “state-orchestrated massacre.”
Now, it is not clear that the war has left Iran in less restrictive hands than before. Ayatollah Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his father as supreme leader, and a group of hard-line senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has assumed an expansive role in running the country.
In 2022, there were also hopes that change might come for Iranian women. Large protests erupted after the death of a young woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of people.
During the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement that followed, more Iranians decided to flout the hijab rules, and violent crackdowns appeared to abate slightly, according to a U.N. report documenting the aftermath of the protests.
It was in that context that the video of Ms. Ahmadi’s 2024 performance, in which she crooned a set of patriotic folk songs while wearing a simple black dress, went viral. The caption read: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately.”
Ms. Ahmadi and two of her collaborators were briefly detained after the video was posted.
Now, with a postwar political order appearing to solidify in Iran, some in the country are looking at the sentencing of Ms. Ahmadi and her bandmates and wondering what it may mean for the future.
“Will this country ever be fixed one day?” said Mariam, 30, a teacher in Mashhad who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of reprisals. “Where in the world is a woman’s singing punishable by lashes?”
The Iranian authorities have attempted to “project an image of normalcy” after the war, said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. But, she said, “cases like Parastoo’s expose the reality of the human rights situation in Iran: Women continue to face profound discrimination under the law, and defiance results in punishment and state violence.”
It was unclear when the authorities planned to lash Ms. Ahmadi and the other defendants. Since the 2022 protests, there have been multiple documented cases of the authorities whipping women accused of violating hijab rules or speaking out against them.
Court documents related to the trial have not been made public.
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9) Protesters Accused of Antifa Ties Sentenced to Up to 100 Years in ICE Attack
The penalties, issued in an attack where a police officer was shot, dwarfed those given to Jan. 6 rioters and appeared to signal that at least some courts will deal aggressively with ICE protesters.
By Alan Feuer and Krista Torralva, June 23, 2026
Alan Feuer reported from New York, and Krista Torralva from the federal courthouse in Fort Worth.
“…National Security Presidential Memo 7, which ordered a whole-of-government approach to going after antifascist groups. The memo greatly expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include a list of political beliefs traditionally protected by the First Amendment — among them ‘anticapitalism,’ ‘extremism on migration, race, and gender’ and even ‘hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.’”
The leader of a group of protesters accused of being members of the far-left movement antifa was sentenced on Tuesday to 100 years in prison after a jury found him and seven other demonstrators guilty of supporting terrorism while taking part in an armed assault last summer against an immigration facility in Alvarado, Texas.
The extraordinary sentence against the protester, Benjamin Song, was only one of the harsh penalties meted out in the case during separate hearings in Federal District Court in Fort Worth by two judges who castigated the defendants for using violence and attacking the democratic process during the protest.
Nine young demonstrators, including Mr. Song, were found guilty in March of an array of charges stemming from the attack on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, which resulted in a police officer being shot in the neck.
Six of the defendants who were convicted of terrorism charges along with Mr. Song were sentenced to between 50 and 70 years in prison. Another, who was found guilty of lesser crimes and was not even present at the protest, was given a term of 30 years in prison. A final defendant is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
The remarkably stiff penalties, issued by Judge Mark T. Pittman and Judge Reed O’Connor, were significantly longer than the lengthiest sentence handed down to any of the more than 1,500 rioters who were prosecuted — and then given clemency — for joining in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The most severe sentence faced by a Jan. 6 defendant was the 22-year term given to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys.
The sentencings in Fort Worth appeared to be a clear signal that, at least in Texas, the courts would deal aggressively with ICE protesters — especially those accused of adhering to the leftist ideology of antifa, a contraction of the word “antifascist.” Activists who have demonstrated against ICE have faced a concerted crackdown from the Trump administration, including 15 people said to be affiliated with two Minnesota antifa groups who were indicted last week on charges of conspiring to impede federal agents during immigration sweeps in the state over the winter.
Both Judge Pittman, who was appointed by President Trump, and Judge O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, have reputations as staunchly conservative jurists. Judge Pittman oversaw the trial of Mr. Song and his co-defendants, which was the first time terrorism charges had been brought against purported members of antifa. Judge O’Connor was brought in after the verdicts were returned to help with sentencings.
While the jurors who heard evidence during the trial clearly believed the prosecution’s theory that most of the defendants had supported an act of terrorism when they took part in the attack on the ICE facility, five of the government’s own cooperating witnesses — people who were part of the supposed antifa cell — denied under oath that they or their compatriots thought of themselves as belonging to antifa. The far-left movement has no central structure or formal membership.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche celebrated the sentences in a post on social media, saying that “violent extremism has no place in our country.”
“The sentences handed down today make clear that antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” Mr. Blanche said.
But the relatives of some of the defendants assailed the sentences as overly punitive at a news conference outside the courthouse.
“In the face of this grotesque distortion of anything that could ever have called itself a process, I am livid,” said Lydia Koza, the wife of one of the defendants, Autumn Hill.
Hope Song, Mr. Song’s mother, said her son would never accept responsibility for what she described as “a government lie made to prosecute innocent people in order to get political persecutions.”
Mr. Trump has long prioritized bringing criminal charges against antifa activists and other left-wing demonstrators who have protested his immigration raids in cities across the country. In September, he issued an executive order declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law.
He also issued a sweeping directive known as National Security Presidential Memo 7, which ordered a whole-of-government approach to going after antifascist groups. The memo greatly expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include a list of political beliefs traditionally protected by the First Amendment — among them “anticapitalism,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and even “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”
The episode in Alvarado unfolded after nightfall on Independence Day last year, when a group of about a dozen people arrived dressed in black at the ICE facility, known as the Prairieland Detention Center. Some began to vandalize the property, spray-painting graffiti on a guard shed and a car, and damaging a surveillance camera, prosecutors said. Others set off fireworks in what they later described as a “noise demonstration,” hoping that the immigrants detained inside would be encouraged by the spectacle.
Mr. Song, a former Marine reservist, stood at a distance with an AR-15-style rifle. And when Lt. Thomas Gross of the Alvarado Police Department responded to a call for help at the facility, Mr. Song yelled, “Get to the rifles!” and opened fire, prosecutors said. Lieutenant Gross was struck by a bullet above his collarbone as the rest of the group fled. He was treated for his wounds and eventually released from the hospital.
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10) Victories by Pro-Palestinian Democrats Show the Party’s Shift on Israel
Three Democrats who have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel won primaries in New York on Tuesday, signaling their party’s new skepticism of the country and its actions.
By Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein, June 24, 2026
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who was endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, won an upset Democratic primary victory on Tuesday night over Representative Adriano Espaillat. Lexi Parra/The New York Times
Three Democrats who made criticism of Israel central to their political identities swept to victory in House primary races in New York City on Tuesday, signaling a new era of skepticism in their party toward the Jewish state and its actions.
The striking results reflected a fast-moving shift in liberal politics. Democratic voters are now more likely to be critical of Israel and its government than they are to be supportive, according to several recent polls, a monumental change in American sentiment.
And while many Democratic officials remain supportive of Israel, next year’s class of congressional Democrats is on track to be more wary about America’s relationship with Israel than at any other moment since the Jewish state was established after World War II.
The primary triumphs in deep-blue districts of Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier came after each was endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, whose advocacy for the Palestinian cause has been integral to his rapid political rise. At a rally for the candidates last week, he called the nation’s leading pro-Israel organization part of a group of “monsters” that he said were too powerful in American politics.
At Ms. Avila Chevalier’s victory party on Tuesday night in Harlem, supporters chanted “free Palestine” while she pushed her campaign’s “babies, not bombs” slogan. She suggested in her victory speech that her win represented a shift in how Democrats in New York would operate.
“Today, we make it clear: The politics of the past ends today,” she said.
Super PACs allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group, have spent huge amounts of money on this year’s midterm elections to try to turn the tide in voter opinion. The organization has had some victories, saying in a statement on Tuesday night that 180 Democrats and Republicans it had endorsed had advanced to the November election. The group congratulated a Maryland House candidate its allied super PAC spent millions backing and said this would “ensure this seat remains represented by pro-Israel leadership.”
But despite those successes, AIPAC has largely been on the defensive.
Polls show that support for Israel among Democrats has sharply and steadily eroded since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent destruction of most of Gaza. A New York Times/Siena survey this spring found that 60 percent of Democratic supporters said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, compared with 15 percent who were more supportive of Israel.
“You’re seeing more and more Democrats making it clear that we should provide no U.S. taxpayer support to the government of Israel,” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said in an interview on Tuesday. Next year, he added, “I hope we will see a Congress that doesn’t provide reflexive unconditional support to the government of Israel.”
Perhaps the most significant of the New York races pitted Representative Dan Goldman, a two-term Democrat from Brooklyn, against Mr. Lander, the former New York City comptroller, who staked his campaign on opposing Mr. Goldman for being insufficiently critical of Israel.
The race between the two men, Jews who both describe themselves as liberal Zionists, symbolized how Democratic voters, especially younger ones, have shifted away from support for Israel.
But perhaps the most outspoken anti-Israel Democratic candidate who won in New York City, Ms. Avila Chevalier, defeated Representative Adriano Espaillat, who has been a steadfast supporter of Israel in his decade in Congress. Ms. Avila Chevalier spoke often of having lived in the West Bank and attended a rally on Oct. 8, 2023, that was widely criticized for featuring speakers who appeared to justify the attacks a day earlier.
Like Mr. Lander and Ms. Valdez, Ms. Avila Chevalier is now the Democratic nominee in a solidly blue House district and is a heavy favorite to wind up in Congress come January.
The fights in New York became increasingly nasty in the final days of the campaign. A local coffee shop chain wrote on social media that Mr. Goldman, who is critical of Israel’s government but has opposed banning aid to the country, was not welcome because it did not serve “genocide enablers.”
Pitched Midterm Battles Over Israel
The main super PAC tied to AIPAC, the United Democracy Project, has spent more than $25 million so far this year, in addition to at least $5 million it has funneled to create new super PACs.
That sum may be just a fraction of what is to come. The group started the year with more than $96 million, making it one of the best-funded PACs in the country.
Its most prominent spending battles so far have been in New Jersey and Illinois. But Israel also became a driving issue in several House primaries in California.
The results have been mixed. In the Chicago suburbs, Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, Ill., won a House primary after explicitly attacking AIPAC. The group spent $7 million in the race, mostly aimed at defeating Mr. Biss, who is Jewish. But in the final days of the primary, when it became clearer that a candidate even more critical of Israel than Mr. Biss could win, the super PAC dialed back its attacks on him.
In New Jersey, the AIPAC-tied super PAC targeted Tom Malinowski, a popular former congressman who supported more restrictions on aid to Israel. But in an embarrassing turn for AIPAC, Analilia Mejia, a progressive organizer who was loudly critical of Israel, beat him in the special election and then won a later primary.
AIPAC has won victories, too. Two of its preferred candidates in Illinois won crowded primaries, even as another anti-AIPAC Democrat won in a Chicago district.
In Washington, defending Israel has fallen out of favor among many congressional Democrats, with a large majority of senators who caucus with the party voting this year to block some U.S. arms sales to Israel.
“Do I think the Overton window on Israel has shifted more in the last six months than my entire career?” said Amy Rutkin, the longtime chief of staff to Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the longest-serving Jewish Democrat in the House, who is retiring. “It surely, absolutely has.”
The shift is part of a generational change after the retirements of longtime Democratic leaders like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the longest-serving Democrat in the House, both of whom are stalwart supporters of Israel. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, is also a backer of Israel.
But among Democratic voters, support for Israel has crumbled. And even House Democrats who are broadly supportive of Israel are highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister. Few enthusiastically support the right-wing Israeli government, and many are openly counting down until elections there, which are scheduled for October.
Shifting Winds in New York
The Democratic shift on Israel has been particularly notable in New York, home to the country’s largest Jewish population and a mayor who has frequently focused on the plight of Palestinians.
“The monsters that we are up against, they take many different forms,” Mr. Mamdani said at a recent rally for his endorsed candidates, before adding that AIPAC believed “the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars.”
Many Jewish leaders and groups criticized the remarks, arguing that they echoed antisemitic tropes at a time of increased hate crimes targeting Jews.
One of the candidates the mayor backed, Ms. Avila Chevalier, defeated Mr. Espaillat, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He was the only candidate in New York who was explicitly backed by AIPAC’s super PAC, which transferred money to a separate group that supported him.
In the 10th Congressional District, which includes Lower Manhattan and a large area of Brooklyn and is one of the most Jewish districts in the country, Mr. Goldman, the Brooklyn Democrat, frequently argued that a focus on foreign policy was misplaced given voters’ domestic priorities. Those arguments fell flat: He lost badly, trailing late Tuesday by more than 30 percentage points.
Several Jewish Democrats who are most likely heading to the House, including Mr. Lander and Mr. Biss, have taken a more antagonistic tone toward the current Israeli government. But whether they will take radically different approaches to policy remains to be seen.
AIPAC as a Litmus Test
For decades, AIPAC was the leading voice of a bipartisan congressional consensus on the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Now, many Democrats in contested primaries want nothing to do with it.
The organization has become a symbol of dark money, alongside organizations backing the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries. And all three interest groups are spending money on many of the same races.
None of the advertisements paid for by the AIPAC super PAC even mention Israel, focusing instead on top-polling issues in each area.
In Maryland, the super PAC spent more than $5 million to back Adrian Boafo, a state legislator, in the primary to replace Mr. Hoyer. The ads focused on Mr. Boafo’s biography and his accomplishments in Annapolis. Cryptocurrency interests spent an additional $3.4 million to back Mr. Boafo, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. He ended up finishing well ahead of a crowded Democratic field.
The next Democratic primaries to revolve around Israel will come in August, when Minnesota, Michigan and other states are holding competitive intraparty contests.
At a Democratic primary debate for Senate last week in Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan declared that “I don’t take AIPAC money because my values don’t align with AIPAC.” Her opponent, Representative Angie Craig, who has been endorsed by AIPAC in the past, replied that she had taken “not one penny” from the group and called for Mr. Netanyahu to lose his re-election bid in October.
The most divisive race, however, will be in Michigan, which has large Jewish and Muslim populations.
The Democratic Senate primary there includes Representative Haley Stevens, a staunch backer of Israel, and Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive public health official who has called Israel’s actions a genocide and opposes any military aid to the country. A third candidate, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, has tried to take a middle path on Israel, but is struggling in the polls.
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11) Iran’s Loyalists Promote a Wider Nationalism, Unveiled Women Included
Government supporters are showing off new ties with alleged former dissidents in a bid to show that they can withstand enemies at home as well as abroad.
By Erika Solomon and Sanam Mahoozi, June 24, 2026
A pro-government demonstration in Tehran last month where some of the women were partially veiled and some dressed more conservatively. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Dressed in a pink top and acid-washed jeans, the young woman in the video hardly looked the part of a pious loyalist to Iran’s clerical rulers, standing alongside a crowd of women draped in black from head to toe. That was exactly the point.
Letting her curls spill onto her shoulders, the woman offered an on-camera testimony.
“I was not a supporter of the Islamic Republic, nor the supreme leader,” she told a pro-government filmmaker, Hossein Shamaghdari, who posted their exchange online. After the United States and Israel attacked in February, she said, she began to admire Iran’s hard-line forces, as they battled two of the world’s most powerful militaries.
“If the Revolutionary Guards and Basijis were not fighting, we would not still be here,” she said, holding back tears, and praising the very forces that had once cracked down on unveiled women and protesters. “I am remembering the start of the war, and rethinking my views about the Islamic Republic.”
The woman is never identified in the video, and it is unclear who she is — let alone whether she has indeed changed her mind on Iran’s autocratic government. What is unmistakable about the video, though, is a new kind of nationalism that Iran’s government and its supporters are formulating — one that embraces those who once rebelled against it.
By not only surviving the war, but emerging with a strong hand in ongoing peace talks, Iran’s government feels emboldened. Still, a national reckoning lies ahead, as the country sinks deeper into economic crisis and its population remains deeply divided after antigovernment protests that swept the country shortly before the war.
To head off those challenges, Iran’s government is tapping into popular outrage about the attack on the country by outside powers. The state and its supporters are projecting a sense of unity they believe can reach constituencies far beyond a hard-core base.
Their message is that loyalists and dissenters can find common ground in a fight against foreign aggression. And they aim to present a friendlier, more inclusive face of the regime — even as that regime continues to crack down on critics, seizing their properties and executing people at the highest rate in decades, according to human rights activists.
For weeks, supporters of the government have been posting videos online that claim to show former protesters arguing that, after the war, there is “no alternative” to the Islamic Republic. Others show hipsters with piercings — once disparaged by Iran’s theocratic government — expressing their admiration for the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
It is impossible to know how genuine those sentiments are but there is little sign in the videos that their appearances are coerced, and many liberal Iranians have voiced staunch opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Perhaps most surprising among this genre of videos are those made by Mr. Shamaghdari that feature unveiled women, often portrayed as the epitome of defiance against the regime.
The hijab is still a legal requirement for women in Iran, and women can be arrested or whipped for shirking it. Last week, an Iranian singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced to 74 lashes for performing unveiled at a concert in 2024, according to a human rights group.
Many now openly flout the rule, however, and unveiled women have become a common sight on the streets of Tehran and rural towns. But never in state-backed media, until now.
“For decades, mandatory hijab has been one of the deepest fault lines between supporters of the Islamic Republic and its opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an Iran analyst at DAWN, a Washington-based think tank focused on the Middle East.
In the past, Iranians’ stance on compulsory hijab often reflected their views on social freedoms, he said, but now loyalists are willing to look past such differences among those standing with them against the war.
“After the war, the country’s main political and social fault line changed,” Mr. Memarian said.
This messaging stands in stark contrast to imagery of women that was prevalent during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Mr. Memarian said, when veiled women were meant to idealize piety and revolutionary sacrifice.
During the most recent war, state television has shown women’s military parades, featuring pink guns and pink jeeps.
Even more ubiquitous have been the images of unveiled women at pro-government rallies. Some loyalists have highlighted their presence as a sign of national reconciliation after the bloody crackdown on January’s protests that left thousands dead.
“We have been unfair to these very people,” Amir Taha Hussein Khan, a pro-government commentator, wrote in a social media post alongside images of unveiled women at pro-government rallies. “Today, these same people, with all their being, selflessly stand against the enemy.”
Some Iranians interviewed by The Times were skeptical that everyone going to the rallies was there out of genuine conviction, arguing that free meals and money were sometimes offered in exchange for attendance. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Either way, critics say the images smack of government hypocrisy.
“They want to use the lack of hijab to their advantage,” said Maryam, a Tehran resident who asked not to be identified by her full name for fear of retribution. “All of a sudden, in the face of war, the regime says we are all Iranians.”
Some critics have posted images online showing unveiled women at recent rallies alongside photographs of a partly-veiled Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody in 2022 over charges of improper dress. Her death kindled the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, when women ripped off their veils and took to the streets in mass protest.
The government has occasionally promoted images of unveiled women in the past, usually at state rallies after periods of dissent, said Shima Tadris, who studies Iranian women’s rights movements at the Gerda Henkel Foundation, a research institute in Germany.
That happened after the January protests, she added, and became widespread during the war because it projected an image of broad-based support for the government.
At the same time, Ms. Tadris said, the government wants to demoralize the January protesters who plunged Iran’s leadership into one of its most precarious moments since the revolution that brought them to power in 1979. The Islamic republic, she said, wants to signal to protesters: “‘You are the ones who are alone, more and more people are joining us.’”
The attempts at promoting national unity come as Iranian society feels more fragmented than ever.
Before the war, Iranians were largely split into two camps: pro and anti-government, said Naghmeh Sohrabi, a Middle East historian at Brandeis University.
The opposition has since splintered into those who support the United States-led war, in the hopes of toppling the government, and those who are against it, fearing the destruction it causes. Government loyalists are split, too, between those who want to continue the war and those who want to negotiate a deal to end it.
“What’s happening on the ground is this fracturing of society on a very deep level,” she said. “The question for them is how do you bring society back together again?”
Roya Khoshnevis, an academic and cultural analyst based in Tehran, said that although those rifts could not be healed with nationalistic fervor, there was collective pride in surviving the war.
“People do not necessarily feel more united,” she said. “Despite the wrong actions the Islamic Republic has taken toward its people for ages, like many Iranians, I am proud of how strong they have appeared.”
Some activists worry the state will no longer be as lenient once the threat of war subsides, Ms. Tadris, the researcher, said.
Last month, Iran’s judiciary summoned the editor of the state news agency, IRNA, over a photo essay that featured images of a woman unveiled in her home. Yet it was Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who came out to defend him.
“The same women they say one day should be arrested, you have shown holding up photos of the supreme leader,” Mr. Pezeshkian said during an interview with Iran’s state broadcaster. “We need to accept differences, and not think of these differences as hostile.”
Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
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12) The Heat Wave in Europe Is Breaking Records. Here’s What to Know.
France had its hottest day ever, and forecasters predicted that Britain’s temperature record for June was likely to be broken.
By Nazaneen Ghaffar and Lynsey Chutel
Nazaneen Ghaffar is a reporter on The Times’s weather team. She is based in London.
London on Tuesday. Britain’s weather service said hot and humid conditions were expected to intensify. Credit...Kin Cheung/Associated Press
Temperatures in Europe are expected to break records as the continent endures its second severe heat wave in two months.
Urgent heat warnings have been issued in more than a dozen countries. That includes France, which on Tuesday had its hottest day on record — not just for June, but for any time of year — and where power grid failures have left more than 60,000 homes without electricity. Britain said its June record of 35.6 Celsius, or 96 Fahrenheit, was likely to be broken on Wednesday.
As global temperatures rise, Europe has been warming faster than any other continent, and officials have scrambled to react to heat waves that are increasingly intense and happen earlier in the year. Making matters worse, most buildings in some European countries are not equipped with air-conditioning, and schools are no exception.
Here’s what to know.
How hot will it get?
· Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland are all under high-level heat warnings.
· France’s weather agency, Météo-France, said temperatures were expected to continue reaching “exceptionally high levels” on Wednesday and Thursday, with highs climbing above 40 Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit. More than half of the country is under the highest-level heat alert through Thursday.
· Spain’s weather service, AEMET, said temperatures were expected to remain high on Wednesday, especially in the north, where highs up to 41 Celsius, about 106 Fahrenheit, were forecast. At least 10 locations exceeded 42 Celsius (107 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday. Forecasters said cooler Atlantic air would arrive on Thursday, bringing a drop in temperatures.
· A rare red extreme heat warning, the highest level, was in effect across large parts of Britain on Wednesday. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, said hot and humid conditions were expected to intensify, pushing temperatures across central and southern England, and southern Wales, up to 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday and 39 Celsius (102 Fahrenheit) on Thursday.
· Much of Italy has been affected by above-normal temperatures. The Ministry of Health has issued red heat warnings, the highest level, for more than half of Italian cities on Wednesday and Thursday. Highs of up to 37 Celsius (97 Fahrenheit) were expected in Florence and Milan. Germany is also sweltering. The country’s weather service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst, said conditions were becoming increasingly hot, especially from Friday onward. The service said temperatures could peak at 41 Celsius (close to 106 Fahrenheit) on Saturday.
· Forecasters said temperatures were expected to gradually return to more seasonal levels across Western Europe starting Friday. However, countries in Eastern Europe were bracing for a scorching weekend, with temperatures expected to climb into the high 30s Celsius by Sunday.
How is the heat affecting people’s lives?
· At least 40 people drowned in France in the past week, officials said. Many were teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas. Marina Ferrari, a government minister whose responsibilities include young people, said in a radio interview on Tuesday that the drownings were mostly in bodies of water such as lakes or canals. “During heat waves like this,” she said, “it’s no small matter to go swimming in areas that aren’t supervised.”
· In Britain, National Rail warned passengers on Wednesday to travel only if necessary. Multiple routes in the south of the country were affected, including in and around London.
· In France, 68,000 homes were without electricity on Wednesday after power grids failed, the national network, RTE, said on social media. During heat waves, every degree hotter leads to one megawatt more of electricity consumption because of air-conditioning needs, the company said.
Europe has been heating up fast.
While tying a single heat wave to climate change requires extensive analysis, scientists have no doubt that heat waves around the world are becoming hotter, more frequent and longer-lasting, and Europe is warming faster than any other continent.
In 2025, almost the entire continent was hotter than normal. Researchers estimate that in recent years, Europe has seen tens of thousands of heat-related deaths annually.
Many homes, schools and businesses across Europe were built for an older, cooler climate. In Britain, many were even built to retain heat, making cooling off amid heat waves especially difficult. Air-conditioning is not a quick fix. In France, installing such systems has become a political flashpoint, while in Britain, high energy prices deter many.
Even in hotter Mediterranean cities, where old-fashioned courtyards, heavy shutters and white-stone facades can keep homes cool, many newer buildings have been constructed using techniques that trap heat.
How to cool off.
Staying cool and hydrating often are the two most important things to do to avoid feeling sick and discomfort in extreme heat. Here are some other ways to keep cool:
· Block out the windows in your home — especially those that get afternoon sun — with a blanket or a darker sheet during the day to keep the heat out. At night, keep windows open and run fans to circulate the air.
· Spritz your skin with a mist of cool or room-temperature water or wipe your forehead with a cool cloth. Cold showers can also help you cool down.
· If you need to be outdoors, put ice cubes in your water bottle and drink cool liquids. If you plan to exercise, douse your head in cold water. Swimming is also a great way to exercise and keep cool.
· When exploring or sightseeing, seek out cooler attractions such as museums, cathedrals or even subterranean exhibitions. Some cities have created public spaces to cool down: Barcelona has climate shelters and Paris has drinking fountains, for example. London has a Cool Spaces map to find spots.
· Watch out for signs of heat stroke. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists some of them as dizziness, a rapid pulse, nausea, headache and fainting. But symptoms can vary.
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13) The War Forgotten by the World Is an Apocalypse Now
By Hannah Beech, Visuals by Daniel Berehulak, June 24, 2026
Hannah Beech and Daniel Berehulak spent nearly a week with rebel forces in Anyar, a devastated interior region of Myanmar.
Many places in Anyar have almost no contact with the outside world — no reliable cellphone signals, no internet.
From a lonely hilltop in Myanmar, an unlikely commander peered at the enemy on the next crest. He squinted through dust-covered glasses. As the wind whipped up dry earth, Dr. Lone Lone, a rebel leader of five years’ vintage, swallowed a cough, then emitted a slight wheeze.
His men saluted. Their bearing was impeccable, even if their weaponry was not.
Throughout Myanmar’s heartland, where a civil war rages fierce and forgotten, rebel groups are outgunned and undermanned. The civilians who support them face unrelenting raids by the military, which abruptly ended a brief period of electoral governance with a coup in 2021. Myanmar’s generals returned the country to full army dictatorship, fractured the nation and ignited a humanitarian crisis.
Far from the spotlight fixed on Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and other global conflicts, Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation of about 50 million people, has quietly collapsed.
Recently, The New York Times photographer Daniel Berehulak and I traveled with Dr. Lone Lone to a rebel-held region. It was in Anyar, a part of central Myanmar where the rebels say no foreign journalists had gone since the military toppled the civilian government and erased political and economic reforms.
A rebel soldier — a boy, really — pointed to the sky where he had been told an armed drone was prowling. Over the previous three days, Dr. Lone Lone and a group of his men had evaded drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters and even paraglider pilots intent on chucking hand-held bombs at them. They had passed through villages that had been assaulted by howitzers or set on fire by the Myanmar military. A drone somewhere in the distance was not Dr. Lone Lone’s biggest concern.
Still, he urged us to retreat.
“I wish you could come to Myanmar without the bombs,” he said. “I love my country.”
After the 2021 coup, anti-military forces rose up and took control of more than half the country. Some of the rebel groups say they are fighting for Myanmar to become a federal democracy, with more rights for individual regions.
Rebel groups have worked with a government in exile to set up schools and hospitals in a series of disparate territories they call “Free Myanmar.” They hoped that these liberated zones would expand and merge until the military, which has kept Myanmar cowering since it first seized power from a democratically elected government in 1962, would be forced to relinquish control.
Anyar, in the nation’s arid central region, is one of the most formidable strongholds of armed resistance against the military. In the years since the coup, Daniel and I have reported from border regions where insurgencies by ethnic minorities have simmered for decades. While those zones endure frequent attacks by the Myanmar military, they also have supply lines to other countries. Arms and intelligence — and the occasional reporter — can enter.
By contrast, Anyar is marooned, even as it suffers the brunt of the military’s anger. The area is home to the nation’s Bamar ethnic majority and was historically the wellspring of support for the military, which is also predominantly Bamar. But the coup, which dragged the country back to a grimmer age, turned many people in Anyar against the military. The cost of this perceived disloyalty has been devastating.
Five years into the civil war, far from the reach of international aid groups, we found a heartland that felt lost in an apocalypse. From the skies above dusty villages and patchworks of farmland plowed by emaciated oxen, the Myanmar military’s instruments of death killed with chaotic impunity. In its isolation, Anyar suffers from crippling shortages, too, of weapons, guerrillas and, increasingly, hope.
To maintain his grip on power, U Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, stepped down as army chief in March so he could take the civilian post of president. He oversaw stage-managed elections in which the military’s proxy party was effectively the sole choice. (In April, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader he ousted, was transferred from prison to house arrest, according to the military.)
The same month that Mr. Min Aung Hlaing prepared to assume the presidency, human rights groups put the monthly civilian death toll in Myanmar at the highest mark since the coup. Nationwide, over the past five years, more than 90,000 civilians and combatants have been killed and 3.7 million people displaced, the United Nations says. Apart from the Palestinian territories, Myanmar was the most conflict-ridden place last year (although not the deadliest), according to the conflict monitor A.C.L.E.D.
Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, told me in an interview that airstrikes were ordered “because we got solid information” of legitimate military targets.
“That many people, civilian people, have been killed in airstrikes is just propaganda,” he said.
Death Along Dangerous Roads
At various stops along our route, bombs fell just before we arrived or just after we left — a measure of how common aerial assaults are in Anyar. Gyrocopters, a light helicopter-like craft, struck a village a couple miles away from where we were at one point. Drones dropped deadly payloads on a community where we had spent the night. We chased the contrails of fighter jets and stared into the sky looking for armed paragliders.
In March, about 240 Myanmar military airstrikes killed more than 400 people, many in Anyar, according to A.C.L.E.D. In mid-April, two gyrocopters attacked a village in Anyar’s Monywa Township, killing at least 17 people. During our time in central Myanmar, we confirmed at least nine killings of civilians that had not been recorded by rights groups. This daily drumbeat of death goes all but unnoticed by the outside world.
“Do foreigners know what is happening to us?” an Anyar resident named U San Nyaung asked me, as he swept rubble from the ruins of his home, which had been burned by Myanmar soldiers.
To reach the front line in Anyar, we traveled by night and by camouflage. It took us three days to traverse what would normally be about a three-hour drive. We went by car, motorcycle, boat and foot, on back roads, mountain paths, rivers and strips of highway that were less than half a mile from the front lines. Many places we visited in Anyar had almost no contact with the outside world because of military blackouts — no reliable cellphone signals, no internet.
Nearly 200 houses in Mr. San Nyaung’s village, which like most of the places we visited we are not naming for security reasons, had been destroyed by fire. Then bombs fell from overhead. Three people were killed by those detonations, including a Buddhist monk. The military had left one final surprise: land mines planted near homes and Buddhist temples, to ensure carnage after soldiers departed.
Mr. San Nyaung began weeping, his tears fat and true.
“I know about Ukraine, Gaza. I feel very sorry for them,” he said. “We share the same sadness.”
Stethoscopes to Guns
The roots of Myanmar’s civil war reach back to 1962, when a general grabbed power, claiming that the army was needed to prevent the country from fracturing amid incursions by ethnic militias. Those insurgencies, in which ethnic minorities demanded autonomy or even independence, have endured for decades, including one that is considered one of the world’s longest running ethnic revolts. But in this latest outbreak of civil war, the rebellion by the Bamar ethnic majority has spread the conflict nationwide.
“The army cannot accept that this time the Bamar are also against them,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “That’s why they are the most cruel to us.”
Dr. Lone Lone, 41, never intended to command a battalion of 120 soldiers. It wasn’t just his nearsightedness, asthma or chronic back pain that made his career as an armed rebel so unlikely. Born in an Anyar town famous for its working elephants, he studied medicine and then ran his own clinic.
In 2021, Dr. Lone Lone was about to go on a grand tour of Europe when the coup intervened and the junta imprisoned Myanmar’s elected leaders. Dr. Lone Lone joined in peaceful protests. But when the military cracked down, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters — including small children — with bullets to the head or heart, he escaped to a border region. There, ethnic militias gave basic training to white-collar urbanites like him.
“I was good at holding a stethoscope, not a gun,” Dr. Lone Lone said.
Still, Dr. Lone Lone commanded respect. He ran a medical corps before coaxing volunteers from his hometown to form a battalion of the People’s Defense Forces, a coalition of militias loosely organized under Myanmar’s government in exile. His soldiers told us about life in what they called the B.C. era — before the coup. One was in the second year of his college physics course. Another worked in marketing. Some of the fighters were teenagers when they took up arms. Two were still only 17 years old. The older soldiers had suspended normal life — date nights, marriage, children, harvests, beach holidays — for what they called “the revolution.”
Nevertheless, some B.C. habits endured. One soldier driving a pickup truck on dirt roads kept using his turn signal, though there was little reason for such politesse near the front line.
Dr. Lone Lone’s soldiers had come to this front line only a week before. In late December, a seven-month battle in northern Shan State ended with 15 rebel battalions, including Dr. Lone Lone’s, retreating. The Myanmar military buys its weapons from Russia and China, and the rebels have long given up hope that the West might finance their fight, as in Ukraine. Dr. Lone Lone’s fighters withdrew so fast they had to leave behind their treasured war elephants, a reminder of Myanmar’s martial past when pachyderms were drafted for duty.
“We have a lack of bullets,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “I feel depressed in our revolution because we do not have support from the United States and Europe, even though we are fighting for federal democracy.”
Myanmar’s generals, for their part, draw support from neighbors like China, India and Thailand, who are mostly interested in trying to keep instability and chaos from sloshing across their borders. Those countries tacitly backed the recent elections, which the United Nations dismissed as a “sham.”
Western investment in the country evaporated after the coup, and the generals rely on projects like a copper mine in central Myanmar, operated by a subsidiary of the Chinese state weapons manufacturer Norinco, to churn out cash. To protect those interests, the military has swept through nearby villages, burning and looting homes and bombing shelters for displaced people.
Ko Thu Rein, an Anyar guerrilla commander who used to work at the copper mine, said that the government in exile loosely coordinating the heartland forces had allocated only five rifles to his unit of 80 soldiers. (Using their own money, the men had managed to scrounge together 10 more.) His soldiers have fashioned mortar launchers out of bits of metal, but there are no mortar shells to fire.
A fighter jet tore through the sky. We tensed and waited to see if the Russian-made plane would circle back for a strike.
“This is my life forever,” Mr. Thu Rein said.
I couldn’t tell if he meant it in defiance, or in acceptance of his fate.
‘There Is Death Everywhere’
There was an airstrike last week, one the week before and another the week before that, the villagers said. There were others that went unmentioned. It was impossible to list them all. There were no more tears to shed, one woman we met at a restaurant said.
We sat eating bowls of noodles. The rebel-controlled village is a transport hub from which fuel and other supplies are disbursed to guerrilla forces. That is one reason the military has been devastating these villages.
Still, people need to eat. The noodles were good. Customers slurped broth as radios on tables squawked a barrage of intelligence. The bomb shelter was out back. It didn’t look large enough to fit all the diners.
I asked Daw Wah Wah, the noodle shop owner, if there had been any attacks over the past few days. She shook her head.
Then she remembered. Less than two miles away, there had been an airstrike. It had killed six people.
When was it, I asked?
“Yesterday,” she replied. “I forgot because there is death everywhere.”
The day before one of three election rounds, two fighter jets reached the village just after noon. Three gyrocopters followed. Ma Khin Moe Hnin, the owner of a fuel depot, kept on working. Then the bombs rained down. Her gas station was charred, as were a medical clinic, guesthouse and cafe where people hooked up to a Starlink satellite for internet access. Ten people were killed, including Ms. Khin Moe Hnin’s brother-in-law.
“I knew it would happen one day,” she said. “The bombs always fall.”
One evening, we were about to cross a river by boat — bridges were bombed too often to use — when a radio alerted us to armed paragliders drifting nearby. In the B.C. years, while in Bali for a medical conference, Dr. Lone Lone had seen paragliders float above the beach, their fabric wings bright against the blue sky. Now, he thought about the soldiers soaring through the inky night, holding bombs. Two officers who deserted from the military told me that paratroopers are considered expendable in a military that depends on conscription and drugs like methamphetamine to keep ranks filled.
We waited for a couple hours until the danger passed.
“The military is creative in one way,” Dr. Lone Lone said, his voice hushed in the dark. “They always find new ways to kill.”
Breaking Point
We kept on traveling through a terrorized heartland. A couple days after we visited the noodle shop, we bumped along back roads on motorcycles for six hours. There was dust in my mouth and deep in my ears. The driver of my motorcycle, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a grenade affixed to his belt, revved the engine. Suddenly, we saw a black sedan, strangely clean, stopped on the road. We stopped, too. Out of the car strode a man with a long beard and gray hair in a ponytail. He wore an army green T-shirt and a sarong, a revolver tucked by his waist. I had no idea who he was. I also had no idea where we were.
The man grinned and stuck out his hand.
“You can call me Brother Zero,” he said. “My unit is the Zero Guerrilla Force.”
Brother Zero, otherwise known as Ko Thet Gyi, operates out of rebel-held territory around Myingyan, close to Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. An artist, he took up arms after the coup. His wife, who was caught in junta-controlled territory, was sentenced to 25 years in prison because of her connection to him. Her face is tattooed on his arm.
At his camp, Mr. Thet Gyi pointed to a crater in the earth where a bomb had struck. Later we looked at another hole, larger and deeper. It was a prison for his soldiers who had tried to run away, Mr. Thet Gyi said. Five years of war, with little hope of respite, had driven up desertion rates.
“We don’t have many options,” he said. “We have to keep our soldiers.”
In February, an Anyar rebel commander who had bickered with other guerrilla leaders, surrendered to the Myanmar military. Soon afterward, precise attacks on Anyar’s resistance forces surged, presumably fed by intelligence provided by him.
In mid-March, after our trip to Anyar, the rebel fighters lost Tagaung, a strategic town that they had captured in 2024. Dr. Lone Lone’s men were forced to retreat from the hilltop front line we had visited. His battalion is now half the size it was when we met him. His deputy commander — who practically hugged me when I gave him a few sachets of Starbucks caramel latte, his favorite drink — has deserted. So has a former teacher who had told me earnestly that he had resigned himself to death if it meant eradicating the military-backed regime.
One evening during our reporting journey, I jolted awake in the back of a truck to find that we had stopped, waiting out another possible airstrike. Dr. Lone Lone grinned at me. He laughed a lot for a commander in what felt like a hopeless war. Then he stopped smiling.
“If I cannot win the revolution, then I will become a monk,” he told me. “I am trying to meditate always, but sometimes in this world, it is too difficult.”
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14) Pregnant and Running for Re-election, a Democrat Faces U.S. Prosecution
Representative LaMonica McIver was charged with assault after an altercation with immigration agents that resulted in no injuries. She faces up to 17 years in prison.
By Tracey Tully, June 24, 2026
Representative LaMonica McIver. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
The legal face-off between the Justice Department and Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey is set to continue in federal court this week. And the stakes are high.
Ms. McIver was charged with assaulting federal immigration agents a year ago, and on Wednesday her case will be argued before a panel of appellate judges.
To Justice Department prosecutors, the case will offer an opportunity to limit the bounds of congressional immunity.
To Ms. McIver the prosecution holds personal and political peril: up to 17 years in prison and an estimated $1 million in legal fees, just as she is running for a second term.
And to a bipartisan group of former Congress members, the charges represent an existential showdown between the executive and legislative branches.
“If the Department of Justice is allowed to proceed with this prosecution, it would create a perverse incentive for Executive Branch officials to act in a more chaotic and unsafe fashion, and create new, unprecedented tools to block legitimate legislative oversight,” wrote lawyers for the 20 former members — 17 Republicans and three Democrats — in support of Ms. McIver’s effort to have the assault charges dismissed before trial.
Ms. McIver, a Democrat and an outspoken critic of President Trump, is accused in an indictment of using her forearms to assault, resist, impede and intimidate two federal immigration agents during a May 9, 2025, clash outside Delaney Hall, a large and troubled migrant detention center in Newark. She was there with two of her Democratic House colleagues for an oversight inspection.
Her lawyers have noted that no one was injured and argued that she was being selectively prosecuted because of her politics, citing the pardons the Republican president granted to his supporters after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, where many officers were harmed.
They have also said that she was precluded from criminal liability by a constitutional protection known as the speech-or-debate clause, which shields members of Congress from being prosecuted on charges tied to their work as legislators.
“The indictment charges her for actions she took and judgments she made while exercising her statutory and constitutional responsibilities,” her lawyers wrote.
A trial court judge, Jamel K. Semper of U.S. District Court in New Jersey, rejected both arguments.
Ms. McIver, who is 40 and pregnant with her second child, appealed, putting the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit at a time when Mr. Trump continues to show a willingness to use the Justice Department to retaliate against political adversaries.
“Members of Congress have many privileges,” wrote Mark E. Coyne, a federal prosecutor who leads New Jersey’s appeals division. “But assaulting federal agents who are trying to arrest someone isn’t one of them.”
The scope of those privileges is at the heart of the disagreement, even though there is consensus on many of the facts surrounding the brief but volatile clash, much of which was recorded.
The confrontation lasted just 68 seconds and began after agents rushed out from behind the gates of the detention center to arrest Ras J. Baraka, the city’s mayor, on a trespassing charge. Mr. Baraka, a Democrat, was running for governor at the time. And his arrest had been ordered by phone by Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, whom Mr. Trump has since nominated to lead the Justice Department, according to body-worn camera footage released as part of the proceeding.
The ensuing chaos resembled a rugby scrum, both parties have noted in legal briefs.
Then, minutes after the alleged assault, Ms. McIver was invited back into the detention center to complete the oversight inspection she had arrived there to conduct.
Her lawyers have said the entire visit was core to Ms. McIver’s duties as a House member, rendering the prosecution unconstitutional.
“After re-entering the secured area,” they wrote in appeal papers, “she quickly returned to her formal tour, diligently continuing her oversight mission.”
Within two weeks, Alina Habba, who was serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, disclosed that she was dropping the trespassing charge against Mr. Baraka. In the same news release, however, she announced she was charging Ms. McIver with assault.
Prosecutors have acknowledged that others were also pushing as a crowd of roughly 40 protesters, lawmakers and reporters moved toward Delaney’s front gate alongside masked agents.
“Other protesters pushed other agents, and one agent shoved McIver; she shoved him back,” Mr. Coyne, the federal prosecutor, wrote in a legal brief.
The constitution, he stressed, does not “prohibit inquiry into illegal conduct simply because it has some nexus to legislative functions” or “immunize members of Congress who engage in violent or forcefully obstructive acts.”
“It’s the ‘speech or debate’ clause, not the ‘speech, debate or conduct’ clause or the ‘anything goes’ clause,” Mr. Coyne wrote.
The three-judge panel is expected to rule on Ms. McIver’s request to dismiss the indictment in the coming weeks.
Delaney Hall, which is the largest migrant detention center on the East Coast, has remained a flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown ever since that spring day.
A month after Mr. Baraka’s arrest, four men escaped through a flimsy wall as unrest over poor conditions gripped the 1,000-bed, privately run lockup, which has a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Detainees began a hunger strike in May, and dozens of demonstrators have been arrested outside the facility during recent protests.
“Trump and his administration want us scared and silent,” Ms. McIver said last week during a congressional hearing held in Newark’s City Hall, a few miles from the center. “They want to whitewash our streets. They want to step on the vulnerable. They want to criminalize oversight and lock me up.”
“Whatever they try, we’re not backing down,” she continued.
Regardless of what the appeals court rules, an appeal to the Supreme Court is considered possible, given the constitutional questions at the center of Ms. McIver’s argument.
Josh Chafetz, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who has written extensively about the separation of powers within the federal government, said the prosecution itself could have a chilling effect on lawmakers’ ability to “push back and serve as opposition” to the executive branch.
“If this winds up going to trial,” he said, “it will be a green light to presidents that they can prosecute their enemies in Congress and, indeed, that they can provoke confrontations with their enemies in Congress — and then prosecute them if they respond.”
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15) France Identifies First Case of Ebola
The patient is a doctor who had traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the health ministry said. Workers are racing to trace those who may have had contact.
By Lynsey Chutel, June 24, 2026
Health workers last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the center of an Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 200 people. Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
French officials on Wednesday confirmed the first case of Ebola in the country, saying that a doctor who had traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an outbreak began last month, had tested positive for the virus.
The humanitarian worker was admitted to a special health care facility and is in stable condition, the health ministry said in a statement. French health workers were racing to trace anyone who may have come in contact with the doctor. Contacts will have to be isolated for 21 days and will be closely monitored, the ministry said.
Congo is at the center of an outbreak in central Africa that was declared on May 15, with most cases in the northeastern Ituri Province. At least 260 people have died, and there have been more than 1,000 confirmed cases in the country, according to the World Health Organization.
The health ministry said the risk of infection for the wider European population was low, citing the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Most of the positive cases in Congo have been in remote parts of the country, and Ebola spreads only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a sick person.
Before the confirmed infection in France, the only active case in Europe was an American doctor who was transferred to Germany for treatment after he contracted the virus in Congo. Dr. Peter Stafford was likely infected on May 9 while treating a woman who had a fever and severe stomach pain, according to Serge, the Christian mission organization that he works for. It was not known that the patient had Ebola when Dr. Stafford treated her. After she died and an Ebola outbreak was declared, it was presumed that she had the virus.
Dr. Stafford made a full recovery and was released this month. His wife and four children were also evacuated to the same hospital, where they were monitored for 21 days and did not become sick.
The outbreak is the 17th in Congo in recent decades, and it has tested the country’s expertise and resources. The type of Ebola virus behind this outbreak, known as Bundibugyo, is rare, with no targeted vaccines or treatment.
Conflicts in the region has caused the forced displacement of people, creating conditions for the rapid spread of the virus.
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16) Democrats and Republicans—Two Sides of the Same Coin
By Bonnie Weinstein, July/August 2026
https://www.socialistviewpoint.org
Saikat Chakrabarti
Only a party independent of the capitalist class can represent the interests of the masses of workers and the poor. There is no political party that can fairly represent our interests and the interests of capital at the same time.
For example, and clarity, I am sighting the young and very charismatic, left-leaning campaign of a local, San Francisco Democratic Party candidate for Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti. He was one of the most “radical” candidates for congress in San Francisco vying for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the 11th District. He lost the election.
Popular slogans—capitalist framework
Chakrabarti rightly called the U.S./Israeli war and occupation of Gaza genocide. He opposed sending any U.S. weapons to Israel. He’s in favor of abolishing ICE. He’s for a “Green New Deal.” He supports Medicare for all. And he is for federally funded universal childcare. And he calls the war on Iran “horrific and illegal.”
He also donated $600,000 to the campaign for Proposition D, known as the Wealth Tax—an initiative that aimed to change the top executive-pay tax that the city collects from some large businesses when their highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median compensation paid to other employees. It also sought to increase the top executive-pay tax rates and introduce a voter approval requirement for future changes to the tax rates.[1]
However, Chakrabarti is also a multi-millionaire worth at least $167 million[2] and, had he been elected, would have been one of the top ten richest members of congress.[3]
His campaign centered on the idea that he wanted to “change the Democratic Party.” In one of his many TV advertisements he stated, “We need a Democratic Party that will fight to create a society that works for all, not just the richest few.”
The fox can’t be trusted to guard the hen house
The major flaw to this argument is that you can’t have it both ways—capitalism itself is a system based upon the oppression of the poor and working class in order to protect the wealth of the ruling capitalist class—to constantly insure increasing rates of profits for themselves.
But the American people are becoming more and more aware that the U.S. political system is definitely not run in their interests, but, indeed, in the interests of the wealthy.
In a May 20, 2026, New York Times article by Ruth Igielnik titled “Latest Indicator of Political Discontent: 43 percent of Voters Dissatisfied With Both Parties,” she reported:
“Forty-three percent of voters are dissatisfied with both major political parties, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll—the latest sign that the frustration that has built over the last decade will continue to roil American politics for the foreseeable future. …Overall, the Times/Siena survey found that just 26 percent of voters felt satisfied with the Democratic Party and that 33 percent felt satisfied with the Republican Party. …Eighty percent of dissatisfied voters said the economic and political system needed major changes or to be torn down entirely, and 77 percent said the economic system was generally unfair.”[4]
The American working class is finally realizing that the economic interests of the overwhelming majority of workers and the poor—are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalist class—because the only ways the capitalist class can increase their rate of profits are to cut the costs of production by:
· replacing workers with machines;
· using cheaper materials resulting in inferior products that workers have to buy;
· speeding up production by reducing workers’ health and safety regulations on the job;
· ignoring environmental safeguards;
· limiting workers’ pay.
All of which negatively effects the economic welfare of the masses while insuring increasing profits for the capitalist class.
Mr. Chakrabarti left these points out of his campaign promises. If he were serious about his left-leaning politics he would have been championing a mass, independent workers’ party in opposition to the capitalist class and their two-party system of economic and social exploitation of the working class for their own selfish interests.
The power of workers’ solidarity independent of capitalist interests
Capitalism can’t end income inequality any more than the capitalists can end wars. Wars are how they maintain and expand their power in the world. Wars target the masses not the wealthy elite.
It is the poor and working class in every country that fight and die in the catastrophic battles for control of the world’s resources.
The capitalist governments bomb infrastructure forcing the masses to flee their homeland because under capitalism, it’s profitable for them to do so. The victors of war aim to gain control over natural resources, and at the same time, profit from the necessity to rebuild a new infrastructure that they can then own and control.
Three concrete examples showing how capitalism holds hostage over the world
1. In an April 25, 2026, New York Times article by Stephanie Nolen titled, “AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance,” exposes that U.S. H.I.V. aid is tied to U.S. access to Zambia’s mineral resources.
“During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of people in Zambia. … Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.”[5]
2. And in a more recent New York Times article dated May 26, 2026, also by Stephanie Nolen titled, “A Powerful H.I.V. Drug Lands in Zambia. But Will It Reach Those Who Need It?” Nolan explains:
“The Trump administration’s other aid cuts have left the country’s health system so fragile that it may not have the infrastructure—to do tests, to deliver the drug, to keep records—necessary to get the drug to all those who need it. And it’s not clear whether Zambia will receive enough donated doses—or be able to buy enough—to have a meaningful impact on rates of H.I.V. transmission. Gilead Sciences, which developed lenacapavir, sells the drug for more than $25,000 per patient per year in the United States.”[6]
3. In another example of capitalism’s “profit over people” choices, in an earlier, May 11, 2026, Times article by Bernard Mokam, titled, “They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI’” the author reported:
“Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet through her backyard, discarding it outdoors. Three or four times a year, a spell of heavy rain forces the excrement back up into the house. … The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits. Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. …The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil. But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it ‘illegal DEI.’”[7]
Independent workers’ power can change the world to benefit all
The Democratic and Republican Parties are doing what they have always done, pretending to be on the side of the poor while protecting the profits for the rich—ultimately threatening the destruction of the planet rather than share the profits they have stolen from the labor and sacrifices of the masses.
Capitalist “democracy” is democracy for the rich and the rule of capitalist totalitarianism for the masses.
Workers will never prosper under capitalism. We will only proper when we rule ourselves democratically and universally by bringing down capitalism and its private ownership of the means of production, and building socialism—the democratic ownership of the means of production by those who do the producing.
[1] “San Francisco Voters Appear to Reject Tax Hike on Highly Paid C.E.O.s” by Soumya Karlamangla, June 8, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/us/politics/san-francisco-tax-proposition-d.html?searchResultPosition=1
[2] “This founding Stripe engineer running to replace Nancy Pelosi may be even wealthier than her,” by Bryan Metzger, Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/saikat-chakrabarti-net-worth-nancy-pelosi-primary-challenger-2025-8
[3] Over half of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires, with estimates consistently showing that at least 50 percent to 55 percent of lawmakers have a net worth exceeding one million. This far outpaces the general U.S. population, where millionaires make up roughly seven percent of adults.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/
[4] “Latest Indicator of Political Discontent: 43 percent of Voters Dissatisfied With Both Parties” by Ruth Igielnik, May 29, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/polls/dissatisfied-voters.html
[5] “AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance,” by Stephanie Nolen, April 25, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/health/pepfar-hiv-aids-zambia.html
[6] “A Powerful H.I.V. Drug Lands in Zambia. But Will It Reach Those Who Need It?” by Stephanie Nolen, May 26, 2026.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/health/lenacapavir-hiv-zambia.html?searchResultPosition=3
[7] “They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/alabama-sewage-trump-dei-voting-rights-act.html
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