The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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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.
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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. Alter 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) Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas: ‘I Won’t Rest Until Every Muslim Is Gone’
Muslim communities have been growing for decades, particularly around Dallas. Now, conservatives want to roll up the welcome mat.
By J. David Goodman, Lauren McGaughy, Jesus Jiménez and Ruth Graham. The reporters, based in Houston, Austin and Dallas, conducted more than 45 interviews at mosques, businesses and political events around Texas for this article, Aug. 17, 2026
Ghulam Kehar rose before dawn in early June to attend the day’s first prayer at his local mosque in Irving, Texas, before heading off for a monthslong deployment with the U.S. Coast Guard.
He had been deployed before, but this time was different. He felt apprehensive about leaving his wife and four children behind in Texas, even for a short while.
Rhetorical attacks on Muslims by top Texas leaders had become more pronounced, and seemed to be trickling down. At his mosque, the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, and others across the state, congregants and religious leaders swapped stories of ugly comments directed at them while praying in public or sitting in public parks.
In recent months, a man was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat at a major new Islamic center in Houston. Not far away, in Conroe, a woman told Muslim shoppers at a grocery store they were “not welcome in this state or this country” — after losing her job, she received nearly $250,000 from supporters after video of her comments circulated widely. In McKinney, a Dallas suburb, a woman grabbed a former mayor and stuffed paper with an anti-Muslim message down his shirt during a heated City Council hearing over a mosque expansion.
“Leaving them alone in this environment, it would be a little worrisome,” Mr. Kehar said of his family. “It’s just the fear of what’s being spewed out there.”
He arranged for his family to join him on his deployment near the Canadian border as soon as they could get there.
Mr. Kehar, who grew up in California, is part of a growing number of Muslims who moved to Texas in recent decades in search of good schools, affordable homes and a thriving community of fellow believers. The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been a particularly strong magnet for families like his. Dozens of mosques have opened. Some are expanding. Others, like the glittering DeSoto House of Peace, south of Dallas, aim to provide new anchors for Muslim communities in Texas.
“This is the place to be for American Muslims,” said Tammam Alwan, who moved to Irving from Detroit after discovering the community through religious videos online. “I made a prayer: Please, God, send me to Irving.”
But as the communities have grown, so has the resentment against Muslims.
The promise to combat “radical Islam” has long been a part of Republican politics. The rhetoric has only intensified nationally, as Muslims like Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York City, and Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, won major races.
But politicians in Texas have gone beyond words, turning the power of the state against some Muslim groups.
A major turning point arrived in early 2025, after members of the East Plano Islamic Center unveiled plans for a real estate development centered on a new mosque in farmland east of Dallas. The opposition was immediate and intense.
State leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have since opened investigations into Muslim institutions across Texas. They’ve sought to block the real estate development and investigate religious divorce counseling. Mr. Abbott threatened to take state funding from Texas airports that provide ritual washing stations for Muslim travelers, ordered the cancellation of a private water park party celebrating a Muslim holiday and labeled the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights group, as a terrorist group — a step that even the Trump administration has so far not taken. (Florida followed Texas in applying the same label to CAIR.)
Efforts by Republican state leaders to restrict Islamic practice have coincided with a push to expand Christianity’s place in public life. In June, Texas became the first state to mandate Bible readings in public schools, where lawmakers had already required prayer time and the posting of the Ten Commandments.
For many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the border as a major concern since early last year, Republican consultants have said. Anti-Muslim activists and hard-right candidates have increasingly described Islam as incompatible with American values. They warn that the United States could soon look like Europe, where Muslim populations are larger.
“I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone,” one statewide Republican candidate, Bo French, wrote on social media this summer.
Muslim leaders in Texas have debated how to respond. Some counseled outreach. Others were frustrated with the return of rhetoric that had been largely dormant since the 9/11 attacks despite years of trying to foster interfaith understanding.
“We’ve constantly tried to point to our record and hope that our record will organically speak for itself,” Dr. Omar Suleiman, a prominent Muslim scholar, said in an interview at the Valley Ranch mosque. “We tried that, and it did nothing for us.”
The moment called for a posture of “strength,” Mr. Suleiman said, and a robust legal defense against what he said were false attacks. “We have to actually make lying legally and politically costly to these people,” he said. “We have to fight them back.”
He pointed to the religious protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution as the basis for such a defense. But recently, hard-line conservatives have been looking for a way to deny those protections.
In what would be an apparent first, one avenue being explored in Texas is to try to use state law to ban or regulate some Islamic cultural practices, such tribunals for marriage and other decisions governed by religious rules, often referred to as Shariah law.
Some want to do it as soon as the Texas Legislature meets next year.
“One of the first things we’re going to try to do is define what a religion is,” said State Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a San Antonio Republican. “Islam itself is not just a religion. It’s much more than a religion.”
Texas’ Muslim population remains small, around 1 or 2 percent of all residents. Precise figures are hard to come by, because the census does not ask about religion, but surveys by the Pew Research Center, and estimates by state officials, put the population between 300,000 and 500,000 people. Among the most populous states, only New York and Illinois have a higher share of Muslims than Texas.
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been a popular destination. In recent years, one of its growing communities is in Irving around the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, the city’s second mosque. Founded in 2009, the mosque has a large campus and is planning a 31,000-square-foot expansion, with a cafe and basketball court. At a recent nightly prayer, families struggled to find parking.
“We’re growing faster than expected,” said Sheikh Yaser Birjas, who has led the congregation since 2010.
Mr. Birjas said the mosque’s success was in part thanks to its early embrace of technology. New people discovered its services online. Some moved to Texas to join.
One indication of the growing community comes from census data on international migration from Muslim-majority countries to the United States. That population grew in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area to more than 159,000 in 2024, from about 79,000 people a decade earlier — growing five times faster than the population as a whole.
Another indication can be found in the increasing number of Muslim congregations.
In the four biggest Dallas-Fort Worth counties, the number of mosques nearly tripled to 76 by 2020, up from 28 two decades earlier, according to data from the Association of Religion Data Archives. In Collin County, a fast-growing suburban area north of Dallas, the number quadrupled, to 12 from three.
The increase was notable, but the number of mosques remains small. By comparison, the four counties have more than 3,000 evangelical Christian congregations.
How Islam Became a Republican Focus
Nearly every speech at the Texas State Republican Convention in June included some expression of anti-Muslim sentiment. Multiple conference panels warned of a Muslim invasion. Combating Shariah law — the Islamic code that guides the observant — was named a top legislative priority.
In the convention hall, the Texas House’s new Sharia-Free Caucus had a booth. Amy Mekelburg, a prominent anti-Muslim influencer, presented a video warning that Texas barbecue restaurants were being replaced by “Arab shopping plazas” — part of a coordinated “takeover.”
The focus on Muslims gained new traction with President Trump’s first White House run. In 2015, the mayor of Irving, Beth Van Duyne, gained national attention by railing against Shariah law. (She is now a member of Congress.) Two years later, Texas Republicans passed anti-Shariah legislation as part of a wave of bills pushed by the Center for Security Policy, a hard-right Washington think tank.
For a time, the party moved away from Islam to concentrate on immigration, the pandemic and gender politics.
But some on the far right began focusing on a different and more contentious message: that Islam is not a religion but a political ideology.
Then came the proposed real estate development with a mosque outside Dallas, known at the time as EPIC City. “This is how the West falls,” Ms. Mekelburg wrote on social media in February 2025.
Her rhetoric caught Mr. Abbott’s attention, and he soon initiated state investigations into the proposed development and the mosque community, the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC, that supported it.
Anthony Holm, a Republican political consultant, said concerns about Islam were an extension of Republican voters’ fears about illegal immigration — and help explain Mr. Abbott’s focus. “Anything he does is poll-driven,” Mr. Holm said of the governor.
Mr. Abbott has used his terror designation of CAIR to try to restrict other Islamic groups. The council is challenging the designation in court.
“We experience waves of Islamophobia,” said Shaimaa Zayan of CAIR’s Austin chapter. “This is the worst wave.”
Seeing a Looming Religious ‘Conflict’
About 300 people gathered at a Dallas movie theater in late May to watch a documentary film billed as revealing “the disastrous effect of Islam in America.”
The event’s sponsors included a nearby Christian ministry, a group of Jewish conservatives, several Republican women’s groups and two local county Republican parties.
“Most of the people that are speaking up are Christian,” Frank X. Panico, the film’s director, who is Catholic, said as he mingled by the popcorn machines.
As the Muslim population has grown in Texas, an assertive Christianity has also taken root. Hard-line conservative Christians characterize the situation not as a demographic shift, but as a spiritual battle.
The documentary, “The Great American Conflict,” contained a mix of theological, political and cultural warnings. It depicted Islam as a force that could pull communities to the left — citing Mayor Mamdani of New York — and also threaten women’s freedom.
The audience heard Texas was at the center of this cultural struggle.
“This is the battlefield right now,” Erick Stakelbeck, a host on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, said at the event.
Barbara Isaacs, an activist in Collin County, distributed a pamphlet encouraging Texans to get involved with their local governments to prevent or slow the construction of mosques.
“Share this with your friends, your church members,” she urged the crowd.
What Does It Mean to ‘Assimilate’?
Farhat Shaikh, a doctor living in Frisco, north of Dallas, stood outside a polling place during a sharply contested mayoral runoff election in June.
For many on the hard right, Frisco — with its large South Asian and Muslim populations — was the epicenter of the fight for Texas’ future.
Dr. Shaikh urged voters to support Mark Hill, a former school board trustee, who vowed to unite the city. Mr. Hill’s opponent, Rod Vilhauer, talked about the need for Muslims to assimilate into American culture, and some of his supporters warned of a Muslim “takeover.”
Mr. Hill prevailed in the election. Still, for Dr. Shaikh, the divisive campaign put Muslims like her in a kind of bind.
Assimilation means joining institutions and being “part of the decision making,” she said. “I’m part of the P.T.A., I volunteer for my community, I’m a practicing physician. I am assimilating.” But being active can also be attacked as trying to “take over,” she said.
The question of assimilation has animated Texas legislators like Mr. Schoolcraft, and fueled calls for a definition of religion in Texas law. Mr. Schoolcraft hoped such legislation would encourage Muslims to more fully assimilate and not create enclaves, such as the EPIC City development.
“I’m not saying totally abandon your culture,” Mr. Schoolcraft said. “But try to become a citizen where you’re living. Otherwise there’s going to be conflict.”
Texas Republicans have warned of Muslims seeking to create a parallel justice system. Some pointed to a small decade-old organization based in Dallas, the Islamic Tribunal, which provides religious consultation to women seeking divorce, including in abusive marriages. Mr. Paxton began an investigation.
A lawyer for the organization, Maria Kari, said its religious guidance — like that of a Jewish rabbinical court or a Catholic tribunal — was protected by the First Amendment.
“We are not a court,” said Taher El-Badawi, who founded the Islamic Tribunal.
Recasting Islam as a political ideology would be unprecedented as a legislative strategy, said Asma T. Uddin, a religious liberty lawyer, and “a way of winning the religious liberty fight before it starts, by defining the other side out of the category.”
American courts have avoided defining religion over the years. In 2010, Tennessee residents tried to stop a new mosque, arguing it was not entitled to be treated as a house of worship because Islam was not a religion.
The Justice Department responded in a brief that “Islam is plainly a religion” protected by the First Amendment. Whether the department under Mr. Trump would take the same position was an open question.
For now, local Muslim institutions have defended themselves on constitutional and legal grounds, and promised to continue their work.
“The Muslim community is a huge community in Dallas and they need help,” said Mr. El-Badawi of the Islamic Tribunal. “We are religious help. That’s all.”
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from San Antonio, Sasha von Oldershausen from Austin and Jeff Adelson from New York.
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2) I’m a Psychiatrist. I’m Hearing Something New From Young Women.
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, Aug. 18, 2026
Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell, a psychiatrist, is the author of the forthcoming “Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis.”
Tess Havas
Several years ago, I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions. Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression — almost before telling me their names.
They had researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends. It was everyone — gravel-voiced film majors and earnest high school athletes, class presidents and girls who skipped school, girls who spent weekends in the Hamptons and girls who had to work for their spending money. The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.
The physician part of me would instantly start thinking through an alphabet soup of treatments for the conditions these girls were reporting — D.B.T., C.B.T. and E.M.D.R. and medications to go with each.
Another part of me — the parent, the Xennial — would struggle to suppress an inner eye roll. If you’re a parent of an adolescent girl, you might have experienced your own version of these two reactions: either terror for your daughter’s psychological well-being or alienation from all the jargon. You might have even tried to convince your daughter that everything was fine. None of those responses set us up to hear what these girls and young women are trying to say.
I’ve been listening to girls every day for years, and I’ve learned a few things that can help parents, therapists and anyone else who struggles to communicate with young women as they describe some form of distress.
It starts with accepting that diagnosis words may function differently for these young women from the way they do for others. They are not necessarily claims to cold, scientific truths, yoked to specific evidence-based treatments. Instead, research increasingly reveals, these words are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to situate one’s very personal pain. We should try to hear them that way: We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally.
One girl told me she had assigned herself a diagnosis of depression, which she later acknowledged she thought would make me care about her. Another girl was stuck on an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, mostly because it made her feel less alone by connecting her to a vocal and vibrant online community.
Several young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort — which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings. Another girl said she used her various self-diagnoses as a container for whatever felt like “too much” about her, allowing her to fulfill what she thought was the teenage female’s highest calling: to be chill.
In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. Are these labels a source of strength or a straitjacket? Are they helping young women find help and acceptance or standing in the way? The answer isn’t so simple.
Adolescent girls and young women aren’t the only ones reaching for therapy-speak, of course. According to some measures, 50 percent of Gen Z-ers have labeled themselves with mental health conditions, and illness identities have taken hold of young people, both online and off. But girls are by far the primary drivers of this trend. They are the main group looking up health information online, talking about their feelings and relationships and seeking labels for what’s wrong.
They are also the demographic with the worst mental health profile. I think the association with young women, a group so often dismissed as frivolous, is a big part of why therapy-speak is regarded as a sign of weakness and self-indulgence.
As for therapists, we think about psychiatric diagnosis a lot less than you might imagine. That’s partly because categories in our field tend to be more flexible than those in other areas of medicine. Classifications often evolve and change over time, especially for young people and most of all for young women. Besides, no two people experience these conditions in exactly the same way. So we always have to try to understand the person first.
Therapy-speak — leading with diagnostic language, applying labels instead of describing feelings — can make that hard. It can leave friends and loved ones feeling they have no ability to help, as though they’ve got to back off and let the professionals do their thing. And it can short-circuit a young person’s already difficult progress of self-discovery.
To be clear, I’d still rather live in a world where everyone talks about trauma too much than one where you’d get shoved in a locker for being different. Ideally, we should create an environment in which girls can stop blaming their own brains for every problem and where they don’t feel they have to be sick to be heard. Until they have access to a more nuanced lexicon of human troubles, however, we need to listen differently.
Small acts of translation can help. Someone who says she has A.D.H.D. may or may not fit the clinical definition, but she’s probably telling you she feels scattered, overwhelmed or afraid she’s a mess. If someone says she has anxiety, you can be pretty sure she’s nervous, uneasy or unsure of herself. If the word “depressed” freaks you out, consider instead why the person using it feels hopeless, lonely or in despair.
If you’re sick of hearing every classmate, roommate or ex described as “toxic,” look past the cliché and consider the harm it’s meant to describe. Whatever works, gently offer that less literal meaning back to her — not to challenge her words but to understand them. Not to see if she really has a particular diagnosis but to see what’s going on beneath it.
This kind of translation is a quiet process but changes the way you show up, the energy you bring. With teenagers, that’s always half the battle. Being too reactive makes it about you and your fears; being too quick to reassure can make you seem you don’t understand the seriousness of her concerns. Searching beneath the buzzwords for what she’s really telling you avoids both pitfalls.
Ultimately, translation is an exercise in empathy, in jumping out of the limits of your own perspective. Making that effort is a powerful way to help another person feel better.
Language can illuminate certain parts of the truth while obscuring others. Perhaps that’s why it is believed that Claude Monet said that in order to see a thing, we must forget its name. Internet users might have been getting at something similar when they came up with the hashtag #LetsNormalizeNotCallingWomenCrazy. When it comes to therapy-speak — whether it’s used in my office or in your house — this kind of translation is an important first step.
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3) A Texas University Is Using A.I. to Cut Left-Leaning Content
The politician behind Texas’ conservative overhaul of higher education is now running a university system. Some say his effort to ferret out forbidden topics is a dystopian academic nightmare.
By Vimal Patel, Aug. 18, 2026
The Texas Tech campus in Lubbock is in a right-leaning part of the state. Its leader is trying to clamp down on teaching about gender and sexuality. David Kozlowski/Getty Images
The Texas Tech faculty meeting began amicably this spring, with offers of refreshments. Then administrators handed out reports, created partly by artificial intelligence, listing the lessons professors needed to stop teaching.
“What?” one professor asked. “I don’t even teach those things.”
“There are factual errors,” added another.
“It’s A.I. slop,” a third said.
Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.
That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton, sees things.
Mr. Creighton, a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university system since November, is the force behind the effort. He has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities.
His course-review plan, he said, “will produce the best curriculum in America. I also believe it will be a national model when we’re finished.”
Mr. Creighton is tackling two of higher education’s most pressing problems, at least in the eyes of its Republican critics and others who argue universities need to be reformed. Academia needs to rebuild lost public trust as campuses have moved left and to make itself more relevant in the era of artificial intelligence, they say.
In an interview, Mr. Creighton fired off a litany of concerns about higher education shared by Republican politicians across the country. He said that diversity, equity and inclusion offices discriminated against Asian students, campus protests often turned antisemitic, and diversity statements — which he has called “leftist loyalty oaths” — sidelined conservatives in faculty hiring.
Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an A.I.-fueled wave will forever reshape higher education in the years ahead. He said he wanted the campus to be well positioned to take advantage of that paradigm shift by focusing on degrees that employers want and eliminating low-enrollment programs. He touts a partnership with Nvidia to invest in A.I. infrastructure.
But Mr. Creighton’s moves have tapped into existential anxieties haunting professors. Many worry that limits on their academic freedom are strangling their work even as technology moves faster to upend education than they can keep up.
“There’s a level of stress that’s very hard to explain,” said Lucy Schiller, a creative-writing professor who was asked to switch out a book she wanted to assign. She said she broke down in tears when she realized the scope of Mr. Creighton’s plans.
Academia’s Republican Wave
Mr. Creighton represents something of a trend in red states like Florida and Texas: a former Republican lawmaker tapped as higher education leader. In Florida, at least seven college presidents are former Republican politicians, as are the heads of both the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems.
Even so, Mr. Creighton sticks out. He was behind some of the state’s most consequential legislation targeting higher education. He wrote a bill enacted last year that sidelined the role faculty play in governing universities and tightened the state’s grip on curriculum. He also wrote a bill enacted in 2024 that abolished D.E.I. offices in the state’s public universities.
Mr. Creighton, who is from Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, earned a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. He said his views on higher education were shaped, in part, by his own difficulties paying for college.
Texas Tech’s main campus, in Lubbock, part of one of the state’s reddest districts, includes an agricultural and engineering college, along with a center dedicated to free-market economics. The university has a politically diverse faculty and student body.
But Mr. Creighton has argued that conservatives have been treated unfairly on campus, and some faculty members have become rattled after his administration issued a series of escalating directives.
Memos in December and April outlined the closures of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes and outlawed student dissertations on gender identity. The administration also created a portal in which professors must submit their course materials for review.
The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr. Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.
“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.
Texas Tech is also making changes beyond the core. Jonathan Friedman, with PEN America, a free-expression group, said that while other universities across Texas are reviewing curriculums, Texas Tech has gone the furthest. The university is “edging forward towards greater and greater ideological control,” he said.
Last month, the American Association of University Professors sued the university, saying the course-review effort is viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.
Some students have voiced concerns. One student group started a petition to remove Mr. Creighton from office, saying he was unfit to serve. But some conservative students support the chancellor.
Mr. Creighton is bringing ideological balance to a sector that is overwhelmingly liberal, said Preston Parsons, the local chapter president of Turning Point USA, a conservative group.
“Is it necessarily a bad thing that we have universities that sit a little different on different issues?” Mr. Parsons asked.
In the interview, Mr. Creighton said that only 60 or so courses of more than 14,000 taught in the university system were recommended for modification, and system officials have said that another 300 courses were “proactively” modified by faculty members before review.
He also said that the course-review effort has been deliberative, with many layers, including a Board of Regents committee, and that A.I. was just one step to make it more efficient. Most of the work was done by humans, he added.
Self-Censoring Courses
Some professors are self-censoring to avoid running afoul of the new guidance.
Ms. Schiller, the creative-writing professor, said the new directives restrict teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” but do not define those terms. “They’re making us do the work of reading between the very obvious lines,” she said, “and overcomplying out of fear that we might be reported or separated from our work or disciplined.”
Jacob Bell, a Medieval historian, said he worried about how to discuss Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for, among other reasons, cross-dressing. Mr. Creighton’s memo about gender exempts biographical details of historically significant figures. Still, any references must be “purely incidental,” according to the April memo.
Dr. Bell removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women. He said Viking mythological poems often featured gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin, material he no longer felt comfortable teaching.
When asked about Dr. Bell’s case, Mr. Creighton suggested that professors not make pre-emptive decisions and rather submit materials to the university system for review.
Dr. Bell went a different route. He believes that future Texas Tech students will be “unprepared to deal with normal people in the world that they’re going to interact with.” He recently accepted a new job, at a public university on the East Coast.
A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.
Survey respondents also said they worried about irreparable reputational damage. One said Mr. Creighton’s directives amounted to “using a chain saw to remove a splinter.”
Mr. Creighton shrugged off the concerns. He said many professors are supportive of the changes, though they are less vocal, and noted other university systems are implementing their own course-content reviews.
“Ours is absolutely the most deliberative and respectful of academic freedom,” he said, adding, “It has never been more exciting to have an opportunity to be a faculty member at the Texas Tech University System.”
Sherry Sylvester, a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, called Mr. Creighton’s effort “fearless and meticulous” and said legislation authored by Mr. Creighton has been critical in wresting control of universities from faculty members.
“Texas is the model for the nation in returning our universities again to places of open debate, free inquiry, getting rid of ideological indoctrination and creating degrees of value for students,” Ms. Sylvester said, adding, “Faculty members need to remember that they are state employees.”
At the faculty meeting this spring, a couple dozen professors questioned administrators, including Ronald Hendrick, Texas Tech University’s top academic officer.
Dr. Hendrick, caught between his enraged faculty and Mr. Creighton’s plan, said he did not know the Texas Tech system would be using A.I. in the effort.
In an interview, Professor Schiller said her report hallucinated information about a course she was not teaching.
It did refer to one book she teaches, however: “Voice of the Fish” by Lars Horn, who says he is transmasculine. The book, which is described by the publisher as exploring “the trans experience through themes of water, fish and mythology,” must be switched out.
Ms. Schiller did not make the changes. Rather, she left the university and started at Grinnell College this month.
“I loved my job here until this year,” she said.
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4) Google Just Made It Easier for Campaigns to Send You Fund-Raising Emails
Republicans previously sued Google claiming its spam filter was biased, but the case was dismissed. The company will now allow verified campaigns to more easily bypass the spam filter.
By Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 18, 2026
Google has updated Gmail’s policy to allow political committees to more easily bypass its spam filter when sending emails for donations, allowing more political ads to land in inboxes. Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Google quietly rolled out a new program on Monday that will allow candidates, political parties and political action committees to more easily bypass Gmail’s spam filter and send fund-raising appeals to the inboxes of the company’s many millions of email users.
The change comes after years of complaints from Republicans that Gmail’s spam algorithm unfairly blocked their committees’ emails more than those of their Democratic counterparts, although those complaints were dismissed in court. For campaigns and PACs that meet the terms of the program, it is expected to route an influx of cash solicitations into Gmail inboxes, helping campaigns raise millions of dollars more in the final sprint to the midterm elections.
Google chose not to debut the new program with any fanfare, instead posting an update to its Help Center on Monday. The company began to reach out to some political committees in both parties on Monday after publishing the change, according to three people briefed on the outreach who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Political strategists in both parties said the new policy could be deeply consequential for candidates — even if frustrating for users in the United States, who are likely to be bombarded with pleas for donations.
“Heading into the 2026 elections, Gmail users are going to be flooded with unwanted political spam because Google decided to create a V.I.P. lane for campaigns,” said Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic digital strategist and veteran online fund-raiser. “This is a bad deal for Gmail users and a gift to bad actors in the political fund-raising space.”
José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google, said the new program resulted from an effort to provide long-term clarity for both campaigns and users.
“This program is designed to connect people with the emails they want to receive while keeping them fully in control of their inboxes,” he said in a statement. “To participate, bulk senders must meet strict security and compliance requirements, ensuring that messages people receive are relevant, useful and verified.”
The new program is set to begin on Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day — and the day before Republicans are set to hold a rare midterm convention in Dallas.
The change comes four years after Google rolled out a similar program on a pilot basis that was discontinued months later.
At the time, the Republican National Committee sued the technology giant, accusing it of “throttling its email messages,” though Google said the party had not signed up for the program. A federal court later dismissed the case, with Judge Daniel J. Calabretta writing of the R.N.C.’s claims, “This is pure speculation, lacking facts from which the Court could infer animus or an absence of good faith.”
The Federal Election Commission also dismissed a formal complaint from Republicans that Gmail’s spam filter was biased against the party.
Whether a fund-raising email winds up in users’ spam folders or inboxes can be worth millions of dollars to campaigns over time.
It is not immediately clear whether the changes would affect one party more than the other, but some Republicans appeared optimistic.
“For years Google’s algorithm silenced Republican voices, burying our emails in spam while Democrats’ landed in the inbox,” said Will Kiley, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This program is a real chance to fix it and let voters hear from the candidates they choose to follow. We’ll be watching closely to make sure Google follows through.”
Some Democrats feared the change could open the door for so-called scam PACs, which spend little of their money on actual campaigns, to more easily reach inboxes. Other Democrats hoped the change might help deliver the party an advantage because Democrats generally have been better at online fund-raising than Republicans.
The R.N.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google’s new program will require that candidates, PACs and party committees register the domain they send emails from and that their spam rates, the percentage of emails that users mark as spam, remain below 0.3 percent, according to the policy.
Mr. Pennington, the Democratic strategist, feared that Google made the change because of pressure from Republicans.
“While there could theoretically be another reason for this policy shift, it appears that Google is sacrificing the inbox sanity of its customers simply to placate a false, bad faith narrative from Republicans claiming partisan spam bias,” he said.
Amanda Elliott, a Republican digital strategist, said the mistrust on the right with the tech industry runs deep, especially around the issue of whether fund-raising emails wind up in inboxes or the spam folder.
“For everyone who’s been talking about censorship and bias, this could be a put-up or shut-up moment,” she wrote in a text message. “Are your emails landing in spam filters because you’re a Republican or because you’re just running a subpar email program and not following best practices? Perhaps we’re about to find out!”
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5) These Protesters Were Charged with Terrorism. Who’s Next?
By Rozina Ali, Aug. 18, 2026
Ms. Ali is a journalist and the author of “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.”
Lucas Burtin
Earlier this summer, a federal judge sentenced a group of eight anti-ICE activists to a collective 450 years in prison after what has become the first “test case” for the Trump administration’s crackdown on left-wing activism.
The government’s case is built on events that occurred in front of the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, on the Fourth of July last year. That night, activists set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the people detained inside. Then a few separated from the group, vandalizing cars, slashing tires on a government van and breaking a surveillance camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and pointed his weapon, one of the demonstrators, Benjamin Song, fired an AR-15-style rifle, injuring the officer in the neck.
The government referred to the group of demonstrators as a “Northwest Texas antifa cell,” suggesting the activists were part of a coordinated effort to commit a terrorist attack on the ICE facility.
What Mr. Song and the others did that night are crimes, to be sure. Mr. Song injured a police officer. Some damaged federal property. All of them were convicted of riot. But civil rights advocates who watched the case expected those protesters to get sentences of a handful of years. Instead, even people on the periphery of the action — whose worst offense was spray-painting a guard post — got anywhere from 30 to 70 years in prison.
The decades-long sentences in the Prairieland case were only possible because prosecutors brought forth an unusual charge: “material support” for terrorism. This law, which has been used to prosecute primarily Muslims in the years after 9/11, is being broadly applied under the Trump administration against people President Trump characterizes as his political enemies. Who and what constitutes “terrorism” could have broad implications for our civil liberties. If Mr. Trump’s statements are any indicator, what happened at Prairieland is not likely to be an isolated incident.
The law that prosecutes material support to terrorism, created in 1994 and expanded two years later in the wake of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, is two-pronged: one part prosecutes support for a terrorist organization and the second prosecutes support for specific acts of terrorism. Both come with lengthy minimum sentences and a possibility of a lifetime in prison. But what could constitute “support” is so ambiguous that, shortly after the law was created, it had confused even senior government officials. During an interagency background briefing, one Clinton administration official wondered if even “$25 of dues” to a group could count as material support.
As it turned out, prosecutions for small donations and increasingly vague definitions of support would happen in a few years. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, prosecutors accused hundreds of people of supporting terrorism this way. “Support for terrorism” could entail anything from translating a magazine to even offering nonviolent alternatives to a militant group. It did not matter if the defendant directly helped carry out an assault or belonged to a terrorist organization: They could be prosecuted as if they were.
The post-9/11 years were a time of a single-minded effort to quash threats of Islamic terrorism before an attack could be carried out. But the ambiguity of the law, in particular its focus on prevention, made the material support statute ripe for abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Take the case of a Kurdish imam in Albany, N.Y., named Yassin Aref, who was arrested in 2004 and charged with both parts of the material support law.
Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Aref witnessed a man (who turned out to be a government informant) “loan” money to a member of Aref’s mosque. The informant fabricated a story, telling Mr. Aref and the man that he had acquired the funds he was offering them by selling ammunition to a terrorist group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani envoy. Mr. Aref nodded along with the vague details of the informant’s tale, and in keeping with Islamic customs of money-lending, agreed to witness the loan. According to prosecutors, that was enough to show his support for terrorism, a crime of which Mr. Aref was eventually convicted, serving 15 years in prison. A Human Rights Watch report later highlighted Mr. Aref’s case as one of many showing dubious uses of antiterrorism laws.
Mr. Aref’s case was not a lone example. In those years, law enforcement swept through Muslim communities, goading young men — including those with no criminal record — toward making statements in support of terrorist plots, then slapping them with material support charges. Of the nearly 1,000 defendants prosecuted by the United States on charges of international terrorism after 9/11, more than half were convicted of material support for terrorism, including cases when no act of violence occurred.
An Albany Times Union columnist who was following Mr. Aref’s trial at the time wrote, “Someday we’ll look back on the present national paranoia over terrorism and the excesses done in its name with the same national embarrassment that Americans feel for Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts of the 1950s and our appalling treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”
Twenty years later, the witch hunt appears to have only expanded, albeit with a different political focus. Last September, two months after the demonstration at the Prairieland ICE facility, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. After the murder, the president’s adviser Stephen Miller described left-wing political organizations as a “vast domestic terror movement.”
Weeks later, Mr. Trump issued a memo directing the F.B.I.’s Joint Task Terrorism Force — a network expanded in the aftermath of 9/11 — to investigate and disrupt “domestic terrorism” and political violence. He also signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” describing it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government.” But antifa, short for “antifascist,” is a leaderless political movement composed of disparate strategies and aims.
The U.S. government has no legal designation for “domestic terrorist groups.” Yet even when it is just talk, the Trump administration’s use of the term had an impact on the Prairieland case. In the original indictment, released in July 2025, prosecutors had not leveled any charges of material support for terrorism. By November, after filing two rounds of indictments, prosecutors charged all eight defendants with the crime.
As a deeply reported Texas Monthly story detailed, the Prairieland defendants were hardly members of a cohesive terrorist cell. Some were part of a Signal chat that was used to plan the demonstration. Several of them were attached to various organizations, like the Democratic Socialists of America and an anticapitalist reading group.
Even if one reads these loose associations as proof of a coordinated attempt, legal experts told me it would not rise to a terrorism charge. The demonstrators were already faced with a cocktail of severe charges after their arrest, including attempted murder. (Mr. Song would be convicted of attempted murder; the other four defendants charged with it were acquitted.) But the material support charge allows the court to impose some of the harshest sentencing in its legal arsenal. “It’s an act of judicial terrorism, designed to keep people from coming to protest,” Shayana Kadilal, a senior attorney for the Center of Constitutional Rights who has worked on material support cases, told me.
This law has not only been used against individuals; prosecutors have also turned it against nonprofits, ultimately shutting down a major Muslim charity and complicating the work of others. “Once terrorism laws are in place, they are hard to roll back,” Katherine Tomaszewski, a lawyer who has helped charities in such cases, told me. “No one wants to be seen as ‘soft on terror.’” But, she pointed out, the danger of the law being so “overbroad and unchecked” is that it can be manipulated.
We’re already beginning to see the Trump administration building on such precedents. In the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s murder last year, the White House called for investigations of liberal foundations and donors, like the philanthropist George Soros and the businessman Reid Hoffman, for their role in what they claim is fomenting political violence (read: financing liberal nonprofits). The Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors to explore possible charges against Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, including racketeering, wire fraud and material support for terrorism.
It could well get worse from here. “The label of ‘terrorism’ is a powerful political tool,” Sufia Khalid, a lawyer representing one of the Prairieland defendants, told me. For the last two decades, the “terrorism” charge was leveled almost exclusively at a religious minority, lulling some into believing that such laws would not affect them. Now, the domestic use of the terrorism charge threatens to cast its net even wider.
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6) ABC Sues F.C.C. to Block Threat to Its TV Licenses
The network asked a court to stop the agency from taking steps that could force ABC stations off the air and accused the F.C.C. of violating its First Amendment rights.
By Jim Rutenberg and John Koblin, Aug. 18, 2026
An ABC News reporter prepares to broadcast from outside the New York Stock Exchange. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
ABC on Tuesday sued the Federal Communications Commission, accusing the agency of infringing on its First Amendment rights. It asked a federal court to stop the F.C.C. from pursuing aggressive regulatory moves that the network said posed an “existential threat” to its operations.
The lawsuit was unusual, a rare example of a major media organization suing the Trump administration over its unrelenting campaign to punish the national press through regulation and lawsuits.
The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, is meant to halt a series of F.C.C. moves that placed the network’s ability to operate in doubt. In the most extreme case, the agency was threatening to strip several ABC stations of their broadcast licenses, which would force them off the air.
ABC owns and operates eight local stations that carry its programming across the country, including in major markets like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Like all local stations, they can only operate with licenses controlled by the F.C.C.
The F.C.C., led by its chairman, Brendan Carr, called for an unusual, early review of the broadcast licenses last spring, citing ABC’s internal diversity and inclusion practices. None of the ABC licenses, which have terms of eight years, were up for renewal yet. Mr. Carr’s decision came after the ABC late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, angered President Trump with a monologue joke.
The F.C.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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7) ‘A Blatant and Gargantuan Conflict of Interest’
By Thomas B. Edsall. Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics, Aug. 18, 2026
Jens Masmann for The New York Times
The Trump family’s crypto business exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct, if we can call it that.
It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.
This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.
The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency.
As far back as October 2018, Nouriel Roubini, an economist at N.Y.U., testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs: “It is clear by now that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles.”
In September of 2022, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, declared: “I’m a major skeptic on crypto tokens.” Dimon went on to suggest that they are “decentralized Ponzi schemes.”
In 2023, Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, dismissed crypto: “Bitcoin is a bubble. It has no inherent value and is terribly overpriced.” He added that “buying Bitcoin is a fool’s game.” It’s a critique he has repeated often since then.
I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.
White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”
However, White continued,
“…shady actors are extremely normalized in the crypto world so the usual reputational screening that might keep someone like that from investing in a business doesn’t seem to apply.
“I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional. While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence.
“The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences.”
Speaking of the last national election, White wrote, “the
crypto industry was quite successful in politics in 2024, installing at least six new pro-crypto senators and more than a dozen representatives.”
With Trump in the White House and Republican control of Congress, White said, the key regulatory agencies are controlled by “loyalist, pro-crypto commissioners.”
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8) How Israel’s Financial Chokehold Is Stifling the West Bank Economy
Intensifying restrictions have hit every part of the territory’s dealings, spurring worries about whether the Palestinian Authority can remain solvent.
By Adam Rasgon, David M. Halbfinger and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, Aug. 18, 2026
Montaser Amro, left, and his brother inspecting a box of unpaid bills at his supermarket in Majd, West Bank. Mr. Amro said that his customers owed him around $155,000 and that he was struggling to pay suppliers. Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
Israeli pressure on the West Bank has sent the occupied territory to the brink of financial collapse as severe restrictions have touched every part of daily life and caused an economic crisis.
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has stopped thousands of Palestinians from working in Israel, withheld billions of dollars of tax revenues and enforced banking restrictions that have harmed business.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has been forced to cut spending on salaries and public services because of the sharp fall in revenues. The reductions have been felt acutely in sectors such as health care, with pharmacies routinely running out of medicines as the government allocates less money to buy them. The budget cuts have also forced clinics to open only a few days a week and hospitals to operate with fewer doctors and nurses.
Ibtisam Hammad, 54, was diagnosed with breast cancer three months ago. After a hospital appointment in the West Bank city of Ramallah, she made her way to a pharmacy to collect her medications. Only three of her six prescriptions were in stock.
“I’m lucky,” Ms. Hammad said, smiling despite her exhaustion. “Last time, they only had one.”
Ms. Hammad’s trouble getting medicines was indicative of wider economic problems. The Palestinian Authority has often warned of a financial collapse that never materialized, but there are growing concerns about how long it can remain solvent.
“We’re facing a huge problem,” Mohammed Mustafa, the authority’s prime minister, said in an interview. “Everyone has been affected.”
Israel has squeezed the economy.
As an occupied territory, the West Bank is inescapably economically dependent on Israel, which controls who and what enters and leaves that territory and the Gaza Strip, including the money that flows in and out.
The Oslo Accords in the 1990s reinforced that dependency, making the Israeli shekel the main currency in both territories and establishing links between Israeli and Palestinian banks. That has effectively given Israel control of a financial spigot that it can turn off.
Tensions have occasionally intensified economic pressure on the Palestinians. After the October 2023 attack, Israel started a devastating war in Gaza and also opened a new era of economic warfare in the West Bank.
First, Israel quickly canceled permits for tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers to reach their workplaces in Israel. Many worked in construction and agriculture and brought billions of dollars into the Palestinian economy every year. Since the start of the Gaza war, unemployment in the West Bank has skyrocketed to 28 percent, more than double the rate before the conflict, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Unemployment rate in the West Bank
Then, in May 2025, Israel started confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars per month in import taxes that it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf. This revenue stream accounts for about two-thirds of the West Bank government’s budget for 2026 of about $6 billion, according to Palestinian officials.
That deficit has forced the Palestinian Authority to lower the salaries of 140,000 civil servants and security officers, shorten school weeks to three days and accumulate billions of dollars in debt.
Maj. Arafat Halabi, a traffic police officer in Nablus, said that his monthly salary of about $1,500 had been halved.
“All I can do is the minimum of the minimum,” he said.
Major Halabi, 36, said that he eats meat only on Fridays to save money, commutes to work on public transportation instead of using his car and has been unable to buy new clothes for his children. His debts are mounting because he can afford only a small part of a monthly loan repayment and his electricity bill.
Israel has also erected new roadblocks across the West Bank, stifling the movement of goods within the territory. In Hebron, the most populous city, the Israeli military has closed five of seven entrances and exits, according to Mayor Yousef Jabari and residents. The military said that only two were regularly open and a third was “intermittently” open based on operational and security considerations.
Doron Spielman, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, accused the Palestinian Authority of “attempting to divert attention from its support for terrorism and its failure to reform by blaming Israel.”
The office of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, who has been a driving force behind the pressure campaign, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Palestinian Authority says it has taken some steps to address Israeli concerns. In February 2025, Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s president, issued a decree to end the practice of paying stipends to the families of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, a long-held demand of Israeli officials. American and Israeli officials have dismissed Mr. Abbas’s efforts, while Palestinian officials say the new law is being enforced.
Banks have been hobbled.
Israel has also limited the amount of shekels that Palestinian banks are allowed to send to Israeli banks, a crucial process that helps enable Palestinian merchants to buy goods from Israel and the rest of the world.
The Netanyahu government permits quarterly transfers of about $1.5 billion from Palestinian to Israeli banks — far less than previous administrations allowed. The restrictions have resulted in about $5.7 billion languishing in bank vaults in the West Bank, according to Palestinian government and banking officials.
“They’re preventing us from meeting the demand in our markets,” said Bashar Yasin, general manager of the Association of Banks in Palestine, a trade group.
Thaer Abahri, a wholesale importer of flour, sugar, rice and chocolate, said that he was able to import only half of what he used to buy.
“I feel hopeless,” said Mr. Abahri, who is from the northern West Bank city of Jenin. “This issue is killing the economy here.”
In recent weeks, Palestinian banking executives have expressed concerns that their institutions could be cut off entirely from Israeli banks. Israel Discount Bank and Bank Hapoalim, the only Israeli banks that work with Palestinian ones, have said that they are worried that those ties could expose them to lawsuits over money laundering or terrorist financing, and they have threatened to end the relationships. The Israeli banks have expressed frustration that the Israeli government has not done more to protect them from the risk of litigation.
Yahya Shunnar, governor of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, warned diplomats in July that the Palestinian economy was nearing a “full crisis” because of Israel’s economic restrictions, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The New York Times.
“There remains a narrow window to act, but it’s closing,” Mr. Shunnar said. “And it’s closing quickly.”
Mr. Shunnar also said that Andrew Abir, deputy governor of the Bank of Israel, the country’s central bank, had warned the Palestinian Monetary Authority to prepare a contingency plan to replace the shekel as its currency. The Israeli central bank said in a statement that it made sense to have contingency arrangements in place.
Palestinian economic experts, however, warned that suddenly doing that could cause chaos and make trading with Israel more complicated and costly.
Businesses and individuals feel the strain.
In Majd, a village near Hebron, Montaser Amro, 32, a supermarket owner, has allowed customers to take groceries and pay for them later. His customers owe him around $155,000, he said, and he is struggling to pay suppliers on time, prompting some to refuse to deliver goods unless he pays upfront.
“How am I supposed to run my business this way?” he said. “It’s not sustainable at all.”
Mr. Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, has few tools to improve the situation. His government has imposed a hiring freeze except for the health sector, stopped allocating money to development projects and is operating on an emergency budget, he said. He has asked for the international community to send more aid, but those requests have largely gone unanswered.
The only hope, Palestinian analysts and officials said, is that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition will be replaced by a less hard-line government in elections in October. A new Israeli government that is less determined to inflict pain on Palestinians could loosen the economic chokehold, they say.
At the Ramallah hospital, Ms. Hammad was trying to come to terms with the shortage of medications and overcome her tiredness. Her two daughters held her arms as she returned to her car.
“It’s the worst time to get cancer,” she said.
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9) Sugar Importer With Trump Ties Said to Maintain Abusive Labor Practices
A watchdog group said the Dominican company continued to violate labor standards after President Trump lifted an import ban last year.
By Ana Swanson, Aug. 18, 2026
Ana Swanson covers international trade and is based in Washington.
Cutting sugar cane on a plantation in the Dominican Republic in 2023. Concerns over forced labor and human rights abuses in the Dominican sugar sector have existed for decades. Erika Santelices/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Weeks after President Trump began his second term, his administration quietly lifted a measure that had blocked a major sugar producer in the Dominican Republic from shipping its product to the United States over concerns about forced labor at the company’s plantations.
The owner of the company, Central Romana, has cultivated close political ties to Mr. Trump, donating to his 2024 campaign and his White House ballroom project. José Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman known as Pepe, has hosted Mr. Trump at his Fifth Avenue apartment and attended a state dinner at the White House welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States.
The decision to allow Central Romana to send sugar to the United States has raised inferences of political interference, along with concern from labor groups that have been monitoring working conditions on the company’s Dominican farms.
On Tuesday, one nonprofit watchdog group, the Corporate Accountability Lab, released a report saying that many of the abusive conditions that led to the United States’ blocking sugar from Central Romana in 2022 had not been rectified.
The farm’s workers, most of whom are of Haitian descent, are still laboring under abusive working conditions, earning poverty wages, working excessive overtime and facing intimidation and threats from their superiors, the group said. The report added that workers live in dilapidated and overcrowded company-owned housing, some of which lacks electricity and potable water.
Corporate Accountability Lab is an independent nonprofit that describes its mission as holding corporations legally accountable. The group carried out more than 100 formal interviews on Central Romana’s farms over the course of five visits in the past several years, it said.
Charity Ryerson, the watchdog group’s executive director, said that the group’s staff members and investigators had regularly visited Central Romana’s farms and worker housing between January 2023 and December 2025 and spoke with dozens of workers in that time.
“What we saw was depressingly familiar — more or less the same conditions that were present when C.B.P. issued the withhold release order,” she said, referring to Customs and Border Protection, which administers such import bans. “The small changes we did see were largely superficial, and, importantly, didn’t address the pervasive climate of fear among workers,” she added.
Central Romana has denied accusations of any labor violations at its farms, stating that the watchdog group’s report is “riddled with inaccuracies and untruths.” In a response to questions from The New York Times, Jorge A. Sturla Ferrer, a spokesman for Central Romana, said that presenting the accusations as facts was “defamatory in nature.”
“Central Romana continues to operate with the ongoing improvements for the working and living conditions of our employees and their dependents, always committed with their welfare in compliance with international regulations and in accordance with the applicable laws of the Dominican Republic,” he said.
The White House referred a request for comment to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Central Romana is the largest sugar producer in the Dominican Republic. The firm is partly owned by members of the Fanjul family, who also operate a conglomerate that sells sugar under the Domino Sugar and C&H brands. Pepe Fanjul and his brother Alfonso, who died this month, have been politically active for decades, donating to both Democrats and Republicans.
In 2024, the Fanjul Corporation gave a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again, a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump, and $413,000 to the Republican National Committee. It gave lesser contributions to Democrats. Pepe Fanjul also hosted a $50 million fund-raiser for the Trump campaign in May 2024, The New Yorker reported.
In October, at a White House dinner for ballroom donors, Mr. Trump called out Mr. Fanjul’s contributions.
“Pepe, you were fantastic,” the president said. “He’s got a little sugar business. He has a monopoly on the world’s sugar — I would say that’s a good business.”
“He’s been great and a supporter right from the beginning for years,” he added.
The Trump administration has recently taken aim at the forced labor laws of other countries. In July, it issued tariffs on more than 80 countries that it said did not adequately ban imports of goods made with forced labor.
The United States has had a longstanding ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. The Trump administration has pushed other countries to adopt such bans in its trade deals. Last month, it added 43 companies to a list that bars goods suspected to be made with forced labor in Xinjiang from the United States. But critics say the United States still has shortfalls on its own labor protections.
Human rights groups have long raised concerns about abuses in the Dominican sugar industry. Many of the workers on Dominican sugar farms are Haitian migrants or Dominicans of Haitian descent. Some do not have citizenship in the Dominican Republic or in Haiti, making it difficult for them to leave and find other jobs.
In its research at Central Romana farms, Corporate Accountability Lab said it found that these stateless workers, as well as elderly workers who had not received retirement benefits, were the most vulnerable to exploitation.
In November 2022, the Biden administration said that it had identified conditions of forced labor on Central Romana’s plantations during an investigation and blocked the company’s sugar from the United States.
That ignited a fierce lobbying push from Central Romana, which spent more than $1.3 million on lobbying from the beginning of 2023 through the end of 2025, according to tracking from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance group. The company hired several well-connected lobbying firms, Akin Gump, Barsa Strategies and Patino Brewster & Partners. Those firms employed former officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees C.B.P. and the import bans, as well as a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
One of Akin Gump’s activities was filing Freedom of Information Act requests with Customs and Border Protection and other agencies in the Biden administration to seek information about the communications between government officials and Corporate Accountability Lab and other groups working on labor issues, the report said.
Corporate Accountability Lab said that, while the import ban was in place from 2022 to 2025, it saw some limited improvements on the company’s farms, including some repairs to housing and latrines. An electrification project also connected at least one of the housing areas to the electrical grid, the report said.
The company also took some steps to make health care more accessible in sugar cane fields, including deploying a medical van to treat minor health issues.
But workers interviewed by Corporate Accountability Lab on the topic described the services as still inadequate. And the worker settlements that the group visited were plagued with many of the same conditions, including a lack of electricity and potable water and poor housing, the report said.
After Mr. Trump came into office in January 2025, Corporate Accountability Lab said that customs officials reached out to them to set up a briefing on their findings, scheduled for Feb. 28, 2025. But the day before, the meeting was canceled, and the labor group’s attempts to reschedule were ignored.
Two weeks later, C.B.P. modified the import order against Central Romana. Though some customs officials have said that the protocol for lifting an order is not well defined, others said that it did not go through established processes.
Corporate Accountability Lab said that the circumstances of the reversal were “procedurally irregular and followed significant donations to the Trump campaign.” The group also said it “saw no evidence” that the company engaged in the type of remediation process that C.B.P. had previously recommended.
One current official, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, told The Times that the way the order was modified was unusual and that he believed the decision was political. Another official said that the decision to lift the order came to customs officials directly from the White House.
Such orders are typically supposed to remain in effect until the importer produces proof that its supply chain is free of forced labor, a process that C.B.P. has said should involve a thorough review of its supply chains, including engaging with workers and worker-led organizations.
But Central Romana’s order was changed on the condition that it provide certification within the next six months that it had complied with applicable labor standards, the report said. The customs agency did not issue a news release about the change, as it had with some previous moves.
Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez, who led global labor policy in the State Department during the Biden administration, said that when she left government in January 2025, shortly before the import ban was lifted, issues at Central Romana persisted.
“I had hoped that the company would pursue a strategy that would really meaningfully address the threats that workers faced and the intimidation and exploitation that they reported, but by the time I left, it had not been resolved,” she said.
In June, six Dominican civil society organizations wrote an open letter arguing that forced labor continued on Central Romana’s farms. Since 2023, the Dominican Republic has been carrying out a plan to deport thousands of people of Haitian descent, worsening a climate of fear and dependency among farm workers, the groups said.
In the months after the lifting of the import ban, Patino Brewster, Barsa Strategies and Akin Gump all filed to terminate their lobbying registrations.
Kitty Bennett contributed research and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.
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10) Israel Opens Criminal Inquiries Into Killings of Hind Rajab, 5, and of Medics
Two high-profile cases that had spurred international condemnation of the country’s conduct in Gaza were transferred to the military police. Such investigations have rarely led to convictions.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 19, 2026
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it would open criminal investigations into the killing of Palestinians by its troops in two high-profile cases during the war in Gaza, including the deaths of Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl, and of more than a dozen medical workers.
The decision to open the criminal investigations into suspicions of military misconduct during the war came after a lengthy review of the cases and followed widespread international condemnation of Israel’s conduct, with several rights groups and governments accusing the country of war crimes.
More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to the territory’s health ministry, whose data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but has included thousands of children.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that a fact-finding mission had completed a review of about 150 incidents during the war, which was waged after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and had transferred them to the military prosecution services for examination. Such investigations have rarely led to convictions.
The first of the two cases to be investigated involves the deaths of Hind Rajab and six members of her family who were killed in a car in Gaza City in January 2024, as well as the shelling of a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance that had tried to approach the vehicle, an attack that caused the deaths of two paramedics.
The second case involves the fatal shooting in March 2025 of 14 Palestinian medics and rescue workers in southern Gaza, as well as that of a U.N. employee who drove by after the others had been shot.
The military said that it had found no grounds for criminal investigation in three other cases, including the killing of seven employees of World Central Kitchen, a relief group, in April 2024. The military also declined to open a criminal investigation into a deadly strike on a building occupied by Doctors Without Borders in February 2024 or into the killing of two of the medical organization’s employees who were traveling in a convoy in Gaza City in November 2023.
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
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11) Trump’s Lust for Vengeance Is Turning Into a Farce
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 19, 2026
Al Drago for The New York Times
The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge.
Trump is consumed by this lust for revenge. It defined the first moments of his second term. “Within hours of taking the presidential oath,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the president “stripped protective details” from Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, “and others he had viewed as disloyal, including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.”
Revenge against the aides and officials who restrained Trump’s worst impulses. Revenge against the bureaucrats and “deep state” agents who challenged his lawbreaking. Revenge against the prosecutors who pursued cases against him and against the judges who ruled in their favor. Revenge against the few Republicans who voted for his impeachment and conviction and against those who abandoned him after Jan. 6. And last, revenge against the American people, for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.
Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Trump turns the weight of the federal government against those Americans who defy his will.
Take Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was supposed to disappear — unlawfully shipped to a foreign dungeon and left to languish as part of the administration’s draconian deportation program. But with the help of his family, lawyers and lawmakers, Abrego Garcia fought back.
Not only did he successfully challenge his removal and captivity, but he also won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court, which ordered the federal government to facilitate his return to the United States. Soon after, the Department of Justice announced his criminal indictment, and he was imprisoned, again.
He fought this, too. In May, a judge dismissed the criminal case against him.
The Ahab-like tenacity of the White House in its pursuit of Abrego Garcia might make sense if he were some criminal mastermind — a danger to the public order. He wasn’t. He was just an ordinary person, a working member of his community who happened to be an easy target for the president’s deportation machine.
He was supposed to be an example — a warning to immigrants, legal or otherwise, to leave the country or suffer the consequences. By challenging the administration and winning in court, Abrego Garcia threatened the president’s program. He stood as a symbol of defiance in the face of Trump’s despotic abuse of power. This is why the Trump administration wouldn’t let up. As an unnamed White House adviser told Rolling Stone last year, “The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything.”
Trump tried to crush Abrego Garcia, and when he couldn’t, he made it the priority of his government to punish him for his resistance. This was less policymaking than obsession. And it should be said that Trump has still not given up; his Department of Justice has asked an appeals court to reinstate the criminal charges against Abrego Garcia.
Abrego Garcia is not alone. Trump has, for most of the summer, been pursuing a vendetta against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. Hearn was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, which is in a state of disrepair in the wake of the president’s attempted renovations.
Several months ago, Trump announced a plan to paint the floor of the pool blue, to match his vision of the National Mall. He handed a no-bid contract to a Virginia-based company, which proceeded to try to waterproof and paint the pool. Once that was finished, Trump drove his presidential motorcade down the empty pool in a show of triumph. Soon after, the pool was filled — and the trouble began.
The blue paint trapped heat, the heat spurred algae growth, and in short order the Reflecting Pool had turned green. There was nothing the White House could do about it. Misapplication of the new coating, meanwhile, had caused the floor to peel; chunks of it floated to the surface.
Unable to take responsibility for his own mistakes and failures, Trump blamed unnamed saboteurs and appears to have ordered the Department of Justice to press charges against them. Enter Hearn, who was accused of pulling off a piece of the pool’s liner. He was indicted by a grand jury on a federal vandalism charge and arrested.
But there was no evidence Hearn had done anything wrong. Instead, the problems at the pool were the product of poor work and quality control. Even the Department of Justice was forced to admit that the damage was the result of a “flawed installation.”
The U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, dropped the charges. Trump was furious. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” He wants a prosecution. He wants revenge.
Trump is hardly the first powerful person to abuse the law enforcement powers of the federal government to pursue narrow interests and petty grievances. Richard Nixon infamously turned both the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. against his political enemies. J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the F.B.I., used his authority to wage what amounted to a personal crusade against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he viewed as a dangerous subversive.
The story of the Trump administration is, as always, one of continuity with the worst parts of our past. And yet that continuity exists alongside novelty.
Both Nixon and Hoover cloaked their abuses of power in the language of necessity and national interest. They paid lip service to the rules and norms of constitutional government even as they treated them as obstacles to their own power. Committed to vice, they nonetheless feigned tribute to virtue.
Trump does no such thing. He does not see himself as a man in possession of an office, heading a government, so much as he sees himself as the government. The state is an extension of his person. He is the king, and it is one of his two bodies.
There is no observable national interest at work in the crusades against Abrego Garcia or Hearn. These are personal crusades, shaped entirely by Trump’s grievances, his desire for revenge, his insatiable need to soothe his own psychic wounds.
There are, to be sure, true believers within this administration, from the executive power fanatic Russell Vought to the far-right nativist Stephen Miller. But the man at the top has no such ambitions. He is there only for himself. The principal aim of his government as he sees it is his own glorification — a desperate quest to never lose face and to pursue vengeance against anyone who might undermine his sense of self.
Hence Trump’s failed war with Iran — a military failure and disastrous strategic mistake. There is no apparent plan to end the conflict, only the futile efforts of a president desperate to shed the stench of defeat. That is what the false negotiations and endless missile strikes are all about: a way to try to end the war without having lost it. Peace with honor, this time as something closer to farce.
The danger, of course, is what happens if there is no way out. What if Trump is truly stuck, fully caught in a trap of his own making?
With the terrible power of the United States at his fingertips, it is frightening to contemplate what he might do to save his fragile sense of self. He has already tried to wreck the country in pursuit of revenge against all those who challenge his ego and authority. There’s no reason to think that he won’t try to wreck the world in pursuit of the same.
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12) Status Defines Friendship for Too Many Americans
By Christine Emba, Aug. 19, 2026
Ms. Emba is a contributing Opinion writer and serves on the board of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Andrew Kung
Why do I feel like I’m being sold friends?
Join a “modern social club,” one ad beckons. “Turn strangers into friends” via curated dinner parties at trendy restaurants. A luxury condo building flogs its “community clubhouse” as an exciting amenity, while yet another social start-up informs me, rather ominously, that “we find your people.”
It’s possible that my feeds are too well primed: the algorithms can tell that I’m in my 30s, living in a city known for its transience, and that I frequently search for data on and read stories about our changing social lives. But the sheer number of these ads suggests that the need for friendship is widespread enough that an industry is forming around it.
There are the run clubs and exercise “cults.” On Instagram, I was seduced by a vibey post reminiscing about the pre-cellphone era of house parties. After I swiped through a carousel of nostalgia-inducing pictures, I was invited to just that kind of gathering — for a fee.
The loneliness epidemic has been well publicized, from the last surgeon general’s repeated warnings to musings in major media outlets. And the loneliness market has boomed: Venture capital firms are investing in “social and relational health”; technologists are selling companions and chatbots as cures for isolation; politicians and philanthropists have adopted “belonging” as a buzzword.
Even though I’d still love to make new friends, I’m lucky to already be embedded in a tight-knit group dating back to college. And these for-profit solutions all seem pitched at those who need them the least — socializing positioned as a luxury good. If isolation really is a societywide crisis, we need societywide solutions — and an understanding of who has been left out most acutely from what friendship promises.
In pursuit of that aim, the researchers Sam Pressler, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, and Soren Duggan, a communications strategist and Army veteran with a background in human intelligence collection, produced a report this spring titled “Nobody to Call,” based on a series of 30 in-depth, qualitative interviews with men ranging from their mid-20s to their mid-40s without college degrees. They hoped to add texture to the conversation on loneliness by seeking out those who they believe are struggling the most. We’ve all experienced social atrophy, Mr. Pressler told me, but for men without degrees the bottom has fallen out.
College completion rates have risen over the decades for both men and women, but a growing proportion of those who aren’t graduating are men. As of 2021, men made up around 43 percent of four-year-college enrollees, down from approximately 57 percent in 1970. “As the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life,” Pressler and Duggan write, “men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.” We tend to talk about the loneliness crisis in terms of gender, but class, as derived from educational status, is the factor too touchy — or too invisible — to acknowledge.
Less than half of Americans hold bachelor’s degrees, but those without are less likely to have places to gather (parks, libraries, even coffee shops), are less likely to join civic groups or social clubs and report having far fewer close friends or people to turn to for social support. The four-year degree isn’t just an economic signal; it’s become a lifestyle determinant.
In the “Nobody to Call” case studies and interview transcripts, men without college degrees described social drift that turns into a social cliff: Graduating from high school meant the loss of an accessible infrastructure for connection, and with it a whittling down of peer groups, and no new structure — college, the military, a union, churches or civic groups — to take its place.
And while higher education is often discussed in terms of its economic value, its relational value is strangely overlooked. The multiyear college experience brings together groups of peers who transition into adulthood together, often forming lasting bonds in the process and connecting to mentors and institutions along the way.
The majority of the men Pressler and Duggan interviewed were almost completely disconnected; of the 30, almost half reported having no close friends, and six reported having only one. In one of many poignant lines from the report, one interviewee noted bluntly: “I don’t have anybody that I feel like I matter to.”
Friendships, purpose and opportunity are built over time, through institutions and shared settings. For many men, unstable work — transient gig jobs, uncontrollable schedules — allows only for the creation of tenuous, easily breakable ties. A lack of money, time and affordable places to gather adds to a lack of confidence and social know-how, making new relationships harder to form or sustain. As one interviewee put it: “It is not community when you exclude people that don’t have them jobs like you, the money like you or even look like you.”
Most of the men interviewed as part of “Nobody to Call” seemed to deeply want to connect and contribute to their broader communities (contrary to the common public narrative of nihilistic, misogynistic loners actively contributing to a “male loneliness crisis”), but material barriers, compounding into psychological ones, often kept them from doing so.
Many admitted that although they wanted to build community and make friends, they had little sense of where to start. “I don’t know how to just go out in the wild and pick up friends. People don’t do as many in-person things as they used to many years ago.”
But there are examples of civic leaders making it easier. For instance, as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup celebrations, New York City’s office of the mayor opened five public soccer pitches around the city for overnight pickup games — an initiative called NYC Open Play. It was free, available at nontraditional hours and staffed to encourage connection; thousands joined to play.
There are other brass-tacks policy changes that could help: ending just-in-time scheduling, providing more job support and protections for gig workers and putting in place better leave policies that might allow space for the development of one’s civic life. But a major issue is simply being seen and understood — not as statistics or caricatures, but as members of a shared community.
America is overdue for a reckoning with how we have made college the main rite of passage to cultural life while letting others atrophy. Potential solutions to this could be anything from more support for apprenticeships and vocational programs — ones that impart the sense of belonging that can be achieved only through the shared pursuit of excellence — to the dream of a national service corps that pools young people together across economic lines.
Like many of America’s most pressing social crises, the loneliness epidemic is divided by class. The “loneliness industry” seeks to capitalize on the crisis of social isolation via paid solutions like those hawked to me online, but friendship as a pay-to-play luxury will continue to leave broad swaths of Americans out.
If loneliness really is a public health crisis, it’s the responsibility of government and institutions, not just the market, to begin offering solutions. Connection is, or at least should be, a public good.
There are almost no "third spaces" left that allow for unrestricted gathering that do not require you buy something. Parks and the library are about it, and where I live that is where folks whom are homeless hang out, so it deters others who don't want to be hassled for cash. College isn't the divider here: plenty of young adults make friends in first jobs, finding roommates, volunteering, etc here without paying college tuition. The overwhelming loneliness of life is compounded not by educational opportunities, but electronics, lack of community, and the fact that it costs minimum $40 for one person to leave the house for anything anymore. You don't meet folks hanging out in your own living room.
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13) The ‘Crack Spread’ Is Going to Make Your Life Unpleasant
By Skip York, Aug. 19, 2026
Mr. York is a fellow in energy and global oil at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
When President Trump announces yet another potential peace agreement with Iran, crude oil prices fall, and Americans make the mistake of thinking that gas and diesel prices will follow. But crude oil isn’t the right barometer of your pain at the pump. By the end of July, crude oil prices had fallen about 25 percent from their April peak, while gasoline prices dropped only about 9 percent after peaking at around $4.50 a gallon in May.
With prospects for peace fading again, both gas and diesel resumed their upward path, with gas at $4.07, while diesel reached $5.47 nationally.
Focusing on the price of crude is misleading, a bit like following the price of wheat when it’s bread that you’re actually buying. The gauge to watch is what’s called the crack spread — the difference between the cost of a barrel of crude and the prices of the refined products made from it. If you want to drill down, it’s often referred to as the 3-2-1 spread, which calculates prices when three barrels of crude are refined into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel, a typical ratio. (Cracking is the process of breaking large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones, which is what a refinery does.)
When crude oil prices fall faster than gas and diesel prices, the crack spread widens. This disconnect is known as the “rocket and feather” effect, in which retail gasoline prices escalate quickly as crude oil prices rise, but drift down slowly when prices start to fall. When wholesale prices of gasoline spike, service station owners raise prices quickly because they know their future gas deliveries will be more expensive. They might also notice that competitors are raising prices and act accordingly, as nobody wants to sell today’s fuel at yesterday’s price and forego the profits.
Conversely, when station owners see wholesale costs start to fall, they’re not necessarily in a rush to cut prices and sacrifice profit margins — at least until customers start to notice. The result is a retail market that tends to overreact to bad news and only grudgingly responds to good news.
More recently, there’s been an added supply twist tied to Russia. Ukraine’s drone bombing campaign has disabled swaths of Russia’s refining capacity, which could decrease the country’s supply by up to 28 percent from last year.
In the Middle East, the Iran-U.S. conflict not only interrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, but also damaged a number of refineries in the Persian Gulf. Similar to the situation in Russia, refining capacity remains well below prewar levels even as crude production in the region begins to recover. War in Ukraine and the Middle East could end immediately, but damaged refining capacity will take a long time to restore — and there aren’t a lot of new refineries under construction in the rest of the world.
In fact, even if crude production rises, it doesn’t help much when some 9 percent of global refining capacity is offline. Refining capacity is now the bottleneck that is squeezing fuel prices higher worldwide, diesel in particular. Russian and Middle Eastern refineries yield more diesel per barrel than U.S. refineries, which lean toward gasoline, so losing that output hits diesel supplies harder. That’s why diesel prices have fallen less than gasoline since their April peaks.
Another big player that is making waves is China, which is both the world’s largest crude importer and its largest refiner. At the start of the Iran-U.S. conflict, China began cutting crude oil imports, which are now at an eight-year low, drawing on domestic stockpiles to avoid rising prices while freeing up barrels for other refiners. That eased pressure on crude oil prices.
China wasn’t necessarily playing the good guy. While it was limiting imports, China also restricted exports of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. That pulled Chinese barrels out of a global market that badly needed them, tightening supply everywhere else and pushing fuel products’ prices up. This isn’t a temporary market reaction; it is a structural change.
And you’re paying for it. Through July, in our peak driving season, data from the Energy Information Agency indicates that wholesale gasoline and diesel prices are up about 59 percent and 69 percent, respectively, over a year ago. That’s way more than the 36 percent increase in crude oil prices.
The impact goes well beyond your commute and into the broader economy. Diesel is the workhorse of the real economy. Diesel moves goods by truck and rail; it makes harvesting crops possible, and is critical in the construction of homes, buildings and factories. That’s why the U.S. Postal Service has temporarily raised rates for package delivery. Jet fuel prices are expected to be up by about 70 percent this year, increasing airlines’ operating costs, sending fares higher. All of this makes the Fed’s job of moderating inflation more difficult.
The world isn’t running out of oil. It is running out of places to turn that oil into fuel. Which means the price of refined products such as gasoline will remain high. And that could be a far more vexing problem to fix.
Good! I hope oil prices go much higher than they currently are. Oil should be so expensive that it's only used for things that absolutely cannot be made with anything else. Using oil to burn in cars and to make cheap plastic should have been stopped decades ago.
@Frank> I hope oil prices go much higher. The wealthy won't care -- whether the price of gas is $4 or $10 won't make any difference. The wealthy will still keep their houses warm no matter the cost. What you're alluding to is a form of regressive taxation. The people on the fringe who have to drive gas powered cars for work will suffer. They're the ones who will have cold houses in the winter.
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