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  • Dick Cheney dies; vice president unapologetically supported wars in Iraq, Afghanistan

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    Richard B. Cheney, the former vice president of the United States who was the architect of the nation’s longest war as he plotted President George W. Bush’s thunderous global response to the 9/11 terror attacks, has died.

    Vexed by heart trouble for much of his adult life, Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.

    “For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”

    To supporters and detractors alike, Cheney was widely viewed as the engine that drove the Bush White House. His two-term tenure capped a lifetime of public service, both in Congress and on behalf of four Republican presidents.

    It often fell to Cheney, not President Bush, to make an assertive, unapologetic case for the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for the controversial antiterrorism measures such as the Guantánamo Bay prison. And after the election of President Obama, it was once again Cheney, not Bush, who stood among the new president’s fiercest critics on national security.

    In an October 2009 speech — one emblematic of the role he embraced after leaving the White House — Cheney blasted the Obama administration for opening a probe of “enhanced” interrogations of suspected terrorists conducted during the Bush years.

    “We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys,” he said. The rhetoric was textbook Cheney: blunt, unvarnished, delivered with authority.

    While Cheney at the time was attempting to occupy the leadership vacuum in the GOP in the age of Obama, there was little doubt that he also was motivated to preserve a legacy that appears to be as much his as former President Bush‘s. For eight years, Cheney redrew the lines that defined the vice presidency in a way no predecessor had. His office enjoyed greater autonomy than others before it, while working to keep much of his influence from plain sight. That way of operating led to a challenge before the Supreme Court as well as a criminal investigation over a leak of classified information.

    Moreover, the image of a powerful backroom operator managing the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” combined with his service as Defense secretary during the Persian Gulf War and his stint as a chairman of defense contracting giant Halliburton, made Cheney a towering bête noire to liberals worldwide. To them, he embodied a dangerous fusion of politics and the military-industrial complex — and they viewed his every move with deep suspicion.

    To his champions, however, he was the firm-jawed, hulking, resolute defender of American interests.

    Standing with the administration was more than a duty to Cheney; it was an article of faith. The invasion of Iraq “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it over again, we’d do exactly the same thing,” Cheney said in a 2006 interview, even as the nation slowly learned that U.S. intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction was simply not true.

    Three years earlier, Cheney had pledged that the U.S. would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators” — a comment that haunted him as insurgents in the country gained strength, killed thousands of allied troops and extended the conflict for years. The war in Afghanistan would drag on for 20 years, ending in 2021 as it had begun, with the Taliban back in control.

    While Cheney will largely be remembered for his leading role in the response to the 9/11 terror attacks, he had long worked the corridors of power in Washington. He was a White House aide to President Nixon and later chief of staff to President Ford. As a member of the House from Wyoming, he rose quickly to become part of the Republican leadership during the 1980s. In the early ’90s, he ran the Pentagon during the Gulf War.

    Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, and spent much of his teenage years in Casper, Wyo. His father worked for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.

    As a young man, he was more interested in hunting, fishing and sports than in academics, and a stint at Yale University was short-lived. He eventually obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wyoming and studied toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

    In 1964, he married Lynne Ann Vincent, who became a lifelong political partner while strongly influencing Cheney’s conservatism. Daughter Elizabeth, who was elected to Congress in 2017, was born in 1966 and her sister, Mary, arrived three years later. The sisters became embittered years later when Elizabeth — who preferred Liz — took a stance opposing same-sex marriage, which seemed a slap to Mary and her wife. Cheney, however, offered his support for such unions, an early GOP voice for same-sex marriage. Years later, he came to Liz’s defense when she broke with fellow Republicans and voted to impeach President Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In addition to his wife and daughters, Cheney is survived by seven grandchildren.

    A fellowship sent Cheney to Washington, where he soon began working for a politically shrewd House member who also was a lifetime influence, Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration, Cheney followed.

    After Ford succeeded Nixon in the wake of Watergate, Rumsfeld served as chief of staff, with Cheney at his side. Ford eventually appointed Rumsfeld secretary of Defense, and Cheney, at 34, ran the White House. Even then, his calm reserve was a hallmark.

    Although nearly everyone working for him was older, “He was very self-assured,” James Cannon, a member of Ford’s White House team, said years later. “It didn’t faze him a bit to be chief of staff.”

    Ford lost a narrow election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, but Cheney’s Washington career was just getting underway. He headed back to Casper and in little more than a year was running for Congress.

    His health, though, already was a factor. In 1978, at age 37 and in the midst of a primary election campaign, he had a heart attack, the first of several. He would undergo multiple surgeries, including a quadruple bypass, two angioplasties, installation of a heart pump and — in 2012 — a transplant. His frequent trips to the hospital and seeming indestructibility provided fodder for late-night talk show hosts during Cheney’s vice presidency.

    With the help of television ads reminding voters that Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson had served full White House terms despite having had heart attacks, he narrowly won the Republican nomination and, in November 1978, secured election to the House of Representatives from Wyoming’s single district.

    In Congress, he was known as a listener more interested in problem-solving than conservative demagoguery, even as he quietly built a voting record that left no doubt about where he stood on the political spectrum. He quickly moved into the ranks of GOP leadership.

    Cheney stepped into the public spotlight after he was named Defense secretary by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. As the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War cooled, Cheney was charged with overseeing a Pentagon that was more fractious than usual. In a test of political and managerial will, he oversaw major reductions in the Defense budget, a profound downsizing of forces and the closing of obsolete military bases. He helped implement the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking and racketeering.

    But Cheney — along with his hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell — made his mark in the American response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Cheney played a key role in persuading the Saudi royal family to allow American troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend against a looming attack from Hussein’s forces.

    The Cheney-led Pentagon then shifted to offense in 1991, amassing an enormous American force that totaled more than 500,000 soldiers, nearly twice the number employed in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. military, with help from allied countries, overwhelmed the Iraqi forces in Kuwait in only 43 days and easily entered Iraq.

    Characteristically, Cheney would defend the then-controversial decision to halt the U.S. advance toward Baghdad, which left Hussein in power. “I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country,” he said in a 1992 speech. “We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.”

    Cheney’s efforts to station U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, considered critical to the push to repel Iraq, would have unforeseen ramifications. The military presence there helped radicalize young Islamic militants such as Osama bin Laden.

    After President Clinton’s victory in 1992, Cheney left government service. Three years later, he assumed the helm of Halliburton, one of the world’s leading oil field companies and a prominent military contractor. The company thrived under Cheney’s leadership: Its relationship with the Pentagon flourished, its international operations expanded and Cheney grew wealthy.

    In 2000, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, asked Cheney to head up the search for his running mate, then ultimately chose Cheney for the job instead. He brought to the ticket an element of maturity and Washington gravitas that the inexperienced Bush did not possess.

    Cheney’s lack of design on the presidency, and his willingness to return to government 10 days shy of his 60th birthday, seemingly gave Bush the benefit of his experience and earned Cheney a measure of trust — and thus authority — commanded by few presidential advisors.

    Once in office, Cheney, mindful of lessons learned in the Ford White House, sought to revitalize an executive office he believed had become too hemmed in by Congress and the courts. He termed it a “restoration.”

    “After Watergate, President Ford said there was an imperiled president, not an imperial presidency,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. Cheney, he said, felt “he badly needed to expand the powers of the presidency to assure the national security.”

    In office barely a week, Cheney created a national energy policy task force in response to rising gasoline prices. A series of meetings with top officials from the oil, natural gas, electricity and nuclear industries were closed to the public, and Cheney refused to reveal the names of the participants. Cheney would exert similar influence over environmental policy and, with an office on Capitol Hill, forcefully advance the president’s legislative agenda.

    A lawsuit seeking information about the task force made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the vice president’s favor in 2004. One of the justices in the majority was Antonin Scalia, who was a friend and, it was later revealed, had recently gone duck hunting with the vice president.

    Another hunting trip gone awry earned Cheney embarrassing headlines in 2006 when he accidentally shot and wounded a member of the party with a round of birdshot while quail hunting on a Texas ranch.

    More troubling to Cheney was a federal criminal probe in connection with the 2003 leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. The investigation resulted in the conviction four years later of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was later pardoned by President Trump.

    Cheney, however, will be largely remembered for his unwavering belief that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — especially the latter — were essential, a stance he maintained even as the missions in both theaters evolved from rooting out suspected terrorists to nation-building, and even as the casualties skyrocketed and it became clear the 20-year mission was doomed.

    When U.S. troops and civilians were pulled out of Afghanistan in a fraught and fatal departure in 2021, it was Cheney’s daughter who spoke up.

    “We’ve now created a situation where as we get to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are surrendering Afghanistan to the very terrorist organization that housed al Qaeda when they plotted and planned the attacks against us,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R.-Wyo.) said.

    The former vice president’s steely resolve was captured years later in “Vice,” a 2018 biographical drama in which Christian Bale portrayed Cheney as a brainy yet uncompromisingly uncharismatic leader.

    It was Cheney who insisted early on that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us,” Cheney said in August 2002. The U.S. eventually determined that Iraq had no such weapons.

    He argued forcefully that Hussein was linked to the 2001 terror attacks. When other administration officials fell silent, Cheney continued to make the connections even though no shred of proof was ever found. In a 2005 speech, he called the Democrats who accused the administration of manipulating intelligence to justify the war “opportunists” who peddled “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage.

    Cheney also frequently defended the use of so-called extreme interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, on al Qaeda operatives. He did so in the final months of the Bush administration, as both the president’s and Cheney’s public approval ratings plunged.

    “It’s a good thing we had them in custody and it’s a good thing we found out what they knew,” he said in a 2008 speech to a friendly crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

    “I’ve been proud to stand by him, the decisions he made,” Cheney said of Bush. “And would I support those same decisions today? You’re damn right I would.”

    Oliphant and Gerstenzang are former Times staff writers.

    Staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this story.

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    James Oliphant, James Gerstenzang

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  • Opinion | The U.K. Stabbing Is Every Commuter’s Nightmare

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    For those of us who ride the commuter rails and subways daily, Saturday night’s mass stabbing on a London-bound train is a nightmare brought to life. In such confined and well-lit spaces, there isn’t any way to do what the experts say you should: run, hide and, as a last resort, fight.

    A train car moving at high speed with the doors and windows closed is a violent psychopath’s dream—a veritable barrel full of unarmed, unsuspecting fish. Most of us have our heads buried in our phones, our ears distracted by music or podcasts. Some of us are poring over newspapers or dreamily watching the countryside fly by. Rarely do any of us do a threat assessment of those nearby. We are in our own little in-between place—not home, not at work. En route. Vulnerable.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    Matthew Hennessey

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  • Trump intensifies military strikes on suspected drug cartels

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    President Donald Trump’s administration has intensified its military campaign against alleged drug smugglers, with a ninth strike announced overnight targeting a boat suspected of carrying drugs.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the ninth strike resulted in the deaths of three people. On Tuesday, the administration reported that two individuals were killed in a separate attack on a boat suspected of smuggling drugs toward the U.S.Trump has justified these military actions by asserting the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He said, “We will hit them very hard when they come in by land and they haven’t experienced that yet, but now we’re totally prepared to do that. We’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land.”Lawmakers from both political parties have expressed concerns about President Trump ordering these military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.Typically, the Coast Guard intercepts alleged drug smugglers, arrests them, and turns them over to the court system for prosecution. The Trump administration is skipping that step and using the military to kill them. In one strike, two people survived. Instead of prosecuting them, the White House returned the alleged drug smugglers to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, where at least one of them did not face charges. Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:

    WASHINGTON —

    President Donald Trump’s administration has intensified its military campaign against alleged drug smugglers, with a ninth strike announced overnight targeting a boat suspected of carrying drugs.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the ninth strike resulted in the deaths of three people.

    On Tuesday, the administration reported that two individuals were killed in a separate attack on a boat suspected of smuggling drugs toward the U.S.

    Trump has justified these military actions by asserting the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He said, “We will hit them very hard when they come in by land and they haven’t experienced that yet, but now we’re totally prepared to do that. We’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land.”

    Lawmakers from both political parties have expressed concerns about President Trump ordering these military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.

    Typically, the Coast Guard intercepts alleged drug smugglers, arrests them, and turns them over to the court system for prosecution. The Trump administration is skipping that step and using the military to kill them.

    In one strike, two people survived. Instead of prosecuting them, the White House returned the alleged drug smugglers to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, where at least one of them did not face charges.

    Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:


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  • Israel says transfer of aid into Gaza is halted ‘until further notice’ as ceasefire faces major test

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    The fragile ceasefire in Gaza faced its first major test Sunday as an Israeli security official said the transfer of aid into the territory is halted “until further notice” after a Hamas ceasefire violation, and Israeli forces launched a wave of strikes.The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending a formal announcement on the halt in aid, which is occurring a little over a week since the start of the U.S.-proposed ceasefire aimed at ending two years of war.Israel’s military earlier Sunday said its troops came under fire from Hamas militants in southern Gaza. Health officials said at least 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes in central and southern Gaza.Israel’s military said it had struck dozens of what it called Hamas targets.A senior Egyptian official involved in the ceasefire negotiations said “round-the-clock” contacts were underway to de-escalate the situation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the military to take “strong action” against any ceasefire violations but didn’t threaten to return to war.Israel’s military said militants fired at troops in areas of Rafah city that are Israeli-controlled according to the agreed-upon ceasefire lines. No injuries were reported. The military said Israel responded with airstrikes and artillery.Hamas, which continued to accuse Israel of multiple ceasefire violations, said communication with its remaining units in Rafah had been cut off for months and “we are not responsible for any incidents occurring in those areas.”Shortly before sunset, Israel’s military said it had begun a series of airstrikes in southern Gaza against what it called Hamas targets. It also said its forces struck “terrorists” approaching troops in Beit Lahiya in the north.Strikes in GazaAn Israeli airstrike killed at least six Palestinians in central Gaza, health officials said. The strike hit a makeshift coffeehouse on the coastal side of the town of Zawaida, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-run government.Another Israeli strike killed at least two people close to the Al-Ahly soccer club in the Nuseirat refugee camp, the ministry said. The strike hit a tent and wounded eight others, said Awda hospital, which received the casualties.A third strike hit a tent in the Muwasi area of Khan Younis in the south, killing at least one person, according to Nasser hospital.An Israeli military official told journalists there had been three incidents Sunday, two in southern Gaza and one in the north, and noted that the update was partial for now.More bodies of hostages identifiedIsrael identified the remains of two hostages released by Hamas overnight.Netanyahu’s office said the bodies belonged to Ronen Engel, a father of three from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and Sonthaya Oakkharasri, a Thai agricultural worker from Kibbutz Be’eri.Both were believed to have been killed during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the war. Engel’s wife, Karina, and two of his three children were kidnapped and released in a ceasefire in November 2023.Hamas in the past week has handed over the remains of 12 hostages.Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said that it had found the body of a hostage and would return it on Sunday “if circumstances in the field” allowed. It warned that any escalation by Israel would hamper search efforts.Israel on Saturday said the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt would stay closed “until further notice” and its reopening would depend on how Hamas fulfills its ceasefire role of returning the remains of all 28 deceased hostages.Hamas says the devastation and Israeli military control of certain areas of Gaza have slowed the handover. Israel believes Hamas has access to more bodies than it has returned.Israel has released 150 bodies of Palestinians back to Gaza, including 15 on Sunday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israel has neither identified the bodies nor said how they died. The ministry has posted photos of bodies on its website to help families attempting to locate loved ones. The bodies were decomposed and blackened. and some were missing limbs and teeth.Only 25 bodies have been identified, the Health Ministry said.After Israel and Hamas exchanged 20 living hostages for more than 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, the handover of remains is a major issue in the first stage of the ceasefire. A major scale-up of humanitarian aid, including the opening of the Rafah crossing, for people entering or leaving Gaza, is the other central issue.Ceasefire’s second phaseHamas said talks with mediators to start the ceasefire’s second phase have begun.The next stages of the ceasefire are expected to focus on disarming Hamas, Israeli withdrawal from additional areas it controls in Gaza, and future governance of the devastated territory.Hazem Kassem, a Hamas spokesman, said late Saturday that the second phase of negotiations “requires national consensus.” He said Hamas has begun discussions to “solidify its positions,” without giving details.According to the U.S. plan, the negotiations will include disarming Hamas and the establishment of an internationally backed authority to run Gaza.Kassem reiterated that the group won’t be part of the ruling authority in a postwar Gaza. He called for the prompt establishment of a body of Palestinian technocrats to run day-to-day affairs.For now, “government agencies in Gaza continue to perform their duties, as the vacuum is very dangerous, and this will continue until an administrative committee is formed and agreed upon by all Palestinian factions,” he said.Rafah border crossingThe Rafah crossing was the only one not controlled by Israel before the war. It has been closed since May 2024, when Israel took control of the Gaza side. A fully reopened crossing would make it easier for Palestinians to seek medical treatment, travel or visit family in Egypt, home to tens of thousands of Palestinians.On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry in Ramallah announced procedures for Palestinians wishing to leave or enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing. For those who want to leave Gaza, Palestinian Embassy staff from Cairo will be at the crossing to issue temporary travel documents that allow entry into Egypt. Palestinians who wish to enter Gaza will need to apply at the embassy.The Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. The ministry maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israel has disputed them without providing its own toll.Thousands more people are missing, according to the Red Cross.Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people in the attack that sparked the war.___Samy Magdy reported from Cairo.

    TEL AVIV, Israel —

    The fragile ceasefire in Gaza faced its first major test Sunday as an Israeli security official said the transfer of aid into the territory is halted “until further notice” after a Hamas ceasefire violation, and Israeli forces launched a wave of strikes.

    The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending a formal announcement on the halt in aid, which is occurring a little over a week since the start of the U.S.-proposed ceasefire aimed at ending two years of war.

    Israel’s military earlier Sunday said its troops came under fire from Hamas militants in southern Gaza. Health officials said at least 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes in central and southern Gaza.

    Israel’s military said it had struck dozens of what it called Hamas targets.

    A senior Egyptian official involved in the ceasefire negotiations said “round-the-clock” contacts were underway to de-escalate the situation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the military to take “strong action” against any ceasefire violations but didn’t threaten to return to war.

    Israel’s military said militants fired at troops in areas of Rafah city that are Israeli-controlled according to the agreed-upon ceasefire lines. No injuries were reported. The military said Israel responded with airstrikes and artillery.

    Hamas, which continued to accuse Israel of multiple ceasefire violations, said communication with its remaining units in Rafah had been cut off for months and “we are not responsible for any incidents occurring in those areas.”

    Shortly before sunset, Israel’s military said it had begun a series of airstrikes in southern Gaza against what it called Hamas targets. It also said its forces struck “terrorists” approaching troops in Beit Lahiya in the north.

    Strikes in Gaza

    An Israeli airstrike killed at least six Palestinians in central Gaza, health officials said. The strike hit a makeshift coffeehouse on the coastal side of the town of Zawaida, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-run government.

    Another Israeli strike killed at least two people close to the Al-Ahly soccer club in the Nuseirat refugee camp, the ministry said. The strike hit a tent and wounded eight others, said Awda hospital, which received the casualties.

    A third strike hit a tent in the Muwasi area of Khan Younis in the south, killing at least one person, according to Nasser hospital.

    An Israeli military official told journalists there had been three incidents Sunday, two in southern Gaza and one in the north, and noted that the update was partial for now.

    More bodies of hostages identified

    Israel identified the remains of two hostages released by Hamas overnight.

    Netanyahu’s office said the bodies belonged to Ronen Engel, a father of three from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and Sonthaya Oakkharasri, a Thai agricultural worker from Kibbutz Be’eri.

    Both were believed to have been killed during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the war. Engel’s wife, Karina, and two of his three children were kidnapped and released in a ceasefire in November 2023.

    Hamas in the past week has handed over the remains of 12 hostages.

    Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said that it had found the body of a hostage and would return it on Sunday “if circumstances in the field” allowed. It warned that any escalation by Israel would hamper search efforts.

    Israel on Saturday said the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt would stay closed “until further notice” and its reopening would depend on how Hamas fulfills its ceasefire role of returning the remains of all 28 deceased hostages.

    Hamas says the devastation and Israeli military control of certain areas of Gaza have slowed the handover. Israel believes Hamas has access to more bodies than it has returned.

    Israel has released 150 bodies of Palestinians back to Gaza, including 15 on Sunday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israel has neither identified the bodies nor said how they died. The ministry has posted photos of bodies on its website to help families attempting to locate loved ones. The bodies were decomposed and blackened. and some were missing limbs and teeth.

    Only 25 bodies have been identified, the Health Ministry said.

    After Israel and Hamas exchanged 20 living hostages for more than 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, the handover of remains is a major issue in the first stage of the ceasefire. A major scale-up of humanitarian aid, including the opening of the Rafah crossing, for people entering or leaving Gaza, is the other central issue.

    Ceasefire’s second phase

    Hamas said talks with mediators to start the ceasefire’s second phase have begun.

    The next stages of the ceasefire are expected to focus on disarming Hamas, Israeli withdrawal from additional areas it controls in Gaza, and future governance of the devastated territory.

    Hazem Kassem, a Hamas spokesman, said late Saturday that the second phase of negotiations “requires national consensus.” He said Hamas has begun discussions to “solidify its positions,” without giving details.

    According to the U.S. plan, the negotiations will include disarming Hamas and the establishment of an internationally backed authority to run Gaza.

    Kassem reiterated that the group won’t be part of the ruling authority in a postwar Gaza. He called for the prompt establishment of a body of Palestinian technocrats to run day-to-day affairs.

    For now, “government agencies in Gaza continue to perform their duties, as the vacuum is very dangerous, and this will continue until an administrative committee is formed and agreed upon by all Palestinian factions,” he said.

    Rafah border crossing

    The Rafah crossing was the only one not controlled by Israel before the war. It has been closed since May 2024, when Israel took control of the Gaza side. A fully reopened crossing would make it easier for Palestinians to seek medical treatment, travel or visit family in Egypt, home to tens of thousands of Palestinians.

    On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry in Ramallah announced procedures for Palestinians wishing to leave or enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing. For those who want to leave Gaza, Palestinian Embassy staff from Cairo will be at the crossing to issue temporary travel documents that allow entry into Egypt. Palestinians who wish to enter Gaza will need to apply at the embassy.

    The Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. The ministry maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israel has disputed them without providing its own toll.

    Thousands more people are missing, according to the Red Cross.

    Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people in the attack that sparked the war.

    ___

    Samy Magdy reported from Cairo.

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  • DEA promoted L.A. agent who pointed gun at colleague despite history of issues

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    David Doherty was standing at his desk inside the Los Angeles headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration when a supervisor from another office stormed in hurling profanities.

    Doherty testified at a preliminary hearing in a San Fernando courtroom earlier this year that a fellow agent, James Young, got “face to face” with Doherty and challenged him to a fight without provocation.

    Doherty said he tried to deescalate by hugging Young and saying it was “all good brother,” according to his testimony. But then, Doherty said, he felt Young’s DEA-issued handgun jammed against his midsection.

    “I got you motherf—,” Doherty recalled Young saying.

    Young then aimed the weapon at Doherty’s face, according to the agent’s testimony.

    James Young allegedly pointed a gun at a fellow federal agent during a 2022 incident at the Drug Enforcement Agency office in Los Angeles.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Staring down the barrel of a gun wielded by an official who, at that time in 2022, oversaw roughly 30 officers in the DEA’s Ventura County office, Doherty told the court, he wrestled Young to the ground and disarmed him.

    More than two years later, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Young, 54, with assault over the incident.

    It was one of several bizarre moments that led Young to exit the DEA — but only after the agency promoted him twice despite documented concerns about his behavior and mental health.

    The Times reviewed a Los Angeles police report Doherty filed about the alleged attack along with DEA disciplinary records and internal e-mails.

    The records show DEA officials were well aware of Young’s concerning behavior, yet still gave him increased responsibilities. One high-ranking DEA official even tried to dissuade Doherty from reporting the attack to police, according to the agent’s testimony and the LAPD report.

    After Doherty’s preliminary hearing testimony, Young was held to answer on on multiple charges for crimes he allegedly committed between 2022 and 2024, including a road rage incident, domestic violence and illegal possession of a stockpile of guns, ammo and grenades.

    Young, who remains free on bond, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He declined to comment. His defense attorney, Jeff Voll, said he plans to ask a judge to grant Young entry into a diversion program due to mental health issues, but offered no further details about his client or the case.

    A DEA spokeswoman said she could not respond to media inquiries because of the federal government shutdown, though the agency has previously declined to comment on The Times reporting about Young.

    Young’s first issues at the DEA arose in 2012, while he was on assignment in Tokyo. That year, he was sent home after a “medical evaluation” that determined he had issues that were “preventing or impeding his ability to perform the requisite tasks and duties of his position,” according to a treatment agreement between Young and the DEA reviewed by The Times.

    Young was required to attend therapy for “mental health issues” and “alcohol abuse,” the document shows.

    Young was also suspended for two days due to “improper operation of a government vehicle and poor judgment” while in Tokyo, according to a DEA disciplinary notice.

    Young was reassigned to Los Angeles in 2013 and eventually put in charge of the DEA’s satellite office in Ventura County, according to Doherty’s testimony.

    In 2021, an agent filed a complaint against Young accusing him of making “volatile, unprofessional phone calls” and “inappropriate comments” toward subordinates, according to an e-mail reviewed by The Times. It was not clear what, if anything, the DEA did about the complaint.

    Two federal law enforcement officials who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly told The Times that many agents sensed something was “off” with Young, with both recounting stories of colleagues concerned about how he handled firearms.

    Doherty testified that after the gun incident at the DEA’s L.A. office in 2022, he felt like higher-ups at the agency tried to protect Young.

    “I didn’t feel like it was being handled appropriately, and I kind of saw the writing on the wall, that it was something DEA was trying to brush under the rug,” Doherty said in court.

    Doherty made a report at LAPD’s Central Division station shortly after the shooting. In it, he said another DEA official in L.A., Assistant Special Agent in Charge Brian Clark, tried to discourage him from going to police. Clark warned Doherty that Young could actually seek to press assault charges against him, according to the report, which did not explain Clark’s rationale.

    Clark, who is now the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

    The LAPD investigation stopped when the head of the DEA’s Los Angeles field office, Bill Bodner, called then-LAPD Deputy Chief Al Labrada and claimed jurisdiction over the incident, according to the police report.

    Bodner left the DEA in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. He and Labrada did not respond to questions from The Times. A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to an inquiry about the case.

    The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General eventually presented a criminal case to local prosecutors in December 2022, according to a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. But the assault charges related to the attack at the field office weren’t filed until June 2025. The spokeswoman declined to explain the delay.

    Young retired from the DEA in 2024, but was allowed to collect a paycheck on administrative leave for roughly 18 months after the alleged attack on Doherty, according to two federal law enforcement officials.

    In September 2024, Young allegedly got into an argument with a driver on the 405 Freeway, bumped the other vehicle with his car and then brandished a handgun at the victim, according to a criminal complaint.

    The day after the road rage incident, Young allegedly attacked his wife and placed her in a wrestling hold, applying pressure to her head and neck, authorities said. A subsequent search of Young’s Saugus home by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies turned up 30,000 rounds of ammunition, several grenades, a sawed-off shotgun and modified credentials to make it appear that Young was still an active DEA agent.

    Investigators also found what was described in court filings as a video of a “gang-style execution” being played on a loop on a large screen.

    If convicted as charged, Young faces up to 29 years in state prison.

    In the Doherty incident, text messages displayed in court show Young claimed he didn’t realize why pulling his gun was wrong until after it happened.

    “Brother I love you. I would die for you. I’m sorry for not reading things right. I thought we were playing, but I know I f— up and misread the situation,” Young wrote to Doherty. “Pls forgive me … I’ll never do anything to hurt you. Please forgive me for pulling my gun. You can file against me. I concede that.”

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    James Queally

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  • ‘It’s hard to see so many kids die.’ How volunteering in Gaza transformed American doctors and nurses

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    When Texas neurologist Hamid Kadiwala told his parents he was heading to Gaza to volunteer at a hospital there, they begged him to reconsider.

    “Why would you take that risk?” they asked. What about his Fort Worth medical practice? His wife? His four children?

    But Kadiwala, 42, had been deeply shaken by images from Gaza of mass death and destruction and felt a responsibility to act. Israel’s siege on the small, densely populated Gaza Strip was “a history-shaking event,” Kadiwala said. “I want my kids to be able to say that their father was one of those who tried to help.”

    Kadiwala is one of dozens of American doctors and nurses who have worked in the Gaza Strip since 2023, when Israel began bombing the enclave in retaliation for the deadly Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.

    Neurologist Hamid Kadiwala poses for a portrait at Tarrant Neurology Consultants in Fort Worth.

    (Desiree Rios / For The Times)

    The volunteers — men and women of all ages, agnostics as well as Muslims, Christians and Jews — have labored under the constant threat of violence, amid raging disease and with little access to food and medicine they need to save lives.

    Many are hopeful that the new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that took effect Friday will halt the violence. But even with new aid rolling in, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza remains daunting.

    With foreign journalists largely barred from Gaza and more than 200 Palestinian media workers slain by Israeli bombs and bullets, on-the-ground testimony from doctors and nurses has been critical to helping the world understand the horrors unfolding.

    But bearing witness comes at a steep personal cost.

    As Kadiwala drove into the enclave in a United Nations convoy late last year, he saw an endless expanse of gray rubble. Emaciated young men swarmed his vehicle. The sky buzzed with drones. Bombs sounded like rolling thunder.

    Kadiwala compared the landscape with dystopian films such as “Mad Max.” “It’s so hard to understand because our brains have never seen something like that,” he said.

    He knew that worse was yet to come.

    “You have to get numb,” he told himself as he prepared to enter Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where he would be living and working for more than a month. “These patients are here for help, not to see me cry.”

    Child patients are forced to share beds or lie on makeshift mattresses in the hospital corridors due to limited resources.

    Child patients are forced to share beds or lie on makeshift mattresses placed in the corridors due to limited resources and space at Nasser Hospital as the pediatric ward of the hospital is overwhelmed with the waves of displaced families arriving from the north in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Sept. 22.

    (Abdallah F.s. Alattar / Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Death in Gaza

    The explosions began each morning shortly before the call to prayer.

    “Within 20 minutes, there would be 150 people sprawled wall-to-wall with serious injuries,” said Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina who has been to Gaza twice, and who was working at Nasser in March in the violent days after a ceasefire broke.

    Perlmutter, 70, had volunteered on more than 40 humanitarian missions: in Haiti after its devastating earthquake, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in New York after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

    Nothing prepared him for Gaza.

    Hospitals stank of sewage and death. Doctors operated without antibiotics or soap. Never before had he seen so many children among the casualties. The hospital filled with shell-shocked kids who had been wrenched from collapsed buildings and others with bullet wounds in their chests and heads.

    “I would step over babies that were dying,” he said. “I would see their blood expanding on the floor, knowing that I had no chance of saving them.”

    Palestinians try to put out a fire at the emergency department of the Nasser Hospital.

    Palestinians try to put out a fire at the emergency department of the Nasser Hospital after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis on March 23.

    (AFP via Getty Images)

    In one haunting experience, an injured boy lying on the ground reached for Perlmutter’s leg, too weak to talk. Perlmutter knew it was too late for the boy, but that other patients still had a shot at survival.

    “I had to pull my pant leg away to get to one I could save,” he said.

    Perlmutter is Jewish and until visiting Gaza was a supporter of Israel. Around his neck he wears as a pendant a mezuzah, which contains a small scroll with verses from the Torah. It was a gift from his late father, a doctor who survived the Holocaust.

    But working in Gaza changed him.

    After treating so many kids with gunshot wounds, he became convinced that Israelis were deliberately targeting children, which the Israeli military denies.

    As he toiled, he and another doctor, California surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, began taking photos of the carnage. Together they would go on to publish essays in U.S. media outlets detailing what they had seen and to send letters to American leaders begging for an arms embargo. Sidhwa would conduct a poll of dozens of American doctors, nurses and medics who said they, too, had treated preteen children who had been shot in the head.

    Activism was a new calling for Perlmutter. He knew it might cost him relationships with loved ones who supported Israel and possibly even patients at his medical practice back in North Carolina. He knew it was straining his relationship with his wife. But he plowed ahead.

    “It’s hard to see so many kids die in front of you and not make that your life.”

    Hospitals under siege

    Andee Vaughan, a 43-year-old trauma nurse, has spent much of her life in ambulances, emergency rooms and on backcountry search-and-rescue trips in her home state of Washington. She spent months providing medical care on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

    She prides herself on maintaining her cool, even under trying circumstances. But while volunteering at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, she often felt tears welling up.

    It wasn’t the mayhem of mass casualty events that shook her, nor the sound of shallow breaths as a patient who had been shot in the skull slipped toward death.

    It was the seemingly countless victims who under normal circumstances could have been saved.

    Like the boy she watched suffocate because the hospital didn’t have enough ventilators. Or patients who perished from treatable infections for lack of antibiotics and proper dressings for wounds.

    Medical workers treat a patient at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.

    Andee Vaughan, bottom right, worked day and night for three months at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.

    (Courtesy of Andee Vaughan)

    “I am haunted by the patients on my watch who probably shouldn’t have died,” Vaughan said.

    Virtually every person she encountered suffered from diarrhea, skin infections, lung problems and chronic hunger, she said. That included exhausted Palestinian doctors and nurses, many of whom had lost family members, been displaced from their homes and were living in crowded tent cities where hundreds of people shared a single toilet. Many Palestinian medical staffers have been working without pay.

    “You have a whole system in survival mode,” said Vaughan, who contracted giardia shortly after arriving in Gaza and who ate just once a day because there was so little food.

    Vaughan spent three months in Gaza and volunteered to stay longer. Then her hospital came under attack.

    As Israeli forces advanced on Gaza City to confront what they described as the last major Hamas stronghold in the strip, Al-Quds was sprayed by gunfire and rocked by bombs. Most of its windows were blown out. A tank missile hit an oxygen room, destroying everything inside.

    Vaughan filmed videos that showed Israeli quadcopters — drones equipped with guns — hitting targets around the hospital.

    “They are systematically destroying all of Gaza,” she said. “They’re shooting everything, even the donkeys.”

    A trauma nurse, center, cuts the shirt off a young patient at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.

    Andee Vaughan, center, cuts the shirt off a young patient at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.

    (Courtesy of Andee Vaughan)

    Just a third of Gaza’s 176 hospitals and clinics are functional, and nearly 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed since the war began, according to the World Health Organization.

    It is not lost on Vaughan that most of the weapons used in those attacks come from the United States, which has provided Israel $21.7 billion in military assistance since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, according to a study by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

    U.S. involvement in the war is what prompted Vaughan to volunteer in Gaza in the first place. “I was there in some ways to make amends for the damage that we have done,” she said.

    Vaughan was evacuated from Gaza last month, bidding goodbye to colleagues and patients who were so malnourished their bones jutted from their skin like tent poles.

    She was ferried to Jordan, where on her first morning since leaving Gaza she went down to breakfast, saw a buffet overflowing with food, and began to sob.

    Coming home

    A doctor talks to a nurse.

    Dr. Bilal Piracha talks to a nurse about a patient’s condition at White Rock Medical Center in Dallas on Oct. 6. Piracha has been to the Gaza Strip three times this year, performing humanitarian work at a local hospital.

    (Emil T. Lippe / For The Times)

    After three tours in Gaza, Dallas emergency room doctor Bilal Piracha now works with a kaffiyeh draped over his scrubs.

    The black-and-white scarf, a symbol of Palestinian liberation, often sparks comments from patients, some of them disapproving. Piracha, 45, welcomes the opportunity to talk about his experience.

    “This is what I have seen with my own eyes,” he tells them. “The destruction of hospitals, the destruction of nearly every building, the killing of men, women and children.”

    Dr. Bilal Piracha stands inside an emergency operating room.

    Dr. Bilal Piracha stands inside an emergency operating room at White Rock Medical Center in Dallas on Oct. 6.

    (Emil T. Lippe / For The Times)

    Like many other U.S. doctors and nurses who have spent time in Gaza, Piracha is racked with survivor’s guilt, unable to forget the patients he couldn’t help, the mass graves he saw filled with bodies, the hunger in the eyes of the local colleagues he left behind.

    “Life has lost its meaning,” he said. “Things that once felt important no longer do.”

    He now spends most of his free time speaking out against the siege, traveling throughout the U.S. to meet with members of Congress and making frequent appearances on TV and podcasts. He has marched in antiwar protests and dropped massive banners from Texas highways that say: Let Gaza live.

    He is in frequent touch with doctors in Gaza, who are hopeful that the new ceasefire will put a stop to the violence, but say massive amounts of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid are needed immediately.

    Piracha doesn’t know what to tell them.

    “We can give them words of hope and prayers, but that is it,” he said.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • 2 years after Hamas-led attack, an Israeli town struggles to rebuild

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    BEERI, Israel  — Little has changed in the house of Miri Gad Messika’s parents from two years ago, when Hamas-led militants blitzed into this tiny community less than three miles from Gaza’s eastern edge, killing more than 100 people and kidnapping 32 others.

    The scorch marks from the fighting that day still mar the walls, and the underbrush of bullet-shattered tiles crackles with Messika’s every step. To the side lay a stuffed panda doll, dusty and discarded on what remained of a kitchen counter.

    “We always used to say this place is 99% heaven and 1% hell,” Messika said, her eyes sweeping across the room before looking out into the ravaged courtyard.

    Miri Gad Messika, a Beeri resident who was in the kibbutz on the day of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, is shown at her parents’ destroyed home on the second anniversary of the attack.

    (Yahel Gazit / For The Times)

    The heaven part was the place she knew all her life as a third-generation resident of Beeri, with its printing press and basketball team. Hell? That was the periodic rocket attacks during the decades of flare-ups between the militant group Hamas and Israel that would send residents racing into their safe rooms.

    “But we knew how to manage that,” she said. “We just went into the safe room and closed the door. That’s it.”

    But 10 minutes into the onslaught that fateful Saturday morning on Oct. 7, 2023, Messika understood it was “a historic event.”

    Visitors point to images of individuals in a photo of a large crowd of people

    Visitors point to photos of their loved ones who were killed at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023.

    (Yahel Gazit / For The Times)

    “We weren’t prepared for such a thing,” she said.

    On Tuesday, the second anniversary of the attack, Messika and others across Israel recalled the day that sparked the country’s longest war, shattered Israelis’ long-held sense of security and entrenched anew the hatreds and divisions long a part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The scars endure like the lingering smell of soot in her parents’ home.

    Four Beeri residents remain in Hamas’ hands, but none are alive, Messika said, adding to a tally of 102 people who were killed — almost 10% of the kibbutz’s population. And while a few hundred residents have returned to live here, most remain in alternative housing, awaiting a reconstruction project to repair the 134 houses destroyed in the attack, including Messika’s.

    Messika is building a new house and is adamant that she, her husband and their three children will continue to live here among the community of those who survived. But there are days — like Tuesday — when she wakes up with a migraine that makes her “want to never wake up.”

    “How do you digest the loss of 102 people?” she said.

    The Hamas operation began around 6:29 a.m. and involved a rocket and drone barrage, paraglider commandos and teams of fighters fanning out on pickups and motorcycles from Gaza across southern Israel. By the time it ended, about 1,200 people were killed, two-thirds of them civilians, Israeli authorities say, and roughly 250 people were kidnapped.

    There is hope here and across the region that there may soon be a denouement to the war. Last week, President Trump presented a 20-point peace plan that has since been accepted — for the most part — by Hamas and Israel. Final negotiations are underway this week in Egypt, with the expectation that all hostages — the 20 who are alive, and the 28 thought to have died — will be handed over in the coming days.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement Tuesday, pledged U.S. support for Israel and said the peace proposal “offers a historic opportunity to close this dark chapter and to build a foundation for a lasting peace and security for all.”

    But even if that were to happen, said Shosh Sasson, 72, there was a sense of something having been irretrievably shattered.

    “I never thought an attack like this would happen here. We always felt safe. But now the ground under our feet feels wobbly. Yes, even now, because the problem is not finished,” said Sasson, who came with her husband to pay their respects at a shelter-turned-shrine on the highway outside Beeri.

    Her husband, Yaakov, agreed. “For the future it will always be like this. Our neighbors don’t want to live with us in a friendly way,” he said.

    Nearby in Reim, the site of the Nova music festival, where about 300 concertgoers were killed, visitors walked around a memorial site, featuring posters bearing images of the victims and a description of their last moments.

    I never thought an attack like this would happen here. We always felt safe. But now the ground under our feet feels wobbly

    — Shosh Sasson, Israeli citizen

    A few yards away, a tour group from Eagles’ Wings, an organization that brings Christians to visit Israel and support it, were listening reverently to 26-year-old Chen Malca as she described her experience surviving the Nova attack. When she finished, a priest led a prayer, putting his hand on Malca’s head as the others raised their hands to the sky.

    “We pray the destruction of Hamas and the destruction of evil, just a couple of yards away from us over in Gaza, Father,” he said.

    As he spoke, an explosion boomed in the distance, then another. One of the Eagles’ Wings organizers reassured the group that it was “the Israeli action activity in Gaza. It’s nothing to be worried about.”

    Standing apart from the mass of people was 55-year-old Kati Zohar, who kept vigil before a memorial for her daughter, Bar, 23, who was killed as she was trying to warn police that Hamas fighters were nearby, Zohar said.

    She and her husband moved four months ago to the city of Sderot — a 20-minute drive away — so as to be near their daughter’s memorial.

    “Every time I feel that I’m missing her, I come here and sit with her, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, talk to her … because this is the last place she was alive and happy,” she said.

    Though once a happy person, “I’m not happy any more, and I don’t think I will be again,” she said. “A part of me is missing.”

    Her sadness, Zohar said, was matched by her disappointment that the Israeli army did not do more to stop the attacks and save her daughter, and by her anger that the war was still going on with the hostages still not returned even as the world is turning against Israel.

    Israel’s campaign since the attack has so far killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, left nearly 170,000 wounded and all but obliterated the enclave, even as almost all of Gaza’s residents are now displaced. The United Nations, rights groups, experts and many Western governments accuse Israel of committing genocide.

    Israel denies the charge, even as it faces unprecedented levels of opprobrium.

    “Everyone is saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, so what Gaza did in Israel on the 7th of October, it’s not genocide?” Zohar said.

    She added that she did not believe peace with Gaza’s Palestinians was possible. “If they’re not sending missiles, it’s drones, or balloons, or another 7th of October,” she said.

    “We’re not trying to disturb them, we’re not sending missiles or drones,” she added. “We say, ‘Let us live in peace, you live in peace.’ But they don’t want that.”

    ACLED, a conflict monitor, released a report Tuesday detailing attacks in Gaza by the Israeli military since Oct. 7, 2023. The report tallied more than 11,110 air and drone strikes; more than 6,250 shelling, artillery or missile attacks and about 1,500 armed clashes.

    Messika, the Beeri resident, felt similarly disillusioned about the prospect of peace. Before the war, kibbutzim residents tried to help Gazans, hiring them for jobs or and taking them for medical treatments. And she remembered her father telling her about going to Gaza to eat falafel — “It used to have the best falafel, he always said” — and buying produce in its vegetable markets. But notions of helping Gazans were born of naivete.

    “We know that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza…. They hate us,” she said, adding that Trump’s plan, which involves disarming Gaza, was the right solution. Messika was still debating with other residents whether all the damaged houses should be torn down, or if some should be preserved as a memorial.

    “Some say we can’t come back to live near a place like this. It would be like living near Auschwitz,” she said. But for her, it was a matter of turning Oct. 7 into a learning opportunity. Without that, she insisted, the suffering would all be for nothing. Though the kibbutz’s council said to go ahead with the demolitions, she appealed and was awaiting a new verdict.

    “The next generation, they need to learn and see with their own eyes, to walk through it,” she said. “It’s not enough to make a website, or a memorial. This is evidence for the history, for what happened to our friends. And I don’t want it to be destroyed.”

    About 10 miles away, in Sderot, people flocked to a mountain on the city’s edge, which over the years has become a popular vantage point for a glimpse of Gaza, complete with a telescope — cost: five shekels — for a closer look at the landscape. Suddenly, in the distance, a large cloud of smoke bloomed somewhere beyond the destroyed edge of Gaza’s Nuseirat camp.

    Some lifted their smartphones to record video. Others gave an appreciative nod and lauded the Israeli military’s “work ethic” during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Behind them, children played in the afternoon sun.

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    Nabih Bulos

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  • Opinion | The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

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    Hamas’s shock troops poured across Israel’s border two years ago, kidnapping, raping and killing civilian men, women and children. Israel’s bitter experience offers lessons America should learn before our own moment of reckoning.

    The most important is that the hypothetical war can actually happen. Even if we’re intellectually prepared, there’s a risk that years of relative peace has lulled us into a false sense of security. The Israeli defense establishment never truly believed Hamas would launch a full-scale invasion. They viewed Gaza as a chronic but manageable problem—one for diplomats and intelligence officers, distant from the daily concerns of citizens. Israeli politicians and generals also spoke of open conflict with the Iran-led Islamist axis much like their American counterparts speak of China and a Taiwan crisis—the pacing threat and the most likely test, yes, but ultimately a question for tomorrow. Then tomorrow came.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    Mike Gallagher

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  • Opinion | Perilous Times for Optimistic Jews in the U.K.

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    Gerry Baker is Editor at Large of The Wall Street Journal. His weekly column for the editorial page, “Free Expression,” appears in The Wall Street Journal each Tuesday. Mr. Baker is also host of “WSJ at Large with Gerry Baker,” a weekly news and current affairs interview show on the Fox Business Network, and the weekly WSJ Opinion podcast “Free Expression” where he speaks with some of the world’s leading writers, influencers and thinkers about a variety of subjects.

    Mr. Baker previously served as Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones from 2013-2018. Prior to that, Mr. Baker was Deputy Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal from 2009-2013. He has been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and broadcasting for some of the world’s most famous news organizations, including his tenure at The Financial Times, The Times of London, and The BBC.

    He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, where he graduated in 1983 with a 1st Class Honors Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

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    Gerard Baker

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  • Friends of Michigan church shooting suspect say he long carried hatred toward Mormon faith

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    The man who opened fire in a Michigan church and killed four people while setting it ablaze long harbored hatred toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to longtime friends, and told a stranger who showed up at his door days before that attack that Mormons were the “Antichrist.” The suspect, identified as 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford, began making those sentiments known years ago following his return from Utah, where he dated but later broke up with a girlfriend who was a member of the Mormon faith, two childhood friends said Tuesday. Sanford had moved to Utah after leaving the Marines and told his friends he had become addicted to methamphetamines.No longer the happy-go-lucky kid who was voted class clown of their graduating class, Sanford routinely spouted off about his grievances against the church, his friends said. The first time they heard it was at a wedding 13 years ago.”We were like, ‘Come on, we don’t want to hear this,’” said Bobby Kalush, who grew up down the road from Sanford. “When he came back from Utah, he was a completely different person.”Just six days before Sunday’s attack, those grudges were still boiling at the surface, said Kris Johns, a city council candidate who described a bizarre brush with Sanford while door-knocking for his campaign.The two were speaking at Sanford’s home in Burton about gun rights when Sanford physically leaned in, Johns said, and asked, “What do you know about Mormons?”For close to 15 minutes, Sanford spoke in controlled and calm tones about the Mormon faith, saying he was concerned about their beliefs while expressing that he was a Christian. Sanford then said he believed that Mormons are the “Antichrist,” according to Johns.”That’s something I’ll never forget,” he said.Police have released very few details about Sanford, who died after being shot by officers, and have refused to discuss what might have motivated the attack at the church, which was reduced to rubble in Grand Blanc Township, about 60 miles north of Detroit.On Tuesday, Sanford’s family released a statement through a lawyer, expressing condolences. “No words can adequately convey our sorrow for the victims and their families,” they said. Sanford served four years in the Marine Corps after enlisting in 2004 and deployed once to Iraq for seven months, according to military records. His commander during the deployment, David Hochheimer, said the unit never saw combat or incoming fire. “It was a relatively quiet time,” he said on Tuesday.Sanford moved to Utah shortly after leaving the military. His friends said they noticed a change after he moved back home, thinking his battle with addiction was to blame. Kalush said his friend was no longer the “short, stocky ball of energy” who once bought dozens of flowers to give out to girls before the homecoming dance.Around bonfires with friends, it wasn’t unusual for Sanford to start talking about how Mormons were going to take over, said Frances Tersigni, who along with his twin brother was among Sanford’s best friends.”It was just so random. It was like, ‘Why Mormons dude?’” Tersigni said. “It’s hard to explain. We didn’t take it serious.” But there were no signs that he was a threat to anyone, Tersigni said. An avid hunter, Sanford was married now and raising a child at home.”He never once, never, said ‘I’ve got to do something,’” he said. “There’s a Jake we all knew, and there was one who was hidden. It wasn’t apparent to us.” Federal investigators remained at the church Tuesday as heavy machinery began moving debris from the church.Authorities have not yet released the names of the four people who died or the eight people — ages 6 to 78 — who were wounded and expected to survive. Among the wounded were a father and his young son, according to a GoFundMe post.One of those who died was being remembered as a grandfather who adored spending time with his family. John Bond, a Navy veteran, was well-known in the community and loved golfing and trains, according to friends organizing fundraising for the family.Another victim was identified online by family as Pat Howard.”Uncle Pat was so many things. … In my mind I see him mid conversation, his eyebrows raised, his eyes bright and a smile just starting to show,” niece Maureen Seliger said on Facebook. Jeffrey Schaub, bishop of the Grand Blanc church, said in a video posted Monday that the attack has left the community reeling.”As you can expect, our members are quite shaken in spirit and in body,” he said. “And it hurts.”There has been an outpouring of support from different faith communities, he said. “It was very humbling to see how much good there is in the world today and that, above all, we are all children of the same Father in heaven,” he said, with a tremor in his voice.Sanford drove his truck into the church’s brick wall while members were gathered inside Sunday morning. He apparently used gas to start the fire and also had explosive devices, said James Dier of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.Flames and smoke poured from the church for hours after the attack.Jerry Eaton, 78, who lives across the street, sheltered seven people who fled the church, including a mother with her four young children. He was watching television when he heard the shooting.”I’ve done a lot of hunting, so I know the sound of gunfire,” he said. “As much as I didn’t want to believe it, that’s exactly what it sounded like.” White reported from Detroit. Associated Press reporter John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.

    GRAND BLANC TOWNSHIP, Mich. —

    The man who opened fire in a Michigan church and killed four people while setting it ablaze long harbored hatred toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to longtime friends, and told a stranger who showed up at his door days before that attack that Mormons were the “Antichrist.”

    The suspect, identified as 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford, began making those sentiments known years ago following his return from Utah, where he dated but later broke up with a girlfriend who was a member of the Mormon faith, two childhood friends said Tuesday. Sanford had moved to Utah after leaving the Marines and told his friends he had become addicted to methamphetamines.

    No longer the happy-go-lucky kid who was voted class clown of their graduating class, Sanford routinely spouted off about his grievances against the church, his friends said. The first time they heard it was at a wedding 13 years ago.

    “We were like, ‘Come on, we don’t want to hear this,’” said Bobby Kalush, who grew up down the road from Sanford. “When he came back from Utah, he was a completely different person.”

    Just six days before Sunday’s attack, those grudges were still boiling at the surface, said Kris Johns, a city council candidate who described a bizarre brush with Sanford while door-knocking for his campaign.

    The two were speaking at Sanford’s home in Burton about gun rights when Sanford physically leaned in, Johns said, and asked, “What do you know about Mormons?”

    For close to 15 minutes, Sanford spoke in controlled and calm tones about the Mormon faith, saying he was concerned about their beliefs while expressing that he was a Christian. Sanford then said he believed that Mormons are the “Antichrist,” according to Johns.

    “That’s something I’ll never forget,” he said.

    Police have released very few details about Sanford, who died after being shot by officers, and have refused to discuss what might have motivated the attack at the church, which was reduced to rubble in Grand Blanc Township, about 60 miles north of Detroit.

    On Tuesday, Sanford’s family released a statement through a lawyer, expressing condolences. “No words can adequately convey our sorrow for the victims and their families,” they said.

    Sanford served four years in the Marine Corps after enlisting in 2004 and deployed once to Iraq for seven months, according to military records. His commander during the deployment, David Hochheimer, said the unit never saw combat or incoming fire. “It was a relatively quiet time,” he said on Tuesday.

    Sanford moved to Utah shortly after leaving the military. His friends said they noticed a change after he moved back home, thinking his battle with addiction was to blame. Kalush said his friend was no longer the “short, stocky ball of energy” who once bought dozens of flowers to give out to girls before the homecoming dance.

    Around bonfires with friends, it wasn’t unusual for Sanford to start talking about how Mormons were going to take over, said Frances Tersigni, who along with his twin brother was among Sanford’s best friends.

    “It was just so random. It was like, ‘Why Mormons dude?’” Tersigni said. “It’s hard to explain. We didn’t take it serious.”

    But there were no signs that he was a threat to anyone, Tersigni said. An avid hunter, Sanford was married now and raising a child at home.

    “He never once, never, said ‘I’ve got to do something,’” he said. “There’s a Jake we all knew, and there was one who was hidden. It wasn’t apparent to us.”

    Federal investigators remained at the church Tuesday as heavy machinery began moving debris from the church.

    Authorities have not yet released the names of the four people who died or the eight people — ages 6 to 78 — who were wounded and expected to survive. Among the wounded were a father and his young son, according to a GoFundMe post.

    One of those who died was being remembered as a grandfather who adored spending time with his family. John Bond, a Navy veteran, was well-known in the community and loved golfing and trains, according to friends organizing fundraising for the family.

    Another victim was identified online by family as Pat Howard.

    “Uncle Pat was so many things. … In my mind I see him mid conversation, his eyebrows raised, his eyes bright and a smile just starting to show,” niece Maureen Seliger said on Facebook.

    Jeffrey Schaub, bishop of the Grand Blanc church, said in a video posted Monday that the attack has left the community reeling.

    “As you can expect, our members are quite shaken in spirit and in body,” he said. “And it hurts.”

    There has been an outpouring of support from different faith communities, he said. “It was very humbling to see how much good there is in the world today and that, above all, we are all children of the same Father in heaven,” he said, with a tremor in his voice.

    Sanford drove his truck into the church’s brick wall while members were gathered inside Sunday morning. He apparently used gas to start the fire and also had explosive devices, said James Dier of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

    Flames and smoke poured from the church for hours after the attack.

    Jerry Eaton, 78, who lives across the street, sheltered seven people who fled the church, including a mother with her four young children. He was watching television when he heard the shooting.

    “I’ve done a lot of hunting, so I know the sound of gunfire,” he said. “As much as I didn’t want to believe it, that’s exactly what it sounded like.”

    White reported from Detroit. Associated Press reporter John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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  • Opinion | Trump Flips the Global Script

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    Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

     

    He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely-recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mr. Mead’s most recent book is entitled The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.

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    Walter Russell Mead

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  • White House peace blueprint for Gaza demands Hamas disarm, step down

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    BEIRUT  — President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday put forth a 20-point plan to end the war in the Gaza Strip, a sweeping proposal that calls on Hamas to not only lay down its arms, but to give up any role in governing the enclave.

    Key elements of the plan, which the leaders announced at the White House in Washington, include the release of hostages, a prisoner swap involving hundreds and amnesty for Hamas fighters. Trump would play a role, heading a commission created to govern Gaza.

    Trump said he was “very, very close” to a deal to end the war, though it had yet to receive any reaction from Hamas. The plan calls for the Israeli military to cease fighting once the pact is approved, but does not specify a final pullout of forces from Gaza.

    “And I think we’re beyond very close,” added Trump of his most concerted push yet to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, even as the Israeli military presses with its offensive into Gaza City, the enclave’s largest urban center.

    In a 30-minute speech to reporters following his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump appeared enthusiastic about his proposal, touting it as an unprecedented step toward peace not only in Gaza but across the Middle East. “This is potentially one of the greatest days ever in civilization,” he said.

    Trump said that he was “hearing that Hamas wants to get this done too.” But, he added, if Hamas didn’t agree to the plan, Israel would have the “right” and “full backing” of the U.S. to “finish the job” — in other words, eliminate Hamas.

    Under Trump’s plan, which the White House published on Monday, hostilities would immediately end, with battle lines frozen before a partial Israeli withdrawal in preparation for the hostages’ release.

    Hamas would return all hostages — alive or deceased — within 72 hours of Israel accepting the deal, after which Israel would release 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Gaza residents detained after Oct. 7, 2023, and a number of the deceased.

    Aid, which Israel has blocked for months, would be allowed in. Hamas would surrender, and the U.S. and partner Arab nations would create an “International Stabilization Force,” which, once ready, would then take over areas in Gaza from which the Israeli military withdraws.

    A “temporary transitional government” will manage the day-to-day running of the Gaza Strip, overseen by a “Board of Peace” chaired and led by Trump. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will also play a role. This body will remain in place until the Palestinian Authority completes a reform program and then can take control of the Gaza Strip.

    And in a nod to Trump’s long-stated interest in developing Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” the enclave will be subject to a “Trump economic development plan” that would “rebuild and energize” Gaza, and will include a special economic zone.

    No one would be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave would be free to do so and could return. Hamas members who “commit to peaceful coexistence” receive amnesty, and those who wish to leave Gaza will get safe passage.

    Netanyahu, who repeatedly demonstrated his admiration for Trump and described him as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House,” said the proposal achieved “our war aims” and was “a critical step towards both ending the war in Gaza and setting the stage for dramatically advancing peace in the Middle East.”

    But Netanyahu also threatened that “Israel will finish the job by itself” if Hamas rejects the plan, or if it accepts it but then backtracks. “This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way. But it will be done,” he said.

    Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt gave their endorsement of Trump’s plan in a joint statement, saying they were ready to “cooperate positively and constructively with the United States and the relevant parties to complete the agreement and ensure its implementation.” The countries added they would work with the U.S. to end the war through a comprehensive agreement that would see the establishment of “a just peace process based on the two-state solution.”

    The Palestinian Authority also welcomed the agreement. The Palestinian Authority, which oversees the Israeli-occupied West Bank, governed Gaza until Hamas prevailed in elections in 2006.

    Hamas is said to have received the proposal a short while ago, and said to be studying it.

    Though the plan as published remains scant on details, it’s unclear how Hamas would be amenable to what amounts to surrender and disarmament while getting none of the terms it has sought throughout more than a year of tortuous negotiations: a cessation of hostilities and a full Israeli withdrawal and disarmament, along with the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

    The plan also has little in the way of a viable path to a Palestinian state — a pre-condition set by Saudi Arabia before it joins any normalization agreement with Israel. Instead, the agreement gives a vague notion of recognizing self-determination and statehood as the “aspiration” of the Palestinian people, and that “conditions may finally be in place” for that after once the Palestinian Authority’s reform plan is “faithfully carried out” and Gaza is being redeveloped.

    Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted there will be no Palestinian state. A number of nations have recognized a Palestinian state. The United Kingdom, Australia and Canada took such action this month.

    Netanyahu earlier Monday formally apologized to Qatar for its recent attack on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha.

    “As a first step, Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed his deep regret that Israel’s missile strike against Hamas targets in Qatar unintentionally killed a Qatari serviceman,” the White House said in a statement. “He further expressed regret that, in targeting Hamas leadership during hostage negotiations, Israel violated Qatari sovereignty and affirmed that Israel will not conduct such an attack again in the future.”

    The war in Gaza began Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people — two-thirds of them civilians, Israeli tallies say — and kidnapping 251 others.

    Israel retaliated with a full-on offensive that pulverized wide swaths of the enclave and has so far killed more than 66,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities and aid groups.

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    Nabih Bulos

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  • Trump says he’ll send troops to Portland, Oregon, as he expands military deployments in US cities

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    President Trump said this task force will replicate what is happening on the streets of Washington DC. The president said the goal is to essentially put an end to crime in Memphis and mirror the actions taking place in the nation’s capital. The memorandum President Trump signed on Monday did not include details on when troops would be deployed or exactly what his promised surge in law enforcement efforts would actually look like. Tennessee’s governor embraced the deployment while the mayor of Memphis is not thrilled with the plan. Crime that’s going on not only in Memphis in many cities and we’re gonna take care of all of them step by step just like we did in DC. We’ll have folks without training interacting with our citizenry, and there’s *** chance that that will compromise our due process rights. The president also mentioned he’s still looking to send National Guard troops to more Democratic-led cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Saint Louis. In Washington, I’m Rachel Herzheimer.

    Trump says he’ll send troops to Portland, Oregon, as he expands military deployments in US cities

    Updated: 8:43 AM PDT Sep 27, 2025

    Editorial Standards ⓘ

    President Donald Trump said Saturday he will send troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary” to handle “domestic terrorists” as he expands his controversial deployments to more American cities.Related video above: President Trump announces National Guard deployment to MemphisHe made the announcement on social media, writing that he was directing the Department of Defense to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland.”Trump said the decision was necessary to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which he described as “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for details on Trump’s announcement, such as a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved. He previously threatened to send the National Guard into Chicago without following through. A deployment in Memphis, Tennessee, is expected to include only about 150 troops, far fewer than were sent to the District of Columbia for Trump’s crackdown or in Los Angeles in response to immigration protests.Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to requests for information.Since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Republican president has escalated his efforts to confront what he calls the “radical left,” which he blames for the country’s problems with political violence.He deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles over the summer and as part of his law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital. The ICE facility in Portland has been the target of frequent demonstrations, sometimes leading to violent clashes. Some federal agents have been injured and several protesters have been charged with assault. When protesters erected a guillotine earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security described it as “unhinged behavior.”Trump, in comments Thursday in the Oval Office, suggested some kind of operation was in the works.“We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland,” he said, describing them as “professional agitators and anarchists.”Earlier in September, Trump had described living in Portland as “like living in hell” and said he was considering sending in federal troops, as he has recently threatened to do to combat crime in other cities, including Chicago and Baltimore. “Like other mayors across the country, I have not asked for — and do not need — federal intervention,” Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said in a statement after Trump’s threat. Wilson said his city had protected freedom of expression while “addressing occasional violence and property destruction.”In Tennessee, Memphis has been bracing for an influx of National Guard troops, and on Friday, Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who helped coordinate the operation, said they will be part of a surge of resources to fight crime in the city.

    WASHINGTON —

    President Donald Trump said Saturday he will send troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary” to handle “domestic terrorists” as he expands his controversial deployments to more American cities.

    Related video above: President Trump announces National Guard deployment to Memphis

    He made the announcement on social media, writing that he was directing the Department of Defense to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland.”

    Trump said the decision was necessary to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which he described as “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

    The White House did not immediately respond to a request for details on Trump’s announcement, such as a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved. He previously threatened to send the National Guard into Chicago without following through. A deployment in Memphis, Tennessee, is expected to include only about 150 troops, far fewer than were sent to the District of Columbia for Trump’s crackdown or in Los Angeles in response to immigration protests.

    Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to requests for information.

    Since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Republican president has escalated his efforts to confront what he calls the “radical left,” which he blames for the country’s problems with political violence.

    He deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles over the summer and as part of his law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital.

    The ICE facility in Portland has been the target of frequent demonstrations, sometimes leading to violent clashes. Some federal agents have been injured and several protesters have been charged with assault. When protesters erected a guillotine earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security described it as “unhinged behavior.”

    Trump, in comments Thursday in the Oval Office, suggested some kind of operation was in the works.

    “We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland,” he said, describing them as “professional agitators and anarchists.”

    Earlier in September, Trump had described living in Portland as “like living in hell” and said he was considering sending in federal troops, as he has recently threatened to do to combat crime in other cities, including Chicago and Baltimore.

    “Like other mayors across the country, I have not asked for — and do not need — federal intervention,” Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said in a statement after Trump’s threat. Wilson said his city had protected freedom of expression while “addressing occasional violence and property destruction.”

    In Tennessee, Memphis has been bracing for an influx of National Guard troops, and on Friday, Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who helped coordinate the operation, said they will be part of a surge of resources to fight crime in the city.

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  • In a dizzying few days, Trump ramps up attacks on political opponents and 1st Amendment

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump has harnessed the weight of his office in recent days to accelerate a campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies and attacks on 1st Amendment protections.

    In the last week alone, Trump replaced a U.S. attorney investigating two of his political adversaries with a loyalist and openly directed the attorney general to find charges to file against them.

    His Federal Communications Commission chairman hinted at punitive actions against networks whose journalists and comedians run afoul of the president.

    Trump filed a $15-billion lawsuit against the New York Times, only to have it thrown out by a judge.

    The acting U.S. attorney in Los Angeles asked the Secret Service to investigate a social media post by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office.

    The Pentagon announced it was imposing new restrictions on reporters who cover the U.S. military.

    The White House officially labeled “antifa,” a loose affiliation of far-left extremists, as “domestic terrorists” — a designation with no basis in U.S. law — posing a direct challenge to free speech protections. And it said lawmakers concerned with the legal predicate for strikes on boats in the Caribbean should simply get over it.

    An active investigation into the president’s border advisor over an alleged bribery scheme involving a $50,000 payout was quashed by the White House itself.

    Trump emphasized his partisan-fueled dislike of his political opponents during a Sunday memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who he said “did not hate his opponents.”

    “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said. “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”

    It has been an extraordinary run of attacks using levers of power that have been seen as sacred arbiters of the public trust for decades, scholars and historians say.

    The assault is exclusively targeting Democrats, liberal groups and establishment institutions, just as the administration moves to shield its allies.

    Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Virginia, resigned Friday after facing pressure from the Trump administration to bring criminal charges against New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud. In a social media post later that day, Trump claimed he had “fired” Siebert.

    A few hours later, on Saturday, Trump said he nominated White House aide Lindsey Halligan to take over Siebert’s top prosecutorial role in Virginia, saying she was “tough” and “loyal.”

    Later that day, Trump demanded in a social media post addressed to “Pam” — in reference to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi — that she prosecute James, former FBI Director James Comey and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

    “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s remarks, saying Monday that the president is “rightfully frustrated” and that he “wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abuse their power, who abuse their oath of office, to target the former president and then candidate for the highest office in the land.”

    “It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponize the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump,” Leavitt told reporters.

    As the president called for prosecution of his political opponents, it was reported that Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, was the subject of an undercover FBI case that was later shut down by Trump administration officials. Homan, according to MSNBC, accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover agents after he indicated to them he could get them government contracts.

    At Monday’s news briefing, Leavitt said that Homan did not take the money and that the investigation was “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters.”

    “The White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100% because he did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said.

    Some see the recent actions as an erosion of an expected firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House, as well as a shift in the idea of how criminal investigation should be launched.

    “If the Department of Justice and any prosecution entity is functioning properly, then that entity is investigating crimes and not people,” said John Hasnas, a law professor at Georgetown University.

    The Trump administration has also begun a military campaign against vessels crossing the Caribbean Sea departing from Venezuela that it says are carrying narcotics and drug traffickers. But the targeted killing of individuals at sea is raising concern among legal scholars that the administration’s operation is extrajudicial, and Democratic lawmakers, including Schiff, have introduced a bill in recent days asserting the ongoing campaign violates the War Powers Resolution.

    Political influence has long played a role with federal prosecutors who are political appointees, Hasnas said, but under “the current situation it’s magnified greatly.”

    “The interesting thing about the current situation is that the Trump administration is not even trying to hide it,” he said.

    Schiff said he sees it as an effort to “try to silence and intimidate.” In July, Trump accused Schiff — who led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump — of committing mortgage fraud, which Schiff has denied.

    “What he wants to try to do is not just go after me and Letitia James or Lisa Cook, but rather send a message that anyone who stands up to him on anything, anyone who has the audacity to call out his corruption will be a target, and they will go after you,” Schiff said in an interview Sunday.

    Trump campaigned in part on protecting free speech, especially that of conservatives, who he claimed had been broadly censored by the Biden administration and “woke” leftist culture in the U.S. Many of his most ardent supporters — including billionaire Elon Musk and now-Vice President JD Vance — praised Trump as a champion of free speech.

    However, since Trump took office, his administration has repeatedly sought to silence his critics, including in the media, and crack down on speech that does not align with his politics.

    And in the wake of Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10, those efforts have escalated into an unprecedented attack on free speech and expression, according to constitutional scholars and media experts.

    “The administration is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st Amendment,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School.

    “We are at an unprecedented place in American history in terms of the targeting of free press and the exercise of free speech,” said Ken Paulson, former editor in chief of USA Today and now director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

    “We’ve had periods in American history like the Red Scare, in which Americans were to turn in neighbors who they thought leaned left, but this is a nonstop, multifaceted, multiplatform attack on all of our free speech rights,” Paulson said. “I’m actually quite stunned at the velocity of this and the boldness of it.”

    Bondi recently railed against “hate speech” — which the Supreme Court has previously defended — in an online post, suggesting the Justice Department will investigate those who speak out against conservatives.

    FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney, with repercussions if they did not yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Kimmel made comments about Kirk’s alleged killer that Carr found distasteful. ABC swiftly suspended Kimmel’s show, though Disney announced Monday that it would return Tuesday.

    The Pentagon, meanwhile, said it will require news organizations to agree not to disclose any information the government has not approved for release and revoke the press credentials of those who publish sensitive material without approval.

    Critics of the administration, free speech organizations and even some conservative pundits who have long criticized the “cancel culture” of the progressive left have spoken out against some of those policies. Scholars have too, saying the amalgam of actions by the administration represent a dangerous departure from U.S. law and tradition.

    “What unites all of this is how blatantly inconsistent it is with the 1st Amendment,” Chemerinsky said.

    Chemerinsky said lower courts have consistently pushed back against the administration’s overreaches when it comes to protected speech, and he expects they will continue to do so.

    He also said that, although the Supreme Court has frequently sided with the president in disputes over his policy decisions, it has also consistently defended freedom of speech, and he hopes it will continue to do so if some of the free speech policies above reach the high court.

    “If there’s anything this court has said repeatedly, it’s that the government can’t prevent or stop speech based on the viewpoint expressed,” Chemerinsky said.

    Paulson said that American media companies must refuse to obey and continue to cover the Trump administration and the Pentagon as aggressively as ever, and that average Americans must recognize the severity of the threat posed by such censorship and speak out against it, no matter their political persuasion.

    “This is real — a full-throttle assault on free speech in America,” Paulson said. “And it’s going to be up to the citizenry to do something about it.”

    Chemerinsky said defending free speech should be an issue that unites all Americans, not least because political power changes hands.

    “It’s understandable that those in power want to silence the speech that they don’t like, but the whole point of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech we don’t like,” he said. “We don’t need the 1st Amendment to protect the speech we like.”

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    Ana Ceballos, Michael Wilner, Kevin Rector

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  • Epstein, Trump officials mentioned in note left by Sacramento TV station shooting suspect

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    The man accused of opening fire on the lobby of a Sacramento ABC television station cited the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case as a motive and promised several members of the Trump administration would be “next,” according to a federal court filing made public Monday.

    Anibal Hernandez-Santana, 64, is charged with multiple weapons offenses and interfering with a radio or communication station for firing several bullets at the window of ABC10’s offices in Sacramento around 1 p.m. on Friday, according to a criminal complaint.

    Hernandez-Santana was arrested the same day as the shooting. During a search of his car, detectives found a note that read “For hiding Epstein & ignoring red flags,” according to the complaint filed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of California.

    The note referenced FBI Director Kash Patel, his second-in-command Dan Bongino and U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, reading “They’re next. — C.K. from above.”

    Sacramento Dist. Atty. Thien Ho said he believed the “C.K.” portion of the note was a reference to Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was killed by a sniper in Utah this month. In an interview on Monday, Ho said police also found a book titled “The Cult Of Trump” in Hernandez-Santana’s vehicle.

    A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento said she could not comment beyond what was contained in court documents.

    Patel said “targeted acts of violence are unacceptable and will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law,” in a post on X.

    Hernandez-Santana was born in Puerto Rico and was not registered as a Republican or Democrat, according to voting records. The Trump administration has faced increasing criticism from both sides of the political spectrum to disclose more information about those who did business with Epstein, the financier charged with trafficking young girls to rich and powerful men before his death by suicide in a federal lockup in 2019.

    Hernandez-Santana was a retired lobbyist, according to Ho, who said the shooting was clearly “politically motivated.”

    Hernandez-Santana first registered as a lobbyist in 2001. His clients included an environmental justice group, the California Catholic Conference and the California Federation of Teachers, according to state lobbying records.

    The day of the shooting, Ho said, a protest was scheduled to take place outside ABC10’s offices over their parent company’s decision to suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over comments he made about the way Republicans have reacted to Kirk’s killing. Kimmel’s suspension was lifted Monday and he is expected to return to the air Tuesday,

    Ho said it was clear the TV station was not a “random target.”

    “When it comes to public safety it’s not about going right or left, it’s about moving forward … clearly he was motivated by current political events,” Ho said.

    Hernandez-Santana did not have a significant criminal history and was not known to local law enforcement before the incident, according to the prosecutor.

    Prosecutors said Hernandez-Santana fired four times at the ABC station, once near the building and three additional times at a window in the station’s lobby, according to court records. No one was injured, but there were employees inside at the time.

    In addition to the message invoking members of Trump’s Cabinet, Sacramento Police detectives also found a day planner that contained a handwritten note to “Do the Next Scary Thing,” on the date of the attack, court records show.

    In a court filing seeking to deny Hernandez-Santana bail, federal prosecutors said the note referencing Patel, Bongino and Bondi “indicates that he may have been planning additional acts of violence.”

    Ho has also charged Santana-Hernandez with assault with a firearm and shooting at an inhabited dwelling. He was expected to make court appearances in both cases on Monday. It was not immediately clear whether he has an attorney.

    Santana-Hernandez faces five years in federal prison and an additional 17 years in state prison if convicted as charged, according to Ho.

    “When someone brazenly fires into a news station full of people in the middle of the day, it is not only an attack on innocent employees but also an attack on the news media and our community’s sense of safety,” Ho said in a statement.

    Times staff writer Laura Nelson and researcher Cary Schneider contributed to this report.

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    James Queally

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  • Yellowstone hiker survives bloody encounter with a bear, possibly a grizzly

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    A hiker who was attacked by a bear — probably a grizzly — in Yellowstone National Park this week has been released from the hospital.

    The 29-year old man had been hiking alone on the remote Turbid Lake Trail when he apparently surprised the bear, according to park officials. While trying to use bear spray, he sustained “significant but not life-threatening injuries to his chest and left arm,” according to officials.

    National Park Service medics responded to the scene, and the victim was able to walk with them to the trailhead, where he was loaded into an ambulance and taken to a nearby clinic. From there, a helicopter flew him to a hospital. He was released Wednesday.

    As is true in the rest of the U.S., bear attacks are exceedingly rare in Yellowstone. Since the park was established in 1872, eight people have been killed by bears, according to the park’s website. For comparison, 125 people have drowned and 23 have died from burns after falling into hot springs.

    Even seeing a grizzly bear is pretty uncommon in the lower 48 states. Prior to 1800, they were much more common, with an estimated 50,000 roaming the American West. But European settlers viewed them as a mortal threat to people and livestock and hunted them to near extinction, reducing their number to less than 1,000 in the contiguous U.S.

    Thanks to recovery and conservation efforts in recent decades, the population has increased to nearly 2,000, mostly in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

    Still, the specter of a bear attack, especially by a grizzly, is enough to make most hikers’ blood run cold. While experts tell backcountry travelers to stand their ground and fight back if attacked by a black bear, the standard advice for years has been to lie down and play dead in the face of a much larger, more aggressive grizzly.

    That advice has been updated lately, but not by much. A national parks website providing guidance on what to do says, “If you surprise a grizzly/brown bear and it charges or attacks, do not fight back! Only fight back if the attack persists.”

    The hiker who was attacked on Tuesday told park officials he thought it was a black bear, but the location, behavior and size of the bear made park staff suspect it might have been a grizzly.

    Discovery of an animal carcass near the attack, and confirmation that bear tracks found nearby were left by a grizzly, support that conclusion.

    The trail has been closed indefinitely and rangers swept the area to make sure there weren’t any other hikers in imminent danger.

    As for the bear? Parks officials say it was probably surprised too and merely acting in self-defense. So the park, “will not be taking any management action against the bear.”

    Last year, Jon Kyle Mohr faced a similar encounter with a black bear in California’s Yosemite National Park.

    He was less than a mile from the end of a 50-mile ultra-run he had started 16 hours earlier in Mammoth Lakes when he saw a huge black shape charging at him.

    In an instant, he said, he felt “some sharpness” on his shoulder followed by a powerful shove that sent him stumbling in the dark. When he turned around, people about a hundred feet away were shining their headlamps in his direction and shouting, “Bear!”

    It worked. The bear disappeared into the darkness and Mohr was left with torn clothes and a few scratches, but no more serious damage.

    Asked how he felt about the experience, Mohr said he was incredibly shaken at first, and lucky it had happened near the Vernal Falls trailhead, one of the most populated places in the park.

    But after a day or two to reflect, he had settled into a more zen frame of mind.

    “It was just a really strange, random collision,” he said. “If I had rested my feet for 20 seconds longer at any point,” during the 16-hour run, “it wouldn’t have happened.”

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    Jack Dolan

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  • Commentary: Wake up, Los Angeles. We are all Jimmy Kimmel

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    Comics have long been on the front lines of democracy, the canary in the cat’s mouth, Looney Tunes style, when it comes to free speech being swallowed by regressive politics.

    So Jimmy Kimmel is in good company, though he may not like this particular historical party: Zero Mostel; Philip Loeb; even Lenny Bruce, who claimed, after being watched by the FBI and backroom blacklisted, that he was less a comic and more “the surgeon with the scalpel for false values.”

    During that era of McCarthyism in the 1950s (yes, I know Bruce’s troubles came later), America endured an attack on our 1st Amendment right to make fun of who we want, how we want — and survived — though careers and even lives were lost.

    Maybe we aren’t yet at the point of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, but the moment is feeling grim.

    Wake up, Los Angeles. This isn’t a Jimmy Kimmel problem. This is a Los Angeles problem.

    This is about punishing people who speak out. It’s about silencing dissent. It’s about misusing government power to go after enemies. You don’t need to agree with Kimmel’s politics to see where this is going.

    For a while, during Trump 2.0, the ire of the right was aimed at California in general and San Francisco in particular, that historical lefty bastion that, with its drug culture, openly LBGTQ+ ethos and Pelosi-Newsom political dynasty, seemed to make it the perfect example of what some consider society’s failures.

    But really, the difficulty with hating San Francisco is that it doesn’t care. It’s a city that has long acknowledged, even flaunted, America’s discomfort with it. That’s why the infamous newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it “Baghdad by the Bay” more than 80 years ago, when the town had already fully embraced its outsider status.

    Los Angeles, on the other hand, has never considered itself a problem. Mostly, we’re too caught up in our own lives, through survival or striving, to think about what others think of our messy, vibrant, complicated city. Add to that, Angelenos don’t often think of themselves as a singular identity. There are a million different L.A.s for the more than 9 million people who live in our sprawling county.

    But to the rest of America, L.A. is increasingly a specific reality, a place that, like San Francisco once did, embodies all that is wrong for a certain slice of the American right.

    It was not happenstance that President Trump chose L.A. as the first stop for his National Guard tour, or that ICE’s roving patrols are on our streets. It’s not bad luck or even bad decisions that is driving the push to destroy UCLA as we know it.

    And it’s really not what Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk that got him pulled, because it truth, his statements were far from the most offensive that have been uttered on either side of the political spectrum.

    In fact, he wasn’t talking about Kirk, but about his alleged killer and how in the immediate aftermath, there was endless speculation about his political beliefs. Turns out that Kimmel wrongly insinuated the suspect was conservative, though all of us will likely have to wait until the trial to gain a full understanding of the evidence.

    “The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, before making fun of Trump’s response to the horrific killing.

    You can support what Kimmel said or be deeply offended by it. But it is rich for the people who just a few years ago were saying liberal “cancel culture” was ruining America to adopt the same tactics.

    If you need proof that this is more about control than content, look no further than Trump’s social media post on the issue, which directly encourages NBC to fire its own late-night hosts, who have made their share of digs at the president as well.

    “Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Trump wrote.

    This is about making an example of America’s most vibrant and inclusive city, and the celebrity icons who dare to diss — the place that exemplifies better than any other what freedom looks like, lives like, jokes like.

    If a Kimmel can fall so easily, what does that mean the career of Hannah Einbinder, who shouted out a “free Palestine” at the Emmys? Will there be a quiet fear of hiring her?

    What does it mean for a union leader like David Huerta, who is still facing charges after being detained at an immigration protest? Will people think twice before joining a demonstration?

    What does it mean for you? The yous who live lives of expansiveness and inclusion. The yous who have forged your own path, made your own way, broken the boundaries of traditional society whether through your choices on who to love, what country to call your own, how to think of your identity or nurture your soul.

    You, Los Angeles, with your California dreams and anything-goes attitude, are the living embodiment of everything that needs to be crushed.

    I am not trying to send you into an anxiety spiral, but it’s important to understand what we stand to lose if civil rights continue to erode.

    Kimmel having his speech censored is in league with our immigrant neighbors being rounded up and detained; the federal government financially pressuring doctors into dropping care for transgender patients, and the University of California being forced to turn over the names of staff and students it may have a beef with.

    Being swept up by ICE may seem vastly different than a millionaire celebrity losing his show, but they are all the weaponization of government against its people.

    It was Disney, not Donald Trump, who took action against Kimmel. But Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to “take action” if ABC did not sounds a lot like the way the White House talks about Washington, Oakland and so many other blue cities, L.A. at the top of the list.

    Our Black mayor. Our Latino senator and representatives. Our 1 million undocumented residents. Our nearly 10% of the adult population identifies as LGBTQ+. Our comics, musicians, actors and writers who have long pushed us to see the world in new, often difficult, ways.

    Many of us are here because other places didn’t want us, didn’t understand us, tried to hold us back. (I am in Sacramento now, but remain an Angeleno at heart.) We came here, to California and Los Angeles, for the protection this state and city offers.

    But now it needs our protection.

    However this assault on democracy comes, we are all Jimmy Kimmel — we are all at risk. The very nature of this place is under siege, and standing together across the many fronts of these attacks is our best defense.

    Seeing that they are all one attack — whether it is against a celebrity, a car wash worker or our entire city — is critical.

    “Our democracy is not self-executing,” former President Obama said recently. “It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.”

    So here we are, L.A., in a moment that requires fortitude, requires insight, requires us to stand up and say the most ridiculous thing that has every been said in a town full of absurdity:

    I am Jimmy Kimmel, and I will not be silent.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • Charlie Kirk railed against transgender rights. His killing has further fueled the fight

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    America’s already roiling debate around transgender rights sharply escalated in recent days after Charlie Kirk — one of the nation’s most prominent anti-transgender voices — was fatally shot by a suspect whose life and social circles have been meticulously scrutinized for any connection to the transgender community.

    Taking over Kirk’s podcast Monday, top Trump administration officials suggested they are gearing up to avenge Kirk by waging war on left-leaning organizations broadly, despite law enforcement statements that the shooter is believed to have acted alone. Queer organizations took that as a direct threat.

    Kirk railed against transgender rights in life, and just prior to being shot on a Utah college campus last week was answering a question about the alleged prevalence of transgender people among the nation’s mass shooters — an idea he had personally stoked, despite pushback from statistical researchers.

    Those circumstances seemed to prime the resulting outrage among his conservative base to be hyper-focused on any transgender connection.

    The connection was further stoked when the Wall Street Journal reported on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report that suggested — seemingly erroneously — that etchings on bullet casings found with the rifle suspected as being used in the shooting included transgender “ideology.”

    It was further inflamed when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that suspect Tyler Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner — who he said was “shocked” by the shooting and cooperating with authorities — is currently transitioning.

    Leading conservative influencers, some with the ear of President Trump, have openly called for a retribution campaign against transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly. Laura Loomer called transgender people a “national security threat,” said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY,” and said that Trump should make transitioning illegal.

    LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, meanwhile, have condemned such generalizations and attacks on the community and warned that such rhetoric only increases the likelihood of more political violence — particularly against transgender people and others who have been demonized for years, including by Kirk.

    “The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile & dangerous,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of California’s leading LGBTQ+ voices, wrote on social media. “First they try to say the shooter might be trans & WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism & truly disgusting.”

    Many political leaders have called for calm, and for people to wait for the investigation into the suspect’s motivations before jumping to conclusions or casting blame. Cox has said that Robinson’s political ideology, different from that of his conservative family, appeared to be “part of” what drove him to shoot Kirk, but that the exact motivations for the crime remained unclear.

    “We’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”

    Searching for a connection

    Officials were expected to release charging documents against Robinson on Tuesday that could contain more information about a motive. However, the debate has hardly waited.

    Both the political right and left have searched for evidence connecting Robinson to their opposing political camp.

    One of the first pieces of information to catch fire was the ATF reporting on the bullet etchings including transgender “ideology” — which turned out to be untrue, according to Cox’s later description of those etchings. That reporting immediately inspired condemnations of the entire transgender community.

    “Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said in a Rumble livestream Thursday.

    On Friday morning, President Trump said “vicious and horrible” people on the left were the only ones to blame for the political violence. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”

    Trump was asked Monday afternoon if he thought the suspect acted alone.

    “I can tell you he didn’t work alone on the internet because it seems that he became radicalized on the internet,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And he was radicalized on the left, he is a left. A lot of problems with the left and they get protected and they shouldn’t be protected.”

    The ATF declined to comment on the leaked report. The Wall Street Journal published an editor’s note walking back its reporting, noting that Cox’s description of the etchings included no references to the transgender community.

    The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group, responded to the uproar by criticizing the Wall Street Journal for publishing unsubstantiated claims that fueled hateful rhetoric toward the transgender community.

    “This reporting was reckless and irresponsible, and it led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers — and a resulting wave of terror for a community that is already living in fear,” the group said.

    Spreading the narrative

    The debate has heightened existing tensions around transgender rights, which Trump campaigned against and targeted with one of his first official acts — an executive order that said his administration would recognize only “two genders, male and female.”

    He and his administration have since banned transgender people from military service, blocked the issuance of U.S. passports with the gender-neutral X marker, threatened medical providers of gender-affirming care for minors, and sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports.

    In September, the Department of Justice also reportedly began weighing a rule that would restrict transgender individuals from owning firearms — a move that came after a shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 18 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

    That shooting led prominent conservatives, including senior Trump administration officials, to link gender identity to violence. National security advisor Sebastian Gorka claimed that an “inordinately high” number of attacks have been linked to “individuals who are confused about their gender” — a trend he claimed stretched back to at least 2023, when a transgender suspect shot and killed three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school.

    After that shooting, Trump Jr. had said that “rather than talking about guns, we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender-affirming bull— on our kids,” and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, had said that “giving in” to ideas on transgender identities was “dangerous.”

    After it was reported that Robinson’s partner is transitioning, Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X that “trans militants” pose a “very serious” threat to the country. Billionaire Elon Musk agreed, saying it was a “massive problem.”

    Many in the LGBTQ+ community have strenuously pushed back against such claims, noting research showing most shootings are committed by cisgender men.

    The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University has found that the majority of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by men, and less than 1% of such shootings in the last decade were by transgender people.

    An analysis by PolitiFact found that data do not show claims that transgender people are more prone to violence, and that “trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender peers.”

    A legacy amplified

    Kirk espoused a Christian nationalist worldview and opposed LGBTQ+ rights broadly, including same-sex marriage. He called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.”

    Just before he was shot at Utah Valley University, Kirk had said that “too many” transgender people were involved in shootings.

    It was not the first time Kirk had addressed the issue.

    Days after the 2023 shooting in Nashville, Kirk went after then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for unrelated comments denouncing a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state houses and saying the transgender community was “under attack.”

    “It is the first shooting ever that I’ve seen where the shooter and the murderers get more sympathy than the actual victims,” he said, appearing to blame all transgender people for the attack.

    The idea that liberals generally or members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically should be held accountable for Kirk’s killing has gained momentum in the days since. Vance and Trump advisor Stephen Miller seemed to allude to reprisals against left-leaning groups on Kirk’s podcast Monday, with Miller saying federal agencies will be rooting out a “domestic terror movement” on the left in Kirk’s name.

    LGBTQ+ advocates called such rhetoric alarming — and said they worry it will be used as a pretext for the administration to ramp up its assault on LGBTQ+ rights.

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    Kevin Rector, Ana Ceballos

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  • After Charlie Kirk’s shooting, how will security change for polarizing public figures?

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    Less than 24 hours after a bullet whizzed across a Utah college campus and claimed the life of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, polarizing figures from across the political spectrum swiftly canceled public events.

    Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) decided to postpone a North Carolina stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour this weekend, while Trump allies Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani reportedly nixed plans for a New York gathering due to “increased security concerns.”

    Popular leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who was set to debate Kirk at Dartmouth College later this month, told Politico he would “wait for the temperature to lower” before holding in-person events again.

    Kirk’s assassination comes amid a spate of attacks on high-profile political figures — including two assassination attempts on President Trump — that security experts say will change the way large-scale political events are held, with open-air venues increasingly seen as risky.

    “In the current threat environment, outdoor venues for political events should be avoided at all costs,” said Art Acevedo, the former head of the Houston and Miami Police Departments.

    Even with a security apparatus as powerful as the U.S. Secret Service, experts say it is incredibly difficult to establish a firm perimeter at outdoor rallies with a large number of attendees. The gunman who opened fire on Trump in Butler, Pa., during the 2024 presidential campaign did so from more than 400 feet away. Kirk was shot from a distance of nearly 200 yards with a powerful bolt-action rifle.

    Kirk’s suspected killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was arrested Friday morning, authorities said. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said ammunition recovered and linked to the shooting had anti-fascist engravings on it.

    A PBS/Marist Poll conducted last year found 1 in 5 Americans believes violent acts would be justified to “get the country back on track.”

    Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman was killed alongside her husband at their Minnesota home in June by a gunman allegedly motivated by conservative politics. In April, police arrested a man who allegedly tried to set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence while the Democrat slept inside with his family.

    Politicians aren’t the only ones being targeted. The killing last December in Manhattan of a healthcare industry executive turned suspected gunman Luigi Mangione into an object of public fascination, with some applauding the act of vigilantism.

    With Americans increasingly viewing their political foes as enemy combatants, researchers who study extremist violence and event security professionals say Kirk’s killing on Wednesday could mark a turning point in how well-known individuals protect themselves.

    “The bottom line is, for public political and other figures, it is increasingly difficult to protect them anywhere, but even more so in an outdoor environment because it’s getting harder to screen people and devices in those open spaces,” said Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer and professor emeritus at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

    Kirk was being protected by roughly a half-dozen Utah Valley University police officers and a handful of private security guards Wednesday, according to campus security officials. While that kind of presence might deter a close-quarters threat, snipers and other assailants with long-range capabilities would not be affected.

    Typically, security professionals seek to create three “rings of protection” around the focus of a public event, according to Kent Moyer, founder of World Protection Group, an international security firm.

    The inner ring often consists of barriers and security personnel meant to separate Kirk from the crowd immediately in front of him, not someone hundreds of yards away. In the middle ring, security guards positioned farther from the focus of the event monitor the temperature of the crowd and try to clock individuals acting strangely or becoming aggressive. An outer ring would serve to search bags and screen individuals before they enter the event.

    It did not appear there was any screening of attendees at the event where Kirk was killed, and it is legal to openly carry firearms on a college campus in Utah.

    Levin said he expects to see drones deployed at similar events in the future, an assessment seconded by Acevedo.

    “If you’re going to do an outdoor event you better make sure you have some kind of surveillance of rooftops,” Levin said.

    When doing risk assessments, Levin said, police and security professionals need to be cognizant that politicians themselves are no longer the sole targets for political violence.

    What Levin called “idiosyncratic actors” are increasingly likely to lash out at those connected to political and policy positions they find unjust. While Kirk was not a politician himself, he was a beloved figure in Trump’s orbit and his activist group, Turning Point USA, has often been credited with driving younger voters to support the president.

    “It’s not just elected officials. It’s pundits, it includes corporate people, people involved in policy and education,” said Levin.

    But a heavy security detail doesn’t come cheap.

    While elected officials are guarded by a range of federal and state law enforcement agencies, political influencers like Kirk must rely on their own vendors as well as security personnel hired by the venues they speak at.

    Levin warned that law enforcement assigned to political events should be on high alert for retaliatory attacks in the near future, given the “dehumanizing” rhetoric some have taken up in the wake of Kirk’s killing.

    Specifically, he pointed to Trump’s oval office remarks late Wednesday blaming Kirk’s death on “the radical left,” despite the fact that Kirk’s killer had not been identified at that time and federal law enforcement officials had not disclosed a motive in the shooting.

    Trump also rattled off a number of attacks on Republicans during his remarks, while making no mention of Hortman’s murder, the 2022 attack on the husband of U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, or the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — all violent incidents carried out by people who espoused right-wing political values.

    “More and more people across the ideological spectrum, though more concentrated on the far hard right, think violence is justified to achieve political outcomes,” Levin said.

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    James Queally, Richard Winton, Sandra McDonald

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  • Israeli strike in Qatar shakes decades-long U.S. security pact with Gulf states

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    BEIRUT — For years, Persian Gulf nations staked their defense on one thing above all: A U.S.-supplied security umbrella, paid for with tens of billions of their petrodollars and agreements that allowed the U.S. to dot the Middle East with some of its largest military facilities.

    The thinking was that being users of U.S. weaponry and having a U.S. military presence was a virtual guarantee of protection if enemies came to call.

    That thinking was upended on Tuesday, when Israel, arguably the U.S.’s top ally, dispatched warplanes and hurled 10 missiles at Hamas’ political office compound in the Qatari capital Doha.

    The attack, which targeted the Palestinian group’s senior negotiation team as it was discussing a ceasefire proposal from President Trump, killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer. Hamas denies any of its senior leadership was killed.

    But whether the targeting succeeded is irrelevant to Gulf leaders pondering the effectiveness of decades-old security arrangements with the U.S.

    “The message to the region appears to be, ‘If you think close ties with and major military support for Washington provides protection… think again,’ ” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.

    “They’re all vulnerable to attack by larger and more powerful neighbors, and they expect a commitment that helping the U.S. militarily comes with a certain degree of protection. It clearly doesn’t,” he said.

    This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC taken on Wednesday shows damage after an Israeli strike targeted a compound that hosted Hamas’ political leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday.

    (Planet Labs PBC via Associated Press)

    Qatari officials were apoplectic after the strike, calling it cowardly and a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

    Especially galling to Qatar — which houses the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the region — is that it allowed Hamas officials to openly live in a well-appointed district of its capital at Washington’s request, just as it had with the Taliban during the group’s negotiations to end America’s war in Afghanistan.

    “Everything about that meeting [with Hamas] is very well known for the Israelis and for the Americans. It’s not something we’re hiding,” said Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

    “I have no words to express how enraged we are from such an action [by Israel]. This is state terror,” he said.

    Other Gulf leaders — even those harboring lingering reservations about Qatar and its regional policies — presented a united front on Qatar’s behalf.

    Saudi Arabia called the strike a “brutal aggression” and said the kingdom would “stand with Qatar without limit.” Bahrain expressed its “full solidarity.”

    Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, traveled to Doha the next day to meet the Qatari emir — a surprise given how assiduously the UAE has worked to improve ties with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-brokered agreements that saw a number of Arab and Gulf nations normalize relations with Israel in 2020.

    “The Gulf states view an external attack on one member as an attack on all,” said Yasmine Farouk, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Project director at the International Crisis Group.

    Farouk added that trust in the U.S. was already diminished in recent years when Washington failed to defend or respond to attacks on Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the UAE in 2022 by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Qatar, which suffered through an Iranian missile assault on Al Udeid in June, now has the dubious honor of having its territory become a proxy battleground for both sides of the larger U.S.-Iran conflict.

    This week’s strike also represents a setback for the anti-Iran coalition the U.S. has worked to forge with its Arab allies and Israel. But the feeling among many in the Gulf is that Israel is just as belligerent and destabilizing an actor as Iran.

    “Israel has misinterpreted the willingness of Gulf countries to normalize relations with it as an acknowledgment of its dominance in the region,” Farouq said.

    “The Gulf states do not want to live in a region dominated by either Israel or Iran,” she added. “They reject that kind of behavior, rather than rejecting a specific country.”

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the immediate motive for the strike was Hamas claiming responsibility for the killing of six Israelis by Palestinian gunmen in Jerusalem earlier this week. He insisted the operation was planned and conducted entirely by Israel.

    At the same time, the more than 1,000-mile distance between Israel and Qatar means Israeli warplanes flew over multiple Arab countries, almost all of them with U.S. bases presumably able to detect incoming aircraft. (The U.S. has 19 bases across the region.) The building the Israelis struck is less than 20 miles away from Al Udeid.

    Trump said he learned about the attack shortly before it began and instructed members of his administration to “immediately” inform the Qataris. But Al Thani said the call from the U.S. came 10 minutes after the planes lobbed their missiles on Doha.

    In May, when Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, they feted him with grandiose events heavy on the pomp and circumstance and pledged trillions of dollars for investments in the U.S. The expectation was that this would buy some leverage, but Trump is reported to have done little more than scold Netanyahu over Tuesday’s strike, even while stopping short of condemning his actions. (Also in May, Qatar donated a luxury Boeing 747 aircraft for Trump to use as Air Force One.)

    The conclusion for Gulf countries expecting U.S. protection from all threats, said Abdulaziz Al-Anjeri, founder of the Kuwait-based think tank Reconnaissance Research, is that some threats are more equal than others.

    “U.S. security assistance is effective against Iran or its allied armed factions, but it does not extend to Israel,” he said, adding that historical alliances with the Gulf don’t carry the same weight for Trump as they may have in the past.

    The issue, said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University, is that there’s little specificity as to what a U.S. security umbrella actually entails.

    “America’s No.1 ally is now striking another American partner, and all they got from Trump is that they ‘felt badly.’ That it happened this way is not in America’s favor,” Al-Saif said.

    He added that Gulf nations, especially Saudi Arabia, have been pushing for more formal — and well-defined — defense pacts, but that the relationship with the U.S. needed to reflect recent changes. “You’re here as a security guarantor,” he said of the U.S. “We cannot be cash dispensers if we feel that our basic security is not guaranteed.”

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    Nabih Bulos

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