News

http://archive.today/2025.05.22-021209/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/middleeast/israel-warning-shots-west-bank.html

Israeli soldiers fired warning shots on Wednesday to disperse a group of senior Western diplomats, Palestinian officials and journalists as they toured a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to statements by the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority and television footage from the scene.

No one was reported injured, but the event intensified the friction between Israel and its foreign partners amid growing international criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. The gunfire came two days after Britain, France and Canada called for Israel to end the war in Gaza, and a day after Britain suspended trade talks with Israel and criticized its support for settlements in the West Bank.

Diplomats from all three countries were among a large diplomatic delegation on Wednesday that toured the city of Jenin in the West Bank, with officials from the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous institution that administers parts of the territory, including Jenin.

The authority had organized the tour to highlight how the Israeli military, seeking to stamp out armed groups, had captured and partly demolished an area on the edge of the city. The neighborhood is known as the Jenin refugee camp because it mostly houses the descendants of Palestinians forced to flee their homes during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel.

Toward the end of the tour, Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood fired at least seven shots to disperse some of the visiting officials as they stood about 80 yards from the soldiers, on the other side of a closed gate, according to several videos verified by The New York Times. The footage showed that the shooting began as officials milled around conducting interviews with journalists, several of them with their backs turned to the soldiers.

The gunfire occurred a few hundred yards from where an Israeli soldier fired on a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, killing her, in May 2022.

http://archive.today/2025.05.16-182248/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-16/ty-article/.premium/gazas-last-hospital-for-10-000-cancer-patients-shuts-down-due-to-repeated-israeli-strikes/00000196-d85c-d048-a7d7-d87e6e700000

In an attempt to assassinate top Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar, the Israeli military on Tuesday struck the European Hospital, Gaza's last facility that could treat cancer patients, killing at least 16 people, wounding 70, and leading to the evacuation of its patients. Since then, strikes on the hospital have not ceased.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that since October 7, 2023, Israel has struck 122 health facilities in the Gaza Strip and 180 ambulances in 686 different strikes.

According to a report by The Guardian, the UN estimates that more than 12,000 people in the Gaza Strip need to travel to receive treatment they don't have access to in the enclave. Ten thousand of them are cancer patients, for whom Aseel Aburass, the director of Physicians for Human Rights' Occupied Palestinian Territory Department, says "the only treatment that can be offered to patients today is symptomatic treatment."

Even before the war, "being a cancer patient in Gaza was a death sentence," according to Aburass. "Today, it is much worse. Their only hope is to evacuate outside the Gaza Strip." She added that "in November, the stock of chemotherapy drugs ran out, and even the little that came in during the respite has already run out."

Ever since the Gaza Strip was blockaded around 18 years ago, cancer patients have suffered significant difficulties in receiving medical treatment. Even before the war, no departments provided radiotherapy, and there was a shortage of equipment and various other treatments. Gazan cancer patients, therefore, mainly relied on treatments they would receive in hospitals in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Most of the Palestinians who left Gaza before the war were, in fact, oncology patients seeking treatment.

The situation has worsened since the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023. The two main hospitals providing radiotherapy were the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in the center of the Gaza Strip and the European Hospital in the south. The Al-Shifa Hospital and the Rantisi Hospital provided supportive treatment.

The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital was abandoned at the instruction of the IDF at the beginning of the war. Around two months ago, Division 252 commander Yehuda Wach ordered the hospital's destruction, leaving the European Hospital as the sole facility treating cancer patients – until its recent closure.

http://archive.today/2025.05.19-093134/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/health/joe-biden-diagnosis-prostate-cancer.html

Prostate cancer experts say that former President Joseph R. Biden’s diagnosis is serious. Announced on Sunday by his office, the cancer has spread to his bones. And it is Stage 4, the most deadly of stages for the illness. It cannot be cured.

But the good news, prostate cancer specialists said, is that recent advances in diagnosing and treating prostate cancer — based in large part on research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department — have changed what was once an exceedingly grim picture for men with advanced disease.

“Life is measured in years now, not months,” said Dr. Daniel W. Lin, a prostate cancer specialist at the University of Washington.

Dr. Judd Moul, a prostate cancer expert at Duke University, said that men whose prostate cancer has spread to their bones, “can live 5, 7, 10 or more years” with current treatments. A man like Mr. Biden, in his 80s, “could hopefully pass away from natural causes and not from prostate cancer,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s office said the former president had urinary symptoms, which led him to seek medical attention.

http://archive.today/2025.05.16-020422/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/us/politics/trump-voice-of-america-firings.html

The Trump administration on Thursday fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.

The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to over a third of Voice of America’s staff. They signaled that the Trump administration planned to continue its efforts to dismantle the broadcaster despite a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network, which President Trump has called “the voice of radical America.”

In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organization was put up for sale on Thursday.

Some of the journalists who were terminated on Thursday were from countries with repressive governments that persecute journalists for independent reporting, Mr. Abramowitz said in the email to employees on Thursday.

Those journalists now have to leave the United States by the end of June, as their immigration status is tied to employment at the news organization.

In a letter sent on Thursday to employees who had been fired, the Trump administration cited “the government’s convenience” as a reason for the terminations. The employees were under so-called personal services contracts, making them easier to let go than regular full-time employees with full civil service protections.

Mr. Trump has accused the outlet, which delivers news to countries with repressive regimes — including Russia, China and Iran — of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda.”

Voice of America, which was founded in 1942, halted operations on March 15, a day after Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Its news programming has been partly restored since the April court ruling that stopped the Trump administration from dismantling the agency and other newsrooms it oversees.

The Trump administration has challenged the April ruling, claiming that the lower court had gone too far in halting other firings that took place in March.

The Trump administration did not appeal parts of the April order that mandated the resumption of Voice of America’s news programming. The lower court found that Congress had required the executive branch to keep the network as “a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”

Ms. Lake said last week that Voice of America would incorporate content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump television channel that has endorsed falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

http://archive.today/2025.05.13-183726/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/world/middleeast/trump-syria-president-meeting.html

President Trump said on Tuesday that he would lift sanctions on Syria, throwing an economic lifeline to a country devastated by nearly 14 years of civil war and decades of dictatorship under the Assad family.

Mr. Trump was expected to meet for the first time with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where he is making the first major state visit of his second term. Mr. al-Shara led the rebel alliance that ousted President Bashar al-Assad in December.

The decision marks a sea change for Syria, breaking the economic stranglehold on a country seen as critical to the stability of the Middle East.

“There is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s what we want to see in Syria.”

A face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump offers Mr. al-Shara a unique opportunity to make his case to a world leader with the power to dramatically shape Syria’s future. It also marks a stunning turnaround for the man who once led a branch of Al Qaeda but broke ties with the jihadist group, seeking to moderate his image in the hope of gaining broader traction.

In the months since a rebel coalition seized control of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and toppled Mr. al-Assad, the United States has kept in place a multilayered sanctions regime that, with the war, has pushed the country to the brink of economic collapse.

Mr. al-Shara and other Syrian officials have argued that the fall of the regime should trigger an end to sanctions, many of which were put in place in response to the Assad dictatorship’s brutal crackdown on an uprising that began in 2011 and morphed into a civil war.

“The sanctions were implemented as a response to crimes committed by the previous regime against the people,” Mr. al-Shara told The New York Times in an interview last month.

And Syrian officials have told American intermediaries that they sought to avoid conflict with all neighboring countries, including Israel, and welcomed American investment.

But the Trump administration for months kept its distance from Mr. al-Shara’s fledgling administration. Some U.S. officials have expressed deep skepticism of Mr. al-Shara’s motives and his promises to protect religious minorities, pointing to his Islamist orientation and history with Al Qaeda.

The American administration had avoided high-level engagements with Mr. al-Shara’s government and issued demands related to counterterrorism and other issues that it says must be met for sanctions relief to be considered.

European leaders, eager to foster stability and prevent new waves of migration, have also pushed for more economic engagement.

Last week, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, offered a diplomatic boost to Mr. al-Shara, being the first European leader to host the Syrian president in his capital and vowing push to gradually lift European Union sanctions on Syria, provided that the country’s new leaders maintain their path toward stability.

“I told the Syrian president that if he continued to follow his path, we would continue on ours,” Mr. Macron said.

http://archive.today/2025.05.13-153233/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/politics/cia-hiring-diversity.html

After the Cold War ended, and again after the Sept. 11 attacks, a string of C.I.A. directors and congressional overseers pushed the agency to diversify its ranks.

The drive had little to do with any sense of racial justice, civil rights or equity. It was, rather, a hard-nosed national security decision.

The push for a more diverse work force intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Middle East and terrorism became top priorities. Members of Congress criticized the agency for not having enough Arabic, Dari and Pashto speakers, and too few officers focused on the Middle East and Central Asia.

The agency’s leaders had come to believe that having analysts from an array of backgrounds would lead to better conclusions. Officers with cultural knowledge would see things others might miss. Case officers who reflected America’s diversity would move about foreign cities more easily without being detected.

Former officials said that, in essence, was why the C.I.A. tried to pursue diversity: to lean into the competitive advantage that American society offers.

But what was once a bipartisan emphasis on the importance of diversity at the agency is facing new pressure. Under the Trump administration, the C.I.A. has moved to dismantle its recruitment programs, especially those that have sought to bring racial and ethnic minorities into the organization, which is mostly white.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, says those steps are about making a colorblind organization solely focused on hiring and promoting people based on merit.

Suddenly, C.I.A. officers who had been assigned to help find the next generation of spy handlers — even those who had worked at recruiting at primarily white universities — were on the chopping block.

Critics of the Trump administration’s moves fear that without aggressive recruiting of minorities, the C.I.A. will be less able to carry out its mission of working covertly in any country in the world and stealing secrets for the United States.

The first Trump administration was not as hostile to efforts to diversify the agency. Under Gina Haspel, who, as the first woman to lead the agency, served as director for much of Mr. Trump’s first term, the C.I.A. continued recruiting diverse candidates.

In 2020, the agency created its first television streaming advertisement, to demonstrate to women and minorities that the agency valued inclusivity, according to one official at the time.

The one-minute ad shows a group of officers — people of color, women and white men — being brought into the agency. A veteran employee who lectures to the recruits is Black. A language expert is of South Asian descent. The senior officers who order an overseas operation are women. And a case officer who executes a brush pass with a source in the field is a Black woman.

Now, the C.I.A. has created a new recruiting video. It focuses on technology and showcases a whiter group of officers, according to people who have seen it.

http://archive.today/2025.05.13-094649/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/illinois-crime-free-housing.html

Catherine Lang was evicted from her apartment outside Chicago after the police saw her swerving in traffic and charged her with driving drunk. A jury found her not guilty, but by then it was too late.

Dalarie Hardimon was evicted after the police chased a man speeding in her van through a residential neighborhood.

And Catherine Garcia was ordered out of the townhouse she and her sons had lived in for 20 years. Their offense? Making too many 911 calls. Most of them came from Ms. Garcia’s intellectually disabled son.

The three women lived in Illinois cities that have adopted what are known as crime-free housing laws, local ordinances that empower the police and landlords to evict tenants who are accused of breaking the law.

The laws were promoted as a way to clear out violent criminals, drug dealers and nuisance tenants who made life miserable for their neighbors. But an investigation by The New York Times and The Illinois Answers Project shows that many cities in Illinois have turned crime-free housing programs into a blunt instrument to oust families for virtually any alleged infraction, no matter how minor.

City police departments have ordered landlords to evict people over commonplace charges including shoplifting and driving while intoxicated. Renters have lost their homes based on accusations that they neglected their pets, failed to keep a close watch on their children and, in one case, eavesdropped on a neighbor. In many cities, a single violation was enough to trigger an eviction.

It did not matter if the person accused was the leaseholder. Entire families have been forced from their homes after a child living there was accused of a crime, or a visitor was arrested. In at least five cases, renters were flagged because they had called 911 to get help or to report a crime that had been committed against them.

Officials in more than a dozen municipalities said that their crime-free programs were fair and that the laws had led to drastic reductions in 911 calls and reports of nuisances in rental communities.

Several noted that they had modified their programs over the years, often in response to complaints from landlords and renters, to ensure that only serious infractions led to evictions.

But many cities, including Belleville, still have ordinances that allow them to seek evictions against virtually anyone the police suspect of breaking the law. Four landlords interviewed by The Times and Illinois Answers said they had each tried to help at least one tenant fight an eviction they thought was unnecessary or unfair. Enforcement records revealed many more cases in which landlords challenged evictions in hopes of keeping good tenants.

Mary Aviles, a landlord in Midlothian, a Chicago suburb, said she had called the police when she noticed a tenant had been leaving dogs caged in the home’s garage. While concerned about the dogs, she was shocked when the police ordered her to evict the tenants without warning; she felt the offense had not endangered others.

If she did not evict her tenant, Ms. Aviles faced fines up to $750 a day or losing her license to run a rental property, common penalties in most cities.

For years, Kate Walz, a lawyer in Chicago, and other housing advocates have sought legislation that would limit or ban crime-free housing programs statewide.

The latest effort, a bill being debated in the Illinois State Senate, would create sweeping regulations for the laws and make it more difficult for people to be evicted if they have not been convicted. The bill is scheduled for a Senate committee vote this week.

More than 100 cities adopted the laws. One in four Illinois residents now lives in a place that compels renters to sign a lease contract that states a tenant can be evicted if accused of a crime.

Many cities require tenants to sign crime-free leases that are so broad that virtually any perceived violation could be grounds for eviction, even if the allegations are never fully investigated or proved.

In Orland Park, renters must sign a contract that says they can be evicted after a single arrest. “Proof of violation shall not require a criminal conviction,” the contract reads.

In DeKalb, a university town about an hour outside Chicago, rental contracts state that tenants can be evicted for any allegation, from a violent felony to a municipal code violation, which can include setting off fireworks or giving alcohol to a minor. The tenant is held accountable for anyone visiting the household, even if the tenant was unaware of the guest’s behavior, or unable to control it.

By 2015, enforcement in some Illinois cities had gotten so aggressive that state legislators passed a law barring city officials from evicting victims of domestic violence for calling 911. Some towns had been counting domestic assault reports at a given address and evicting everyone living there, including the victims.

Despite the reform, The Times and Illinois Answers found hundreds of instances in which cities ordered tenants evicted after a domestic violence call to 911, most of them in Belleville. Mr. Eiskant said his program has never evicted a victim of domestic violence.

In 2021, Oak Forest police found a man overdosing on the floor of his apartment. The next day, police department officials ordered the man’s landlord to evict him. Last year, the police told a landlord to evict a family after a teenager who lived in the home was accused of stealing cars in Chicago with his friends. And at least four families were evicted after someone in the home was caught by the police smoking marijuana.

Oak Forest’s ordinance grants landlords, but not tenants, the opportunity to appeal the city’s decision to issue a crime-free housing violation. Tenants can be left in the dark because city officials send violation letters to landlords and make no effort to communicate with tenants, or explain why the tenants have been targeted for eviction.

In cities that do offer renters a chance to appeal, tenants are generally on their own to hire a lawyer. In many cities, the person ruling on appeals is the police chief or the crime-free housing officer, who would have ordered the eviction in the first place.

Many tenants choose not to appeal, because of the hassle or the belief that they would not win. Some cities do not provide for an administrative appeal, leaving tenants no option but to wait for a formal eviction notice and to fight it in court.

HOUSTON, United States

Federal charges have been filed against a New Mexico man accused of going on an arson spree in that state which destroyed a Tesla dealership and the Republican Party headquarters.

Jamison Wagner, 40, is accused of setting ablaze a Tesla showroom in Albuquerque and the Republican Party of New Mexico (RPNM) headquarters in February and March.

Wagner was arrested April 12 after investigators linked surveillance footage of both locations to him, with his white Hyundai vehicle being identified at the scenes. They confiscated evidence from his home, including materials for homemade incendiary devices using glass containers and flammable liquid which were used to ignite the fires.

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Sorry for the double post. My VPN is a cunt.

http://archive.today/2025.05.03-092052/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/us/politics/republicans-congressional-review-act.html

As President Trump moves unilaterally to slash the federal bureaucracy and upend longstanding policies, Republicans in Congress have embarked on a spree of deregulation, using an obscure law to quietly but steadily chip away at Biden-era rules they say are hurting businesses and consumers.

To do so, they are employing a little-known 1996 law, the Congressional Review Act, that allows lawmakers to reverse recently adopted federal regulations with a simple majority vote in both chambers. It is a strategy they used in 2017 during Mr. Trump’s first term and are leaning on again as they work to find ways to steer around Democratic opposition and make the most of their governing trifecta of the House, the Senate and the White House.

But this time, Republicans are testing the limits of the law in a way that could vastly expand its use and undermine the filibuster, the Senate rule that effectively requires 60 votes to move forward with any major legislation.

http://archive.today/2025.05.04-093155/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/joe-biden-cognitive-test-age.html

Months before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was forced to abandon his re-election campaign, his top White House aides debated having him undergo a cognitive test to prove his fitness for a second term but ultimately decided against the move, according to a forthcoming book.

Mr. Biden’s aides were confident that he would pass a cognitive test, according to the book, but they worried that the mere fact of his taking one would raise new questions about his mental abilities. At the same time, Mr. Biden’s longtime doctor, Kevin O’Connor, had told aides he would not take the 81-year-old president’s political standing into consideration when treating him.

The discussion took place in February 2024, a few weeks before Mr. Biden’s final White House physical exam and a period preceding some of his most damaging public episodes.

The same month that Biden aides considered the cognitive test, Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, released a report concluding that the president was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Mr. Biden held a late-night news conference to deliver an angry response in which he referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and declared, “My memory is fine.”

Throughout Mr. Biden’s presidency and especially during his re-election bid, his aides and advisers often argued that the news media was unfair in how it covered his age, fueling voters’ negative perception of his vigor. Few influential figures in the White House or on his campaign would entertain the idea that he was struggling to perform his presidential duties.

But outside Mr. Biden’s tight inner circle, many Democratic politicians and strategists began to worry quietly as his re-election bid took shape. By June 2022, Democrats were talking among themselves about his potential to drag down the 2024 ticket, with many suggesting he should not run again.

A New York Times article that month included an interview with David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama who has become one of the party’s elder statesmen.

Mr. Axelrod said that Mr. Biden “looks his age” — then 79 — and that he was feeding a narrative that he was no longer up to the job of being president.

“The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Mr. Axelrod said.

That comment prompted an angry call to Mr. Axelrod from Ron Klain, then Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was fueling doubts about a Democratic president who was on track to begin a re-election campaign.

“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Mr. Klain told him, the book recounts. “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”

http://archive.today/2025.05.02-221839/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/opinion/work-school-classroom-politics-harvard.html

On Oct. 8, 2023, I was on the steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, taking part in a vigil for the victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack. I’m an Israeli American tenured professor, and I felt it was my duty to stand up for Jewish and Israeli students. I helped organize an open letter denouncing antisemitism. I am a member of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. I have written numerous blog posts and opinion articles on this matter.

In my classroom, I have not discussed these issues at all. I am a professor of computer science, and students take my courses to learn the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computing devices. Students in my class have been on both sides of the campus divide. Two of them asked for more leniency in academic assignments because of their involvement in campus activism, one with a Jewish organization, the other with a Muslim one. I refused them both.

Why does this matter? An assignment about Boolean circuits is clearly less important than combating campus antisemitism, let alone the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. But the value I want to encourage is professionalism. When we erode the boundaries between the academic and the political, we ultimately harm both.

In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.

Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.

A vast majority of faculty members do not attempt to pursue a political agenda. They are busy doing the work of education and research that has made American universities the envy of the world and the engine of our prosperity. Unfortunately, a few faculty members can have a disproportionate influence on how universities are perceived and provide ammunition to those who want to see them destroyed.

http://archive.today/2025.05.01-112854/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/world/europe/ukraine-trump-minerals-deal.html

The minerals deal signed between the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends.

But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would.

It is not yet clear how the nine-page deal, the text of which Ukraine’s government made public on Thursday, will work in practice. Although the Trump administration had wanted Kyiv to use its mineral wealth to repay past U.S. military assistance, the idea of treating that aid as debt was removed in the final document.

​The deal also seemed to specifically keep the door open for Ukraine to eventually join the European Union, a move that neither the United States nor Russia has opposed.

But there was no mention of a security guarantee — which Ukraine had long sought to prevent Russia from regrouping after any cease-fir​e.

Still, the much-anticipated signing of the agreement has almost certainly accomplished one thing that seemed almost impossible two months ago: It has tied Mr. Trump to the future of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s parliament still has to ratify the agreement, which will probably happen in the next two weeks, parliament members said on Thursday morning.

In the end, it appears that Ukraine managed to get some of what it wanted, but not everything. The notable omission was the absence of a security guarantee.

The signing of the deal on Mr. Trump’s 100th day in office was just the latest twist in his ever-shifting approach to the war, which Russia started with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Mr. Trump has falsely blamed Kyiv for instigating the war and seemed to find more of a kinship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than with anyone in Ukraine. He has repeatedly questioned why the United States became Kyiv’s biggest ally under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And he has made no secret of his irritation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Kyiv’s requests for more military assistance.

http://archive.today/2025.04.28-134416/https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-biden-aide-israel-missed-opportunity-for-saudi-deal-hopefully-it-wont-do-so-again/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government missed an opportunity to reach a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia last year, a top aide to former US president Joe Biden said in an interview that aired Sunday.

The deal would have required a ceasefire and hostage release deal and a willingness on the part of Israel to establish a political horizon for an eventual Palestinian state — something Netanyahu has long rejected and, since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, has stated would amount to a prize for terrorism.

“I don’t understand the decision not to grab that opportunity as the most important strategic move Israel can make,” Amos Hochstein told Channel 13’s “Hamakor” investigative program. “I think it was missed before. I hope Israel doesn’t miss that opportunity moving forward — even if it means doing things that politically are uncomfortable.”

Hochstein was one of nine senior Biden administration officials interviewed for the Sunday program who took viewers through their frustrations in dealing with Netanyahu’s government throughout the Gaza war.

The former US officials shared their belief that Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the postwar management of Gaza was a stalling tactic to avoid decisions that risked toppling his government.

They detailed brief deliberations in Washington about having Biden deliver a speech aimed at potentially spurring an election in Israel, given Netanyahu’s intransigence.

And they revealed that a video posted by Netanyahu accusing the US administration of withholding various weapons transfers for months scuttled a nearly final agreement to release the lone shipment of 2,000-lb bombs that had actually been frozen.

Biden officials fumed at Netanyahu, who they felt was being ungrateful for the support that the US had been providing.

Weeks earlier, the White House had pushed a $19 billion supplemental security assistance package for Israel through Congress.

“Hamakor” also interviewed a more junior administration official who resigned in protest of what she said was Biden’s decision to give Israel a pass despite a US law that bars the transfer of weapons to countries that block the transfer of humanitarian aid.

Despite the disagreements, the top Biden officials professed devotion to Israel’s security, explaining that this dedication was what made attacks by Netanyahu and his supporters, who accused them of abandoning Israel, particularly stinging.

“Having the prime minister of Israel question the support of the United States after all that we did — do I think that was a right and proper thing for a friend to do? I do not,” said former national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “[However], I will always stand firm behind the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and that the United States has a responsibility to help Israel, and I’ll do that no matter who the prime minister is, no matter what they say about me or the US or the president that I work for.”

Facing pressure from progressives in his party, Biden signed a memo early last year requiring the State Department to draft a report certifying whether recipients of US weapons were using them according to international law and not blocking humanitarian aid from reaching civilians.

Stacy Gilberg, who served as a senior adviser in the State Department, was among those involved in compiling that report. Shortly before it was released on May 10, she and her colleagues were boxed out of the process and the final conclusions of the report were written by higher-level officials, Gilbert told “Hamakor.”

The report concluded that while Israel did not fully cooperate with efforts to ensure aid flowed into Gaza, Jerusalem’s actions did not amount to a breach of US law that would require a halt on US weapons.

“I had to read the report twice because I couldn’t believe what it said. It was just shocking in its mendacity. Everyone knows that is not true,” she said, explaining her decision to resign in protest shortly thereafter.

Herzog, too, made a point of summarizing Biden’s perilous term positively.

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.26-092803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine.html

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Mr. Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.

Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the U.S. refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released on Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”

But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

But what has been so striking about Mr. Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the American president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.

After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two U.S.-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

Those are just a couple of the U.S. government organizations that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.

At the same time, Mr. Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Mr. Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.

The net effect of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Just last month, Mr. Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”

“The current approach,” Mr. Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.25-234108/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/world/europe/ukraine-peace-counterproposal.html

In response to a White House proposal to end the war in Ukraine that critics say would grant the Kremlin much of what it wants, Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counteroffer — one that in some ways contradicts what President Trump has demanded, but also leaves room for possible compromises on issues that have long seemed intractable.

Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.

Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for compromise. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.

In their proposal, the Ukrainians say their country should be “fully restored,” without specifying what that would mean. Though Mr. Zelensky has long said his administration’s ultimate goal is the return of all territories that made up Ukraine when it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, including Crimea, Kyiv’s latest proposal seems to be intentionally vague on this point.

U.S. officials later explained that although the total amount of territory controlled by Russia was unlikely to change in any future negotiations, Ukrainian officials have made clear that they intended to propose territorial swaps to improve the country’s defensive positions. Trump administration officials have privately assured the Ukrainians that they would fight for the swaps, but said they could not guarantee that Russia would go along with them.

And the White House has taken Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s, when it comes to the future shape of Ukraine’s military. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine’s military, now the largest and most battle-hardened in Europe besides Russia’s own, be subject to strict limitations on its size and capabilities. Trump administration officials have told the Ukrainians that they would not support such limitations.

After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.

But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.

One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.

A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.

http://archive.today/2025.04.21-151945/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/google-search-remedies-hearing.html

The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.

In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.

The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.

The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.

The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Judge Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies like Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.

The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.03-150445/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/europe/russia-envoy-us-visit-trump-dmitriev.html

A Kremlin envoy said on Thursday that he was meeting with the Trump administration in Washington this week, the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.

The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation.

He said on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration about Mr. Dmitriev’s post.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” It also came as President Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.

Mr. Dmitriev did not specify whom he was meeting with, but his main known American counterpart in recent weeks has been Steve Witkoff, the close friend of Mr. Trump who is the White House envoy for the Middle East and Russia.

Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.

In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.

In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”

“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, with Mr. Putin having rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.

But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.

In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.

U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.

“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-233234/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-rubio-putin-ukraine.html

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on.”

Whatever Mr. Rubio’s meaning, his words were the latest American gift to Mr. Putin’s cause. At every turn since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, he or his top national security aides have issued statements that played to Russia’s advantage: taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table, repeatedly declaring that Ukraine would have to give up territory and even blaming Ukraine for the invasion itself.

On Friday, Mr. Trump himself suggested that the United States could walk away from the conflict, much as it did when frustrated in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, in an interview with The New York Times in the spring of 2016, when he was first running for president, Mr. Trump described Ukraine as Europe’s problem. “I’m all for Ukraine; I have friends that live in Ukraine,” he said.

But Mr. Trump added: “When the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn’t seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we’re the farthest away.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth struck a similar tone in February, when he declared on his first official trip to Europe that Ukraine would not enter NATO for the foreseeable future, that Russia would likely keep the 20 percent or so of Ukraine it had seized, and that any peacekeeping or “tripwire” force in Ukraine to monitor a cease-fire would not include Americans.

Mr. Trump’s distrust of Mr. Zelensky remains as strong as ever. “I’m not a fan,” he told Ms. Meloni in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday.

There is virtually no serious discussion underway at the White House or on Capitol Hill about the next package of arms for Ukraine when the current support, which was pushed through in the last months of the Biden administration, runs its course, according to congressional supporters of Ukraine.

European officials say they have not even received assurances that the United States will continue its extensive intelligence sharing for Ukraine, which has been key to its ability to target Russian troops and infrastructure.

In fact, when the White House talks about its relationship with Ukraine these days, it is usually in terms of what it is getting, not what it plans to give. Since the Oval Office blowup, the United States and Ukraine have been renegotiating a deal for American investment and access to Ukrainian minerals, rare earths and other mining projects.

It has taken the better part of six weeks to rewrite the deal that was left unsigned at the White House that day. But Mr. Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week that they would sign a substitute agreement next Thursday.

The deal Mr. Trump really covets is one with Russia. But getting there requires getting past Ukraine — either by declaring a cease-fire, or just setting the problem aside.

Some experts argue that even if Mr. Trump makes that huge shift, it likely will not work. They doubt Mr. Putin is ready to limit his ties to China, Iran and North Korea — countries that fuel the war effort with technology, drones and, in North Korea’s case, troops.

In several interviews, including one with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Witkoff described the benefits of a broader relationship with Russia, one that would essentially normalize relations. When Mr. Carlson asked about Mr. Putin’s broader ambitions to take all of Ukraine and perhaps seek to reabsorb some of the former Soviet republics, Mr. Witkoff dismissed the idea. He said he was “100 percent” certain that Mr. Putin has no desire to overrun Europe, or even to control Ukraine.

“Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?” he asked. “That would be like occupying Gaza.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-123341/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-israel-iran-nuclear.html

Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program, according to administration officials and others briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Trump made his decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran’s ability to build a bomb, at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically.

The debate highlighted fault lines between historically hawkish American cabinet officials and other aides more skeptical that a military assault on Iran could destroy the country’s nuclear ambitions and avoid a larger war. It resulted in a rough consensus, for now, against military action, with Iran signaling a willingness to negotiate.

In a meeting this month — one of several discussions about the Israeli plan — Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, presented a new intelligence assessment that said the buildup of American weaponry could potentially spark a wider conflict with Iran that the United States did not want.

A range of officials echoed Ms. Gabbard’s concerns in the various meetings. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; and Vice President JD Vance all voiced doubts about the attack.

Even Mr. Waltz, frequently one of the most hawkish voices on Iran, was skeptical that Israel’s plan could succeed without substantial American assistance.

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-150937/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-national-security.html

This month, a network of pro-Russian websites began a campaign aimed at undermining confidence in the U.S. defense industry, according to disinformation analysts.

The F-35 fighter jet was one target. The effort, coordinated by a Russian group known as Portal Kombat, spread rumors that American allies purchasing the warplanes would not have complete control over them, the analysts said.

A study by analysts at Alethea, an anti-disinformation company that has tracked the F-35 campaign, indicates that pro-Russian outlets are already stepping up their propaganda efforts.

“The U.S. government at least publicly seems to be taking a more hands-off approach or prioritizing defense against other threats,” said Lisa Kaplan, Alethea’s chief executive. “So foreign governments are currently targeting government and military programs like the F-35 program — if they can’t beat it on the battlefield, beat it through influencing political discourse and disinformation.”

Alethea found that Russian-controlled websites began pushing narratives after China restricted the export of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs. The messages claimed that the United States faced a strategic vulnerability that could affect its ability to manufacture the F-35 and other weapons systems.

The Russian postings said that America’s willingness to allow manufacturing to move overseas had made its military edge unsustainable. The websites also amplified the message that U.S. allies no longer trusted that American defense companies would be reliable suppliers.

In the past, U.S. cybersecurity agencies would counter such campaigns by calling them out to raise public awareness. The F.B.I. would warn social media companies of inauthentic accounts so they could be removed. And, at times, U.S. Cyber Command would try to take Russian troll farms that create disinformation offline, at least temporarily.

But President Trump has fired General Timothy D. Haugh, a four-star general with years of experience countering Russian online propaganda, from his posts leading U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

The F.B.I. has shut down its foreign influence task force. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ended its efforts to expose disinformation. And this week the State Department put employees who tracked global disinformation on leave, shutting down the effort that had publicized the spread of Chinese and Russian propaganda.

Almost three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the guardrails intended to prevent national security missteps have come down as the new team races to anticipate and amplify the wishes of an unpredictable president. The result has been a diminished role for national security expertise, even in the most consequential foreign policy decisions.

“Right now, the N.S.C. is at the absolute nadir of its influence in modern times,” said David Rothkopf, the author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”

Mr. Trump is skeptical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Pentagon is considering plans to hand over U.S. command of NATO troops. The president is close to the tech billionaire Elon Musk, so the Pentagon invited him to view plans in the event of a war with China in the Pentagon “tank,” a meeting space reserved for secure classified meetings (the White House stopped Mr. Musk from getting the China briefing).

Mr. Trump fired the director of the National Security Agency and six National Security Council officials on the advice of Laura Loomer, a far-right activist. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, appeared to have little influence over the dismissals.

“When somebody with no knowledge can come in and level accusations at the N.S.C. senior directors, and Waltz can’t defend them, what does that say?” asked John R. Bolton, one of those who had Mr. Waltz’s job in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Last Tuesday afternoon, just six days after Mark Zuckerberg’s third meeting with Donald Trump this year, the Meta CEO’s key antagonists in the federal government arrived in the Oval Office.

The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement.

Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta. The social media giant has pushed the president to settle a lawsuit that began in his first term, and continued through the Biden years, which seeks to force the company to divest Instagram and Whatsapp. (The FTC is an independent agency, but both Meta and many of its foes have prepared for Trump to shape the handling of the lawsuit.)

On Monday, during an election campaign-style rally in Nampa, Idaho Senator Bernie Sanders had two anti-genocide protesters ejected from the event by police for unfurling a banner depicting the Palestinian flag with the phrase “Free Palestine.” As the protesters were dragged away by police, thousands in the arena erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine,” drowning out Sanders’ attempts to quell their anger.

For nearly two months, tens of thousands of people across the United States have been attending rallies held under the banner of “Fighting Oligarchy” and headlined by Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

However, it is necessary to take stock of the political tendencies claiming to be “fighting oligarchy.” What role—if any—should Sanders, his protégé Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Party play in this struggle?

The episode in Nampa, Idaho, helps answer this question. Under conditions in which Israel is systematically exterminating, starving and ethnically cleansing the entire population of Gaza, Sanders declared at the rally that Israel “has the right to defend itself.”

As Sanders said these words, two rally attendees dropped a Palestinian flag banner over the giant American flag that was positioned behind the stage.

At the sight of the banner, the packed auditorium roared in approval, with many standing and cheering in extended applause.

An order was quickly given by Sanders’ campaign to have the banner removed. Local police ripped down the banner and detained those who unfurled it. Sanders did not tell the cops to leave the anti-genocide protesters alone, doing nothing to protect them even as the crowd continued to protest the police assault.

Amid growing boos and chants from the crowd, Sanders raised his hands and said, “Shhhhhh!” This had the opposite effect; thousands began chanting, “Free Palestine! Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” with many raising their fists in solidarity.

For the last 18 months, the Democratic Party, in alliance with the Republicans, has armed, funded and politically backed the genocide in Gaza. In the opening months of the genocide, both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez vocally opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, with Sanders declaring in November 2023, “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, [a] permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas.”

Ocasio-Cortez publicly backed US arms sales to Israel, declaring, “on the sole principle of Iron Dome and defense, I absolutely think there’s an openness, for sure.” Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Biden in 2020 and, after he had orchestrated the Gaza genocide, in 2024.

http://archive.today/2025.04.16-160823/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-protesters.html

A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters.

Ms. Greene, a Republican firebrand and loyal ally of President Trump, had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her. As her supporters stood and clapped, several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as Andrew Russell Nelms of Atlanta, and dragged him out of the room.

“I can’t breathe!” Mr. Nelms shouted, interjecting with expletives as he was told to put his arms behind his back. The police then used a stun gun on him twice.

Back inside the room, Ms. Greene was unfazed as she greeted attendees at the event, in Acworth, Ga., northwest of Atlanta. She thanked the officers, drawing applause from the crowd of about 150 people.

“If you want to shout and chant, we will have you removed just like that man was thrown out,” she said. “We will not tolerate it!”

Minutes later, as Ms. Greene started to play a video of former President Barack Obama discussing the national debt, police forcibly removed and used a stun gun on a second man, identified later as Johnny Keith Williams of Dallas, Ga., who had stood up and started to heckle.

Over the next hour, as Ms. Greene trumpeted the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government and played clips of herself railing against witnesses in committee hearings, police officers escorted at least six people from the room, according to a spokesman for the Acworth Police Department. Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.

http://archive.today/2025.04.15-201702/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/richard-l-armitage-dead.html

Richard L. Armitage, who served as the No. 2 official at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, during the turbulent era of the 9/11 attacks and the start of America’s retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79.

Mr. Armitage was the unnamed source of a 2003 news account disclosing the identity of a secret Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration had made the case for war based on exaggerated claims that the country was tied to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.

Ms. Wilson was publicly named a week after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion column in The New York Times accusing President Bush of misleadingly claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson, a former state department official, accused the Bush administration of outing his wife in retaliation for his criticism.

Mr. Armitage, a 1967 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who saw action in Vietnam, served in senior roles in the State and Defense Departments during the Reagan administration. In the 2000 election, he advised the inexperienced Mr. Bush as part of a group that called itself “the Vulcans” — hawkish foreign policy insiders from earlier Republican administrations.

Condoleezza Rice, a leader of the group, became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. Mr. Armitage was confirmed by the Senate as the deputy secretary of state under Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Vulcans, who also included Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response, Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani general, seeking support in what would become an American-led war on terror.

The president of Pakistani*, Pervez Musharraf, later told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his country “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t support the United States. Mr. Armitage denied that he had threatened military action against Pakistan.

Following his graduation from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He then volunteered to serve as an adviser to Vietnamese forces, and he became conversant in Vietnamese during three tours with Vietnamese troops. He earned a Bronze Star.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Mr. Armitage led a flotilla of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuees to safe harbor in the Philippines, according to a Naval Academy biography.

He was a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan and then served as an assistant secretary for defense for East Asia and the Pacific. In 1983, he became assistant secretary of defense for security policy.

Under President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Armitage served as an ambassador to East European states after the fall of the Soviet Union. He founded Armitage International after leaving government in 2005 and ran it until his death.

In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Armitage endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump. Four years later, he was one of more than 130 former Republican national security officials who signed a statement calling Mr. Trump “dangerously unfit” to serve a second term. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 race.

* Sic.