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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) How Economic Anxiety Is Driving the Democratic Socialists’ Surge
Interviews with D.S.A. members and organizers in New York City suggest that frustration with the economy has been the most important factor in the group’s growth.
By Emma Goldberg, July 7, 2026
“‘The lesson that many Democrats will take away from these elections is get with the populist program or get out,’ Ms. Owens said. ‘The economic populist moment is here.’ Plenty of establishment Democratic leaders are alarmed by how widely the democratic socialist message is resonating, with some saying that the desire for economic change is understandable but that the group’s policies and candidates won’t have broad enough appeal in swing states. ‘They believe the capitalist system is rigged for those at the top,’ said Jay Jacobs, chairman of New York’s Democratic Party.”
The Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter has fostered a sense of community through running events and soccer games. Nicole Craine for The New York Times
On many Tuesday evenings, Richard Custodio can be found jogging over the Manhattan Bridge, along with fellow members of a Democratic Socialists of America run club. These outings are peppered with debates, some probing and some existential.
Many feel a persistent sense of economic angst. Rent is crushing, and Mr. Custodio wonders where he could find the money to get his girlfriend a ring. He and his D.S.A. run-club friends — some of them white-collar workers with six-figure salaries, others with blue-collar jobs — discuss what they have in common with working-class Americans. Some ask, “Am I a class traitor?”
Mr. Custodio, a 28-year-old investment researcher, has a ready reply. “If you’re someone who has to work for a living, and you’re not living off a trust fund, you are part of the working class,” he says.
Mr. Custodio is part of a swell of young people active in D.S.A.’s New York City chapter who helped push two democratic socialists, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, to victories in House primaries last month. Their wins have caused some soul-searching among establishment Democrats, eager to find out why so many New York voters have embraced democratic socialism.
Certainly a rethinking of the Democratic Party’s support for Israel played a role, as did a desire for fresh fighters in Washington.
But in interviews, many D.S.A. members, leaders and strategists argue that the driving force in the primary results and in the group’s expanding influence is a sense, especially among young people, that the economy isn’t working for many people. This economic frustration — and the spotlight given to it by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is prompting many to join the D.S.A., with the national organization announcing that it had surpassed 120,000 members on Saturday.
“A once good operative once said, ‘It’s the economy stupid,’” said Morris Katz, a progressive strategist who closely advises Mr. Mamdani, citing the octogenarian James Carville. “Look at Dari and Claire’s slogans. Claire’s slogan was ‘Workers deserve it all,’ and Dari’s was ‘Babies not bombs.’ Those are two campaigns fundamentally speaking to a political class that has neglected workers.”
In New York’s 13th District, Ms. Avila Chevalier, 32, performed best in several younger precincts including or next to Columbia University — including one home to its medical school and its on-campus housing, and another directly adjacent to Columbia. Her opponent, Representative Adriano Espaillat, did best in older and majority-Hispanic areas, with his best precinct including the Fort Washington Senior Center.
In New York’s Seventh District, covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Ms. Valdez won college-educated and higher-income areas handily. Her worst-performing precinct, excluding those with large Hasidic populations, has the oldest voters in the district.
Young people explaining their support for Ms. Valdez and Ms. Chevalier cite layoffs in white-collar industries, the threat of job displacement from artificial intelligence, rising costs of living, and a sense that the federal government is spending money on wars that could be spent on services.
Nationally, the job market for educated young people is dire. The unemployment rate for college graduates between 22 and 27 has been up significantly in the last three years; more than 40 percent of college graduates that are employed held jobs that didn’t require their degrees.
And even New Yorkers who have low six-figure salaries say they have realized that neither their college degrees nor their high income seem to guarantee a sense of long-term stability.
“People are feeling this economic precarity,” Mr. Custodio said. “When everything sucks, everything feels really on edge, you’re more open to things changing.”
At the national level, progressive strategists say they are trying to make the case that economic grievance is what’s driving recent D.S.A. election wins, more so than any other policy issue.
Lindsay Owens, who runs a progressive think tank in Washington, said that after the New York primaries she went through a whirlwind week of meetings — with congressional aides, national operatives and democratic socialists in New York. She listened to influential Democrats argue over whether there was a single overpowering issue that drove voters toward the D.S.A.
“The lesson that many Democrats will take away from these elections is get with the populist program or get out,” Ms. Owens said. “The economic populist moment is here.”
Plenty of establishment Democratic leaders are alarmed by how widely the democratic socialist message is resonating, with some saying that the desire for economic change is understandable but that the group’s policies and candidates won’t have broad enough appeal in swing states.
“They believe the capitalist system is rigged for those at the top,” said Jay Jacobs, chairman of New York’s Democratic Party.
“What D.S.A. is doing is filling a vacuum in a time where people are feeling very much distressed over their economic condition,” he added. “The challenge we have is to compete in the arena of ideas with them.”
As for signs of rapprochement, Mr. Jacobs signaled concern. He said he had reached out to the three House primary winners in New York City and spoken to two, but Ms. Avila Chevalier had not returned his calls: “I placed three calls, and that’s it.”
As young people grow more economically disillusioned, D.S.A. members have become younger and more white collar. In a 2013 national survey of its members, the organization found that the median age of its members was 68 years old. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 33. In 2013, 3 percent of D.S.A. members surveyed said they were white-collar workers; by 2021, that had grown to 13 percent.
Membership has also grown as democratic socialists win primaries. The New York City chapter grew by more than 7,200 people in the year after Mr. Mamdani’s primary win, and by more than 870 members in the week after Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier won. The group’s members have been buoyed by its victories, including New York’s new tax on pieds-à-terre and New York City’s rent freeze on one- and two-year leases for rent-stabilized apartments).
“The No. 1 thing that brings people to the D.S.A. is that they want to not feel powerless, which is how most members respond to the economic reality,” said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-leader of the group’s New York City chapter. “They’re motivated by economic struggle.”
The New York City chapter has been encouraging people to channel their sense of financial unease into political organizing. Mr. Gordillo noted that the group’s orientation sessions for new members include a conversation themed, “What is the working class?” There, new members are taught that anyone who works for a living can be working class.
“A lot of tech workers are working class,” Mr. Gordillo said. “We’re trying to build a broad movement — we think of most D.S.A. members as being working class.”
Mr. Gordillo, who until recently worked as an electrician, described his own political coming-of-age. He moved to New York City just over a decade ago to work in an art gallery. Rent in New York was eye-popping, and he often heard friends fret over how they would ever save enough to start families.
After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election in 2016, Mr. Gordillo went to a D.S.A. workshop on socialism, where organizers taught him about the conflict between “the working class and the billionaire class.” Mr. Gordillo took the message to heart and has spent the last decade expanding the group’s membership and influence.
At D.S.A.-run soccer games and orientation sessions, and at victory parties for Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier, many young people describe joining the organization because they believe big economic changes, like rent freezes and affordable child care, are the only answer to an economy that makes it difficult for even the well-off to keep pace.
“A lot of my friends who are actors or work in hospitality or nightlife, they’re drawn to the social safety net that D.S.A. is looking to achieve,” said Jessie Cialdella, 28, a D.S.A. member who works in digital commerce.
Leslie Bentley, 35, a D.S.A. member who lives in Bushwick and voted for Ms. Valdez, grew up in rural Kentucky, where most people she knew voted Republican. As a teenager, she remembered being frustrated by the idea that voting Republican meant her neighbors were “voting against their own interests.”
She said she understood that those people were challenging liberal conventions and establishment candidates because of their economic frustrations, a sense that the ultrawealthy were leaving working people behind. Now, she feels that she and her neighbors in Bushwick are channeling this same feeling into votes for the far left.
“This isn’t a Republican issue or a Democratic issue,” Ms. Bentley said. “It’s about being able to afford where we live.”
She and fellow D.S.A. members, she added, are drawn to candidates who seem to understand firsthand that college degrees and comfortable upbringings don’t insulate people from instability. She pointed to Mr. Mamdani’s story as an example: He is a Bowdoin graduate raised on the Upper West Side, who knows that the luxuries of New York should be accessible to anyone.
“Zohran grew up in the economic prosperity of the 1990s,” she said. “I always joked we needed a mayor who had fond memories of going to the Toys ‘R’ Us in Times Square and to Mars 2112.”
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2) Global Economy, Hit by Iran War and Inflation, Faces Sharp Slowdown
The I.M.F. projected world output growth would fall to 3 percent for the year, a number pushed down by high commodity prices.
By Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, July 8, 2026
Buildings destroyed by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran in March. Despite dark clouds, the global economy has proved relatively resilient, buttressed partly by demand for A.I. technology. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
The global economy is set to slow sharply in 2026 after the war with Iran disrupted energy supply chains and triggered a fresh bout of inflation, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday.
The forecasts reflect the damaging toll from the decision by the United States and Israel to attack Iran this year. Those attacks spurred Iranian retaliation on energy infrastructure in the region, destabilizing a world economy that had already been rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Global output growth is poised to fall to 3 percent in 2026 from 3.5 percent last year, according to an update for the I.M.F.’s World Economic Outlook. That is slightly slower than the fund’s April projection of 3.1 percent growth, underscoring the protracted nature of the conflict.
The forecasts remain subject to considerable uncertainty. Attacks on tankers trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz this week have raised doubts about the durability of the recent cease-fire between the United States and Iran, and on Tuesday the United States rescinded a waiver on sanctions that would have allowed more Iranian oil to be sold on global markets.
President Trump cast doubt on the truce at a NATO meeting in Turkey on Wednesday when he said, “I think it’s over.”
Shipping traffic through the strait was obstructed for months, sending energy prices higher and pushing up consumer prices around the world. The I.M.F. expects global inflation will rise to 4.7 percent in 2026 from 4.1 percent in 2025 because of elevated commodity prices.
Although the 2026 outlook is slightly darker, the I.M.F. said the global economy was proving to be relatively resilient. Global growth in the first quarter of the year was stronger than projected, as renewable energy helped blunt the effect of higher oil prices and investments in artificial intelligence powered output.
“The global economy as a whole has, so far, weathered the shock from the war better than feared,” the I.M.F. economists wrote in the report.
Oil-producing countries in the Middle East have been hit hardest by the war and are expected to face sharp contractions this year.
The outlook for Iran, however, was modestly upgraded since April as U.S. sanctions on its oil exports were temporarily relaxed. This week, the Trump administration revoked a 60-day license allowing the sale of Iranian energy products after tankers were attacked trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Nations that consume the most energy are also facing an output crunch from higher oil prices. Growth in India is expected to decline to 6.4 percent this year from 7.7 percent in 2025. Output in China is projected to decline to 4.6 percent in 2026 from 5 percent last year.
Output projections in the United States held steady from April at 2.3 percent, as oil exports and technology investments buttressed growth.
High gas prices have been a political concern in the United States, but Kevin M. Warsh, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week that inflation risks had eased in the weeks since he took over. Speaking at a gathering in Europe last week, he reiterated his pledge to deliver price stability after an extended period in which the central bank had missed its 2 percent target.
The I.M.F. urged policymakers to remain focused on price stability as they assess the effect of volatile commodity prices and growing demand for new A.I. technology.
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3) Midtown Neighborhood Has to Cope in a Troubled Building’s Shadow
Travelers were shut out of major hotels, and work ground to a halt for some on Tuesday after a building partially buckled in Manhattan.
By Caitlyn Freeman, Published July 7, 2026, Updated July 8, 2026
East 44th Street in Manhattan on Tuesday, as evacuations continued after a high-rise office building on 42nd Street was at risk of partial collapse. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Edwin Tualiza, who has done HVAC work at the affected building, was working in an adjacent building, 219 East 42nd Street, when he was ordered to evacuate Tuesday morning.
“It looked like it was fine yesterday,” said Mr. Tualiza, 39, who guessed at what might have caused the problems. “There’s a lot of options and possibilities, but the building’s beams started buckling, and now the whole block is on a standstill.”
At least two nearby hotels were also evacuated: the Hampton Inn Manhattan Grand Central, on 43rd Street, and the Westin New York Grand Central, on 42nd Street.
Paul Maurizio, the front desk manager at the nearby Little Charlie Hotel, on Second Avenue near 45th Street, said no officials had told them to evacuate the building, adding that the hotel had received phone calls from people who had evacuated other area hotels and were now looking for rooms.
On East 43rd Street, Christy Walls huddled over a pizza with her two children and college roommate, backpacks stacked on the pavement.
They had planned to check in for their stay at the Hampton Inn, but the hotel was blocked off by street barricades.
“We’re standing on the street with security and police,” the former roommate, Emily Oehler, said on a phone call with Hampton Inn’s corporate offices. “I don’t want you to cancel it because I need a room.”
Ms. Walls, visiting the city from West Virginia for a two-night stay to see “The Outsiders” on Broadway, said the group was trying to switch their reservation to another Hampton Inn. One hotel already turned them down.
“We just need a place to stay,” Ms. Walls said.
Wesley Parnell and Ryley Ober contributed reporting.
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4) What to Know About the Compromised Building in Manhattan
The building on East 42nd Street, the former headquarters of Pfizer, was being converted to apartments. Several upper floors were sagging.
A high-rise Midtown Manhattan office building being converted to apartments showed signs of collapsing on Tuesday, prompting evacuations, street closings and an emergency response that disrupted the morning rush around Grand Central Terminal.
But on Tuesday night, New York City’s buildings commissioner, Ahmed Tigani, sought to reassure the public, even as he said that the neighborhood around the building may remain in a tense situation “for the next couple of days.”
“I can say right now the building is stable,” Mr. Tigani said. “We feel confident in the emergency plan we have now.”
The Fire Department received a call about falling bricks near the building, 235 East 42nd Street, just before 8 a.m., officials said. The building, the former corporate headquarters of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, is being transformed into a 1,600-unit residential property that one of its developers has said is the largest such conversion in the United States.
A safety manager at the building, which has 37 stories, reported on Tuesday that a steel beam on the 21st floor was compromised, city Buildings Department records show. Two support columns inside the building were buckling, and several upper floors were sagging, fire officials said.
Here’s what else to know:
Was anyone hurt amid the threat of a collapse?
There were no injuries, fire officials said. Construction workers were evacuated from the building, and workers were also cleared from adjoining properties at 225 and 221 East 43rd Street as a precaution, fire officials said.
Cliff Johnsen, the business agent for Steamfitters Local 638, said his union’s members were evacuated from 235 East 42nd Street after beams started to bend. “The north side of that building is crumbling,” he said. “I-beams are bending like cigarettes in there.”
A “frozen zone” had been established from 40th Street to 45th Street and from First Avenue to Third Avenue as a further precaution, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference.
What kind of work is being done at the building?
The former Pfizer headquarters — two buildings, 235 and 219 East 42nd Street, which were combined — is being turned into an apartment complex as part of a broader effort to use empty Manhattan office buildings to help ease the city’s housing crunch.
The project, a joint effort by Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate, began in 2024 and had been expected to be finished next year. In addition to redesigning 235 East 42nd Street, the developers’ plans call for adding 11 stories to the existing 22 at 219 East 42nd Street, Mr. Tigani said.
Four hundred of the planned 1,602 apartments were earmarked as affordable. The design also includes more than 100,000 square feet of amenities such as shops, a rooftop pool and a fitness center.
Metro Loft said in a statement that it was aware of problems with the building and was working with the Buildings Department to “understand the full scope of the situation.”
Reporting was contributed by Liam Stack, Claire Fahy, Mihir Zaveri, Caitlyn Freeman, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Matthew Haag, Hurubie Meko and Davaughnia Wilson.
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5) The Alluring Albanian Island Inspiring Ivanka’s Fantasy
A former military base in the Adriatic Sea, the island is in a beautiful setting but it is strewed with snakes, crumbling buildings and land mines.
By Andrew Higgins, July 8, 2026
Reporting from Sazan Island in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Albania.
A view of Sazan Island, once the site of Italian, Soviet and then Albanian military bases, now in ruins. Ilir Tsouko for The New York Times
Ivanka Trump recently told a podcaster how she “found” Sazan Island off Albania’s southern coast, saying she swam there from a friend’s boat and hiked “barefoot all the way up to the top.”
She must have very tough feet.
The Albanian island — coveted by Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, for a luxury hotel and resort development — is clogged with bramble, seeded with mines, and so stony that even its beaches, which are covered with pebbles, not sand, are difficult to walk on shoeless. It is also crawling with snakes, many of them venomous.
More plausible than Ms. Trump’s back-to-nature hiking reverie was her account that she and her companions “were just captivated” by the island’s beauty. It sits in the clear turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea and is indeed a captivating place, splashed with bursts of bright pink by wild bougainvillea and scented with pine.
Uninhabited except for a dozen Albanian soldiers confined to ramshackle quarters next to the harbor, Sazan is an oasis of calm entirely free of the noisy restaurants, cafes and rapidly proliferating tourist hotels along the coast of the nearby city of Vlore on the Albanian mainland.
The only sound on Sazan other than the wind blowing in off the sea is the panting of day-trippers from Vlore hiking up the hill, none of them barefoot, and the barking of a black dog kept by the soldiers to keep trespassers away.
But turning Sazan into a high-end resort for wealthy travelers seems a long shot.
A former Italian, Soviet and then Albanian military base, the island has no potable water and is not connected to the electricity grid. Its waterfront is piled with rusting machinery and abandoned metal contraptions. Signs posted on trees along island paths warn of land mines.
It is owned by the Albanian state and, according to Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, is not for sale. Though it could be available, Mr. Rama said in an interview, for use by Mr. Kushner and his partners if a joint venture deal with the government can be worked out.
In recent weeks, amid anti-government protests in Tirana, the Albanian capital, Sazan has been enveloped by a swarm of far-fetched, online conspiracy theories about plans financed by Mr. Kushner and Gulf investors for a “new Epstein island,” Israeli settlements, a dumping ground for Palestinians and an apocalypse-proof bunker for billionaires.
Wild stories of what is afoot on the island are hardly new. In 1950, at the start of the Cold War, the C.I.A. reported that Sazan had become “the last word of modern Soviet port construction” with a missile launch site and a base for dozens of Soviet submarines. In 1959, the C.I.A.’s photographic intelligence agency took a closer look and “found no evidence of a reported submarine base,” according to a declassified secret report.
Kostandin Liko, 70, a retired Albanian naval officer, worked on the island before the 1991 collapse of Communism, which had turned Albania into Europe’s poorest and most isolated country. He said Sazan was always detached from reality, recalling it as an island of relative plenty thanks to its well-stocked shops and low prices — the result of a system of favors designed to keep military personnel loyal to the country’s Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha.
More than 4,000 people — soldiers, naval officers and their families — Mr. Liko said, lived there, enjoying comforts far beyond the reach of Albanians struggling to find enough food to eat just eight miles away in Vlore.
A 2015 survey of the island commissioned by Conservatoire du Littoral, a French group that works to preserve coastal areas, cataloged Sazan’s extraordinary diversity of plant and bird life but also made clear the island was not an unspoiled Shangri-La.
It reported that decades under military control had left Sazan littered with decaying buildings, concrete bunkers, 62 tons of metal and piles of hazardous waste, including asbestos, barrels of toxic chemicals and unexploded ordnance.
Removing all this, the group’s report said, “is very complex and it will require significant amount of work and funding.”
It urged that the island be declared a protected area and opened up to limited “green tourism,” warning that projects “to create large and intensive tourist development” would badly damage Sazan’s unique ecology.
Exactly what kind of tourism Mr. Kushner would like to develop is not known, except that it will cater to the very wealthy. Early design images he posted on X in 2024 showed what looked like a sci-fi movie set featuring rows of concrete capsules with floor-to-ceiling windows jutting out from a hillside above the sea.
Sazan Real Estate Development L.L.C., a Kushner-linked company overseeing the project, has drawn up preliminary plans that include an 800-room hotel, a golf course and a casino. But these were all proposed for a second part of the planned resort complex located on the mainland, at Zvernec, not on the island.
The company, in a written response to questions, said the “project remains in the planning and design phase” and that “no conclusions should be drawn from individual consultant tenders or preliminary planning materials.”
Mr. Kushner’s wife, Ms. Trump, told the podcaster David Senra that, after first seeing Sazan during a yacht trip around the Mediterranean, “we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful.” That provoked online mockery from skeptics of the Trump family’s capacity for “restraint and care.”
Mr. Liko, the retired naval officer, said he has no problem with Mr. Kushner’s pouring money into Sazan to build a resort “because this is the way the world works under capitalism.”
That view puts him at odds with protesters who have gathered in the distant capital for more than a month to demand that the prime minister, Mr. Rama, resign over his role in a system they say unfairly favors the rich and well-connected.
“Of course there is no equality, but if we want equality we should go back to Communism,” Mr. Liko said. “We already tried that,” he added.
Reminders of how that worked out cover the island — thousands of mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers and miles of underground tunnels. They were built as part of a decades-long drive by Mr. Hoxha, Albania’s leader from 1944 until his death in 1985, to secure the country against attack and preserve its go-it-alone ideological purity.
After World War II, Moscow set up a military base on Sazan, prized for its strategic location just 30 miles from the coast of Italy, a NATO member. But the Soviets were thrown off the island in 1961 after a rancorous diplomatic and ideological rupture. Mr. Hoxha objected to Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.
Once the Soviets had gone, Mr. Liko recalled, the island was off limits to all foreigners. Even Albanians who wanted to go there, he said, had to pass background checks and prove their loyalty to Mr. Hoxha and his idiosyncratic brand of Communism.
Today, it is open to anyone who can get there, which requires either renting a speedboat for a 30-minute journey from Vlore or a daylong trip on tourist vessels that stop off briefly at Sazan during meandering tours along the Albanian coast.
Protesters in Tirana have embraced Sazan as a symbol of inalienable and unbroken Albanian sovereignty down the ages. But with a history that stretches back to ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, the island has been tossed for centuries between different powers — the Ottoman Empire, the Venetians, the British, the Italians, who occupied it from 1915 until 1943, and then Nazi Germany until 1944.
The island’s only road, a crumbling concrete strip up part of the biggest hill, was built by Italians. So, too, was a defunct electric generating station, now an empty ruin. The biggest relic of former Communist rule is a concrete hall that once housed a cinema and served as a venue for party meetings.
Its walls disintegrating and its cracked floor caked in dirt, the hall looms atop a weed-clogged hill, offering magnificent views of the sea — and bleak reminders of a vanished Stalinist regime that promised equality for all but kept the best vistas — and movies — for itself.
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6) As Parents Reject Vitamin K Shots, Some Babies Develop Devastating Bleeding
Doctors described treating brain and abdominal hemorrhages in infants who hadn’t received the routine injection. Several said the images of those patients were seared in their minds.
By Maggie Astor, July 8, 2026
Jordan Bohannon
When the mother arrived with her newborn, blood oozing from the umbilical-cord stump, Dr. Jessica Kirk and a nurse were alone in a small pediatric emergency room in Florida.
After two decades in medicine, Dr. Kirk, a pediatric hospitalist now practicing in Fairhope, Ala., usually has an idea of possible diagnoses within moments of meeting a patient. But she hadn’t seen this before. As the nurse took vital signs, Dr. Kirk called her medical director.
“Oh no,” she recalled the director saying upon hearing the child’s name. The parents, the director said, had declined the vitamin K injection newborns routinely receive to help blood clot. Without it, infants are vulnerable to spontaneous bleeding.
This baby was hemorrhaging internally.
Within minutes, he was cold, pulse high, blood pressure low, Dr. Kirk recalled. She gave IV fluids, an emergency dose of vitamin K and a plasma transfusion, all while trying to arrange a transfer to a neonatal intensive care unit. The baby’s abdomen became firm from blood flooding into it. He started to fade out of consciousness.
It was 2021, and the number of parents refusing the vitamin K shot had begun to increase, quietly enough that encountering a baby who hadn’t received it still shocked Dr. Kirk. Now, many doctors say they see that regularly, and bleeding cases are accumulating.
A study of electronic medical records found that 5.2 percent of babies in the U.S. went without the shot in 2024, up from 2.9 percent in 2017, meaning tens of thousands more unprotected babies. And more than 15 doctors told The New York Times they had observed a further increase in the past two years.
The resulting hemorrhages aren’t tracked nationally. But experts estimate that as many as one in 60 untreated infants — 1.7 percent — will suffer a bleed in the first week of life, and another fraction of a percent within six months.
More than a dozen doctors around the country — including emergency physicians, neonatologists and pediatricians — told The Times they had treated brain or abdominal hemorrhages in infants who hadn’t received vitamin K, mostly in the past five years. They did not always know the outcomes, since some patients were transferred to other facilities. But at least 12 of these babies died, and at least 14 others had brain damage.
Some doctors described cases in broad terms to protect patient privacy, and some who provided more details asked that babies’ sex or exact age not be published.
Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., said she and her colleagues now treated a hemorrhaging infant every month or two on average.
“It’s not unusual anymore,” Dr. Martin said.
On June 29, Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Representative Kim Schrier of Washington, both Democrats, wrote to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is currently leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urging the C.D.C. to publicly track vitamin K refusal and deficiency bleeding. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not say whether it would.
National data would enable doctors “to sit down with a family and say, ‘Let me tell you what we’re seeing,’” Ms. Schrier, who was a pediatrician before coming to Congress, said in an interview. “It feels like a more real-world discussion than a theoretical risk.”
Several doctors described vitamin K deficiency bleeding cases as so horrific that they were seared in their minds, though they treat sick children every day.
Dr. Donna Schoonover, a pediatric hospitalist in Washington, said she would never forget one image: an eye popping out of its socket from the blood pooling in an infant’s skull.
A Routine Injection
Infants are naturally deficient in vitamin K because it doesn’t cross the placenta well, and breast milk contains little. Formula can contain more — but newborns’ digestive systems can’t fully absorb it, said Dr. Leela Sarathy, the medical director of newborn nursery services at Mass General Brigham for Children.
The risk of bleeding from vitamin K deficiency is highest in the first week but persists at a lower level for months. One injection within six hours of birth nearly eliminates it. (Unrelated factors can also cause bleeding.)
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended the shot in 1961, and vitamin K deficiency bleeding became very rare in the United States. “We learned about it, but it was something that happened mostly in other countries,” said Dr. Judy Felgenhauer, the medical director of the pediatric hematology and oncology program at Providence Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Wash.
The injection is very safe. But in the 2010s, doctors started to notice more Americans turning it down for their children. While the vitamin K shot is not a vaccine, rejection of it rose alongside vaccine rejection, among many of the same parents.
Misinformation online has contributed, said Dr. Stephanie DeLeon, the associate chief medical officer at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital OU Health.
Some Facebook groups and other forums for expectant parents are full of inaccurate claims and parents expressing anguished indecision, unsure what to believe and terrified of harming their children.
Though the C.D.C. still recommends vitamin K, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other Trump administration officials have amplified distrust of standard medical guidance in many areas. And Children’s Health Defense — an organization Mr. Kennedy previously led — has suggested vitamin K shots could be dangerous.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the health department, blamed the Biden administration’s Covid policies for the increase in vitamin K rejection and said the department was seeking to “rebuild” trust “through honesty, informed consent, sound science and respect for individual choice.”
Some parents tell doctors they are worried about a preservative called benzyl alcohol, though there is no evidence of harm from the tiny amount in the vitamin K shot, and preservative-free shots are available. Some believe the shot is linked to leukemia, based on a small study from the early 1990s that multiple larger studies have contradicted.
Other parents oppose interventions that they consider unnatural. Some want to spare their baby the discomfort of an injection, and think the danger of skipping it is insignificant.
“They’ll say it’s a one-in-a-million bleeding risk,” said Dr. Annemarie Stroustrup, the senior vice president of pediatric services at Northwell Health, a large health care network in New York and Connecticut where several infants have hemorrhaged in the past two years. “It’s decidedly not.”
An emergency vitamin K injection can start the clotting process within hours, and some babies can be kept alive until then with transfusions, surgery to relieve pressure on the brain by removing part of the skull, or life support.
But an estimated 20 percent of vitamin K deficiency bleeds are fatal. And many survivors have brain damage, which can cause paralysis, intellectual disabilities or a long-term need for a feeding tube or ventilator.
Dr. Martin said that she had treated more than a dozen infants with vitamin K deficiency bleeds, and that devastated parents often told her they knew there was a theoretical risk but never thought it would happen to their child.
Unforgettable Devastation
The first signs of bleeding can be subtle, doctors said. An infant might be sleepy or not feed normally.
Then “you snap your fingers” and they’re critically ill, Dr. Martin said.
Some babies have seizures. Some vomit or defecate blood. Some stop breathing. They are rushed to the hospital, where scans show profuse bleeding, and tests can distinguish vitamin K deficiency from other causes.
Dr. Jeremy Jacobs, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who specializes in blood coagulation and recently co-wrote a paper on vitamin K deficiency bleeding, recalled a child a few months old who arrived with bruising and spots of blood under the skin. Imaging showed a brain hemorrhage.
Clotting improved after an emergency dose of vitamin K, Dr. Jacobs said, but it was too late. The baby died.
Conversations with parents can be shattering, doctors said. They emphasized the importance of compassion for people who thought they were doing the right thing.
Some parents struggle to accept a connection to their refusal of the shot. The other response, Dr. DeLeon said, is “utter devastation and guilt.”
On the day the newborn arrived in her emergency room, Dr. Kirk worked single-mindedly until he could be transferred to a larger hospital. The transfer meant she would never know whether the child survived.
As the transport team took charge, she had a moment to speak with the mother, who had been sitting, her face white, watching the doctor and nurse try to save her baby.
Dr. Kirk meets many parents on the worst days of their lives. She looks them in the eye, she said, and tells them: “I just want you to hear this from me and remember my voice saying this to you: This is not your fault. There’s no way you could have seen this coming. There’s nothing you could have done differently.”
She looked this mother in the eye and told her it wasn’t her fault. She meant it. She knew the woman had believed she was acting in her child’s best interests.
“But what I could not bring myself to say to her was, ‘There’s nothing you could have done,’” Dr. Kirk said. “I just couldn’t say it.”
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7) How Rebels in Congo Could Use Ebola to Consolidate Their Power
A violent militia that controls large swaths of Congolese territory in the east may use the virus to try to bolster its authority.
By Ruth Maclean and Justin Makangara, July 8, 2026
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of two dozen countries Ruth Maclean covers in West and Central Africa.
A church member distributes food to displaced people at the Kigonze camp. The camp is home to more than 25,000 people in Bunia, Ituri province, the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in June. Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
The deadly Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is moving faster than efforts to contain it, raising fears about what might happen if it explodes in highly populated areas held by M23, the powerful rebel group that seized vast swaths of territory last year.
Ebola cases have already been reported in the rebel zone, including one infection in the city of Goma, the rebel headquarters. Transmission for the moment appears to be low there, according to figures released by Congo’s health ministry, but hot spots are getting closer and closer to occupied areas, moving south from the epicenter in the province of Ituri.
When M23 seized territory last year, thousands of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Now, the rebels impose taxes, control public utilities and present themselves as the only legitimate authority in their territory, which includes two provincial capitals, Goma and Bukavu.
Officials say a full-scale outbreak in M23-controlled areas would be devastating for civilians trapped by fighting and the virus. But it may also present an opportunity for the rebels. If M23 manages to contain Ebola successfully, it could bolster the image it has cultivated as a legitimate authority, at a time when the Congolese government is struggling to get the outbreak under control.
M23 rules over a population that is highly skeptical of Ebola. Some Congolese have called the virus a hoax meant to line the pockets of government officials and foreigners. Isolation wards in Ituri have recently been burned and medical workers violently attacked.
During an outbreak in 2018, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed in for the Ebola response and some funds were misused, leading to the health minister’s imprisonment for embezzlement.
Against this backdrop, M23 has set up an Ebola task force, produced slick videos documenting visits to laboratories and treatment centers and released cartoons about hand washing.
It has introduced measures aimed at containing the spread, like limiting the number of passengers allowed on buses, and accused the Congolese government of “indifference” toward those in Ituri.
Congo’s neighbor, the tiny country of Rwanda, has supported and supervised M23 for years and has stationed between 14,000 and 18,000 troops in Congo, according to a United Nations panel of experts.
But the Congolese government says M23 is in no position to handle the outbreak. “Both the M23 and Rwanda are ill-equipped to run an emergency response for a threat of this magnitude,” said Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, Congo’s foreign minister.
For health workers to have unfettered access and be able to do their work, she said, “Rwanda must leave the D.R.C.”
Responding to a request for comment, Rwanda’s government said it was accelerating the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from Congo after a peace agreement brokered in Washington last year. Rwanda closed its borders to Congo in May, when the outbreak was first detected by the World Health Organization, but has since partially reopened them.
Many people living under M23’s rule refused to comment for this article, fearing for their safety.
One medical worker in South Kivu province said the Ebola response had become so politicized that speaking out was dangerous. Even sharing situation reports — normally widely disseminated documents providing infection updates — was not allowed, the worker added.
Congolese health officials have hardly any visibility into what is happening in rebel territory beyond a few basic numbers about infections, contact tracing and deaths that cannot be independently verified.
Dieudonné Kazadi, the director of Congo’s National Institute of Public Health, said he had no information about what was happening in rebel-held areas. “I can’t give you the situation in the territories occupied by M23 because I don’t have access,” he said.
M23 has kept two key airports in the area closed since the rebels seized territory last year, despite calls from the United Nations and the United States to reopen them for humanitarian aid during the outbreak.
Rwanda has gradually eased restrictions, allowing humanitarian supplies and workers, and now some civilians through. The rules were adjusted to “protect both our population and the region while minimizing unnecessary disruption,” said Rwanda’s health minister, Sabin Nsanzimana.
This Ebola outbreak could become the worst in history, partly because the species of the virus, known as Bundibugyo, was identified so late. Congo’s health ministry said on Sunday that there were 1,561 confirmed cases in the country and 506 confirmed deaths.
“We have to plan actively around an explosion of cases, which will descend in the Kivus,” said David Munkley, the east Congo director for the Christian humanitarian organization World Vision.
Dr. Jean Kaseya, the head of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview that verifying virus reports in rebel territory was currently impossible.
“Independent people don’t get access there,” he said.
Trying to contain an outbreak across rebel lines requires careful diplomacy, he added. He has shuttled between capitals in the region, meeting regularly with Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, and others.
A planned meeting with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has not yet been scheduled, though Dr. Kaseya said he works closely with Rwandan officials.
“The very first day I was informed about the case in Goma, I had a conversation with Rwandan authorities. And we started to coordinate from that day,” he said. One of his aims is to secure vital access for health workers and humanitarians working on the response.
M23 has also been accused of treating the crisis as a financial opportunity.
One health worker in M23 territory who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation said rebels are constantly calling health authorities in the area, like hospital directors and chief medical officers, asking about Ebola funds. The health worker accused the rebels of trying to siphon money meant to stop the outbreak.
Despite the politics of the outbreak, a degree of technical cooperation exists across the front lines. Some test samples in rebel areas have been sent to Kinshasa, the capital, and others from Beni, in government-controlled North Kivu province, to the laboratory in Goma.
The Congolese government continues to pay health workers and laboratory technicians in M23-held areas, and it collects data about cases, testing and contact tracing, though health officials cannot independently verify the data.
Most people living under M23 obey the group’s Ebola measures, fearing the consequences of disobedience.
But not everyone.
One taxi-bus driver in Goma, Raimo Mukiza, said he had reduced the number of passengers in his taxi, wore a face mask and carried disinfectant. “Some people follow the measures and others don’t,” he said.
For the millions of Congolese trapped in rebel-held territory, the risk is “to be contaminated by Ebola, or to die by hunger or by violence,” said Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his work treating victims of sexual violence.
Dr. Mukwege said he has not been able to travel to he hospital that his group, the Panzi Foundation, runs in South Kivu since the M23 takeover last year. He excoriated the United States and others for failing to stop the fighting in eastern Congo.
“The world closes its eyes on this situation,” he said.
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8) Let’s Make a Deal: My San Francisco House for Your A.I. Stock
Even before OpenAI and Anthropic go public, they are distorting home sales in the San Francisco Bay Area, as people race to buy and sellers ask for stock instead of cash.
By Emmy Martin, Reporting from San Francisco, July 8, 2026
San Francisco home sales in May rose 12.2 percent from a year earlier, with the median price of a single-family home climbing to $2.14 million, according to a Homes.com report. Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
Even before OpenAI and Anthropic go public, they are distorting home sales in the San Francisco Bay Area, as people race to buy and sellers ask for stock instead of cash.
San Francisco home sales in May rose 12.2 percent from a year earlier, with the median price of a single-family home climbing to $2.14 million, according to a Homes.com report.Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
When Nima Gabbay decided to sell his three-bedroom, two-bath San Francisco home for $2.995 million last month, his listing described the residence’s soaring 10-foot ceilings, kitchen wrapped in Calacatta marble, remote-control skylights and oversize two-car garage.
The 51-year-old real estate investor and developer also added an unusual clause: He would accept shares of OpenAI or Anthropic as payment for the home.
Two OpenAI employees soon came forward offering some of their shares for the property, Mr. Gabbay said. One bid more than $1 million above the asking price, but appeared to inflate the value of his OpenAI stock. The other backed off when OpenAI filed to go public last month, deciding to hang on to the stock.
Mr. Gabbay ultimately went with a third buyer who works in tech, and the sale is set to close this week. He was not at liberty to disclose the sale terms or the buyer’s identity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement, he said.
“There’s a bit of a gold rush situation right now in San Francisco,” Mr. Gabbay said. Selling the home was “an avenue for me to potentially pick up some of this stock and be a part of the excitement of the companies going public.”
Even before OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings, the artificial intelligence companies — which are based in San Francisco and leading the A.I. boom — are distorting the city’s housing market. Sellers are asking for pre-I.P.O. stock as payment for homes, property prices are surging as buyers bet that whatever they overpay today will look cheap tomorrow, and landlords are pushing out tenants to sell into the hotter market.
The maneuvering is aimed at getting ahead of the wave of wealth when OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion, go public. Their I.P.O.s, plus the recent public offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, could create more than 16,000 millionaires and more than 20 billionaires, according to Sacra, a private market research company.
Already, San Francisco’s sales of homes above $10 million have doubled over the past six months compared with a year earlier, said Joel Goodrich, an agent with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury.
Forty-four homes closed at prices at least $1 million more than their asking price last month, said Mike Simonsen, the chief economist for Compass Real Estate. And there have been 144 such sales so far this year, up from eight in the first half of 2025. Fewer than 600 homes — including single-family houses and condos — are on the market today, about 40 percent below San Francisco’s average of the past decade, according to Compass.
The market is so frenzied that a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom 5,725-square-foot home in the Cow Hollow neighborhood with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz sold for $15 million in May, nearly double the list price of $7.9 million, according to John Caruso of Sotheby’s International Realty.
Even in a city that lived through the late-1990s dot-com boom and major public offerings by companies like Google (in 2004), Facebook (2012) and Uber (2019), property agents and wealth managers said they had never seen anything quite like this.
“There’s a hysteria that’s out there right now,” said Pete Rodway, a Compass agent who works mostly in the luxury market.
One of his clients, an OpenAI employee, was scrambling to buy a $5 million home now to beat “a thousand other people that are going to have a budget of $30 million,” he said.
Garret Spiecker, who works at Citizens Private Bank and describes himself as a “financial therapist” for sudden wealth, said he had advised dozens of OpenAI and Anthropic employees on how to navigate the housing market. He has suggested they buy properties through trusts to protect their privacy, especially on homes above $5 million.
“In this cycle, which differs from some of the others, a lot of these individuals are very young and quite wealthy very fast,” he said.
Anthropic and OpenAI, which have not set dates for their I.P.O.s, declined to comment. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)
Techies who do not work at OpenAI or Anthropic have accelerated their plans to buy homes. Sam Rosenstein, 31, a software engineer at the software company Databricks, and his partner, Michelle Huang, 31, who works in tech sales, jumped into the market this spring partly because they wanted to close on a deal before the flood of A.I. wealth, Ms. Huang said.
“There was just a general acceptance that that time will eventually come,” she said.
Their urgency spiked when Mr. Rosenstein’s landlord decided to sell his rental property to cash in on the rising market. But the competition for a home was so fierce that one house the couple bid $600,000 over asking for in April ended up selling for roughly $900,000 more than its asking price.
In May, Mr. Rosenstein and Ms. Huang landed a four-bedroom, two-bathroom in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for $2.185 million, bidding $385,000 above asking.
“When we put in the offer for the house, the seller came back and said we could pay the offer that we put in, or we could pay less money but provide 60 hours of A.I. consulting” on a personal project, Mr. Rosenstein said. “That’s totally the weirdest thing that has happened.” They declined the $10,000 discount.
Like Mr. Gabbay, other home sellers are unabashedly angling for shares of OpenAI and Anthropic.
In April, Storm Duncan, 56, the founder of the tech-focused investment bank Ignatious, quietly marketed his 4,372-square-foot four-bedroom, five-bath compound in nearby Mill Valley, Calif. — featuring an infinity pool and views of the San Francisco skyline — on a LinkedIn page he created just for his house, which he valued at approximately $8 million. He direct-messaged Anthropic employees and investors, hoping to trade the home for stock.
The listing went viral after someone from Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in Anthropic and OpenAI, leaked the LinkedIn post, Mr. Duncan said. The California Post published an article about the property soon after.
Mr. Duncan took the listing down, though he said he would still do the deal if the right opportunity arose. Anthropic is “narrowly focused on building a great product,” he said.
In May, Vijay Chattha, 49, a tech entrepreneur, listed his three-bedroom vacation home in Sonoma County wine country, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, with a $500,000 discount off the $2.5 million price if the buyer paid in Anthropic stock.
“I think Anthropic is going to grow faster than the real estate market, so why not just do a trade?” Mr. Chattha said. He added that he already had OpenAI stock and wanted to use the deal to build a stake in Anthropic.
The vacation home, now listed at $2.35 million, has not sold. But Mr. Chattha said he was undeterred. He next plans to list a condo in San Francisco — also for A.I. stock.
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9) Family of Man Fatally Shot by ICE Agent Calls for Independent Inquiry
The man killed, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was mourned by his sons as a father, husband and business owner, and said he was shot inside his car. Details of the encounter remain unclear.
By Edgar Sandoval, July 8, 2026
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s birthday celebration in March. Credit...via League of United Latin American Citizens
The son of a man from Mexico who was killed Tuesday by an immigration enforcement agent during a traffic stop in Houston called for an independent investigation into his death.
Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, described learning that his father had been on his way to work when he was shot inside his car. During an emotional press briefing Wednesday, Mr. Salgado held back tears recalling the moment he saw a video in which he heard his father cry in agony moments after he was injured.
“I learned of my father’s passing from a news report and social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement,” Mr. Salgado said. “He did not deserve to die.”
Mr. Araujo, 52, was mourned by his family as a father, husband and business owner who had been in the country for 35 years and was trying to obtain legal residency.
Details of the interaction between Mr. Salgado and immigration agents were unclear. Federal authorities said that agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. and tried to arrest Mr. Araujo, whom they described as an “illegal alien.” They said he “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent, who then fired at him.
No evidence was immediately provided to support that account.
Mr. Araujo suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, was taken to a hospital and died, said Rustin Rawlings, a spokesman for the Houston Fire Department. Mr. Salgado said that he has not heard the other men who were detained at the scene of the shooting.
The authorities did not say why Mr. Araujo was being sought and did not provide video camera footage of the altercation.
Mr. Araujo’s son, speaking on behalf of his family, and several immigration activist organizations and elected officials are also asking the public to come forward with any new video or images that shed light on what led to the fatal encounter.
Videos on social media appear to show immigration agents hovering over a man holding his abdominal area. Other images showed another man on the ground with his hands behind his back as someone screamed in pain.
“I am calling for a full investigation into the events that transpired yesterday,” Mr. Salgado said.
Mary Benton, a spokeswoman for Houston’s mayor, John Whitmire, said she did not expect the city to take over an inquiry.
“The Houston Police Department had no involvement and the city has no jurisdiction over a federal agency,” Ms. Benton said.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is conducting an investigation. The F.B.I.’s Houston office will focus its investigation into what the authorities have called an assault on a federal law enforcement officer.
Mr. Salgado’s family and civil rights activists are calling for an inquiry that will be fully transparent.
The fatal shooting is part of a growing number of violent interactions between people in cars and federal agents.
More than 20 people have been shot in their cars since September, some of them fatally. Federal officials have said in most cases that the actions were justified because the vehicles had been “weaponized” and the agents’ lives were in danger.
But in the year since President’s Trump began his aggressive immigration crackdown, many accounts of shootings by immigration agents have since been contradicted by video evidence. Those include two fatal shootings in Minneapolis during a crackdown in January. In another case, video undermined the account of an ICE agent, resulting in dropped charges against the man who was shot. The agents involved in the shooting had previously been suspended by ICE and placed under federal investigation.
Juan Proaño, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said that Mr. Araujo, who runs a construction business, had been on his way to a site with three workers, including a brother, when they came across the federal agents.
The league and other immigration activists have also called for an independent investigation by the local authorities into the shooting.
“How dare ICE act this violently, as though officers are above the law, and then expect the family, the community and the American public to believe anything they say?” Roman Palomares, a leader of the league, said during Tuesday’s press briefing.
Some residents near the shooting scene said that ICE agents have been a common sight in recent weeks. One resident, Katherine Cruz, said that a few weeks ago ICE agents cut her off abruptly as she drove in the neighborhood.
“The way I was approached, I’m assuming he got approached the same way. Unfortunately, he lost his life and I didn’t,” Ms. Cruz said.
Shahrzad Rasekh contributed reporting from Houston.
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10) Inspector of Buckling Building Cited for Missing Problems at Other Sites
A New York Times review of city records shows that the firm, Domani Inspection Services, was repeatedly accused of breaking New York City rules.
By Stefanos Chen, Dionne Searcey, Asmaa Elkeurti and Mihir Zaveri, July 9, 2026
The reporters conducted dozens of interviews for this article, including with engineering experts and city officials, reviewed hundreds of pages of city documents and analyzed millions of rows of city violation records.
“Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents unionized workers, said he was concerned about Domani’s role as an inspector on this project, given its history of violations. And he also pointed to the flawed nature of special inspectors who are paid for by property owners. ‘You can’t inspect yourself, and that is essentially what is going on,’ he said.”
An ambitious building project at 235 East 42nd Street in Manhattan was evacuated suddenly after workers noticed columns beginning to buckle. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Before columns buckled inside a Midtown Manhattan office tower on Tuesday, a private firm conducted several inspections of major structural alterations being done at the site — and apparently signed off on at least some of them, records and interviews show.
The firm, Domani Inspection Services, certified the safety of high strength bolting, steel welding and the structural stability of changes being made as part of an ambitious project to transform the offices into a 37-story apartment building.
It was not clear whether any of the work inspected by Domani contributed to the failure of columns on the 21st floor of the building. But a New York Times examination of the inspection company’s record has found that it has been repeatedly cited for missing warning signs at other building projects in the city.
The damage at the building, at 235 East 42nd Street, forced the evacuation of several other buildings throughout the area, disrupting workplaces and choking off a vital thoroughfare during a time of peak tourism. The disruption has placed scrutiny on the future of office-to-residential conversions as a creative and efficient solution to the city’s crippling housing shortage.
It has also put a spotlight on MetroLoft, a developer of the project, and Domani, the private firm hired by the property owner as a so-called special inspection agency. Such firms are supposed to ensure specific tasks performed by individual workers are done properly. And they sign and stamp technical reports attesting to as much. The city requires their approval before deeming large projects completed.
The New York City Department of Buildings accused Domani three times from 2012 to 2017 of violations ranging from conducting unlicensed concrete testing to failing to report a facade collapse. Two of those cases were dismissed, while a third resulted in a fine of $1,000, records show.
In 2019, Domani was accused of failing to perform inspection duties after a six-foot section of concrete wall broke loose from the 25th floor of an Upper East Side building project it was hired to monitor. The concrete crashed through the roof of a neighboring six-story building and into an occupied apartment, causing significant damage. It was not clear whether anyone was injured. The inspection firm was fined $12,500 in that incident, records show.
A spokeswoman for Domani said the firm was involved in litigation related to that incident and could not comment on it for that reason.
At least some private inspections by Domani appear to have been conducted by John McMonagle, whom city officials identified as “the director” of the inspection agency.
He was fined $12,500 by city officials for making a false statement during the inspection of another Manhattan property, in 2022. Records show that the fine was never paid, but a spokeswoman for Domani, commenting on behalf of Mr. McMonagle, said the firm has no record of the violation.
Later that year, the city accused him of failing to perform his duties at a landmark building in Lower Manhattan that was found to be so unstable it eventually had to be demolished. That case was dismissed.
Mr. McMonagle was listed as having performed numerous inspections at the Midtown building project that was evacuated on Tuesday on East 42nd Street.
Although Domani has had a number of brushes with the Buildings Department over the years, there was no indication in city records that it had been singled out for violations more frequently than other inspection agencies.
In a statement issued by the Domani spokeswoman, Mr. McMonagle said the firm was still reviewing records related to the office conversion on East 42nd Street and added that it would be “inappropriate to speculate” on the cause of the incident or whether “any inspection issue contributed to it.”
“Domani has performed tens of thousands of special inspections throughout New York City over many years, and we take our professional and regulatory responsibilities extremely seriously,” he said.
Such inspection firms are not the only ones on a work site responsible for safety. Contractors, developers and engineers also play roles. The Buildings Department hovers over it all, sending inspectors on occasional spot checks to make sure building codes and safety regulations are being followed and to ensure all work matches approved construction plans.
But those reviews, known as development or enforcement inspections, occur less frequently than special inspections. They can include serious findings, like dangerous work conditions, or administrative issues like paperwork mishaps.
Before the conversion project ran into trouble on Tuesday, city inspectors had flagged at least 22 administrative violations at the site.
On fewer occasions, they found serious safety concerns.
The property owners were required to pay the city more than $32,500 in safety violation penalties in 2025. The Buildings Department issued a stop work order in August of that year after a large metal panel fell from the 33rd floor onto the sidewalk outside.
The Buildings Department conducted four enforcement inspections from March to May of this year, said Andrew Rudansky, a spokesman for the department, and found no unsafe or illegal conditions.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rudansky said the Buildings Department is still investigating the cause of the buckling of the columns.
MetroLoft said that it is working with the Buildings Department to fix the problems. The company said the tower was never at risk of collapse and the issues affected only a small area of the project.
Still, the incident at the East 42nd Street building raises questions about the city’s inspection process, including its reliance on special inspection agencies, like Domani, to monitor and ensure the safety and soundness of construction.
“Was work being performed in accordance with approved plans, permits and any post-approval amendments?” said Pierina Sanchez, a member of the City Council who chairs the Committee on Housing and Buildings. “Were the engineer of record, special inspection agency, construction superintendent, site safety manager and other required professionals fulfilling their responsibilities?”
Jamison D. Morse, principal at PVEDI, an engineering and architecture firm that also acts as a special inspector, said the system works well because it lightens the load for the city.
“It’s hard for cities or municipalities to staff people with this kind of expertise, and also then to keep up with the volume of projects,” he said. “If you talk about the number of special inspectors, and the number of projects in construction right now in New York City requiring this, there’s just not enough.”
City building codes have required special inspections of major projects since 1968, and the rules were strengthened in 2008 to prevent unqualified inspectors from signing off on crucial safety reviews. Today, there are more than 2,000 special inspectors registered in New York City.
After an incident at a Queens construction site Domani was supposed to be inspecting in February 2017, the city asked the firm to come to the site the next day. The city accused Domani of failing to cooperate with the Building Department’s follow-up inquiries. That citation was dismissed.
During excavation work at a Brooklyn construction site in 2018, adjacent bracing — temporary supports that can affect the stability of the building and neighboring properties — was removed improperly, the Buildings Department said. Domani had been hired as the project’s special inspector, but the city cited the firm for failing to perform the structural safety inspections required for that work, according to city records.
City inspectors said that the site had become hazardous and the Buildings Department was never notified, though the case was later dismissed.
And after the incident involving falling concrete in 2019, city inspectors found that the walls of the Upper East Side tower Domani was hired to inspect were thinner than required by the construction documents — a compliance violation the special inspectors never flagged in their reports.
Steve Bongiorno, a structural engineer who has worked on high-rise projects in New York, said relying on such private inspectors like Domani can work well, but the entire program must be better monitored.
“The city really needs to put the brakes on here and re-evaluate their process for assuring quality control,” he said.
The joint project on East 42nd Street, the former headquarters of the drug company Pfizer, is intended to be the largest transformation of office space to housing in New York City. It began construction in 2024 to convert the office space into a massive 1,602-unit apartment complex with a rooftop pool, shops and a fitness center, and had been expected to be finished early next year.
But transforming cubicle farms into apartments is often challenging because of various codes and structural challenges, and this one was particularly complicated.
For now, city officials say the building is stable, and workers are undergoing the process of shoring it up. Temporary supports had been added to the building where four new floors and a large vertical portion had been added onto the existing building in recent months.
Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents unionized workers, said he was concerned about Domani’s role as an inspector on this project, given its history of violations.
And he also pointed to the flawed nature of special inspectors who are paid for by property owners.
“You can’t inspect yourself, and that is essentially what is going on,” he said.
Claire Fahy, Caitlyn Freeman and Ashley Southall contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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11) A $3.2 Trillion Deal-Making Frenzy Is Spurred by the A.I. Economy
This year’s boom represents the most spent on global deal-making in a six-month period in a decade. But questions persist about whether it can continue.
By Lauren Hirsch, July 9, 2026
The Magnificent Seven: Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google.
The frenzy has heavily favored large companies, with 44 deals announced in the first six months of this year that were larger than $10 billion. Karsten Moran for The New York Times
An ebullient stock market, huge bets on artificial intelligence and an open regulatory environment have fueled one of the biggest six-month booms in deal-making in years.
Through the end of June, there have been about $3.2 trillion in global deals, a 45 percent jump from a year earlier, according to Dealogic, a data provider. That is the most spent on deal-making over a half-year period in at least a decade.
The frenzy heavily favored large companies, with 44 deals announced that were larger than $10 billion, including takeovers and large-scale fund-raising in the private markets. Those blockbusters pushed the overall value of deals higher even though the total number of transactions fell about one percent from last year, as companies with less financial fire power or those more vulnerable to geopolitical uncertainties stayed on sidelines.
Executives of many large companies, however, have brushed aside the uncertainties posed by tariffs and the war in the Middle East to pursue takeovers that are more likely to be approved by regulators under the Trump administration than they were during previous administrations.
Many companies “perceive they have a window in which to attempt to affect something transformational, and now is really the time to try to do it,” Matt McClure, a global co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, said in an interview.
Bankers insist this time is different from previous booms, like the record-low-interest era of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leveraged buyouts of 2007 and the dot-com bubble in the 1990s.
The companies driving this year’s deal-making surge are among the world’s largest and best-funded and many of them are aiming to transform their business by doing big mergers, rather than making smaller acquisitions.
Some of this activity is propelled by a need to simply keep pace in an economy dominated by only a handful of giant corporations. Consider that companies need to be about twice as large to enter the S&P 500 as they did five years ago. Exxon Mobil, once the most valuable company in the United States, is about one-eighth the size of the largest of the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies.
“The definition of scale keeps moving, so companies need to be bigger and bigger, and big companies need to do bigger and bigger deals to have an impact,” said Ben Wilson, a co-head of North America mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan.
NextEra’s $118 billion deal for Dominion Energy, which was announced in May, would create a utility giant aimed at supplying the increasing amounts of electricity needed to power artificial intelligence. SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition last month of Cursor, a start-up that makes code-writing software, is aimed at helping Elon Musk’s rocket company build its A.I. models.
Typically, companies are reluctant to take on big deals in times of turmoil. Disruptions to oil supplies because of the war with Iran and the White House’s open hostility toward America’s biggest trading partners in Europe show no signs of abating. Questions also persist around the A.I. build-out, such as the costs for computer chips, supply constraints and potential delays on when these A.I. companies might reap profits.
“What makes the current boom a little counterintuitive is it appears to be associated with maybe not unprecedented, but top-quartile-level uncertainty and volatility,’’ said Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and senior adviser at the investment bank Evercore.
The deal activity has been a boon for banks, too, with details likely to emerge when they announce earnings next week. Bank of America expects its investment banking revenue in the latest quarter to be up 28 percent from a year earlier, while JPMorgan Chase expects a 10 percent increase, according to a research note from Jefferies.
Not every company has joined the party. In all, 21,727 deals were announced this year, down slightly from 21,997 at this point last year. Some of that decline can be attributed to the challenges facing private equity. Companies owned by private equity firms made up 24 percent of the overall deal value, according to Dealogic, down from about 34 percent in 2024 through 2025. Many of these firms are grappling with the uncertain values of the software companies they acquired before A.I. posed a threat to them, making them difficult to sell.
“So far this year, it’s just not been quite at the pace the market originally anticipated,” Mr. McClure said.
Initial public offerings during the first half of the year were dominated by larger companies bent on powering the race for A.I. and those in defense technology.
Madison Air Solutions, a cooling company that serves data centers, raised $2.23 billion in an I.P.O., and Cerebras, a Silicon Valley maker of A.I. chips, raised $5.55 billion. And, of course, SpaceX raised more than $75 billion, in the largest-ever initial public offering.
These offerings helped boost the value of I.P.O.s in the United States to $155 billion, the most since 2021, when a flurry of so-called blank check vehicles stampeded into public markets.
Bankers say the door for other offerings related to A.I. remain open. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip maker, is set to raise $28 billion in a U.S. listing this week.
But the first weeks of trading for SpaceX shares have been volatile. While still above its I.P.O. price of $135 a share, SpaceX’s stock on Wednesday dipped below $150, where it opened in the frenzied first minutes of trading when it hit the market last month. It closed at $148 a share on Wednesday.
Other recent debutantes have seen their shares fall below their I.P.O. prices. They include Cerebras, as well as Fervo Energy and X-Energy, both of which aim to power data centers. About a third of companies that went public in the second quarter are down below their I.P.O. price, according to data from the research and advisory firm Renaissance Capital. Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said those results were largely in line with how I.P.O.’s have performed historically in their early months of trading.
“There are a number of examples of I.P.O.s generating a lot of initial hype then fizzling out,” Mr. Kennedy said. “At the same time, other speculative bets are holding up.”
Questions about whether demand will ultimately justify enormous spending on A.I. continues to swirl over the markets, along with other uncertainties like the war in the Middle East and inflation. Shares of the Magnificent Seven helped lead the S&P 500 through its best second quarter in six years, even as shares of those companies fell roughly 9 percent in June.
Still, Mr. Kennedy said, “I do think the A.I. theme will continue to drive activity through the end of the year.”
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12) Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers
The data center boom has roiled communities across the country, but on Native land, a Big Tech push for quick approvals has pitted the need for development against a history of exploitation.
By David W. Chen, Photographs by Tamir Kalifa, July 9, 2026
David W. Chen and Tamir Kalifa reported from Tulsa and Oklahoma City, as well as the Seminole, Cherokee, Muscogee and Caddo Nations, to hear how tribal leaders are wrestling with data centers.
“True wealth is the well-being of our families,” Chebon Kernell, a tribal council member for the Seminole Nation, said during a tour of his family’s cemetery.
Since its casino closed in 2017, the Caddo Nation, an hour west of Oklahoma City, has struggled, so some Caddo leaders see only hope in the data center boom. “We’re not poor,” Bobby Gonzalez, the Caddo chairman, said. “We’re broke.”
But in Binger, Okla., home of the baseball legend (and Choctaw) Johnny Bench, Mr. Gonzalez bumped into Tracy Newkumet, a former tribal council member who felt differently about a future tied to Big Tech. She could live without a cellphone, she said as she prepared for the Caddos’ traditional turkey dance, but not without water, maybe the biggest concern for data-center development in Indian Country.
The dizzying expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence has communities in Republican and Democratic states feeling blindsided as citizens and local governments are forced to grapple with noise, water and energy concerns. That division may be even more palpable on Native lands, where outside exploitation has a long and ugly history and where technology companies see a chance for rapid development that gets past the red tape impeding projects elsewhere.
The National Congress of American Indians wants to capitalize on the Trump administration’s A.I. Action Plan to “build, baby, build.”
“Tribal lands, which are vast, strategically located, and home to an eager American work force, are the ideal place to build the infrastructure that will power America’s A.I. dominance,” wrote Larry Wright Jr., the Congress’s executive director, to the White House last fall.
Chebon Kernell, a tribal council member for the Seminole Nation, rejected what he called “the false fruits of wealth” that conjure painful memories.
“True wealth is the well-being of our families,” he said during a tour of his family’s cemetery, an hour east of Oklahoma City. “True wealth is being able to live on this Earth Mother without fear and without having to look over one’s shoulders.”
Last fall, at the National Congress’s annual conference in Seattle, activists interrupted an A.I. panel by chanting, “You can’t drink data!” and “The biggest lie is A.I.!” Traci L. Morris, executive director of the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University, was onstage and was reminded of when the federal government expanded broadband access to reservations in 2010.
“There were tribes that were like: No, we’re never going to go on the internet,” said Ms. Morris, a member of Oklahoma’s Chickasaw Nation. “Well, data centers are here, and tribes need to make a decision.”
The issues have cropped up on Indian lands nationwide. In the Pacific Northwest, the Yakama Nation went to federal court in May to block a clean energy project on a sacred site that would power a data center campus. Honor the Earth, a national Indigenous group, has kicked off a Stop Data Colonialism campaign featuring an interactive map tracking proposed data centers.
But Oklahoma, which has 38 federally recognized tribes, “is really ground zero,” Ms. Morris said.
Among the reasons tech companies find tribal lands so appealing is speed, according to the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. While energy projects on nontribal lands can face permitting delays of three to 10 years, projects on tribal land often proceed more quickly because tribes wield sovereign authority to handle their own regulations and permitting.
But many tribal leaders are in no rush. Mr. Kernell was in Washington, D.C., on business when his wife texted in February to see if he had noticed the very last agenda item at the next Seminole council meeting — approving a nondisclosure agreement with a data center developer.
There was “no consultation, no conversation,” Mr. Kernell said, so he hastily organized a town hall that drew dozens of opponents from inside the tribe and outside. Days later, the council, with Mr. Kernell on it, unanimously passed a data center moratorium, the first tribe to do so.
Last year, after intense opposition, the council of the Muscogee Nation, 40 miles south of Tulsa, rejected rezoning 5,570 acres from agriculture and meat processing to business for a technology park. Jordan Harmon, a Muscogee lawyer and policy specialist for the Indigenous Environmental Network, pointed to Honor the Earth’s “Stop Data Colonialism Manifesto” that is “completely anti-A.I., specifically generative A.I. developed by Big Tech.”
“That’s where the community sometimes is in conflict or butting heads with tribal leadership,” she said.
Now all eyes are on the influential Cherokees, the country’s most populous tribe, with 480,000 enrolled members, whose 7,000-square-mile reservation is almost the size of New Jersey.
Two prominent Cherokees — Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, both Republicans — are vocal data center proponents. Mr. Mullin, when he was still Oklahoma’s junior senator, called data centers a “game changer,” highlighting a Google hub in Pryor, Okla., that generates millions in tax revenue.
So far, Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, has been cautious, establishing a task force to study the environmental and economic impacts.
“We don’t want to be on the sidelines, but we don’t want to be bystanders,” he said. “We’re moving probably slower than some governments.”
Even that approach has its detractors. Oklahoma City, Tulsa and other municipalities have paused data center development. State Representative Brad Boles, a Cherokee member who won last month’s Republican primary for a seat on the state’s regulatory board, shepherded a bipartisan effort to insulate households and businesses from electric bill spikes caused by data centers’ energy demands.
One co-sponsor, State Representative Amanda Clinton, a Tulsa Democrat and Cherokee, called the frenzy “the new land run.” Still, she understands the appeal.
“I think Oklahoma is so strained for jobs and economic development that we will roll over too easily and give away the farm,” she said while driving around the perimeter of Project Clydesdale, a $1 billion, 500-acre data center now under construction in Tulsa County.
The Colusa Indian Community of Northern California, which has operated its own power plant and electricity grid for two decades, hopes to bridge the gap between skeptical Native Americans and outside tech giants.
“There’s a mistrust of corporate America in general, and we share that mistrust,” said Ken Ahmann, chief operating officer of Colusa Indian Energy, which just opened a Tulsa-area office. “Our charter in this space is to help act as a firewall and a negotiating partner on behalf of the tribes.”
The Colusa are now in talks with the Caddo, among other tribes, to build a power plant for a data center in Oklahoma by the end of the year.
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13) Sifting Through Quakes’ Rubble, and the Ashes of a Revolution
The devastation of Ms. Zúñiga’s city in Venezuela follows the demise of her political project. The revolution is over, but the human ties that help her cope remain.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, July 9, 2026
Anatoly Kurmanaev has reported in La Guaira, Venezuela, over the course of 12 years, including after last month’s twin earthquakes.
Jacqueline Zúñiga, 52, between several public housing complexes that collapsed during the twin earthquake. Ms. Zúñiga’s building was damaged and she is living in a makeshift shelter.
I first met Jacqueline Zúñiga in the port city of La Guaira, just as Venezuela was beginning its descent into an economic quagmire from which it has never emerged.
It was 2014, and I had recently moved to Venezuela as a rookie reporter. I wanted to know how the ruling Socialist Party’s base was reacting to the downturn, and came across Ms. Zúñiga’s work on the internet.
A lifelong believer in social causes, Ms. Zúñiga ran a women’s rights project in La Guaira, one of thousands of so-called social movements that formed the foundation of the government’s power pyramid.
Ms. Zúñiga had just managed to arrange for dozens of members of her group to get apartments at new government-built housing towers in eastern La Guaira, a scruffy, narrow stretch of concrete between Venezuela’s coastal mountains and the Caribbean Sea.
Despite the growing economic troubles, it was a moment of immense pride and, for some, the achievement of their lives.
Last week, I found Ms. Zúñiga again, and we returned to those towers. Almost all had been reduced to rubble. We watched as rescue workers carried body bag after body bag from the ruins.
They were among the sea of buildings that were destroyed by powerful twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela last month, killing over 3,800 people, mostly in La Guaira.
Ms. Zúñiga, now 52 and with a few gray hairs, had met many of the quake’s victims over her three decades of social activism in a small state where everyone seems to know each other. As we drove through the destroyed city, the landscape evoked a raft of memories.
She mentioned close friends, neighbors and distant acquaintances. She spoke about people she saw regularly at bakeries, banks and street markets. There were also political enemies, people with whom she had competed for the shrinking resources of the bankrupt state.
All were dead or missing.
La Guaira’s physical destruction followed the unraveling of the political project to which Ms. Zúñiga had dedicated her life. Hugo Chávez had died the year before I met her. The revolution he declared after becoming Venezuela’s president in 1999 was already waning.
Venezuela’s economic model, based on price and currency controls and inspired by Cuba’s state-run system, tumbled like a house of cards when oil prices collapsed in 2014. The corruption and incompetence of the Chávez government became glaring when the oil bonanza stopped.
Venezuela, once the world’s biggest oil exporter, lost most of its economic output and, over the next decade, millions of its citizens dispersed around the world.
The U.S. raid in January that led to the capture of Mr. Chávez’s handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, was a coda to a socialist experiment that, by last year, existed largely on paper. The Socialist Party remains in power, but is now under the thumb of the Trump administration, which is focused on exporting Venezuelan resources to the United States.
Over the past decade, Ms. Zúñiga’s group has tried to continue its work. Members created furniture workshops and tourism and urban farming projects, all aimed at empowering working-class women.
Most of these initiatives failed.
As Venezuela’s economic crisis deepened, Ms. Zúñiga and her group became involved in disputes with rival factions of the ruling party over the diminishing spoils of the government’s patronage system. She fell out of favor with La Guaira’s current authorities.
Some of those political conflicts were intense, involving evictions and police raids. Others were tragicomic. One of Ms. Zúñiga’s friends, Joanna Corro, recounted how their group once briefly kidnapped a housing official to obtain a larger apartment quota.
These were some of the same homes Ms. Zúñiga and I visited in 2014, shortly after the first residents moved in from nearby slums. These buildings are known as OPPPE, an abbreviation that reflects the complexity of Venezuela’s bureaucracy. It stood for “the Presidential Office for Special Plans and Projects,’’ though few residents knew that.
Many residents had been victims of flash floods in 1999 that swept away their previous homes in La Guaira’s hillside slums, a disaster those who lived there simply call “La Tragedia,” the tragedy.
Overall, Ms. Zúñiga figured 120 of the roughly 600 members of her activist group, the José María España Women’s Movement, had received government housing in La Guaira. They lived there with their children and sometimes extended family.
For most families, who had lived in shacks they built themselves, the apartments were their first formal accommodation. When I visited in 2014, about two years after their construction, the paint was already peeling in the tropical heat, the wall plaster was nonexistent or of dismal quality, and only some of the elevators worked.
But the apartments had running water, flushing toilets, washing machines, garbage chutes and air conditioning. And the government gave the apartments away and did not charge rent.
Free housing was the apex of a sprawling patronage system that helped keep the Socialist Party of Venezuela in power for nearly three decades.
Ms. Corro, Ms. Zúñiga’s friend, recounted the perks: “Cars, apartments, food, TVs, bank credits, school supplies.”
“There was everything, everything, everything,” she added.
All free.
In return, recipients were expected to attend government rallies, vote for its candidates and pressure others to do so as well. Those who supported the opposition risked losing benefits, including their apartments.
The high occupancy of government housing is one reason it appears to account for a significant share of the earthquake’s death toll. There are also questions about their structural integrity.
“Look where we ended up sticking you,” Ms. Corro, 43, said to no one in particular as she looked at the rubble of one tower. “We never imagined it would end up like this.”
Her sister Isamar, 35, was somewhere between the concrete slabs that tumbled like pancakes, presumed to be dead.
The relationship between the Socialist Party and Venezuela’s poor was deeply transactional. But the sense of political empowerment among its supporters was real and has outlived the handouts.
Ms. Zúñiga recounted the racial discrimination she felt before Mr. Chávez, who was mixed race and came from a poor rural family, took power.
“I always felt uncomfortable going into formal places. Should I be here? Can I even be here?” she said
“Now, I am proud to be Black,” Ms. Zúñiga said. “The people know they have value, that they are visible.”
Ms. Zúñiga was born in a working-class neighborhood of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, into a Colombian family that had escaped their homeland’s civil war.
She often came to La Guaira to visit her father, who worked in construction.
She became involved in local projects, organizing a public transport cooperative and lobbying for street paving. When Mr. Chávez became president, she enrolled in one of his first poverty-reduction programs and received a subsidized loan. She used it to buy an apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in La Guaira.
She lived in that apartment for nearly 27 years, until it was destroyed last month by the back-to-back earthquakes. She escaped unscathed, but lost all her possessions.
“Do you know how much I fought for that house?” Ms. Zúñiga asked me as she looked at the damaged building, called “La Marina.” A green curtain flapped in the window of her sixth-floor apartment. A red letter “D” was sprayed by the entrance, signifying a demolition order.
“We have done so much together only for him to come and destroy the house,” she said, referring to God. “So many people I know have died. This has me so confused.”
Ms. Zúñiga and her friends’ belief in the Venezuelan government has long faded. But they have maintained their commitment to social justice and their distrust of the free markets. Above all, years of activism have given them a sense of community that has helped them weather repeated adversity.
They had each other, and their mutual support was clear during the latest and, for most of them, their greatest tragedy.
We stood by piles of rubble and watched U.S. military helicopters fly overhead and heavily tattooed, muscular American rescue workers in cargo pants working among the destroyed buildings.
Ms. Zúñiga said she was wary of the Americans and had little faith in Venezuela’s interim government, which is led by Mr. Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She said she would still vote for a left-wing candidate when the next elections are held, but not necessarily one from Ms. Rodriguez’s party.
I asked Ms. Zúñiga if the decades spent campaigning for Mr. Chávez’s anti-imperialist and socialist slogans were worth it.
“Chávez had the best intention in the world, but there was a lack of education,” she said. “But we had the opportunity to do very beautiful things. So many women have gained tranquillity, opportunity, visibility.”
Since the earthquakes, Ms. Zúñiga has been sleeping in an open-air market stall in La Guaira’s downtown. She has outfitted the stall with a mattress, makeshift curtains and an electric fan. At night, she locks the market’s gate to keep herself safe.
The market is part of Ms. Zúñiga’s long-running food distribution initiative, which allows La Guaira residents to buy fresh produce directly from regional farmers. The farmers whom she has befriended over the years have given Ms. Zúñiga a place to sleep, food and modest pay for helping serve customers.
She has turned a community canteen that she founded near her house into an aid distribution center and a temporary shelter for children who have lost homes or relatives in the quake.
She said she is depressed but forces herself to go because people are hungry and need help. I cry a little bit, and then I get up,” she said in her makeshift room.
We got up to visit friends who were still looking for relatives in the rubble. As we walked out, a farmer’s wife took Ms. Zúñiga by the arm and gave her a hug.
“You’re going to lift yourself up like a warrior,’’ the woman said, “the one that you are.”
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14) Sea Mining Could Devastate an Enigmatic Group of Creatures, Researchers Warn
The snails and other mollusks around hydrothermal vents have evolved to thrive in extreme conditions, but mineral extraction could drive more than half to extinction.
By Catrin Einhorn, July 9, 2026
The scaly-foot snail is among the undersea animals found to be at risk of extinction from mining. Chong Chen
Deep-sea mining threatens to drive to extinction more than half of the snails and other mollusks that rely on hydrothermal vents, according to the latest update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the global scientific authority on the status of species.
The finding comes as nations are expanding plans for deep-sea mining, eager to access valuable minerals needed for electronics and other uses.
Some of these minerals are found in and near chimney-like structures around hydrothermal vents, areas where cold seawater seeps through fissures in the earth’s crust and hits magma. As the water heats, it picks up elements like copper, zinc, gold and silver before shooting back into the ocean at temperatures that can reach over 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The rapid cooling causes the metals to precipitate out. Companies are interested in harvesting these and other deep-sea metals, arguing that growing demand combined with the serious environmental impact of mining on land make oceans an attractive source.
But the vents and their surrounding areas are rich in life as well as metals. Around the world, they are home to creatures like giant tube worms that can reach more than six feet long, swarms of ghostly white shrimp and furry-looking crabs. The chimney structures are also coated in snails and other mollusks, which are the focus of the Red List update.
The animals’ strangeness is part of their scientific significance. Not many living things could survive, let alone thrive, in such an intense environment. Instead of relying on sunlight for fuel (whether directly, like plants, or indirectly through the food web) these animals run on bacteria that turn chemicals released through the hydrothermal vents, like hydrogen sulfide, into food.
“Down there, they use the Earth as energy,” said Chong Chen, a senior scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology who worked on mollusk assessment.
And the strangeness doesn’t end there. Take the scaly-foot snail. Its external flesh is covered in scales that contain iron sulfide nanoparticles, and its shell is also infused with iron.
“It’s the only animal that sticks to magnets,” Dr. Chen said. When the snails are exposed to air, he added, “they rust.”
The scaly-foot snail is among the 62 percent of these mollusks, or 125 of 201 known species, that were found to be at risk of extinction from deep-sea mining. These species are not currently thought to be in decline. Rather, they are threatened precisely because they live in areas where permits have already been issued for mining exploration.
“The reason that they’re assessed as endangered is because there is a clear, active threat that their entire habitat, every place they live on earth, could be destroyed if commercial-scale deep-sea mining goes ahead as is currently intended,” said Julia Sigwart, the head of marine zoology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and museum in Germany and one of the scientists who helped lead the assessment.
Even if the chimneys are left in place, she said, sediment from disturbing surrounding areas would smother the mollusks.
Across the world’s oceans, there are about 600 known sites containing hydrothermal vents, each often the size of an auditorium or a football field. Hundreds more are thought to exist.
One mollusk, the hydrothermal vent monoplacophoran, has been found at only two locations along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off the Azores. But because those places both fall within marine protected areas, the species was among more than 30 that were classified as being of “least concern.”
Researchers have found that, of the various deep-sea habitats threatened by mining, these vents nurture the highest density of life. That has made them especially controversial. Currently, the main focus for deep-sea mining lies elsewhere, with the potato-size nodules found on certain underwater plains. But those areas come with their own unique life, and in 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its risks were understood and effective protection of the marine environment could be ensured.
The Metals Company, a front-runner in deep-sea mining exploration, did not respond to questions about the mollusks’ vulnerability.
The Trump administration has moved to push ahead with deep-sea mining in international waters without global approval. The International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates deep sea mining in waters outside of national jurisdiction, is meeting this month in Jamaica to continue what has been a highly contentious series of negotiations.
In addition to the mollusks in protected areas, Thursday’s update to the Red List included another example of conservation success. The numbat is a stripy Australian marsupial that was widespread across southern Australia until European settlers introduced cats and foxes to the continent. By the late 1970s, its numbers had shrunk to around 300 individuals, according to I.U.C.N. But intensive efforts — captive breeding, fencing to keep cats and foxes away, and the killing of foxes and feral cats — have paid off. There are now 2,000 to 3,000 numbats. The efforts need to continue, scientists have noted, but the species has moved from being classified as endangered to near threatened.
But the desert rain frog, which has gone viral on social media for its grumpy-looking face and round body, has moved from near threatened to vulnerable because of diamond mining and energy infrastructure developments in South Africa and Namibia.
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15) Gaza Aid Worker on His Way to Watch World Cup Killed by Israeli Strike
The Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas militant but was aware of reports that “uninvolved civilians” were harmed.
By Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir, July 9, 2026
Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem and Abu Bakr Bashir reported from Sheffield, England.
An Israeli airstrike has killed a Palestinian aid worker who played an instrumental role in delivering humanitarian relief in the Gaza Strip, according to his family members and colleagues.
The worker, Mohammed al-Waheidi, 65, served as a member of the Egyptian Committee in Gaza, a relief group. In addition to facilitating deliveries of humanitarian aid, the committee helps resolve disputes between families, and was organizing World Cup watch parties around Gaza over the past few weeks.
The Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas militant in the attack on Tuesday in northern Gaza, but did not identify that person or say whether they had been killed. It said in a statement that it was aware of “the claim that uninvolved civilians were harmed as a result of the strike” and “regrets any harm” to such people.
Israeli forces have been carrying out frequent airstrikes in Gaza despite signing a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal with Hamas last October. Israeli officials have said the military has been going after Hamas militants who participated in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which ignited the war in Gaza.
Israel said 1,200 people were killed in the Oct. 7 attack and about 250 more were taken back to Gaza as hostages. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says that more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza were killed during the war.
While the military has issued many announcements saying its strikes in Gaza have killed Hamas militants, interviews with medical officials in Gaza and hospital records indicate that Israel has also killed civilians over the past nine months.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the October cease-fire, including children, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Mr. al-Waheidi was in a car on his way to a friend’s house to watch the Argentina-Egypt World Cup match on Tuesday night when he was hit by the Israeli strike, according to his son, Fawaz, 22. It was not immediately clear where he was in relation to the targeted Hamas militant.
The younger Mr. al-Waheidi said in a telephone interview that he was told on Tuesday evening that an airstrike had killed a person with his last name. He frantically tried calling his father, but a stranger answered the phone and said only that someone had been wounded.
He said he then raced to the hospital, where he identified a bloodied body as belonging to his father.
“I was totally stunned,” he said. “He was such a good man.”
Fawaz said his father was a supporter of peace with Israelis. He had worked in Israel years ago and was a teacher for the Palestinian Authority, the Western-backed government that Hamas expelled from Gaza in 2007 and which now administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
He also said that Hamas had arrested and tortured his father before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack because of his opposition to the group.
“He was persecuted by them,” he said of Hamas.
Ismail Thawabteh, the director general of the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza, declined to comment.
Mohammed Mansour, a spokesman for the Egyptian Committee, said Mr. al-Waheidi had managed the group’s relations with local leaders. He coordinated with them to ensure the safe delivery of aid in Gaza, where two years of war have devastated the territory and left hundreds of thousands of people displaced and living in tents.
Fawaz said he did not want anyone to use his father’s killing for more violence.
“What we need is peace,” he said. “May God have mercy on my father.”
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