by Anthony Teso

Internal fights with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over “cancel culture,” “political correctness” and “call-out culture” are not side dramas. They are symptoms of a deeper organisational sickness: the inability of a would-be mass socialist organisation to distinguish political discipline from moral punishment, comradely correction from public shaming, and class struggle from subcultural boundary maintenance.

Let us state the matter plainly. A socialist organisation must be absolutely serious about racism, sexism, transphobia, harassment, chauvinism and abuse. These are not “distractions” from class politics. They are among the ways capitalism divides the working class, cheapens labour power, polices bodies, disciplines social reproduction and fractures solidarity. Any “class politics” that treats oppression as a nuisance is not Marxism. It is economism with a lunch pail.

But the opposite error is just as destructive: a politics that turns every disagreement into an accusation, every clumsy formulation into a moral indictment, every political dispute into a question of personal purity, and every organisational problem into a demand for exclusion. That is not socialist accountability. It is liberal moral management wearing a red hoodie.

DSA’s own formal standards recognise the need for conduct rules. The national Code of Conduct prohibits harassment on the basis of sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, race, religion, national origin, class, age and other protected categories. Its meeting code also asks members to refrain from demeaning or harassing speech, exercise consideration and “share analysis and opinions rather than accusations.” That last phrase is crucial. It points toward a socialist culture of debate, not a permanent tribunal.

The issue, then, is not whether DSA should have standards — of course it should. The question is the standards to be enforced, the politics involved and the organisation’s purpose.

DSA says in its Workers Deserve More programs that it wants to bring together millions of people across the United States to fight for a democracy where working people control their lives, government and economy. That is a mass-political ambition, not a boutique affinity group.

A mass organisation cannot operate like a graduate seminar, a nonprofit HR department or a social-media pile-on machine. It has to organise real workers as they exist: uneven, contradictory, wounded by capitalism, shaped by reactionary common sense, capable of transformation, and often more interested in rent, wages, health care, transit, war and the boss than in mastering the latest activist vocabulary.

A socialist organisation cannot require people to arrive already purified. If it does, it will not build a working-class movement. It will build a political boutique for people who already know the password.

The false choice between class or anti-oppression politics

The worst version of this debate counterposes “class” to “identity.” This is lazy, and worse, politically disarming.

Marxism does not require indifference to oppression. Capitalism does not exploit an abstract worker floating above history. It exploits workers who are racialised, gendered, sexualised, disabled, criminalised, documented or undocumented, paid or unpaid, housed or unhoused. The working class is not a grey block of identical wage-earners. It is internally divided because capital actively organises those divisions.

So, the socialist answer cannot be: “Stop talking about oppression and go back to economics.” That is not class politics. That is class politics stripped of its actual class content.

Yet the moralistic answer is no better. The fact that oppression is real does not mean every conflict should be handled through denunciation. It does not mean accusation is analysis. It does not mean discomfort is violence. It does not mean disagreement is harm. It does not mean the loudest or most wounded person in the room automatically has the correct political line. Furthermore, it does not imply that bureaucratic punishment is the path to liberation.

The real divide is this: one’s politics try to integrate struggles against oppression into working-class organisations; the other substitutes moral adjudication for political struggle.

The first asks: How do we build solidarity across real differences? How do we politically educate one another? How do we transform people through struggle? How do we make the organisation safer without making it brittle, paranoid and afraid of debate?

The second asks: Who is harmful? Who is unsafe? Who must apologise? Who must be removed? Who has failed the vocabulary test? Who can be made an example?

The first builds a movement. The second builds a courtroom with worse rules of evidence.

Solidarity is not niceness

Twin Cities DSA’s “solidarity culture” statement is useful because it comes from the labour movement rather than from the moralistic etiquette wing of progressivism.

It argues that in unions, solidarity means honouring picket lines, protecting coworkers from bosses, and having heated debates from the standpoint of a united front against the boss. It explicitly contrasts these principles with call-out dynamics that isolate people rather than build collective power.

That is the key insight: solidarity is not the absence of conflict; solidarity is conflict disciplined by a shared enemy and a shared project.

In a workplace, workers must assemble with people who do not agree with them on everything. The union must organise a diverse group of coworkers, including the MAGA supporter, the liberal, the apolitical individual, the one who makes inappropriate comments, the person who has never attended a political meeting, and the coworker who believes socialism means Joseph Stalin personally stealing their pickup truck.

This does not mean anything goes. A union cannot allow racist harassment, sexual abuse, homophobic intimidation or anti-trans cruelty to fester. That would destroy solidarity from within. But the labour movement, at its best, does not begin with purification. It begins with common struggle, collective discipline, democratic debate and transformation through action.

A socialist organisation must do the same. It must be able to say: “That behaviour is unacceptable.” But it must also be able to say: “This person can be corrected.”

It must be able to say: “This political line is wrong.” But it must also be able to say: “Wrong is not the same as evil.”

It must be able to say: “This conduct requires consequences.” But it must also be able to say: “Consequences are not revenge.”

Without those distinctions, accountability becomes arbitrary. And arbitrary accountability does not produce political clarity. It produces silence, resentment, factional manipulation and fear.

Professional class-style punishment

The problem is not merely that some people are “too sensitive.” That is a shallow diagnosis.

The more profound issue is that DSA has absorbed much of the political culture of the contemporary professional-managerial progressive milieu: nonprofit procedure, academic jargon, HR-style harm language, social-media reputational punishment, and a tendency to convert political disagreement into ethical contamination.

This culture has a class basis. It is not simply a set of undesirable ideas floating in the air. It reflects the habits of people trained in institutions where power often works through credentials, language, reputation, access, compliance and informal social sanction. In these spaces, individuals accumulate status by demonstrating correct awareness and lose it by violating norms that are often unstable, unspoken and unevenly enforced.

Jo Freeman’s classic essay “ The Tyranny of Structurelessness” remains useful here. Freeman argued that supposedly structureless groups do not abolish power; they merely make power informal, opaque and less accountable. Informal cliques, hidden rules and invisible hierarchies replace democratic structures.

That applies directly to activist moralism. A group can claim to be horizontal, anti-authoritarian and decentralised, while still being governed by informal status hierarchies based on who knows the language, who has the right friends, who can mobilise outrage, who can frame the accusation, and who can define the room’s emotional reality. The result is not democracy. It is rule by those most fluent in the culture of accusation.

This is why “call-out culture” is not actually anti-bureaucratic. It frequently lays the foundation for bureaucracy. First comes the informal pile-on. Then comes the demand that the leadership “do something.” Then comes the disciplinary procedure under pressure. Then comes precedent. Then comes fear. Then comes silence. Congratulations — the revolution now has a complaints department.

The Bowman lesson: Accountability or expulsion reflex?

The Jamaal Bowman controversy revealed this contradiction in public form.

Bowman’s 2021 Israel trip, sponsored by J Street, and his vote for Iron Dome funding produced a serious conflict inside DSA. DSA’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group, along with several chapters, demanded expulsion unless Bowman explicitly supported BDS. The National Political Committee ultimately declined to expel him but stated that he would not be re-endorsed unless he demonstrated solidarity with Palestine in alignment with DSA expectations.

This was not a trivial matter. Palestine is not a decorative issue. US imperialism, Israeli apartheid, military funding and socialist internationalism are core political questions. A socialist organisation has every right to hold its endorsed candidates accountable. Indeed, it must. Otherwise, endorsements become branding exercises for ambitious politicians who borrow the rose and forget the class struggle.

But the Bowman fight also exposed DSA’s underdeveloped theory of discipline. What does accountability mean for elected officials? What commitments are binding? Who decides? What is the sequence of correction, public pressure, censure, non-endorsement and expulsion? Is expulsion a first resort, a last resort, or a factional weapon? How does the organisation distinguish betrayal from contradiction, tactical disagreement, cowardice, district pressure and outright political rupture?

A serious socialist organisation needs answers to those questions before the crisis hits. Otherwise, every controversy becomes a referendum on everyone’s moral seriousness. One side accuses the other of betrayal; the other accuses the first of purity politics; the media publishes a story about socialist chaos; members learn that politics is mostly procedural combat; and the working class, once again, is invited to watch the left eat itself with utensils made of recycled bylaws.

The problem is not that Bowman should have been above discipline — no elected official should be. The problem is that the DSA often oscillates between two failures: loose electoral opportunism and punitive overcorrection. It adapts too much, then panics too late. It tolerates ambiguity until members explode, then tries to resolve political weakness through moral emergency.

That is not strategy. That is indigestion.

Censorship, memory and the fear of debate

The same contradiction appears in debates over publications and speech.

In 2018, Democratic Left published an editorial on article removal and censorship after coordinated calls to remove pieces or authors from the publication’s archives. The editorial resisted the idea that already-published pieces should be removed simply because of retrospective ideological disagreement, while recognising that socialist publications need ethical and political standards.

This is precisely the kind of distinction DSA needs more of. There is a difference between refusing to publish reactionary garbage and pretending that disagreement can be solved by making old arguments disappear.

A socialist organisation needs archives, memory, debate, correction, polemic and public development. It should not be terrified of its own past. Every living political tradition contains errors, fights, reversals, unsatisfactory formulations and unfinished arguments.

The bourgeoisie has its reason for erasing history: it wants to hide exploitation. The left should not imitate that impulse in miniature by hiding disagreement. We should argue. We should annotate. We should rebut. We should say: “This was wrong, and here is why.” But removal is not clarification. It is often just avoidance dressed up as justice.

A movement that cannot survive the existence of an old bad article is unprepared to survive the state.

Moralism is not materialism

Marxism begins with social relations, not moral essence. It asks what structures produce behaviour, what interests are at stake, what forms of power are operating, and what kind of collective action can transform the situation. Moralism begins with guilt, contamination, accusations and purification.

This does not mean Marxists have no morality — obviously we do. Exploitation is monstrous. Imperialism is monstrous. Racism and misogyny are monstrous. Capitalism is essentially organised barbarism operating through a payroll system. But Marxism does not stop at moral condemnation. It moves from condemnation to analysis, from analysis to organisation, and from organisation to power.

The tribunal rarely gets that far. It often mistakes accusations for politics. But accusing is easy. Organisation is hard. Denunciation is easy. Recruitment is hard. Expulsion is easy. Transformation is hard. Calling someone out is easy. Building a durable working-class majority in the most powerful capitalist country on Earth is, regrettably, a bit more demanding than writing “do better” in the tone of an assistant dean.

The Communist Manifesto argues that communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties, and that they have no interests separate from the proletariat as a whole. It also insists that the proletariat must constitute itself as a class and fight politically. That is the standard: not subcultural distinction, but class formation.

A socialist organisation should ask of every internal norm the following: does this help constitute the working class as a political force? Or does it merely distinguish the enlightened from the suspect?

If a norm helps workers fight bosses, landlords, police violence, imperialism, racism, sexism and ecological destruction, good. Keep it. Strengthen it. Teach it. Institutionalise it democratically.

If a norm mostly helps insiders police outsiders, veterans humiliate newcomers, factions weaponise grievances, and educated activists display refinement over ordinary members, throw it into the nearest procedural compost bin.

The subculture trap

The danger for DSA is not that it has too many standards. The danger is that it has too many informal, unstable, moralised standards and not enough democratic, political, transparent ones.

A mass socialist organisation should be demanding. It should expect discipline, seriousness, study, accountability, anti-racism, anti-sexism, internationalism and commitment. But demanding is not the same as precious.

A revolutionary organisation cannot be built around the emotional reflexes of the most conflict-averse people in the room. Nor can it be built around the punitive reflexes of those who experience every disagreement as an opportunity to prosecute.

The working class is not recruited by lowering politics to the lowest common denominator. That is not the argument. The working class is recruited by connecting socialist politics to lived antagonisms: wages, rent, debt, schools, healthcare, war, climate, policing, reproduction, time, dignity and power.

People can grow politically when they enter a serious organisation that treats them as capable of growth. They do not grow when they are treated as walking liabilities.

A socialist organisation must be a school of class struggle. Schools are correct. They do not merely expel. They set standards. They also teach. They distinguish ignorance from malice, confusion from sabotage, and contradiction from betrayal. A school that expels every student who enters without already knowing the curriculum is not an educational institution. It is a club.

What socialist accountability should look like

The answer is not “anything goes.” Such an approach would be idiotic and, even worse, it would leave vulnerable members at the mercy of those who can dominate the room. Socialist democracy requires conduct rules.

But those rules must be clear, political, proportional and democratically controlled.

First, DSA should distinguish sharply between political disagreement, bad formulation, oppressive conduct, harassment and abuse. These are not the same. Treating them as identical destroys trust.

Second, discipline should be proportional. Correction, mediation, education, warning, temporary suspension, removal from leadership, non-endorsement and expulsion are different tools. A serious organisation does not use a hammer for every repair unless it wants the house to look like it lost a fight with a toddler.

Third, accusations should not substitute for evidence. A socialist organisation cannot reproduce carceral logic in red packaging, but neither can it abandon due process. Due process is not liberal weakness. It is protection against arbitrary power.

Fourth, political education must be central. If members keep violating norms because they do not understand the politics behind them, the answer is not endless punishment. The answer is systematic education, mentorship and collective discussion.

Fifth, elected officials need explicit discipline mechanisms before crises emerge. Endorsement agreements, reporting requirements, public accountability processes and defined consequences should be clear in advance. No more improvising socialist discipline in the middle of a media firestorm.

Sixth, DSA must rebuild the art of the polemic. A polemic is not a denunciation. It is a political weapon aimed at clarification. A good polemic names the line, explains the stakes, defeats the argument and leaves the person room either to change or to reveal their unwillingness to change. A bad polemic just throws someone into the volcano and calls the smoke “accountability.”

Conclusion: No more tribunal socialism

DSA faces a strategic choice. It can become a mass socialist organisation rooted in workplaces, tenants’ struggles, anti-imperialist politics, electoral fights and democratic class formation. Or it can become a self-policing progressive subculture whose main product is internal discipline and whose main emotional register is suspicion.

The first path requires standards. The second path also has standards. The difference is that the first uses standards to build solidarity, while the second uses standards to ration belonging.

A socialist organisation must not tolerate bigotry, harassment, abuse or chauvinism. But it also must not confuse socialist politics with moral purification. It must not turn every contradiction among the people into an enemy proceeding. It must not import the punitive habits of the nonprofit office, the university seminar, the HR department and the social media pile-on, and then call the result liberation.

The working class does not need a tribunal. It needs an organisation.

It needs a place where people can fight, learn, argue, change and act together. It needs discipline without bureaucratic moralism. It needs accountability without ritual humiliation. It needs anti-oppression politics rooted in class struggle, not class politics amputated from oppression or oppression politics amputated from class.

The question is not whether DSA should be “nice.” Niceness is cheap. The question is whether DSA can become serious. And a serious socialist organisation does not ask, “Who can we punish to prove we are righteous?” It asks: “What must we build to win?”

Anthony Teso is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tempest Collective and Solidarity in the United States

by Dr. Dan Steinbock

Photo caption.  Ebola in West Africa, 2013 / Photo credits: ©EC/ECHO/Jean-Louis Mosser via Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For weeks, the latest Ebola outbreak was framed as a regional emergency. That assumption is now being challenged by mounting evidence that the outbreak may be broader, more fragmented and entrenched than initially believed.

On Saturday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited eastern Congo’s Bunia, a city at the heart of the Ebola outbreak, where the virus is spreading faster than the response.

The crisis is centered in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with spillovers into Uganda and rising concern across neighboring states. Official numbers remain uncertain because surveillance systems in conflict zones are incomplete.

The outbreak circulated undetected for weeks, perhaps longer, before full recognition. By the time authorities moved aggressively, transmission chains may have spread across borders, refugee corridors and informal trade networks.

Why this Ebola crisis is different

The danger does not lie primarily in the current number of cases, which remain far below the scale of COVID-19 or even the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014-16.

Historically, Ebola outbreaks have remained geographically concentrated. Although the virus is highly lethal, it is relatively difficult to transmit compared with airborne respiratory diseases.

But the present crisis is unfolding under unusually adverse conditions: war, displacement, urbanization, weak public-health systems, declining international aid capacity and growing mistrust of authorities. “Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration,” the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières has warned.

Eastern Congo is one of the most difficult environments in the world for epidemic control. Armed militias, population displacement and attacks on medical facilities undermine contact tracing and isolation efforts. Informal border crossings are extensive. Urban growth has accelerated faster than health infrastructure. In some affected regions, public trust in government and foreign health interventions is extremely weak.

Moreover, the current outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no fully established licensed vaccine exists comparable to those deployed against the Zaire strain during previous outbreaks. That sharply complicates containment.

Potential contagion links

One of the least understood aspects of the present outbreak concerns contagion linkages beyond immediate epidemiology. Let’s start with physical contagion networks: Eastern Africa’s transport corridors increasingly connect local outbreaks to regional and global mobility systems.

Cities like Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi are no longer isolated peripheral centers. They are integrated into international aviation and trade flows linking Africa to the Gulf, Europe and Asia.

Second, institutional contagion effects: Fragile health systems already weakened by debt burdens, inflation and post-pandemic exhaustion are struggling to absorb another major shock, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Third, psychological and economic contagion: Financial markets, tourism flows, commodity exports and investment patterns can react violently even to limited outbreaks if fears of wider transmission intensify. The 2014-16 Ebola crisis demonstrated how panic itself can generate severe economic damage independent of the actual epidemiological scale.

Finally, geopolitical contagion: In a fragmented multipolar world, global health crises increasingly intersect with strategic competition, sanctions, debt restructuring and security concerns. Epidemics no longer operate outside geopolitics; they amplify it.

The impact of US aid withdrawal

One of the most consequential dimensions of the current Ebola crisis concerns the partial retreat of US and Western international health support over recent years.

American funding cuts and shifting priorities have weakened several pillars of global epidemic preparedness, including surveillance systems, laboratory support, emergency logistics and NGO operations across vulnerable regions. The abrupt manner these cuts have been executed has compounded the negative effects.

The broad erosion of development assistance after COVID-era fiscal strains aggravates the problem. In practice, this means slower outbreak detection, weaker field operations and reduced healthcare resilience precisely where early intervention matters most.

The retreat of preventative international health capacity is likely to ultimately increase the probability of far costlier future global emergencies.

In the case of Ebola, the Trump administration is contributing to amplified risks. Though most countries are following the WHO’s advice on travel bans, the U.S. is ignoring it.

Contagion scenarios

The first and most likely plausible scenario is a severe but regionally contained epidemic. The outbreak could produce thousands or even tens of thousands of cases regionally, while devastating local economies and healthcare systems.

In this case, intensified international response efforts eventually stabilize transmission through traditional Ebola control measures: isolation, tracing, border monitoring and behavioral adaptation. For now, this is regarded as the likeliest scenario.

The second scenario involves a wider multinational African epidemic. This becomes plausible if transmission becomes embedded along mobility corridors linking Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and beyond. Refugee flows, mining routes and informal commerce networks could facilitate wider regional spread.

In this case, Ebola would remain primarily an African crisis, but one with major global economic, humanitarian and geopolitical repercussions.

The third scenario — a true global pandemic transition — remains relatively unlikely but can no longer be dismissed entirely. Sustained international spread would likely require repeated exportation into major cities combined with failures in hospital containment and perhaps viral adaptation toward easier transmission.

There is currently no evidence of such adaptation. Nevertheless, prolonged uncontrolled transmission increases evolutionary opportunities and magnifies systemic risk.

From regional emergency to global test

The present Ebola crisis has not become a global pandemic threat comparable to COVID-19. Public health officials hope it will remain regionally concentrated despite severe humanitarian consequences.

The failure to contain the Ebola crisis in its early local stage suggests that the lessons of Covid-19 pandemic have not been learned. It heralds still another tragedy of missed opportunities.

However, the world today is less institutionally cohesive, less politically cooperative and less strategically prepared for transnational crises than it was just a decade ago. Pandemic fatigue, geopolitical rivalry and fiscal retrenchment have weakened precisely the mechanisms needed for early containment.

Infectious disease containment operates according to a simple principle: outbreaks are cheapest to stop at the periphery. Once they reach major urban systems and international mobility corridors, costs rise exponentially.

It is a principle that the international community can ignore only at its own peril.

by Alejandra Garcia

Photo caption.  Bolivia: “a rebellion against neo liberalism”

On Thursday, former Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma declared that the protests shaking Bolivia for the past month represent a popular rebellion against neoliberalism and a government that subordinates itself to the United States.

In an interview with an international news agency, Morales, who governed Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, spoke from the coca-growing region of Chapare, his political stronghold in central Bolivia. From there, he praised the determination of the social sectors mobilized against the neoliberal policies implemented by the right-wing government of President Rodrigo Paz since his rise to power.

It is important to note that Morales’ statements came shortly after an unusual blackout in the Chapare region, which raised alarm among Indigenous organizations and rural movements fearing that the outage could have been part of a maneuver by the Paz administration to facilitate his arrest.

During the interview, Morales emphasized that the demonstrations, involving miners, transport workers, teachers, farmers, Indigenous communities, and other social groups, are aimed at defending workers’ and families’ economies, democracy, the Constitution, and Bolivia’s natural resources.

President Rodrigo Paz has accused Morales of orchestrating the protests, which are demanding his resignation amid Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in four decades. In response, Morales rejected the accusations and stated that, “it is a government completely subordinate to the United States. I believe the time has come to decide who rules: the empire or the people. I am absolutely convinced that this rebellion is against the neoliberal model and against the neocolonial state.”

Paz is widely seen as a new Latin American ally of Washington. The United States has publicly backed his administration and warned that Bolivia is facing an alleged “attempted coup d’état.”

According to Evo, “The Paz government is completely subordinate to the US”

At 66 years old, Morales is sheltered by thousands of Indigenous people and peasant supporters who are preventing police from executing an arrest warrant, as part of Paz’s political persecution against the former president. “I would like to accompany the demonstrations, but this judicial harassment prevents me from doing so,” Morales stated.

The leader also denounced an ongoing United States-backed plan, supported by the Paz government, to carry out a military operation involving the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Southern Command in order to arrest him. We’ve seen this excuse before, like in Venezuela, with the narrative of the non-existent Cartel of the Sun, that led to the kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro on January 3rd.

“Hunger is what is driving this mobilization,” Morales insisted, recalling his role as Bolivia’s first Indigenous president.

On Tuesday, Bolivia’s Congress repealed a law that would have allowed President Paz to declare states of emergency and deploy the military to control protests without parliamentary approval. Morales warned that if such measures were imposed, “I doubt the people would back down.”

Barred from running in the 2025 presidential elections by a ruling from Bolivia’s Constitutional Court, Morales has proposed that the current government call new elections within 90 days. He also stated that he has no personal ambition to return as a presidential candidate.

“Now is no longer my time,” Morales concluded. “But I still have the responsibility to accompany the political movement that I lead.”

by Pamela Ferdinand

Key findings:

• A review of nearly 300 studies summarizes evidence that chlorpyrifos may harm multiple systems throughout the body, including the brain, hormones, liver, gut microbiome, muscles, reproductive organs, and bones.
• The review describes DNA damage, chromosome instability, and epigenetic changes that may alter how genes function long after exposure.
• Some harmful effects appear at exposure levels below those considered safe under current pesticide exposure testing standards.

For decades, regulators viewed chlorpyrifos — a pesticide widely used in the U.S. and around the world — primarily as a neurotoxin that disrupts signaling in the brain and nervous system. But as the EPA reconsiders whether to continue to allow its use on foods like apples and soybeans, a new review indicates other insidious harms.

Published in April [2026] in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, the review synthesizes findings from nearly 300 studies worldwide published up to this year. These include laboratory experiments, animal studies, epidemiological research, regulatory documents, and risk assessments.

Growing evidence suggests chlorpyrifos may damage the brain, hormones, liver, gut microbiome, muscles, reproductive organs, and bones. Studies also link the pesticide to DNA damage and lasting changes in gene activity that may increase the risk of chronic disease.

Together, the findings portray chlorpyrifos as what the reviewers call a “multi-system toxicant” that poses a more significant threat to public health than previously understood. It suggests the pesticide acts on the body in ways far beyond disrupted nerve signaling or obvious poisoning. Pregnancy and early childhood are especially sensitive periods for chemical exposure.

“What has genuinely evolved over time is our understanding that chlorpyrifos causes harm in ways that go beyond its effects on the nervous system including damage to DNA, changes in how genes are switched on or off, interference with hormones, and disruption of the healthy bacteria that live in the gut,” said Dr. Dana Boyd Barr, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and past president of the International Society of Exposure Science.

The authors warn that current regulatory systems may not fully capture the complexity of chlorpyrifos’ dangers to the body. Many occur at levels too low to be detected by current safety testing, which looks for the disruption of an enzyme involved in nerve cell communication.

The review links chlorpyrifos exposure to:

• Biological changes associated with inflammation, chronic disease, and cancer
• Brain and nervous system damage, including lower IQ and developmental harms in children, neurodegenerative disease, and disrupted cell growth, survival, and communication
• DNA damage and altered gene regulation that hinders normal cell repair and changes how genes are switched on and off during development (epigenetics)
• Hormone disruption involving thyroid, estrogen, and testosterone pathways
• Liver injury, gut bacteria disruption, and metabolic dysfunction linked to obesity and type 2 diabetes
• Reproductive, muscular, and skeletal harm, including reduced sperm quality and bone loss

Industry pushback despite reported harms

The review comes as the EPA reassesses whether the pesticide’s remaining uses meet the statutory standard of “no unreasonable adverse effects.” The action follows years of official stalling, prior bans, policy reversals, and legal challenges.

Meanwhile, agrichemical companies are lobbying federal and state lawmakers to shield pesticide manufacturers, including Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto, from some lawsuits involving Roundup weedkiller. The suits allege their products cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), among other cancers.

In February 2020, Corteva Agriscience—then the world’s largest producer of chlorpyrifos — announced it would stop production, citing declining demand. But existing stocks continued to be used. The chemical remains approved for several major crops in the U.S., including apples, strawberries, soybeans, citrus, wheat and peaches.

Health concerns trigger restrictions and bans

Chlorpyrifos — the active ingredient in Dursban^® and Lorsban^® — belongs to a class of chemicals known as organophosphates. Introduced in the U.S. in 1965, chlorpyrifos became one of the world’s most heavily used insecticides by the 1990s.

Farmers use chlorpyrifos to control ticks on cattle and pests on crops. It is used on golf courses, in greenhouses, on wood products such as telephone poles, and in residential areas.

Chlorpyrifos poses a significant neurotoxic risk to humans, with developing fetuses and children being particularly vulnerable.

U.S. regulators banned chlorpyrifos for household use in 2001. The ban came after mounting evidence, including a prominent study by Columbia University, linked exposure to developmental brain harms in children.

Evidence that chlorpyrifos damages children’s brains later prompted bans or restrictions in more than 40 countries, including the European Union. The European Food Safety Authority concluded there was no safe exposure level, but it is still widely used elsewhere in the world. Several U.S. states, including California, New York, Hawaii, Oregon and Maryland, currently maintain restrictions or bans.

Yet chlorpyrifos persists in food (including fruits, cereals, and vegetables), the environment, and human tissue. The compound dissolves easily in fats and crosses cell membranes, allowing it to accumulate in tissues over time.

It can also travel long distances — in some cases more than 600 miles — from where it was applied. Researchers have detected residues in food, drinking water, soil, rain, snow, and wildlife. Samples range from the Mississippi River to remote Antarctica.

Children, pregnant women, farm workers face the highest risks

Health effects of chlorpyrifos depend on dose, duration, and route of exposure, the reviewers say. Genetic differences may also influence vulnerability.

For most people, exposure occurs through contaminated food, water, and air. Farmworkers often face the highest exposure levels. But researchers say chronic low-level exposure during pregnancy and childhood may also carry risks.

Infants and children remain especially vulnerable because their detoxification systems are still developing. They also consume more food relative to body weight and frequently put their hands in their mouths.

Chlorpyrifos risks extend beyond nerve damage

For years, scientists and regulators focused on one primary mechanism of harm. Chlorpyrifos becomes more toxic after the body converts it into a compound called chlorpyrifos-oxon. This blocks acetylcholinesterase (AChE), the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine in the nervous system.

Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter essential for communication between nerve cells. It also helps regulate attention, learning, memory, movement, breathing, and heart rate.

Without acetylcholinesterase, nerves fire uncontrollably. In insects, the effect causes paralysis and death. In humans, severe poisoning can cause seizures, respiratory failure, or death.

That effect on the single enzyme still matters. But the review argues it no longer explains the full scope of chlorpyrifos toxicity.

Chlorpyrifos affects the nervous system not only by blocking AChE activity, its well-known toxic mechanism, but also by disrupting fat balance in cells and interfering with other cell signaling pathways. These additional effects may worsen its harmful impacts on the brain and nervous system.

Chlorpyrifos is linked to cell damage throughout the body

Instead, researchers describe evidence that the pesticide may trigger widespread biological stress across organs and tissues. Studies point to several possible mechanisms, including inflammation and oxidative stress, when highly reactive oxygen-containing molecules build up, damage cells, and weaken the body’s defenses. Other ways include hormone disruption and altered gene regulation.

Chlorpyrifos may be especially harmful to mitochondria, the structures inside cells that produce most of the body’s energy. Damaged mitochondria can leak harmful, highly reactive molecules (mtROS) that can damage DNA, proteins, and cell structures.

The review also highlights how chlorpyrifos may cause genes to switch on and off. Scientists increasingly believe these changes may help explain how environmental exposures contribute to chronic disease years after exposure occurs.

“While traditionally characterized by its potent acetylcholinesterase-inhibitory properties, accumulating evidence now shows that chlorpyrifos and its bioactive metabolite, chlorpyrifos-oxon (CPO), exert far broader toxic effects, including the induction of oxidative stress, enhancement of neuroinflammatory processes, and the triggering of persistent epigenetic alterations,” the authors wrote.

Babies and children are more susceptible to chlorpyrifos harms

The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that chlorpyrifos exposure poses risks to fetuses, infants, children, and pregnant women. Chlorpyrifos crosses the placenta and injures the developing nervous system before birth.

“Chlorpyrifos poses a significant neurotoxic risk to humans, with developing fetuses and children being particularly vulnerable,” they wrote. “Neurotoxic effects of the pesticide have been observed even at low doses.”

The body’s defenses against chlorpyrifos also depend heavily on an enzyme called paraoxonase-1 (PON1) that helps break it down. But PON1 activity varies widely among individuals due to genetics and age.

Infants and young children naturally have lower levels. This may also increase their susceptibility to toxicity, the authors say.

Prenatal exposure linked to lasting brain damage and lower IQ

Human studies link prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure to:

• Attention deficits
• Delayed motor development
• Lower birth weight
• Reduced IQ
• Structural brain abnormalities

For instance, an August 2025 study of New York City children found that prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos was linked to widespread brain abnormalities and weaker motor skills years later. The researchers concluded prenatal exposure may cause lasting brain disruptions. The effects appeared to worsen with higher exposure.

What emerges is a troubling picture: the developing brain is being shaped by a toxic soup of chemicals acting on the same parts of the brain.

Meanwhile, animal studies show that chlorpyrifos disrupts nerve cell growth and alters brain signaling tied to learning and memory. It also damages connections between neurons during critical developmental periods, studies suggest.

Perhaps most striking, chlorpyrifos appears in these studies to suppress brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BPA, flame retardants, and other toxic chemicals also disrupt BDNF, which Dr. Bruce Lanphear describes as “fertilizer for the brain.”

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor helps neurons survive and form synapses. It also helps them strengthen learning pathways and recover from injury.

“What emerges is a troubling picture: the developing brain is being shaped by a toxic soup of chemicals acting on the same parts of the brain,” said Lanphear, a preventive medicine physician and professor at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University who studies how toxic chemicals impact human health. “Yet when the EPA evaluates chlorpyrifos, it largely considers the pesticide on its own—not alongside other chemicals that disrupt the same brain pathways.”

Studies investigate links between chlorpyrifos and cancer

The ways chlorpyrifos affects the body may contribute to the growth and rate of liver, breast, and ovarian tumors, studies indicate. One large 2015 study of more than 30,000 women—spouses of pesticide applicators—linked chlorpyrifos exposure to elevated breast cancer risk. While human evidence remains limited and inconsistent, the reviewers say, the combination of effects warrants closer investigation.

Additionally, 3D laboratory models suggest that chlorpyrifos may cause breast cancer cells to invade nearby tissues more actively. Epidemiological studies also report associations with hormone-related cancers, particularly more aggressive forms of hormone receptor-negative breast cancer.

Animal studies done in living organisms also indicate that long-term, low-dose exposure to chlorpyrifos increases the risk of breast cancer, the reviewers say. The pesticide can make tumors appear sooner and increase their number, likely due to hormone disruption.

Parkinson’s, memory loss and other neurological impacts

The review cites evidence linking chlorpyrifos exposure to movement problems, memory impairment, anxiety-like behaviors, and damage to brain regions involved in emotion and cognition. One recent study reports that chlorpyrifos exposure may be associated with more than double the risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Researchers say chlorpyrifos-oxon (CPO) — produced when the body breaks down chlorpyrifos — may be especially dangerous. According to federal researchers, chlorpyrifos-oxon is about 1,000 times more toxic than chlorpyrifos itself.

Laboratory research indicates CPO may disrupt pathways tied to learning, memory, inflammation, and nerve cell survival. Studies also suggest that chlorpyrifos-oxon damages a structural protein called tubulin, potentially disrupting brain development. Tubulin helps nerve cells grow and form connections.

“Overall, the ability of CPO to interfere with normal developmental processes in the nervous system far exceeds that of its parent compound,” the authors wrote.

Hormone disruption linked to fertility and metabolic problems

The review finds substantial evidence that chlorpyrifos may interfere with multiple hormone systems (endocrine disruption) throughout the body. These include thyroid, estrogen, and testosterone pathways.

Research links exposure to abnormal reproductive cycles and tissue development, lower sperm counts, and reduced sperm quality. Some studies suggest it causes reduced prostate weight and disrupted hormone signaling in placental cells. Chlorpyrifos may also contribute to obesity, insulin resistance, and blood sugar problems, the review shows.

Gut bacteria changes may fuel inflammation and disease

The review also tracks harms involving the gut microbiome — the ecosystem of microbes that supports digestion, metabolism, and immune function. Experimental studies indicate reductions in beneficial bacteria alongside increases in potentially harmful microbes after chlorpyrifos exposure.

These changes may be tied to leaky gut syndrome, when bacterial toxins enter the bloodstream and trigger inflammation throughout the body. This type of gut-liver axis disruption may contribute to systemic inflammation and metabolic disease, the reviewers say.

Studies link chlorpyrifos  to liver, bone and muscle damage

The liver itself emerges as a major target of chlorpyrifos, experimental studies show. Researchers describe potential ties between chlorpyrifos and:

• Chronic liver inflammation
• Disrupted cholesterol, with higher levels of LDL  (“bad”) cholesterol and lower HDL (“good”) cholesterol
• Liver cell injury, including a form of cell death linked to iron buildup in liver cells (ferroptosis)

The review also links chlorpyrifos to musculoskeletal damage, including weaker bone formation, reduced bone density, and increased bone breakdown. Some bone changes occurred alongside neurological problems, suggesting broader developmental damage.

Studies show structural and functional changes involving both “slow-twitch” endurance muscles and “fast-twitch” muscles used for rapid movement. Some suggest chlorpyrifos may damage the diaphragm.

Chlorpyrifos DNA damage and altered gene activity raise alarm

The review highlights growing evidence that chlorpyrifos may damage DNA. Researchers describe chromosome damage and broken DNA strands.

Studies also point to disruption of microRNAs, molecules that help regulate processes such as brain development, inflammation, and cell growth. And they suggest chlorpyrifos alters gene regulation in ways linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, metabolic disease, inflammation, and cancer.

“Collectively, the studies discussed above indicate that chlorpyrifos is a multifaceted genotoxic agent whose harmful effects extend far beyond acetylcholinesterase inhibition to include direct DNA strand breaks, chromosomal instability, and epigenetic reprogramming in various cell types, tissues, and species, detectable even at environmentally and clinically relevant concentrations,” they wrote.

Studies investigate links between chlorpyrifos and cancer

The ways chlorpyrifos affects the body may contribute to liver, breast, and ovarian tumors, studies indicate. These include changes in DNA damage and repair, cell growth control, and gene expression.

Experimental studies in liver and breast cells found abnormal cell growth and altered tumor progression. Some epidemiological studies report associations with hormone-related cancers, particularly more aggressive forms of hormone receptor-negative breast cancer.

One large 2015 study of more than 30,000 women—spouses of pesticide applicators—linked chlorpyrifos exposure to elevated breast cancer risk. While human evidence remains limited and inconsistent, the reviewers say, the combination of effects warrants closer investigation.

Current safety standards fail to protect public health

Underlying the review is a larger challenge to how regulators evaluate the safety of chlorpyrifos and other pesticides. Current approaches, the authors say, do not adequately account for their effects, especially during fetal development and early childhood.

“The regulatory system was designed to prevent obvious poisoning, but many pesticide-related diseases do not appear immediately. Exposures too low to cause symptoms today may impair fetal brain development or contribute to Parkinson’s disease decades later,” Lanphear added. “The science has moved ahead of the regulatory framework. That is the gap this review highlights.”

Epidemiological studies suggest that prenatal and early-life exposure, even at relatively low environmental levels, may be linked to impaired neurodevelopment and cognitive function. That means both the way exposure occurs and the amount of exposure should be considered important factors that influence toxic effects when evaluating health risks, they say.

They also revisit longstanding criticism of industry-funded chlorpyrifos studies that have been used to shape federal exposure limits for decades. They cite the so-called “Coulston study,” a 1972 safety evaluation funded by Dow Chemical.

Later researchers questioned parts of the study, arguing that it was not peer-reviewed. They also found that some baseline data was excluded from the original analysis, understating the pesticide’s toxicity.

The review calls for an independent reassessment of industry-sponsored toxicology studies used in past safety evaluations. It also calls for stronger protections for children and pregnant women, expanded biomonitoring programs, and safer pesticide alternatives, the authors say.

They argue that academic research should play a larger role in regulatory decisions to provide a fuller picture of chlorpyrifos harms. Independent research indicates a potentially higher threat to human health, particularly for children, due to exposure to this pesticide, they say.

“The societal costs associated with these risks are substantial, highlighting the urgent need for stricter regulations on chlorpyrifos use,” the authors wrote.

Reference

Kalenik S, Zaczek A, Rodacka A. Chlorpyrifos and Chlorpyrifos-Oxon: A Widening Spectrum of Toxicity. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2026; 27(9):3909. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms27093909

by Katherine Krueger

To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.”

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

by Lylla Younes

BEIRUT, Lebanon—When Lebanon and Israel announced a ceasefire agreement on April 16, Nasreen Abd Elaal and her husband and four children packed their few belongings and departed the public school in Marj al-Zuhoor where they had taken shelter—for the last time, they hoped. They returned the next day to their home in Ain Arab, a small village nestled in the plains near the southern border, where they run a small butcher shop and corner store. That same day, Israeli forces entered the village and established a curfew, warning local residents not to leave their homes after dark, before setting up a checkpoint on the exit road leading south.

Twelve days later, Abd Elaal was working behind the counter at the store when she saw a large armored bulldozer lumbering down the road, followed by a swarm of army vehicles carrying, by her estimation, more than one hundred Israeli soldiers. The troops spread through the village, pointed their guns at residents and told them that the area was located within Israel’s new “yellow line”—a line demarcating an Israeli zone of control along the southern border inside Lebanese territory that was unilaterally declared by Israel using the same terminology as in Gaza. The soldiers told Abd Elaal and the other village residents that they had two hours to evacuate north.

“They didn’t even give us that,” Abd Elaal recalled. She rushed home and put her children in their pickup truck, then went back into the house with her husband to pack what they could. They were interrupted by the sound of a car horn and ran back outside to find that an Israeli soldier had opened the door of their vehicle and begun honking the horn while their children were sitting inside. “He told us they had orders to empty the village. He said, ‘You either leave right now or you die.’” Residents were expelled from the village so rapidly, many weren’t even able to lock their front doors behind them, Abd Elaal said.

The forced expulsion of Ain Arab—where Israeli soldiers went door to door, forcing residents from their homes at gunpoint—was a striking example of the Israeli military’s campaign to ethnically cleanse villages across southern Lebanon. Human rights advocates and locals told Drop Site they hadn’t heard of a similar incident occurring in this latest phase of the war—the Israeli military typically bombs and shells areas to forcibly displace residents. Over 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since March 2, and many have no idea if or when they will be able to return to their homes.

Abd Elaal returned with her family to the same school-turned-shelter in the village of Marj al-Zuhoor in the Bekaa Valley where she said four families share one room and water access is intermittent. After studying a map that the Israeli military published on April 19, they found that their village was actually located outside of Israel’s “yellow line,” prompting a group of men from the village, including Abd Elaal’s husband and a local official, to visit an army office in the village of Marjayoun on May 21 to ask if the state could work with UNFIL—the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the South—to return them to their lands. When the residents followed up a week later, army officials said they had not been able to secure them safe passage back home.

“To say we are destroyed is not enough,” Abd Elaal said. Most villagers lived off of the land, and their expulsion meant that they couldn’t prepare the fields for spring planting. “We left our livelihoods in the soil and fled.”

The story of Ain Arab underscores the brutal and sweeping nature of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in southern Lebanon, where a flurry of displacement orders are issued daily and lines of advance are drawn and redrawn without regard for civilian land or life. Israel did not adhere to the ceasefire announced in mid-April, and has steadily escalated its air and ground offensive, prompting Hezbollah to wage a campaign of resistance attacks. The Israeli assault moved gradually further north, culminating in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring on Sunday that he had ordered the Israeli military to strike targets in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, prompting thousands to flee the area. The move caused Iran to consider suspending its own ceasefire talks with the U.S. entirely.

On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to de-escalate the fighting after he spoke with Netanyahu and Hezbollah through mediators. Trump said no Israeli troops would be “going to Beirut” and that Hezbollah “agreed to stop shooting at Israel.” He said Hezbollah had “agreed that all shooting will stop—That Israel will not attack them, and they will not attack Israel.” A statement by the Lebanese embassy in Washington on Monday said that Hezbollah had agreed to not attack northern Israel. There was no immediate public statement from Hezbollah.

While the latest arrangement may have prevented another large-scale Israeli attack on the Lebanese capital, the deal did little to stop the fighting in the region south of the Zahrani River and in the Bekaa Valley. A day after Trump’s announcement, Israeli forces carried out multiple air strikes on the southern city of Nabatieh and reiterated a warning to all residents in the area to evacuate ahead of more planned attacks. At least eight people were killed, including two children, in Israeli strikes on Tuesday, while Hezbollah also continued launching dozens of projectiles and drones toward Israeli soldiers.

“The villages they issue warnings for are getting hammered,” said Abbas Atwe, a medic in the Islamic Health Authority stationed in Nabatieh. “On some days, we see up to 25 airstrikes in some places.” He added that while many have left the villages near Nabatieh, thousands remain, either unable to afford renting elsewhere or unwilling to abandon their homes.

The displacement orders typically arrive as lists of villages published by the Israeli military spokesperson on X, which are then disseminated among community Whatsapp groups and on social media. Occasionally, the occupation releases satellite imagery indicating precisely which buildings they plan to target. But in many cases, strikes rain down at random on civilian homes, leading to dozens of casualties a day. Since March 2, the Israeli military assault on Lebanon has killed 3,468 people and wounded more than 10,500 others. Over 600 of those deaths have occurred since the so-called ceasefire was declared in mid-April. During the last week of May, an average of 11 children were killed or wounded in Israeli attacks every 24 hours, according to UNICEF.

“These don’t constitute lawful advance warnings because they don’t actually give residents the information they need to know to actually leave,” Kristine Bekerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa told Drop Site. Under international law, she added, militaries can only displace residents for their own safety—not to achieve a strategic objective—and are required to ensure both the health and safety of these residents as well as their safe return as soon as the threat to their lives is past. To do otherwise is to commit “the war crime of unlawful transfer, which is basically one way of saying forced displacement.”

One way to determine whether an army is carrying out unlawful transfer, Bekerle said, is to examine what it is doing to prevent displaced residents from returning. In southern Lebanon, Israel has done so through two methods: the demarcation of its so-called “yellow line,” past which Lebanese civilians are barred, and a systematic campaign of mass destruction of civilian property, which ensures that residents have no homes to return to. She described the findings of a forthcoming report from Amnesty, which compares displacement orders issued in the current phase of the war with those issued in 2024. The researchers found that not only are displacement orders far more sweeping and frequent in this round of fighting, but that they are less frequently followed by instructions for exactly which buildings and neighborhoods to evacuate.

“It’s just getting worse,” Bekerle said.

In one of the largest recent attacks, an Israeli airstrike near Jabal Amel Hospital in the southern city of Tyre (Sour) killed four people, injured nearly 130—including dozens of the hospital’s medical, nursing, and administrative staff—and caused extensive damage to the hospital, including cutting off electricity to intensive care units. First responders worked for hours to rescue the injured from the rubble and the nearby Hayram Hospital issued an urgent call for blood donations. Lebanon’s health care system has come under repeated attack by Israel with hospitals being bombed and paramedics and rescue workers being targeted in double- or triple-tap strikes, with over 120 killed over the past three months.

Mohanad Hage Ali, a research director at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, told Drop Site that vast destruction of civilian property is one of Israel’s primary military objectives in southern Lebanon.

“If you look at the Gaza model, it’s not really about controlling Hamas; it’s about re-structuring the geographic surroundings of the state of Israel in ways that would change reality for good,” Ali said, adding that so far the Israelis had destroyed approximately 60 villages near the southern border. “You’ve pushed out Lebanese Shia, who the Israeli security mind equates with Hezbollah, further and further away from Israeli towns and settlements.”

Back at the shelter in Marj al-Zuhoor, Abd Elaal yearned to return to her land, where she hoped to find her home still standing. Since they arrived, her infant daughter has been in and out of the hospital battling illness from the cold shelter nights. Abd Elaal called on the state and UNIFIL forces to ensure their safe passage back to Ain Arab, before it was too late. While Lebanon and Israel have held several rounds of direct talks in Washington, Israel has refused to withdraw its troops from Lebanon and has only escalated its brutal assault, pushing deeper into Lebanese territory and forcing more people from their homes.

“Nothing is coming from these negotiations. We go to sleep to death and wake up to death,” Abd Elaal said. “They’ve destroyed everything. Tell me, what more do they want? What is left?”

by Gary Wilson

Photo caption.  Thermal drone imagery shows heat signatures from gas turbines operating at xAI’s Southaven, Mississippi, power plant. Floodlight’s investigation found more than a dozen turbines still running after the EPA said gas turbines like these require Clean Air Act permits before operation. The plant powers xAI’s Colossus 2 data-center complex near Memphis. Photo: Evan Simon/Floodlight

by Ralph Nader

A skeptical friend reading The New York Times asked me why columnist Nicholas Kristof keeps writing columns about recurring poverty in less developed countries. My answer is simple. Because he keeps going to these remote areas populated by brutalized human beings living in dire impoverishment and sickness.

At no small risk to himself (Kristof caught malaria in the Congo), he goes to where the most deprived people on Earth live for his stories. He does what few columnists are willing or able to do by exposing how children, the elderly, and entire families are dying under the most unimaginable cruelty.

I suspect that what keeps Kristof going is that he sees how inexpensively many of these mortalities and morbidities can and have been prevented. For example, a $4 vaccine can prevent cervical cancer, which kills over 900 women worldwide every day!

Knowing all this has led to his sharp denunciation of Tyrant Donald Trump and DOGE Director Felon Elon Musk’s immediate and illegal closure of the Agency for International Development (USAID). Soon after the failed gambling czar re-disgraced the White House on January 20, 2025, the world heard Musk’s sadistic boast, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”

Why on Earth would these callous corporatists criminally destroy an agency with an average budget of $23 billion a year (about 10 days of the Trump-bloated Pentagon war budget) to save the lives of millions of babies, children, women, and men? Especially when much of this spending goes right back to US contractors who ship the food, medicines, drinking water, wheelchairs, medical devices, and other materials to poverty-stricken nations.

The Trump-Musk cabal sadistically exuded glee, declaring they were saving taxpayer money. The money spent by USAID is a small price to pay for preventing the atrocities they visited on those most in need of humanitarian assistance on the planet. Given the reputation of the US’ invasive military empire all over Asia, Africa, and South America, war criminal Trump failed to understand the benefit that such aid—often called “soft power”—does to improve Uncle Sam’s tarnished reputation.

In his latest column, dated May 10, 2026, and titled “The Children America Abandoned,” Kristof makes the following points:

“A year after some of the world’s richest men cut aid for the world’s poorest children, …” Trump and Musk retained “some lifesaving programs, particularly for HIV/AIDS…” However, Trump’s “71% cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025…” led to the loss of “750,000 lives worldwide” in Trump’s first year, citing a study by a Boston University researcher. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet projected that at present official development assistance (ODA) defunding rates, 9.4 million lives will be lost worldwide, including 2.5 million among children 5 years and younger, by 2030.

While these enormous preventable death numbers may shock most Americans, it is because USAID over decades has not been encouraged by its cautious superiors in the White House to toot its own horn for fear of enraging right-wing ideologues in Congress who have long wanted foreign aid abolished.

“A few doses of a $3 malaria vaccine can now save a Congolese child’s life,” Kristof writes. Tuberculosis is a major contagious killer in Africa, mostly among children and pregnant women. A series of regular TB drugs, consistently administered by clinics, can sharply reduce this epidemic. Again, very cost-effective.

What these clenched-jawed Trumpty Muskites ignore is that catching precursors of pandemics in African or Asian countries can prevent deadly viruses and bacteria from migrating to the United States. Without funds and diligent monitoring, the current Ebola emergency in the Congo is spreading.

These are the human costs of the American people electing politicians whose military death cult keeps getting more Pentagon funding from Congress, displacing programs sustaining life. Trump’s war crimes are used to seek an increase of a staggering 50% budget increase or $500 billion for the Pentagon. Trump wants to use deficit financing to further bloat the Pentagon budget so he can keep cutting taxes for the super rich, himself, and giant corporations for the next fiscal year.

In one of his previous columns, Kristof shows how the swollen, corrupt military spending on contractors can be better used in our domestic economy, repairing public services and building infrastructure. The last president to make this comparison was former five-star general President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 in an address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors (See the address.) Two recent books: Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex by William D. Hartung and The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine by Andrew Cockburn unmask the devastating impact of wasteful military spending on human needs.

The Democratic Party refuses to make the runaway military budget, now overconsuming half of the entire federal operating budget, a political campaign issue. Worse, they eagerly join the congressional Republicans in the yearly hoopla for ever more megadollars for the Pentagon. Serious appropriations hearings in the House and Senate are a long-ago memory for this untouchable depravity of blank checks, stealing from the many unmet necessities of the American people and their children here at home, which also cost many American lives.

So, Kristof, who has written devastating critiques of Trump, ends his column with “The truth is ugly: The world’s richest men are crushing the world’s poorest children.”

Nicholas Kristof, it is time to break the unspoken reluctance of The New York Times editorial page—replete with specific editorial and op-ed denunciations of bully Trump’s many crimes—and raise the cry of IMPEACHMENT or, in the vernacular that Tyrant Trump very often uses, say “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, the Impeachment Symposium of April 8, 2026).

As I have said many times, with Trump, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. In addition to manipulating districts, he is openly intending worse takeovers of the November elections, having said in January, “We shouldn’t even have an election” in November. What are our politicians and the mainstream media waiting for? It is time for them to summon the courage of their declared convictions!

P.S. Kristof’s most recent feature exposes the sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against kidnapped Palestinian men, women, and children, including training dogs to rape shackled prisoners (See The New York Times, May 17, 2026, “The Silence That Meets The Rape of Palestinians”).

by Corey Riday-White

We’re all living in a world—and in bodies—more polluted with plastic than the one our parents grew up in. And with global plastic production increasing by 3-3.5% annually and expected to double by 2040 or 2050, our children, and their children, will inherit even more plastic particles in everything from their food systems to their internal organs.

Two new pieces of media shine a light on the enormous harm that these invasive plastics are causing to our health across generations—and how Big Oil and the plastics industry have not only caused this crisis but also are bent on continuing it with no end in sight.

The Netflix documentary Plastics Detox details how the endocrine-disrupting chemicals from plastics contaminate three generations: the mother, the fetus, and the fetus’ developing reproductive cells—“a toxic trespass,” according to an expert interviewed by the film’s producers. Following environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan as she strives to help couples struggling with infertility, the film shows how chemicals found in plastic are identified as major endocrine disruptors, significantly contributing to hormone dysfunction, lower sperm quality, and falling fertility rates.

Just as viewers begin to wonder, how did we even get here? How is there so much plastic in… well, everything? California Attorney General Rob Bonta appears on screen, succinctly explaining that “the entire plastics industry is built on a lie”—that we can simply recycle our way out of the problem. “The only reason that plastics today are ubiquitous is because the people were told that this product can be recycled,” Bonta explains. Investigations from the Center for Climate Integrity and others have revealed that the major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies that produce and sell plastics have long known recycling was not a technically or economically viable solution to plastic waste.

On behalf of California, Bonta has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against ExxonMobil that seeks to hold the oil giant, and the world’s biggest producer of the polymers used in single-use plastics, accountable for helping to create and push that myth.

A new book by journalist Beth Gardiner, Plastics Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet, details the more than 100-year evolution of the plastics industry, including the industry’s deliberate efforts to reshape our society from one that, coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, reduced and reused its materials to one that simply disposed of them. Disposability equals profitability to the industry. Gardiner details how plastics’ inability to be reused or recycled was not a bug, but a feature. As one industry leader put it at the 1956 Society of Plastics Industry conference, “The future of plastics is in the trash can.” To actualize plastics’ true selling potential, the industry would have to “teach people how to waste.”

From there, the world’s leading petrochemical companies, with their ethos of single-use disposability, went on to create the plastic waste crisis. The American public, though, quickly became wary of plastic pollution and began to push back. In response, the industry first promoted landfilling and incineration to hide the plastic from view. But it quickly became clear that these disposal options would not placate a public frustrated by a flood of disposable plastics. People did not want more landfills, did not want incineration, and did not want plastic in the environment. This public outcry led to calls for bans on single-use plastics. To protect their markets, the petrochemical companies began a decades-long, coordinated effort to sell the public on plastic recycling—despite their knowledge that it was neither technically nor economically viable.

No amount of effort, investment, public education, or consumer diligence can overcome a material that resists recycling at a molecular level. Plastic’s intrinsic structure creates technical and economic barriers that make successful, safe, and scalable plastic recycling impossible—barriers that plastics producers identified in their own internal assessments as early as the 1970s. Rather than acknowledging these limitations, the industry has embarked on a nearly half-century long campaign to ensure the public never learned about them.

Now the world’s largest plastics producers make public commitments to expand the use and capacity of chemical (or “advanced”) recycling, even in the face of overwhelming evidence demonstrating that major economic and technical limitations remain unresolved. Chemical recycling operations continue to flounder as a result of predictable issues, including many of the same factors that industry insiders identified decades ago, while companies quietly retreat from their heavily publicized commitments once their public relations value has expired.

We are now awash in plastic. It is literally everywhere, quietly changing our human existence. Attorney General Bonta has the right idea—we need to bring an end to the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lies. Consumers are legally entitled to make informed decisions. Corporations cannot be given unfettered license to continue to sell us baseless false solution after baseless false solution. They must be held accountable.

by Marwan Asmar

Israel’s government, soldiers and settlers destroyed between 13,000 and 14000 olive trees in the occupied West Bank in the first five months of 2026. The figures are based on different Palestinian and Israeli sources.

In May 2026 alone Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he had ordered the uprooting and destruction of 3000 trees in northern Palestine. The uprooting of these trees were ordered to be felled in a single day.

In early February, 2006 human rights’ groups reported that over 8000 trees were destroyed and a report by the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Commission (PWSC) released last Mid-May showed that 4,414 had been uprooted, destroyed and/or poisoned.

The uprooting of “Palestinian trees” by Israeli settlers backed by the Zionist army has become a normal state of affairs as it has increased viciously since October 2023 when over 37,200 olive trees were “uprooted”, “broken” and “burned” in conjunction with the Israeli war and slaughter of Gaza.

The situation spelled disaster for Palestinian farmers. In cahoots with Israeli soldiers, settlers would go down on Palestinian villages and towns and start uprooting olive trees out of sheer vandalism.

At the end of last April, this is exactly what happened when settlers from the “Adi Ad” settlement descended on the Turmus Aya village that lies to the north-east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and started to destroy and vandalize 400 olive trees.

As they did this, on Saturday night, they were guarded by the Israeli army. This attack came days after the settlers descended on the village and set fire to a house and a car there.

The attack on Turmus Aya is not an isolated incident. The village has been targeted for the past few years. The PWSC, a monitoring organization of such attacks said the Israeli army had been responsible for 1,322 of such attacks while the settlers involved for 497 acts of vandalism on different Palestinian cities with Hebron topping the list at (321), Nablus (315), Ramallah (292) and Jerusalem (203).

Statistics point out that Israel has destroyed between 800,000 and 1 million olive trees in the occupied Palestinian territories from 1967 till now. However, since that year, when Israel effectively occupied all of the Palestinian territories, it destroyed 2.5 million trees.

Besides olives, they included orange (different varieties), lemon, grapefruit and clementine trees. The Palestinian territories are known for their varieties like almond, figs, apricots, peaches and plums trees.

These trees were destroyed by the Israeli occupation for basic military takeover to expand the Palestinian lands with Israeli settlements – about 147 settlements and 224 outposts – and create the required infrastructure and roads for these since some of them resemble big cities.

In the case of the Smotrich announcement for example, and the uprooting of 3000 trees on Palestinian lands in the north West Bank, the purpose there was to expand the Israeli Shaked Industrial Park which is next to the settlement there that has the same name.

Gaza, another story

Gaza is another sad story for the Israeli genocide has affected the whole of the agricultural sector. During the last war on the Gaza Strip, Israel destroyed 1 million trees according to Fayyad Fayyad, head of the Palestinian Olive Council. The destruction literally decimated the agriculture sector of the enclave.

Prior to 7 October, 2023, Gaza had 1.1 million trees roughly producing 50,000 tons of olives every year but no more.  About 98 percent of Gaza’s tree cropland has been destroyed.

Dr Mazen Qumsiyeh, a biologist at Bethlehem University, calls the destruction in Gaza an “ecocide” as statistics show that over the past two years and more, Israel has destroyed between 500,000 to 700,000 non-olive trees.

Today in Gaza everything has been razed to the ground. There had once been 35 olive oil presses in the Strip but most of these have been destroyed with only five left as of the end of last year.

The loss of a million olive trees is a $50-million-plus-loss since the total olive oil sector (West Bank and Gaza) contributed between $160 and $190 million to the Palestinian national economy as a direct result of exports to regional and international markets.

The olive oil sector accounts for roughly five percent of the Palestinian GDP and 20 percent of the agricultural sector. Further olive oil production sustains 100,000 families in the Palestinian territories.