Racketeering was a ‘stretch’ in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial, legal experts say

A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes.
July 2, 2025

By Shayna Jacobs and Salvador Rizzo 


NEW YORK — A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes including sex trafficking and drug distribution.

Some legal experts following the criminal trial said Wednesday that it was not a surprise that the music mogul beat the racketeering conspiracy count in the indictment. It required prosecutors to establish that Combs led an operation involving employees who facilitated illegal sex and drug-related behavior in an organized manner akin to a mafia crime ring.


“Even reading the indictment, it did seem like a stretch to charge Combs with the RICO statute,” said Anna Cominsky, who heads New York Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic. RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

New York lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, who represented mafia scion John Gotti Jr. and Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, described Combs as “a guy that lived a questionable lifestyle and ran a music empire” but said “the RICO charges were so out of place here.”

Combs also was acquitted of two counts of sex trafficking charged as individual crimes. He was convicted on two counts of transporting his accusers for the purpose of prostitution. On the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking counts, he faced up to life in prison.

Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Ricky Patel, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations’ New York field office, issued a statement addressing the impact of sex crimes on victims and on society but did not address the outcome of the case specifically.

“Sex crimes deeply scar victims, and the disturbing reality is that sex crimes are all too present in many aspects of our society,” the statement said.

The RICO statute has been used in recent years in other cases that involved allegations of sexual violence. Singer R. Kelly was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in federal court in Brooklyn in 2021 for 30 years’ worth of allegations of abuse related to women and minors. In 2019, NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in a case that involved a minor and forced labor from within the self-help organization he headed.

Those cases differed from Combs’s, according to Lichtman, because the accusers in Combs’s case were adults in consensual relationships with the producer and had the ability to leave and see other partners. While they may have suffered abuse, the evidence did not show they were forced into sex, he said, and they sought out more and more sexual experiences and time with Combs.

Unlike in other RICO cases, the Combs case did not include a witness who testified that a distinct organization was committing crimes.

Prosecutors were required to prove that members of the enterprise agreed to commit two racketeering acts from a list of alleged crimes. In summations, prosecutor Christy Slavik said that crimes such as drug distribution and sex trafficking were easily proved and that his two alleged trafficking victims, singer Cassie Ventura and a woman called Jane, a pseudonym, clearly didn’t want to participate in “freak-offs.”

Federal prosecutors often bring racketeering cases against gangs and gang members, including in recent years against the MS-13 organization.


The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has prosecuted dozens of gang members under the RICO statute in recent years, and it usually uses insiders with deep knowledge of the gang to narrate the case for the jury from the witness stand, often relating gruesome crimes that they committed with others.

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Raj Parekh, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who is now at the firm Sparacino PLLC, said: “RICO can be a powerful storytelling vehicle about structure: who gives the orders, who follows them and how the operation runs as a coordinated system. The strongest cases are those where the story is clear, the enterprise is well-defined, and the criminal acts are tightly woven into the enterprise’s structure and purpose.”

He added: “These [insider] witnesses often come with baggage, such as criminal records, plea deals and inconsistent statements. The key is not only to confront these issues directly, but most critically, to ensure the testimony clearly explains to the jury how the witness’s firsthand knowledge supports the charges in the case.”

Virginia defense lawyer Joseph Flood, who has handled RICO cases, also noted that the government did not have a key witness to walk the jury through operations at the alleged organization — one potentially fatal flaw in the government’s strategy in the Combs case. Witnesses who worked for Combs spoke of involvement in drug deliveries and described their role in setting up their boss’s hotel rooms for sex parties but did not discuss a broad scheme or hierarchy.

“I think they had a real uphill climb. … Maybe crimes were committed, but they were sort of ad hoc and done to serve a sexual purpose. … The primary goal here was to pleasure him, not to make money,” Flood said.

Flood said that while the conduct may have been repulsive, “I was shocked that this was going forward as a RICO conspiracy. They just didn’t seem to have it.”

Twenty-Four Hours of Authoritarianism

Donald Trump had a very busy Tuesday.

By Jonathan Chait

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty

July 2, 2025

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Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.

He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation. Trump wasn’t canceling elections, he protested, nor was he calling brownshirts into the streets. So how could I call the president authoritarian?

Many highly educated Americans share my friend’s intuition. They believe that if elections are occurring and criticism of the president is not banned outright, then democracy is not under threat. They fail to see the administration’s slow-moving efforts to break down the norms and institutional barriers that otherwise inhibit the ruling party from asphyxiating its opposition. Political scientists who study democracy have a term that clarifies the phenomenon: democratic backsliding. Backslide far enough, and you end up in something called “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections are still held, but the ruling party has commandeered so many institutions in society and has violated so many laws to enhance its own power that the opposition hardly stands a chance. These are dry phrases, but they capture the way in which democracy and authoritarianism are not binary alternatives, but values that lie on a continuum.

Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism

I thought back to my friend’s comments yesterday, because in a single day, Trump took or was revealed to have taken six shocking new assaults on liberal democracy. They would have been shocking, anyway, before he spent a decade bludgeoning our civic nerve endings to the point where these things now register as mere routine politics.

Yesterday alone:

1. Trump floated the notion of arresting New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The president was responding to a question about Mamdani’s promise to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.” But he proceeded to suggest that he was explicitly targeting Mamdani’s political beliefs—“We don’t need a communist in this country”—and publicly entertained the groundless accusation that Mamdani, a U.S. citizen, is “here illegally.”

2. Trump threatened to prosecute CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that allows users to alert one another to ICE activity and on a Defense Intelligence Agency preliminary analysis suggesting that American air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced, referring to the ICE-app story, “because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.” Trump endorsed Noem’s threat, and added, “They may be prosecuted also for giving false reports on the attack on Iran.”

3. The president mused about the prospect of financially punishing Elon Musk for criticizing the Republican megabill. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

To examples such as these, my friend might reply that Trump doesn’t always deliver on his rhetoric. That is true, but only to a point. Especially in his second term, Trump follows through on quite a lot of his threats. Indeed, yesterday’s litany of authoritarian moves is not limited to words. It includes at least three actions:

4. The New York Times reported that Trump has appointed Jared L. Wise to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group. In 2023, federal prosecutors had charged Wise, a former FBI agent, for participating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegedly egging on fellow rioters to assault police officers with shouts of “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Like the rest of the January 6 defendants, Wise was pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term. Now he is working under Ed Martin, a fellow supporter of Trump’s efforts to secure an unelected second term in 2021, and who has tried to intimidate various administration targets with a variety of legal and extralegal punishments.

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5. The administration impounded $7 billion of Education Department funding for after-school and summer programs, English learners, teacher training, and other school functions. The funds had been appropriated by Congress, but Trump once again decided to seize the power of the purse from Congress for himself, in violation of the structure laid out by the Constitution.

6. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled a groundless nuisance lawsuit Trump had filed against the CBS show 60 Minutes. The suit absurdly claims that Trump suffered mental distress because the show aired an interview with Kamala Harris in 2024 that had been edited for length (which is, in fact, standard practice in television news, as Trump and his lawyers surely know). The only apparent reason Paramount settled was to grease the skids for the Trump administration to approve the company’s bid to buy a Hollywood studio. (The company has denied that this was its motivation.)

None of these moves is a one-off. All follow what has become standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government’s powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends.

This new order, if unchecked, will at some point reach a level at which opposition becomes prohibitively dangerous and the commanding heights of business, media, and academia all submit to Trump’s whims. We might not arrive at that end point. But it is very clearly where Trump is trying to take us.

ICE agents now snatching migrants with open court cases; NYC officials, lawyers say it’s ‘utterly unlawful’

Federal agents patrol the halls of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

By Emma Seiwell | eseiwell@nydailynews.com |

New York Daily News July 3, 2025 at 6:50 AM EDT

In a sudden escalation in President Trump’s mass deportation efforts, ICE agents are snatching and detaining migrants with pending immigration court cases at lower Manhattan courthouses, a move which city officials and attorneys blasted as “utterly unlawful.”


In the past month, Department of Homeland Security attorneys have routinely moved to dismiss asylum seekers’ cases in court, in hopes that the judge will grant the dismissal, rendering those individuals’ asylum cases nonexistent and making them subject to expedited removal.

Federal agents have been seen sitting inside, or just outside of courtrooms, and staging themselves in the hallways to ambush and arrest these migrants as they step foot outside the courtroom.

More recently, ICE agents are detaining migrants regardless of whether the judge tossed their case or not, according to city Comptroller Brad Lander and several immigration attorneys.

“What’s happening now, is that people who clearly have status as asylum seekers, either a motion to dismiss is not being made or not being granted, they have pending asylum applications, the judge is granting them a hearing to present their credible fear,” Lander told reporters last week. “And nonetheless, ICE without any rationale whatsoever is disappearing with them. It is an utterly unlawful process.”Brad Lander arrives at the Ted Weiss Federal Building on Friday, June 20, 2025 in Manhattan, New York, to observe federal agents outside an immigration court. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

Lander said he observed asylum hearings at 290 Broadway on Thursday, including one case where the judge gave a Guatemalan woman another hearing for her case in February 2027.

“Nonetheless, in the hallway on her way out of the courtroom, masked ICE agents detained her,” he said. “When I ask, ‘Do you plan to produce them for the February 2027 hearing? Or are you processing them for deportation, of course they refuse to answer questions.”

Lander said he also watched two brothers break down crying in the courtroom, saying “they are certain they will be killed,” as their father had been, if they were to be deported back to Colombia.

Because the pair’s private immigration attorney was a no-show, the judge granted them another hearing in February 2027. ICE agents arrested them both anyway when they left the courtroom, Lander said.

“I can’t imagine what the legal ground here could be if they were not stripped of status,” Lander said. “They have status as asylum seekers. The federal government accepted their asylum applications and a federal immigration judge granted them a hearing on those asylum applications. So what grounds there could be for their arrest and removal, I have no idea. And I’m pretty sure the ICE agents who removed them have no idea, either.”A woman cries after her husband was detained by federal agents following an Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office hearing on June 4, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Benjamin Remy, an immigration attorney with New York Legal Assistance Group, has been at 26 Federal Plaza nearly every day since courthouse arrests began, giving legal advice to migrants on their way into court, and as they’re being hauled away by federal agents.

Remy and his NYLAG colleague, attorney Allison Cutler said they had previously seen federal agents detaining people whose cases had not been dismissed when courthouse arrests began in late May. For several weeks this appeared to be less common, but in the past week they said they have seen numerous people get detained despite having open cases.

“I tell these ICE guys, this really just boils down to getting people their day in court. The judge denies their case, that’s that. The judge grants their case, that’s that,” Remy told The News. “But people deserve to have that opportunity to go into court, present evidence, testify and let the chips fall where they may. And basically everyone we’re seeing detained is being robbed of that.”

Cutler, chimed in, emphasizing that asylum is a right.

“We are obligated under international law to hear asylum applications. If someone expresses fear of returning to their country, we must hear their asylum case,” she said. “The reason those laws were created was because of the holocaust, and the genocide, and so to avoid that again, this is what this government decided to do. And this administration is refusing to follow that.”

Those who are detained with open asylum cases will have to fight their case from detention, often in faraway states like Texas and Louisiana, where many are shipped off to, Cutler added.Federal authorities detain a man after attending a court hearing at immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road New York said she has seen judges write detailed written decisions denying the government’s motions to dismiss in some migrants’ cases, and still witnessed ICE detain them.

“We totally think that is not legal,” Austin said plainly. “It feels like they’re just grabbing people, snatching people, even the people that can’t be removed. They’re just trying to funnel them into this system.”

Austin noted that fighting a case from detention, often across the country, becomes logistically complicated.

“What are they supposed to do? Their families [are] in New York, right? They may have trouble affording counsel. It’s hard to gather evidence,” Austin said.

Data gathered by the American Immigration Council analyzing over 1.2 million deportation cases decided between 2007-2012 found that only 3% of detained migrants without legal representation avoided deportation, compared with 32% of detained migrants who had legal representation.Federal law enforcement officers detain a man at 26 Federal Plaza Tuesday, June 10, 2025 in the Manhattan, New York. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

As for migrants who were never detained, 78% with legal representation avoid deportation, versus only 15% for those without representation.

Austin said she has seen many migrants decide to give up and self-deport just to avoid possible detention, despite being in the middle of a legal court process to obtain asylum.

“That includes a lot of people who remain scared to go to their country. So they’re saying, ‘I’m going to get deported, and then I’m going to flee again,'” Austin said.

When asked to explain why ICE agents are detaining migrants whose cases had not been dismissed, a DHS spokesperson did not address the question directly.

In a statement attributed to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, they stated that most “aliens” who “illegally” entered the U.S. in the past two years are subject to expedited removals.

“Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge,” the statement said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal as they always should have been.”

At Glastonbury, Left-Wing Politics Are Shocking Again. As Are Israeli Atrocities in Gaza.

June 30, 2025

Credit...Christopher James Hoare for The New York Times

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist


The notion that conservatism is “the new punk rock” has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.

This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don’t like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth.

Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump’s orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolized “overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said.” This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled “Heil Hitler.”

Increasingly, however, it’s the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in Gaza and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain’s Glastonbury music festival this weekend. The act’s singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.,” the Israel Defense Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticized Bob Vylan for “appalling hate speech” and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members’ visas.

The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticized it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their U.S. visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He’s said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn’t know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offenses.
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Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. “What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. “The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul searching among British society,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It’s hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage.

I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They’ve witnessed Jews being attacked, demonized and ostracized in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas.

But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it’s not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverization of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel’s war in Gaza looks like to them.

Many of these people feel helpless watching a war that has created, as of January, the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. On social media, they’re seeing desperate Palestinians address them directly from the rubble. Some followed the teenage TikTok star Medo Halimy, who once went to high school in Texas and who made viral videos about his “tent life” before being killed in an Israeli airstrike. Maybe they’ve seen video of a sobbing, starving child eating sand. Hirsi Ali blames social media for creating a cultural movement against Israel: “The algorithm is the accelerant,” she wrote. She’s not entirely wrong, but she fails to consider Israel’s role in creating the content feeding that algorithm.

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I’ve heard Israelis and their partisans mock pro-Palestinian activists as ignorant of the region’s history and geography. But many of these activists have developed an intimate familiarity with the intolerable misery of life in Gaza right now, a level of human suffering that Israel’s defenders too often wave away.
And they know how regularly attempts to protest this suffering, or even merely describe it, are dismissed as antisemitic incitement.

In a deeply disturbing article last week, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that I.D.F. soldiers have shot hungry Gazans as they rush toward aid distribution sites. Some soldiers apparently call these shootings “Operation Salted Fish,” after the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in his limitless cynicism, accused Haaretz of propagating an antisemitic “blood libel.”

An Israeli state that behaves this way is going to be reviled for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism. Clumsy attempts by Israel and its allies to stamp out this revulsion by throwing around accusations of bigotry only lend it the frisson of forbidden truth. That doesn’t justify the provocations of Bob Vylan or Kneecap; they meant to offend, and they did. Sometimes, however, radicalization is born in the gap between what people feel and what they feel they can say.

IN ONE CHART: IMMIGRATION ARRESTS INCREASE

 

Immigration arrests rose sharply after Trump took office. In May, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, met with immigration officials to set a target of 3,000 arrests a day. After that meeting, arrests rose sharply again:

Source: Deportation Data Project | Data is through June 10. | By The New York Times

Most arrests are in states with large immigrant populations, like Florida and Texas. But the pace is faster than it was last year in every state. See data from across the U.S.

How much is $3.3 trillion?

The National Debt Clock in New York, in April. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s domestic policy bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That number is so large that it’s difficult for most people to comprehend. Our writer Evan Gorelick did the math.

Say you start playing the lottery the day you’re born. If you somehow managed to win every game in every U.S. state, every single day — we’re talking everything from scratch-offs to Powerball jackpots — it would still take you around 75 years to rack up $3.3 trillion (assuming, of course, that you pay taxes on your winnings).

Here are five other ways to think about $3.3 trillion:

It’s enough to buy every piece of real estate in Manhattan — all 1.1 million residential and commercial properties — twice, based on recent valuations.

It’s more than the combined wealth of Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the next 18 richest people in the world.

If distributed evenly, it would be enough to give every U.S. household more than $25,000.

Broken into $100 bills, it would create a stack 2,200 miles high — far beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. Laid end to end, those bills could wrap around the Equator 128 times.

If you spent $1 every second without stopping, it would last more than 104,000 years. If you spent $1 million every day, it would last more than 9,000 years.

What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Really Means

Credit...Ad Nuis/Transworld, via Redux

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist


Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.

So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too.

I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.

My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors.
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Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening.


The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery.

There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

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There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in Gaza exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”

To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.

There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.

Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

By David Gelles in New York; Somini Sengupta in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; and Brad Plumer in Washington. June 30, 2025

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.

The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.

The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.

China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own relative to its huge population. So it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.

The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.

While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.

Lack of New U.S. Sanctions Allows Russia to Replenish Its War Chest

President Trump has issued no new restrictions on Russia this year, in effect allowing Moscow to acquire the money and materials it needs in its conflict with Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s halting of new sanctions has created an opening for companies to funnel funds and components to President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times


By Aaron Krolik
July 2, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
The DealBook Newsletter Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them. Get it sent to your inbox.

Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force.

The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.

Sanctions became the center point of the Western-led effort to isolate the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The effort evolved into an international game of cat-and-mouse, as evasion schemes regularly sprang up around the world.

During his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. imposed thousands of so-called maintenance sanctions targeting new schemes. But this year, those actions have come to a standstill, according to a New York Times analysis of restrictions on trade, financial transactions and other activities connected to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Trump’s approach to economic statecraft is to impose pressure and get leverage and try to get the best deal possible,” said Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “For whatever reason, with Russia, he doesn’t want to have any leverage over Putin.”

The Biden administration placed, on average, over 170 new sanctions a month on entities linked to Russia from 2022 to 2024. The targets included oil and weapons production, tech procurement and banking.

In total, the Biden administration imposed more than 6,200 blocks on individuals, companies, vessels and aircraft linked to Russia. In Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, the United States ramped up pressure even further, issuing nearly three times the monthly average, according to a Times analysis of data from the Treasury Department.

The effects of that pressure are already beginning to erode. A Times review of trade records, online listings and corporate filings identified more than 130 companies in mainland China and Hong Kong that are advertising immediate sales of restricted computer chips to Russia. None of the companies is under sanctions.

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If one company is targeted with restrictions, many others are ready to take its place.

One of these firms, HK GST Limited, advertises chips essential to Russian cruise missiles, including the Kh-101, which was recently used in a strike on Kyiv that killed 10 civilians. The firm was incorporated in Hong Kong nine months ago, and its website was set up in February. An analysis of website hosting data, domain ownership, code patterns and contact details links the company to a network of four similar electronics distributors, including Singaporean-based ChipsX and Carbon Fiber Global, a high-performance drone part manufacturer based in China. All of these companies were set up within the last three years.

Replica Websites

Similar looking websites, often built with the same code and with the same addresses in the domain registries, suggest that the same players are spinning up new businesses to evade sanctions.