Thursday, July 31, 2025
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Ciara is among the first descendants of enslaved people granted citizenship by Benin
Ciara is among the first descendants of enslaved people granted citizenship by Benin
“The article describes Benin's efforts to welcome descendants of enslaved people. The country recently passed a law granting citizenship to those who can trace their lineage to the slave trade. Benin has also launched a digital platform to process applications and has established memorial sites related to the slave trade.
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — U.S. singer Ciara is one of the first public figures to become a citizen of Benin under a recent law by the small West African countrygranting citizenship to descendants of enslaved people.
The Grammy-winning performer’s acquisition of citizenship at a ceremony Saturday in the city of Cotonou is part of a broader initiative by Benin to attract the Black diaspora, acknowledge the country’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, and promote tourism focused on slavery-related sites of remembrance.
“By legally recognizing these children of Africa, Benin is healing a historical wound. It is an act of justice, but also one of belonging and hope,” Justice Minister Yvon Détchénou said at the ceremony.
Here’s what to know about Benin’s efforts to welcome descendants of enslaved people:
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Benin’s Afro-descendant citizenship law
In September, Benin passed a law granting citizenship to those who can trace their lineage to the slave trade.
It is open to anyone above 18 who doesn’t already hold other African citizenship and can provide proof that an ancestor was deported via the slave trade from anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Beninese authorities accept DNA tests, authenticated testimonies and family records.
Last week, the government launched My Afro Origins, the digital platform that processes applications.
While Benin is not the first country to grant citizenship to descendants of enslaved people, its citizenship law carries added significance, in part because of the role it played in the transatlantic slave trade.
A national reckoning with its role in the slave trade
European merchants deported an estimated 1.5 million enslaved people from the Bight of Benin — a region that includes present-day Benin, Togo and parts of Nigeria — to the Americas.
Beninese kings actively participated in capturing and selling enslaved people to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The former kingdoms and the communities they raided still exist today as tribal networks.
Benin has long been working to reconcile with its legacy of complicity. It has openly acknowledged its role in the slave trade, a stance not shared by many other African nations that participated.
In the 1990s, it hosted an international conference to examine how and where enslaved people were sold. In 1999, then-President Mathieu Kérékou apologized to African Americans during a visit to a church in Baltimore.
‘Memorial tourism’
Alongside this national reckoning, “memorial tourism” around the legacy of the slave trade has become a key approach of Benin’s government to attract Afro-descendants.
Memorial sites are mostly in Ouidah, one of Africa’s most active slave-trading ports in the 18th and 19th centuries. They include the Slave Route, which was the path marking enslaved people’s final journey to ships, and the Door of No Return, a haunting doorway that opens to the Atlantic Ocean where they left Africa, and their families, for the last time.
Sindé Chekete, the head of Benin’s state-run tourism agency, said these sites give Afro-descendants the opportunity to learn about and honor the struggles and resilience of their ancestors.
“It may inspire some people to say ‘I want to return to Africa and choose Benin to understand this history’,” Chekete said.
Following her citizenship ceremony, Ciara toured the historic city, where she walked the Slave Route to the Door of No Return.
“Between emotion, reflection and heritage, I experienced a profound return to what truly matters,” she said.
Ciara is best known for chart-topping hits like “Goodies” and “Level Up,” her dynamic choreography, and her work in fashion and philanthropy.“
Opinion | They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan. - The New York Times
They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.
Photographs by Daniel Terna
"Ms. Goldberg, an Opinion columnist, reported from Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Terna is a photographer in Los Angeles and New York.
Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.
It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.
“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”
A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”
But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.
At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.
Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.
“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”
The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries.) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”
Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.
It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.
“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”
These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”
The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.
When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”
In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politico headline shortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”
While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.
Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helped push down the company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.
The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.
The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”
This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.
As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”
Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.
In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.
Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)
“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”
With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.
When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.
A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.
The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.
At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.
Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.
This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.
One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”
It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.
Since Castillo and her neighbors started their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.
While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.
Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”
Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.
“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”
There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.
Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’ aggression toward civilian observers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.
Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”
To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.
If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isoation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.
“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment."
Trump Administration Told Taiwan’s President to Avoid U.S. Stopover - The New York Times
Trump Administration Told Taiwan’s President to Avoid New York Stopover
"The Taiwanese leader canceled U.S. transit visits after being urged to change his plans, two officials said. Washington has been in talks with Beijing over trade and a possible summit.
President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan had planned to make brief stops in New York and Dallas next month, en route to and from Latin America, hoping to demonstrate the island’s strong ties with the United States in defiance of China.
But the Trump administration, which is focused on delicate talks with Beijing over trade and a possible summit, told Mr. Lai to cancel his proposed stopover in New York, according to two officials familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions between the two governments. Mr. Lai canceled his whole trip.
The hints of tension between Taipei and Washington come at a sensitive moment for Mr. Lai. He suffered a serious setback over the weekend when a sweeping recall campaign aimed at removing 24 opposition lawmakers failed to dislodge any of them. Taiwan is also among the economies facing a Friday deadline for tariff negotiations with the United States.
Mr. Trump’s desire for steady relations with China, and potentially to secure a summit with President Xi Jinping, may have influenced his administration’s position on Mr. Lai’s travel plans. Mr. Trump has said he is open to visiting China to meet with Mr. Xi.
Confirmation of Mr. Lai’s travels would have riled China, which held trade negotiations with Mr. Trump’s team in Stockholm this week. China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and sees the United States’ support for Taiwan as meddling in a domestic issue. Beijing routinely objects to Taiwanese leaders’ visits abroad, particularly to the United States.
Matthew Pottinger, who was the longest-serving deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, criticized the apparent decision by American officials to “bend over backwards” in the face of Chinese objections to transit stops by the Taiwanese leader. He noted that such visits were common during the first Trump term — he himself had met with the Taiwanese president on a visit to New York — and during the Biden administration.
“Beijing will pocket this concession and ask for more,” Mr. Pottinger said.
According to the two officials familiar with the planning, Mr. Lai called off the trip after Trump administration officials told him to revise his itinerary for the United States, and, in particular, to forgo the visit to New York, which was viewed as more high profile. The news about the Trump administration’s objections to Mr. Lai’s travel plans was earlier reported by The Financial Times.
On Monday evening Mr. Lai’s spokeswoman, Karen Kuo, said that the president had no plans to travel soon. Mr. Lai needed to focus on dealing with damage in southern Taiwan from a typhoon, as well as trade talks with the Trump administration, Ms. Kuo said. She said the reports of U.S. obstructions were “inaccurate” and “purely speculative.”
While Mr. Lai’s office had never publicly confirmed the trip, three Taiwanese officials had in recent days and weeks privately described his plans to stop in New York and Dallas as part of his travels to Paraguay, Guatemala and Belize, three of Taiwan’s diplomatic partners in Latin America.
David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies U.S.-Taiwan relations, pointed out that such U.S. stops were coordinated with Washington. “The idea that Taiwan would plan a trip for its president to visit three of its diplomatic partners while transiting through the United States, all without approval from senior American officials, strains credulity,” he said.
The White House National Security Council did not reply to a request for comment. Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Tuesday that because Taiwan had not announced any travel plans by Mr. Lai, any discussion about it was “a hypothetical.”
Mr. Lai’s predecessor as president, Tsai Ing-wen, visited New York in 2023, during the Biden administration.
Ms. Tsai also met in California with Kevin McCarthy, then the speaker of the House, the third-ranking post in the U.S. government. That was the highest-level in-person meeting for a leader of Taiwan in the United States since Washington switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
The United States maintains political, economic and security ties with Taiwan, and allows the island’s president to make stops on the way to and from other countries — but Washington has sometimes set limits. In 2006, President Chen Shui-bian canceled a plan to travel through the United States after Washington denied him permission to stop in New York.
Taiwanese officials had made arrangements for Mr. Lai to give a speech in New York, and he was expected to attend an exhibition of Taiwanese technology and products in Dallas, according to two researchers who had heard about the plans from diplomats.
Asked about the reports that the Trump administration had blocked Mr. Lai’s plans for visiting the United States this time, a spokesman for the Chinese government’s Taiwan affairs office reiterated that Beijing “adamantly opposes” any such visits at any time.
Amy Chang Chien is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Taipei, covering Taiwan and China.
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times."
U.S. Economy Slowed in First Half of 2025 as Tariffs Scrambled Data - The New York Times
U.S. Economy Slowed in First Half of 2025 as Tariffs Scrambled Data
"Gross domestic product rebounded in the spring after contracting at the start of the year, but consumer spending remained weak.
Economic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.
Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. That topped forecasters’ expectations and appeared to represent a strong rebound from the first three months of the year, when output contracted at a 0.5 percent rate.
But both those figures were skewed — in opposite directions — by big swings in trade and inventories caused by President Trump’s ever-shifting tariff policies. Taken as a whole, the data from the first six months of the year tell a more consistent story of anemic, though positive, economic growth.
Breaking Down G.D.P.
Overall gross domestic grew in the second quarter, but the underlying trends were skewed by shifting tariff policies.
Many forecasters expect a further deterioration in the months ahead, as tariffs work their way through supply chains, federal job cuts filter through the economy and stricter immigration policies take a toll on industries that rely on foreign-born workers.
“We don’t think we’ve seen the full effects from tariffs yet,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley. “I don’t see how we power through without a soft patch at least for a little while.”
But the economy has repeatedly defied such gloomy predictions in recent years, and some forecasters believe it could do so again. Unemployment remains low, measures of consumer confidence have rebounded and tariffs have so far done little to push up prices overall. The tax-and-spending bill passed by Congress this month could also provide a short-term boost to economic activity, although many budget experts have warned that it could pose a long-term risk by adding trillions to the federal debt.
“We’re going to look back and either say, ‘Wow, the economy was super resilient and these things didn’t matter as much as we thought they would,’ or we’re going to say, ‘Yeah, you could kind of feel it was weakening,’” said Louise Sheiner, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I think we just don’t know.”
Officials at the Federal Reserve will be weighing those dueling narratives at their meeting on Wednesday. They are widely expected to hold interest rates steady, but a flood of economic data this week could help decide whether and when they will cut rates again.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday seized on the G.D.P. data to renew his demand that the Fed lower rates. In a social media post, he said that the report was “WAY BETTER THAN EXPECTED!” and that Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, “MUST NOW LOWER THE RATE.”
“Let people buy, and refinance, their homes!” Mr. Trump wrote.
The data released on Wednesday included evidence to support both sides of the debate.
Consumer spending, the bedrock of the U.S. economy, grew at a 1.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter. That was an acceleration from the 0.5 percent rate in the beginning of the year, but well below the 2.8 percent growth in spending in 2024. That could be a sign that consumers, whose resilience has helped keep growth on track during a tumultuous economic period, are finally showing signs of strain.
High interest rates also continue to weigh on the housing sector, which contracted for the second straight quarter. And inflation continues to cool: Consumer prices rose at a 2.1 percent rate in the second quarter, barely above the Fed’s long-term target of 2 percent.
If consumers continue to pull back and inflation remains tame, that could lead the Fed to restart rate cuts in the fall, especially if the labor market shows signs of weakening. But the data on Wednesday also included hints of why some policymakers remain cautious.
After-tax incomes, adjusted for inflation, grew at a 3 percent rate, suggesting the strong job market could allow consumers to keep spending. And “core” consumer prices, excluding volatile food and energy categories, rose at a 2.5 percent rate, even without much effect from tariffs.
Spending data for June, which will be released on Thursday, could give a clearer picture of how consumers are responding to the mixed economic signals. Aditya Bhave, an economist at Bank of America, said he will be paying particular attention to spending on discretionary services, such as air travel and hotel stays, for signs of whether consumers are pulling back or powering ahead.
“I really think about discretionary services as the canary in the coal mine,” Mr. Bhave said.
The big swing in the overall G.D.P. figures between the first and second quarters paint a misleading picture of the economy. That is because of the unusual patterns in trade and spending caused by Mr. Trump’s tariff policies, and by the confusing way that economic activity is measured.
When Mr. Trump returned to office, businesses and consumers anticipated that tariff rates would rise and rushed to stock up on foreign goods and materials before new duties took effect. That resulted in a surge in imports at the start of the year. That pattern reversed in the second quarter because many companies had already imported the goods they needed.
Big swings in imports can result in confusing G.D.P. numbers because imports, in principle, shouldn’t be counted in the figures at all.
G.D.P., as the name suggests, is meant to measure only goods produced domestically. But rather than measure production directly, the government counts all the goods and services sold in the country, and then subtracts the ones that were made overseas. (It also adds in exports, which are produced domestically but sold to foreign buyers.)
That means that, in theory, imports should be offset elsewhere in the data, either showing up as spending or as unsold products held in inventory. Spending and inventories are both counted as part of G.D.P.
In practice, though, the government is good at counting both imports and consumer spending, but often must rely on rough estimates for inventories, especially in preliminary data. The G.D.P. figures showed that imports subtracted nearly 5 percentage points from G.D.P. growth in the first quarter, then added more than 5 points in the second. Shifts in inventories offset those swings, but only partly, adding a bit less than 3 points to first-quarter growth and subtracting a bit more than 3 points to the second quarter.
Many economists expect the data to be revised in the coming months to show bigger moves in inventories to more fully cancel out the swings in imports. That would result in less volatility in the quarterly G.D.P. figures.
Measures of underlying activity, which remove the volatile trade and inventory components, show that growth slowed sharply in the first quarter, then weakened further in the second.
“Headline numbers are hiding the economy’s true performance, which is slowing as tariffs take a bite out of activity,” Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for the insurer Nationwide, wrote in a note to clients.
The second-quarter figures will be revised at least twice in coming months as more complete data becomes available. Those revisions could be significant: Many economists initially dismissed the contraction in G.D.P. in the first quarter because consumer spending was solid and measures of underlying growth were strong. But subsequent updates made the first quarter look significantly weaker than the preliminary data had suggested.
Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the economy for nearly 20 years."
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Opinion | How Netanyahu Played Trump for a Fool in Gaza - The New York Times
How Netanyahu Played Trump for a Fool in Gaza
"On July 26 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran this headline: “Israel at War Day 659. Gaza Medical Sources: At Least 25 Killed by Israeli Gunfire, Some While Waiting for Aid.”
If you had been following this Gaza story closely, you would know that Haaretz was running a similar headline almost every day for weeks — only the number of Palestinians killed while waiting for food aid handed out by Israel in Gaza changed. As I watched these stories pile up, the thought occurred to me that roughly a month earlier Israel had managed to assassinate 10 senior Iranian military officials and 16 nuclear scientists sitting in their homes and offices. So how was it that Israel had the capacity to destroy pinpoint targets in Iran, some 1,200 miles from Tel Aviv, and could not safely deliver boxes of food to starving Gazans 40 miles from Tel Aviv?
That did not seem like an accident. It seemed like the product of something deeper, something quite shameful, playing out within the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Key figures in Bibi’s extreme-right ruling coalition, like the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, openly pushed a policy that would result in the starvation of many Gazans — to the point where they would leave the strip entirely. Bibi knew the United States wouldn’t let him go that far, so he provided just the bare minimum of aid to prevent being toppled by the Jewish supremacist thugs he’d brought into his government.
Alas, that turned out to be a little too bare, and terrible pictures of malnourished children started emerging from Gaza, prompting even President Trump to declareon Monday that there is “real starvation stuff” happening in Gaza. “You can’t fake that. We have to get the kids fed.”
How did we get here, where a Jewish democratic state, descended in part from the Holocaust, is engaged in a policy of starvation in a war with Hamas that has become the longest and most deadly war between Israelis and Palestinians in Israel’s history — and shows no sign of ending?
My answer: What makes this war different is that it pits what I believe is the worst, most fanatical and amoral government in Israel’s history against the worst, most fanatical, murderous organization in Palestinian history.
But they are alike not just in the awfulness of their goals — each seeking to wipe out the other to control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They are also guided by leaders who have consistently prioritized their own political survival and ideological obsessions over the basic well-being of their own people — not to mention the interests of the United States.
You may have noticed that this war has no generally accepted name — like the Six-Day War, the Sinai War or the October War. Well, I personally have always had a name for it. It’s the War of the Worst.
This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.
Let’s go to the videotape: For months Hamas has been fully aware of the acute food and housing shortage in Gaza — shortages it helped trigger by launching a savage attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, without any plan for the morning after other than to kill as many Jews as it could and with no strategy to protect civilians in Gaza from what Hamas knew would be a savage Israeli retaliation. For months now Hamas has also known that if it released its Israeli hostages, agreed that its leadership would leave Gaza and invited an Arab peacekeeping force blessed by the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza instead of Hamas, the suffering of Gazans would stop immediately.
But Hamas refuses to do that. It not only wants to keep control of Gaza after any cease-fire; it also wants the United States to guarantee its safety from a resumption of Israeli attacks if and when it gives up the last Israeli hostages, whom Hamas has stashed in tunnels and elsewhere for more than 21 months. This is a sick, twisted organization that bears huge responsibility for the suffering in Gaza.
But what too many people still have not grasped is just how sick this current Israeli government is. Too many American officials, lawmakers and Jews keep trying to tell themselves that this is simply another right-wing Israeli government, but just a little more right. Wrong.
As I have argued since my column on Nov. 4, 2022, the morning after this Israeli government was elected, which was titled “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” this Israeli government is uniquely awful.
It has empowered the likes of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who suggested last year that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes two million civilians to die of hunger, but that the international community won’t allow him to. “We bring in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich told a conference hosted by the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
This language is worth parsing, because it goes to the core of what Netanyahu has done to Israel. He has brought into the halls of power people like Smotrich, representatives of a dark, long-repressed minority strain in Jewish history. There has been a deep struggle in the Jewish tradition between those who believe that all humans are created in the image of God, and therefore there is something called “humanity” — and that part of the Jewish covenant with God involves protecting all of humanity — and a minority view that argues there is no humanity, per se; there is just “us” and “them.” For the Jewish people to survive and thrive in this region, according to this line of thought, Jews must overcome their humanism, not be guided by it.
This minority strain of thinking has always been there, but it had never been given the power it has today. It has never been allowed to direct Israel’s huge advanced war machine. This is Bibi’s unique contribution. He has not only empowered the worst of the worst in Israel but also simultaneously sought to unshackle them from the rule of law. He has engaged in a nonstop campaign to strip power from Israel’s independent, ethical gatekeepers, like the former heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Israeli Army. As I write, Netanyahu is trying to oust Israel’s high-integrity, independent attorney general, after a two-year campaign to underminethe oversight powers of Israel’s Supreme Court, precisely to do something no Israeli government has ever done: formally annex the West Bank, if not Gaza, too — and push out as many Palestinians as possible — without any legal restraints.
Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, have never understood this. They think that everyone is just as transactional as they are — whether it’s Vladimir Putin or Netanyahu — and that deep down everyone wants “peace” first and foremost and not “a piece” of Ukraine or “a piece” of the West Bank or Gaza. That is how Bibi and Putin have, each in his own way, managed to play Trump and Witkoff for fools for so long.
What is an example of that? In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a three-phase cease-fire deal that involved a hostage exchange and a prisoner swap. But Trump and Witkoff let Netanyahu unilaterally break the cease-fire in March, before the last two phases could be negotiated. Bibi cited Hamas’s refusal to meet Israel’s demandto release more hostages before negotiations would resume — even though Hamas was never obligated to do so in Phase 1 of the U.S.-brokered deal.
An analysis by Amir Tibon in Haaretz this week headlined “How Trump Facilitated Netanyahu’s Gaza Starvation Policy and Failed to Bring the Hostages Home” argued that there was no military rationale for Bibi to restart the war. Hamas as a military force had been defeated.
It was all to serve Bibi’s political needs. Smotrich and the other extremists effectively told Bibi he had to restart the war or be toppled, and Bibi duped Trump and Witkoff into believing he could free the hostages with harsher military blows on Hamas and more hardship for Gazan civilians, and by confining the population to a small corner of the strip.
It all turned out to be wrong. Hamas was not defeated, and when Israel eventually had to resume supplying food through its distribution organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, it was so bungled that countless Gazans were dying each day swarming the Israeli distribution sites.
Hamas, Tibon noted, having seen “that Netanyahu’s blockade and starvation strategy had become a P.R. disaster for Israel, raised its demands in the ongoing hostage negotiations.” The bottom line, he concluded, is this: “Netanyahu dragged Trump and Witkoff into adopting a failed policy — one that returned no living hostages, cost the lives of nearly 50 Israeli soldiers since the war was resumed in March, led to the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians and precipitated a full-blown humanitarian disaster. The consequences of this failure will haunt Israel for years.”
Alas, it will haunt Palestinians as well, because I fear it has improved the chances that Hamas will come out of this war without having to cede power in Gaza. Bibi and Hamas have been tacitly enabling each other’s political survival for decades. It is quite possible that this disastrous war will end with both of them still in power.
If that is the case, say goodbye to any two-state solution and hello to a forever war. Because, to paraphrase the philosopher Immanuel Kant, out of the crooked timber of Bibi and Hamas no straight thing will ever be made.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman •"