Last year, the National Institutes of Health sent more than $1 million in taxpayer-funded grants to Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH). At the same time, the institute hosted a summer program for graduate scholars that it offered only to “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and also sexual and gender minorities (SGM).”
The program saw Northwestern invite “a small cohort of trainees in the behavioral and social sciences” to campus to “attend a series of lectures and workshops” on “Intersectional BIPOC SGM-focused HIV Science.” Those lectures did not include straight or white scholars. In both its online description of the program and in its application, Northwestern stated plainly that the program was restricted to racial, sexual, and gender minorities.
“The program invites a small cohort of trainees in the behavioral and social sciences who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and also sexual and gender minorities (SGM) in either graduate or postdoctoral training programs to attend a series of lectures and workshops,” an archived version of the program’s website states. The 2024 application for the program, meanwhile, required applicants to state their “racial background,” pronouns, “current gender identity,” “current sexual orientation,” and whether they were “Latinx/Latino/Latina or Hispanic,” according to a copy reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The program’s racial and sexual requirements did not put the institute at odds with the Biden administration, which awarded a $1.3 million grant to ISGMH in 2022 for a program on “sexual and gender minority health.” They could, however, attract the ire of the Trump administration, which has taken aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses and moved to slash NIH funding for the so-called indirect costs that come with federal research grants. The ISGMH grant is active through 2027, and roughly half of the funds are yet to be distributed.
The requirements could also land Northwestern in legal trouble. Similar racial restrictions for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont prompted the school to pull the job posting amid threats from attorneys. Northwestern appears to have made a similar move—sometime between September and January, the ISGMH amended the webpage for its summer program to remove references to race, gender, and sexual orientation, archives of the site show.
“The program invites a small cohort of trainees in the behavioral and social sciences in graduate or postdoctoral training programs to attend a series of lectures and workshops,” the updated language states.
For Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, the institute’s walkback serves as a tacit admission that the program’s restrictions violated federal law.
“NU is a federal funding recipient. Title VI bars it from racially discriminating in its programming. Title IX bars it from discriminating in its programming based on sex,” Morenoff told the Free Beacon. “That means it is illegal for NU to accept or reject applicants to any program based on either race or sex.”
Northwestern did not respond to a request for comment.
Founded in 2015, the ISGMH touts its status as “the first university-wide institute in the country focused exclusively on research to improve the health of the sexual and gender minority (SGM) community.” Its discriminatory summer program is far from its only source of controversy.
Two of the institute’s lead faculty members, Steven Thrasher and Alithia Zamantakis, were central figures at the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that plagued Northwestern last spring. Thrasher, a journalism professor, serves as Northwestern’s “chair of social justice in reporting,” while Zamantakis, a research assistant professor, focuses on “health equity for Black and Latinx transgender and nonbinary individuals, specifically regarding HIV care and gender-affirming care.”
The two professors were charged with obstructing police officers at the encampment last April after they engaged in what they called a “defensive line” meant to prevent officers from reaching student protesters. Thrasher touted his doing so at the time, writing, “We locked arms and kept the police at bay. They retreated. 24 hours later the camp is still up.” For her part, Zamantakis called it “a pretty mind-blowing experience to have your employer send their own police after you to arrest you within your place of employment.”
Thrasher has also accused Israel of persecuting “Queer Palestinians,” a contention that came through a joint Instagram post with “Mama Ganuush,” a self-described “Palestinian African trans drag artist” who is “dedicated to ending the Palestinian genocide & liberation from the Israeli apartheid.”
“Queer Palestinians have long faced Israel’s targeted attacks on their lives and institutions,” the post stated. “Palestinian doctors provided stigma-free care, but Israel destroyed this system.” Historically, such “queer Palestinians” have been killed, threatened with charges, or forced to flee to Israel.
Northwestern canceled Thrasher’s classes, placed him on paid leave, and launched an investigation into his encampment actions in September. In turn, thousands of “scholars, journalists and health professionals” signed a petition demanding his reinstatement and arguing he was targeted not for blocking cops but for “his political speech against Israel’s war in Gaza.” Northwestern’s journalism school recommended no disciplinary action against him, according to Thrasher, who is set to return to campus in April. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Northwestern is one of five universities under federal investigation for “widespread antisemitic harassment.” It is also one of 10 campuses that the Trump administration’s task force to combat anti-Semitism will visit in an “effort to eradicate anti-Semitism, particularly in schools.”
U.S. authorities seized $23M in crypto linked to a $150M Ripple wallet theft, experts believe the incident is linked to the 2022 LastPass breach.
U.S. authorities seized $23M in crypto tied to a $150M Ripple hack, suspected to have been carried out by hackers from the 2022 LastPass breach.
Security researcher ZachXBT identified the victim as Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. Authorities seized $24M in frozen assets before they could be withdrawn. This aligns with prior findings that cybercriminals cracked master passwords from LastPass to carry out major heists. The government’s latest action officially secures the recovered funds.
It appears @Ripple was hacked for ~213M XRP ($112.5M)
Source address rJNLz3A1qPKfWCtJLPhmMZAfBkutC2Qojm
So far the stolen funds have been laundered through MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, HitBTC, etc pic.twitter.com/HKGYsLQeMv
Law enforcement traced $23,604,815.09 of stolen crypto between June 2024 and February 2025 to multiple exchanges, including OKX, Kraken, WhiteBIT, AscendEX, FixedFloat, SwapSpace, and CoinRabbit.
According to the complaint for forfeiture unsealed by the U.S. DoJ, threat actors may have used private keys extracted by cracking the victim’s password vault stolen from the 2022 security breach suffered by an online password manager.
“In December 2022, the above-described commercial online password manager suffered two major data breaches — one in August 2022 and one in November 2022 — in which the attackers stole encrypted passwords and the online password manager vault data. December 2022, the above-described commercial online password manager suffered two major data breaches — one in August 2022 and one in November 2022 — in which the attackers stole encrypted passwords and the online password manager vault data.” reads the complaint. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) has been investigating these data breaches, and law enforcement agents investigating the instant case have spoken with FBI agents about their investigation. From those conversations, law enforcement agents in this case learned that the stolen data and passwords that were stored in several victims’ online password manager accounts were used to illegally, and without authorization, access the victims” electronic accounts and steal information, cryptocurrency, and other data”
Investigators didn’t name the password manager but noted it suffered major breaches in August and November 2022, which match with the incident suffered by LastPass.
Investigators found no evidence of device hacking, supporting the hypothesis that attackers decrypted stolen password manager data to access the victim’s crypto wallet. The scale and speed of the theft indicate a coordinated effort, consistent with previous breaches of online password managers and crypto thefts. Authorities believe the same hackers behind those attacks were responsible for this incident.
“Working with dozens of victims, security researchers Nick Bax and Taylor Monahan found that none of the six-figure cyberheist victims appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto theft, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts, or SIM-swapping attacks.” reported KrebsOnSecurity.
“They discovered the victims all had something else in common: Each had at one point stored their cryptocurrency seed phrase — the secret code that lets anyone gain access to your cryptocurrency holdings — in the “Secure Notes” area of their LastPass account prior to the 2022 breaches at the company. Bax and Monahan found another common theme with these robberies: They all followed a similar pattern of cashing out, rapidly moving stolen funds to a dizzying number of drop accounts scattered across various cryptocurrency exchanges.”
However. LastPass’s statement highlights that they are not aware of any conclusive evidence that connects any crypto thefts to our incident.
“Since we initially disclosed this incident back in 2022, LastPass has worked in close cooperation with multiple representatives from law enforcement. To date, our law enforcement partners have not made us aware of any conclusive evidence that connects any crypto thefts to our incident.” reads the statement. “In the meantime, we have been investing heavily in enhancing our security measures and will continue to do so.”
Be honest… Has your team forgotten LastPass was breached in 2022 which has lead to 9 figures in cryptocurrency thefts?
Let’s not forget your team has long covered up the extent of the attack and gaslit many confirmed victims.
Monahan criticized LastPass for not warning users that stored secrets, especially in “Secure Notes,” may be at risk, blaming their inaction for massive financial losses.
(NewsNation) — The United States is sending federal personnel to the Dominican Republic to locate missing University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki.
Konanki, 20, went missing while on a spring break trip with friends in Punta Cana during the early hours of Thursday.
A resident of Ashburn, Virginia, Konanki was last seen on Mar. 6 at 4:50 a.m. while walking on the beach at Riu Republica Resort, which is just north of Punta Cana in the La Altagracia district.
Sudiksha Konanki disappears on spring break with friends
According to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, Konanki was last seen wearing a brown bikini, big round earrings, a metal designer anklet on her right leg, yellow and steel bracelets on her right hand, and a multicolored beaded bracelet on her left hand.
Missing Pitt student Sudiksha Konanki
The United States is sending federal personnel to the Dominican Republic to locate a missing University of Pittsburgh student. Sudiksha Konanki, 20, went missing while on a spring break trip with friends in Punta Cana during the early hours of Thursday.
Missing Pitt student Sudiksha Konanki
Konanki is a citizen of India and a permanent U.S. resident. She was one of six female University of Pittsburgh students traveling together for Spring Break. According to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, the Indian embassy in the Dominican Republic has led the search efforts, along with state, federal and on-the-ground law enforcement.
The Dominican Civil Defense said it, and a search and rescue unit, has been working since Saturday to locate Konanki. Drones and helicopters are also being used in the search.
“It is our understanding that the US is deploying considerable federal assets to locate the missing female, supporting the Dominican National Police,” the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said.
Interviews underway after University of Pittsburgh student goes missing
The public prosecutor’s office did interview Konanki’s friends. Police also spoke with a man who was allegedly at the beach around the same time as Konanki and are trying to verify his story.
On Sunday, RIU Hotels released a statement, saying, in part, “From the moment her absence was reported, we have been working closely with the local authorities, including the police and the navy, to conduct a thorough search.”
Hotel officials also said that they have created an internal communications channel so that all employees across the five Punta Cana hotels can share any information they have with hotel leaders and police, according to NBC News.
State Department issues travel advisory for Dominican Republic
The U.S. State Department has issued a Level 2 travel advisory for the Dominican Republic, warning of violent crime, including armed robbery, homicide and sexual assault.
Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman told NewsNation his department is “leaving no stone unturned” and has reached out to her parents, who are likely traveling to the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the University of Pittsburgh is in contact with Konanki’s family and is offering full support in efforts to locate her.
Authorities remain concerned about the lack of information on Konanki’s whereabouts, while her travel companions are expected to return to the U.S. on Monday after speaking with Dominican officials.
Thomas Julia, the sheriff’s office spokesperson, told NBC News, “Right now, it runs the gamut from something accidental to foul play. It is all at this point under consideration. Nothing’s been ruled out.”
Anyone with information regarding her whereabouts is urged to contact the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office at 703-777-1021.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who served as lead negotiator for the student group behind the illegal encampments that plagued campus last spring, is in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after the Trump administration pulled his visa and green card, a senior State Department official confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.
Khalil’s attorney said federal immigration authorities detained Khalil on Saturday night at his university-owned apartment in execution of a State Department order to revoke his student visa. The attorney said Khalil had received a green card after graduating from Columbia in December. An immigration enforcement official told the attorney the State Department had revoked the green card as well. The senior department official confirmed the two revocations.
A public ICE database first listed Khalil as being held in an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. By Monday morning, it said he had been moved to a facility in Louisiana.
“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” the State Department official told the Free Beacon. Rubio issued a similar statement, saying he will “be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
It was an apparent reference to a statement from the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) group Khalil belongs to that endorsed Hamas’s “armed resistance.”
“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group wrote on Oct. 8. One day earlier, on the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 , 2023, attack on Israel, CUAD lauded the “Al-Aqsa Flood”—Hamas’s name for the terror spree—as a “moral, military and political victory.”
“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there. It is our duty to fight for our freedom!”
Khalil was one of the CUAD student leaders who organized the encampments. He led negotiations with the school as they unfolded, demanding divestment from Israel. Khalil pledged further unrest in the buildup to the fall semester, telling the Hill he would continue to push Columbia to divest from Israel by “any available means necessary.” Video footage placed him at a more recent illegal protest at Barnard College that took place on Wednesday.
“And we’ve been working all this summer on our plans, on what’s next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history,” Khalil said in August. “We’re considering a wide range of actions throughout the semester, encampments and protests and all of that. But for us, encampment is now our new base.”
Khalil has openly discussed his visa status and his upbringing in Syria, including in an interview with Qatar-funded network Al Jazeera.
Columbia issued a statement on Sunday that did not directly address Khalil’s detention and instead referenced “reports of ICE around campus.”
“Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings,” the statement read. “Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.”
The news comes amid a flurry of actions from the Trump administration to deport pro-Hamas visa holders, something President Donald Trump promised to do on the campaign trail. In his second week in office, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to investigate and deport anti-Semitic resident aliens, including those on visas, who have violated U.S. law.
The State Department revoked the visa of a university student for the first time on Thursday, citing the individual’s prior involvement in criminal activity tied to Hamas-supporting campus disruptions. Khalil’s arrest came two days later and does not come as a surprise—the encampment negotiator was included on a shortlist of pro-Hamas student visa holders that anti-Semitism watchdog group Betar USA presented to the administration, the Free Beaconreported last month.
On Friday, meanwhile, Trump’s newly formed task force to combat anti-Semitism announced it had revoked approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia over its failure to curb anti-Semitism in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, issued a statement that acknowledged Columbia’s “failures and shortcomings” and pledged to work with Trump administration officials “to address their legitimate concerns.”
“Columbia is taking the government’s action very seriously. I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” Armstrong wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.”
Two days earlier, Columbia student radicals stormed a Barnard College campus building for the second time in a week. During the first storming, they sent a security guard to the hospital and caused $30,000 in damages. On the second occasion, the agitators distributed Hamas propaganda meant to justify Oct. 7. Within hours of the Trump administration’s funding cut announcement, Columbia suspended its four students who had been arrested while clashing with police during the more recent incident.
The administration appears likely to pull more taxpayer funds from Columbia. The anti-Semitism task force is actively probing $5 billion worth of Columbia’s grants and contracts over the Ivy League institution’s “apparent failure” to protect Jewish students.
Update March 10, 9:30 a.m.: This piece has been updated with additional information.
Brooklyn detectives are investigating a deadly stabbing at a public housing complex on Saturday morning that claimed a man’s life.
According to police sources, the grim discovery was made at around 5:44 a.m. on March 8 inside the lobby of a building at 153 Marcus Garvey Blvd., within the Roosevelt Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Officers from the 81st Precinct and Police Service Area 3 received a frantic 911 call about an unconscious man at the location.
Upon arrival, officers say they discovered 47-year-old Donald Nesbit of Coney Island unresponsive with stab wounds to the back. EMS pronounced him dead at the scene.
The victim in Saturday’s deadly stabbing is known to police, sources familiar with the case said. It is not immediately clear when or why the deadly attack occurred.
No arrests have been made and the investigation remains ongoing, police reported.
Anyone with information regarding this homicide can call Crime Stoppers at 800-577-TIPS (for Spanish, dial 888-57-PISTA). You can also submit tips online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org, or on X (formerly Twitter) @NYPDTips. All calls and messages are kept confidential
It is a difficult time for the transgender community in Kentucky and those who support them. Less than two years ago, the state legislature, gripped with anti-trans hysteria, passed a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. And in recent weeks, an onslaught of executive orders from President Donald Trump further imperiled access to gender-affirming care nationwide.
But Oliver Hall, director of trans health at the Kentucky Health Justice Network, knew how to respond. When the state decimated care for vulnerable youth, they helped families connect with providers out of state. When Trump released his anti-trans orders, Hall pressed to make sure those providers held the line.
“One of the first things we needed to do was call the clinics in other states, making sure they weren’t going to start preemptively complying, and stop providing care,” said Hall.
Immediate mobilization isn’t new to the staff at the Kentucky Health Justice Network. In addition to connecting LGBTQ+ people to services, it also serves as an abortion fund. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it triggered a near-total abortion ban in the state — changing the landscape for abortion access almost overnight.
“We prepared to just kind of shift on a dime to be able to do more of the travel support,” Hall said.
As Hall and others in the reproductive justice and LGBTQ+ rights space know all too well, the assaults on transgender Americans are occurring against the backdrop of a wider war on bodily autonomy.
In 2025 alone, state legislatures have already passed 11 anti-trans bills, and roughly 614 bills are under consideration that could negatively impact trans and gender-nonconforming people. In 2024, 87 anti-trans bills were introduced in Congress, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. Despite many conservatives’ attempts to create distance from anti-abortion politics, many of the states that moved to restrict access to gender-affirming care have some of the strictest abortion bans. The same president who issued a slew of executive orders targeting transgender youth also appointed the Supreme Court nominees who made it possible to overturn Roe. And the court he reshaped is expected to make a ruling on gender-affirming care for transgender youth this spring.
For decades, abortion providers, advocates, and funds have persisted under an ever-shifting and intentionally vague legal landscape dead set on, if not outright, banning abortion care, making it as difficult as possible for abortion providers to effectively and ethically treat their patients.
Now, providers who offer gender-affirming care find themselves in that same landscape, working tirelessly for their patients as the proverbial sand shifts constantly beneath their feet.
But if these fights are inextricably linked, so are the solutions.
“We have to be more imaginative of what care can or may need to look like.”
“In both the gender-affirming care space and abortion care space and again, broadly even immigrant health, we have to always be prepared for the ground to shift and change underneath us,” said Dr. Lakshmi Sundaresan, a family medicine physician in Michigan. “And I think that is the hardest thing.”
Sundaresan, who like many provides both abortion and gender-affirming care services, said that one lesson from both practices is that you have to be “imaginative.”
“Flexibility is important,” she said. “We have to be more imaginative of what care can or may need to look like.”
In abortion care, providers have shifted, where possible, toward counseling patients through self-managed abortions at home and sending pills by mail to states, Sundaresan said. Evidence suggests this strategy has been broadly effective. In the year after Roe was overturned, the number of abortions went up, with experts attributing it to a rise in telemedicine and self-managed medication abortions.
Thinking outside of the traditional approaches can help transgender patients, Sundaresan said. One way to do this is by looking for off-label uses of medications that might have gender-affirming side-effects, such as spironolactone, a blood pressure medication that also can block the production and action of testosterone. “The question would be, can we use a side effect or an alternative way that a medication works to help support folks in their gender journeys if there are restrictions placed on traditional hormone replacement therapy?” she said.
The answers may also lie outside of the health care space.
“Part of what imagination has to look like is how we can provide care – or people can manage their care — outside of interacting with the medical establishment,” she said.
Ongoing court battles over Trump’s anti-trans executive orders show how rapidly the legal landscape can and will change.
Before Trump returned to the White House, access to gender-affirming care varied widely by state, similar to abortion care since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. In recent years, more than two dozen states passed laws prohibiting care for trans minors, the most extreme of which criminalized prescribing puberty blockers as a felony. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing Tennessee’s law, in a case advocates hoped might set some guardrails at the state level. After oral arguments in December, many worry the conservative justices will uphold the law and give states wide latitude to restrict care.
In late January, Trump flexed federal power to target gender-affirming care for trans youth nationwide. He issued an executive order that threatened to withhold federal funding from hospitals, medical schools, and other institutions that offer gender-affirming care to anyone under 19 years old, even puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The president also directed the Justice Department to investigate doctors under the federal statute that criminalizes female genital mutilation, in coordination with state officials.
“It’s a coordinated, concerted effort to use trans people and trans youth in particular as political pawns,” said Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA, an association of medical providers that advocates for LGBTQ+ health equity, which joined a lawsuit challenging the executive order.
Many hospitals and clinics across the countryquickly canceled appointments for young trans patients, who weren’t sure if they would ever be rescheduled.
This left “a patchwork landscape,” Sheldon said, “where your access to care not only depends on your geography but also institutional leadership and interpretation of the executive orders, rather than medical expertise.”
“Your access to care not only depends on your geography but also institutional leadership and interpretation of the executive orders, rather than medical expertise.”
In early February, coalitions of doctors, patients, parents, advocacy groups, and Democratic attorneys general filed two federal lawsuits: one in Maryland, the other in Washington state. By mid-February, two different judges granted temporary restraining orders that blocked the Trump administration from implementing the executive order provisions.
Doctors and other health care workers around the country were relieved, both for themselves and their patients.
“I felt like I could finally breathe again,” wrote a Seattle physician, Physician Plaintiff 1, who is one of three doctors suing the Trump administration under pseudonyms for fear of being targeted under the executive order, in a court filing in the Washington case.
Many were in tears at a staff meeting held just a few hours after the federal judge in Washington first blocked Trump’s order, Physician Plaintiff 1 wrote. Providers rushed to deliver good news to patients and their families, as the court orders gave some hospitals enough reassurance to continue offering care.
But the relief is temporary and subject to the uncertainties of litigation, including the Trump administration’s potential defiance of court orders. Both federal courts initially blocked the Trump administration’s plans until the end of February, then granted injunctions that will last until further developments in the case.
Despite the injunctions, the Trump administration still attempted to pull funding from some hospitals, and the plaintiffs in the Washington case have asked the court to hold the Trump administration in contempt for defying orders.
Amid the uncertainty, some health systems haven’t been willing to risk restarting their gender-affirming care programs. Others have been slow to give providers and patients concrete guidance about the evolving situation.
“We have not had clear communication around resuming care,” said D, a provider in Pennsylvania who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted. D said their institution’s leadership and legal teams were still reviewing the executive orders and the court rulings blocking them.
“We’re put into this new role as future-tellers and legal experts,” D said. “I’m not sure we’re going to have a lot of clarity for some time, and possibly not until we have more final resolution of the lawsuits.”
Now that Trump has shown his playbook of leveraging federal funding to block care, doctors are weighing how to insulate themselves and their patients from this form of pressure.
“I have been trying to figure out if there is a place I could practice medicine that doesn’t accept federal funding,” wrote Physician Plaintiff 3 in another court filing in the Washington case, “or whether I could set up my own medical practice so that I could continue providing care to both my cisgender and transgender patients on an equal basis.”
Navigating the shifting legal risks is a key part of the puzzle for both abortion and gender-affirming care providers.
“These directives don’t carry legislative power, but it will take months to years to litigate them,” said Sundaresan.
The shifting landscape leaves providers at the whim of hospital and clinic executives. “It’s often hospital policy, not actual laws, that are dictating what kind of care we’re allowed to provide,” Sundaresan said.
One way to combat preemptive compliance in both the abortion and gender-affirming care space is by providing consistent and persistent messaging on what the laws actually mean, argued Hall, the Kentucky trans health director.
Not unlike much of the confusion that swept through the country in the early days after the Dobbs decision, Hall said that confusion about the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth further hindered access to care.
“We had providers in the state who thought they couldn’t refer their patients out of state, providers, which is not true. We had therapists who thought they couldn’t provide gender-affirming mental health care, which was also not true. We had pharmacists who thought that they couldn’t dispense hormone therapy that was prescribed by an out-of-state prescriber, which was also not true,” said Hall.
In this case, research and messaging played a critical role in making sure that not just the medical establishment but also “the public, and particularly those families, understand that they still have options they don’t have to just give up,” they said.
Building resiliency among providers and advocates is also crucial when facing an opposition not averse to acts of violence.
Throughout the decades, anti-abortion protesters have reigned terror upon providers, bombing clinics and murdering doctors. In 1984, for example,there were 29 cases of arson, firebombing, or bombings against abortion clinics. And in 1993, Dr. David Gunn was infamously fatally shot by an anti-abortion extremist.
Today, while those threats still persist against abortion providers; hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care now find themselves under that same violent spotlight. In 2022, a Massachusetts woman called in a fake bomb threat to the Boston Children’s Hospital in retaliation for their transgender youth services. “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital; you better evacuate everybody, you sickos,” she said, according to court records.
Mabel Wadsworth Center in Bangor, Maine, which provides a range of health care services, including abortion and gender-affirming care, counsels both staff and volunteers about the risks before they ever put on a uniform.
“There are inherent risks, unfortunately, in our culture with working at an abortion care provider, and now that also is associated with being a gender-affirming care provider,” said Aspen Ruhlin, the community engagement manager at the center. “We just make sure folks who are coming onto this staff are aware of what those risks are.”
Even with training, facing backlash and threats for work in both abortion and gender-affirming care spaces isn’t easy. But Sundaresan in Michigan said that she has no plans to stop.
“I don’t have any special coping skills,” she said. “I’m a person that has to sit with uncertainty, just like our patients have to sit with uncertainty.”
Protesters demonstrate in front of police along the perimeter of the Columbia University campus in NYC on April 30, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender/NurPhoto via AP
Columbia University could hardly have been more draconian in the last year and a half since students began speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In early November 2023, four months before the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment even began, the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. A few hundred students from the groups had had the audacity to walk out from classes and hold a “die-in” protest on campus — some of the most widely celebrated nonviolent protest tactics available.
The crackdown was just getting started.
There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right.
Since then, the university has ordered police raids on campus three times, leading to the arrests of over 100 students. Last week, the school expelled four students, three from Barnard College, one from Columbia. Many dozens of students have faced discipline and suspensions for participating in pro-Palestine protests and speech. Professors have been slandered before Congress, censured, removed from positions, and reportedly pushed into retirement over their support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. The campus has been essentially locked down for almost a year.
Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.
For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university.
“Columbia has worked overtime to appease,” wrote Layla, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name having faced doxxing attacks and harassment from Zionist groups. “Students are miserable. Campus is a panopticon. And their funding was still cut.”
The Trump administration can be expected to use its perverted conception of antisemitism to further its explicit plans to decimate, corporatize, and re-whiten higher education. The shame here lies with university leaderships — at Columbia and schools nationwide — that have failed to stand up for their purported missions of critical thinking and academic freedom. Instead, they have put some of their most vulnerable community members, particularly international students and students of color, at risk.
There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right, intent on a program of destruction. And there is no appeasing a nationalist Zionist worldview that, defying reason, sees antisemitism in every call for Palestinian freedom. Columbia is proof of the failure of caving in; the administration has offered up a platter of repression for more than a year and is still slated to lose $400 million.
“Number One Priority”
Schools nationwide — especially elite, wealthy institutions like Columbia — have a choice: Take a collective stance in opposing Trump’s assaults on education, or continue their obsequiousness to a government that has already made clear that it wants to destroy them regardless.
Columbia leadership, much to its shame, has made its decision clear.
In a letter to the university community responding to the cuts, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong appeared unwilling to change course.
“I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” she wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism. This is our number one priority.”
“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent.”
Antisemitism is no doubt a legitimate concern in a country led by antisemites; the Trump administration and pro-Israel organizations’ concerns are anything but legitimate. So far, Columbia’s purported crackdown on antisemitism has included anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic repression, the consistent conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and a willingness to only prioritize the concerns of certain Jewish voices, while silencing the dissent of the dozens of anti-Zionist Jews on campus.
“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent,” said Reinhold Martin, a Columbia historian of architecture and president of the university’s American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, chapter. “And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville.”
Martin was referring, of course, to the 2017 white supremacist gathering, where neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a fascist murdered an antifascist counter-protester with his car, and Trump responded by calling participants “some very fine people.”
While university campuses have been historic sites of dissent and political critique, it would be a mistake to see the contemporary, neoliberal university as a terrain of liberatory struggle. Universities have become ever more privatized and policed factories for the production of human capital, often appended to massive investment assets. The student-led Gaza encampments were all the more impressive considering how unrevolutionary university life has become.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is waging a counterrevolution against every shred of progress won by Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist struggle in the last century. Far-right education crusaders like Christopher Rufo are unambiguous about their aims here. Institutions of higher education participate in such a project at their own peril.
“The Trump administration is seeking to deprive universities of fiscal autonomy, to constrain universities politically,” said Martin, the Columbia professor. “To use the lever of government funding to quash dissent, with the expectation that a paradigm emerges out of this of a truly corporate university, in which it will be impossible to dissent, just as one cannot dissent in the boardroom or in the office suite of a real estate development company or a financial institution.”
Columbia is the largest private landowner in New York City and boasts an endowment of $14.8 billion; a significant amount of its income comes from its huge hospital complex, as well as tuition.
As an institution, Columbia can survive the federal cuts, but they would undeniably risk harming certain federally funded research and grants. Trump’s attack on Columbia is also intended to chill other schools more dependent on government money. All the more reason, then, for wealthy institutions to refuse the acquiescence trap.
Celebrating Funding Cuts
In the same letter announcing that the university would continue its crackdown in the face of the funding cuts, Armstrong, the school interim president, called for a “unified Columbia, one that remains focused on our mission and our values.”
Meanwhile, according to an anonymous source, members of the 1,000-plus member-strong Columbia Alumni for Israel WhatsApp group were celebrating Trump’s funding cut as a victory. One group chat member wrote on Friday that they “can’t wait for the rest of the funding to be cut.” This was the same group, which includes professors, whose members were strategizing to get pro-Palestinian foreign students and faculty deported.
As a Jewish professor and Columbia alum myself, who also spent time at the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment, including during a Shabbat dinner service, I am disgusted but not shocked that claims to Jewish safety have been turned into Trumpian weapons to dismantle higher education. And I am dismayed that university administrators and Democratic leaders have so readily laid the ground for these attacks over a year of repressive actions against students protesting a U.S.-backed genocidal war.
There is unity to be found in the educational communities. Many people understand that the Trump regime’s plans to eliminate all anti-racist, anti-colonial, and trans-inclusionary content from educational spaces cannot be disentangled from its attacks on pro-Palestine speech.
If university leaders won’t reverse their repressive course, professors, students, and staff must come together to resist, within and across campuses.
A Bronx man was shot to death in Brooklyn early on Saturday morning, police reported.
Steven Battle, 45, of 3rd Avenue in the Bronx, was gunned down inside 38 Somers St., near Rockaway Avenue, in Broadway Junction at about 2:47 a.m. on March 8.
Officers from the 73rd Precinct, in responding to a 911 call about the incident, found Battle at the location with a gunshot wound to his head.
Steven Battle, 45, of 3rd Avenue in the Bronx, was gunned down inside 38 Somers St., near Rockaway Avenue, in Brooklyn at about 2:47 a.m. on March 8.Photo via Google Maps
EMS rushed the victim to Kings County Hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
So far, no arrests have been made in the ongoing investigation, police said.
Anyone with information regarding the homicide can call Crime Stoppers at 800-577-TIPS (for Spanish, dial 888-57-PISTA). You can also submit tips online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org, or on X (formerly Twitter) @NYPDTips. All calls and messages are kept confidential.
Brooklyn detectives are looking for the suspect who shot a man dead in a hail of gunfire on Friday night.
Police said the deadly shooting erupted in the lobby of an apartment building at 132 Herkimer St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant at about 6:15 p.m. on March 7.
Officers from the 79th Precinct, in responding to a 911 call about the incident, found the victim, a 23-year-old man, shot multiple times about his body. He was unconscious and unresponsive.
Police investigate a fatal shooting at 132 Herkimer St. in Brooklyn on Friday evening, March 7, 2025.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
EMS rushed the victim to Brookdale University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police have withheld his identity, pending family notification.
Throughout Friday night, detectives were seen canvassing the crime scene and going door to door looking to find potential witnesses.
So far, no arrests have been made in the ongoing investigation, law enforcement sources said.
Anyone with information regarding the shooting can call Crime Stoppers at 800-577-TIPS (for Spanish, dial 888-57-PISTA). You can also submit tips online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org, or on X (formerly Twitter) @NYPDTips. All calls and messages are kept confidential.
The cryptocurrency investors and executives who crowded into the White House for a summit with Donald Trump on Friday represented billions in net worth.
They also represented more than $11 million in donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, a review of the guest list by The Intercept shows.
The list of invitees to the crypto summit offers a window into the tight links between Trump and the crypto world, which spent heavily last year to back candidates who favored looser regulation.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has dropped legal action against several leading crypto companies and on Friday hosted the White House meeting that drew alarm from ethics watchdogs.
Ahead of the White House summit, Trump signed an executive order creating a government bitcoin reserve — essentially telling the government to hold onto the bitcoin it has already acquired through forfeitures and directing it to find “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring more. He also called on the government to maintain its holdings of more volatile “altcoins” other than bitcoin.
“From this day on,” Trump said at the summit, “America will follow the rule that every bitcoiner knows very well, never sell your bitcoin. That’s a little phrase that they have. Is it right? Who the hell knows.”
Watchdogs question Trump’s sudden embrace of crypto.
“The outsized influence the crypto industry seems to have on the Trump administration is concerning,” said Delaney Marsco, director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group. “When you put it in the context of the campaign donations, the inaugural fund donations, it paints a really troubling picture of potential corruption.”
Running Down the List
The invite list for Friday’s summit, as confirmed by White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks, included companies that donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Companies can give unlimited donations to that fund — making it an attractive way for them to curry favor. Large tech companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft rushed to donate to the fund after Trump’s victory left them in political peril.
Among the companies invited to the summit, Crypto.com, Kraken, and Paradigm gave $1 million to the inauguration effort. They were outdone by the trading platform Robinhood, which gave $2 million, and by Ripple, which gave $5 million worth of its custom crypto token.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase also donated $1 million. During last year’s campaign, the company spread money around both parties, including a $1 million donation to a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC.
But the biggest item on Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s spending list was a pro-crypto super PAC, Fairshake, that disproportionately spent money on GOP candidates. Its spending may have helped tip the Senate for Republicans. Coinbase said in October that it would give another $25 million to the super PAC to help tip next year’s midterm elections as well.
In total, Trump received at least $10 million donated by crypto interests to his campaign or super PACs supporting him, according to the tracking website Follow the Crypto.
Some companies’ contributions to the fund may not have been made public yet, since the inaugural committee is not required to make a formal disclosure until 90 days after Trump’s swearing-in.
In January, Chainlink Labs co-founder Sergey Nazarov, another invitee to the summit, posted pictures of himself at inaugural balls that the Trump team used to entice big-ticket donors. The company did not immediately respond to a question about whether it had donated.
Many of the crypto executives invited to the gathering also made personal donations to Trump’s campaign or to pro-Trump super PACs.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin brothers who co-founded the Gemini crypto exchange, gave more than $800,000 each to a Trump campaign committee.
JP Richardson, the CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus, donated more than $850,000 worth of bitcoin to the campaign, according to a Fox Business report last year.
Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley gave $300,00 to a Trump campaign committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Kraken chair Jesse Powell, whose company was represented by another executive at the summit, said in June that he “personally donated” $1 million to Trump, complaining that “the Biden White House has stood by and allowed a campaign of unchecked regulation by enforcement.”
Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani gave $300,000 to a Trump campaign committee and hundreds of thousands more to the Republican National Committee.
David F. Bailey, the CEO of pro-crypto media company BTC, gave nearly $500,000 to a Trump campaign committee at the end of July.
Bailey, who took a leading role in the successful campaign to pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, celebrated on social media after Trump’s victory: “The reality of what we just pulled off is really starting to hit. I know we took a big chance by going all in, but it was the right call and I’m very thankful to the community for making the leap of faith.”
Trump has a direct financial interest in another company represented at the summit: World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance company that lists Trump as its “chief crypto advocate.”
“President Trump has so many conflicts of interest broadly, it’s almost impossible to calculate how many conflicts of interest he has,” Campaign Legal Center’s Marsco said. “But it’s like this fox watching the henhouse situation, where you have a president who has a vested financial interest in crypto being a lucrative industry, and seeing itself become legitimized on a global scale.”
Inside the White House
Crypto leaders have influence outside and inside the White House.
One of Trump’s first acts after winning the election was to appoint venture capitalist David Sacks as his crypto and artificial intelligence czar. Sacks’s firm was invested in a crypto index fund manager, although the firm recently updated its website to say it had exited that investment.
Sacks also held undisclosed amounts of bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana but sold them before Trump’s inauguration, according to a social media post he made Sunday.
Sacks sat to Trump’s left during the crypto summit and blasted the Biden administration’s attempt to enforce securities rules. Since taking office, the Trump administration has dropped cases against Coinbase and Kraken, and put on hold a fraud case against a crypto investor who had bought $30 million of tokens from Trump’s company.
“This is an industry that was subjected to prosecution and persecution for the last four years. Horrible lawfare. And nobody knows what that feels like better than you do,” Sacks said. “You never back down, you stand to fight even in the face of an assassin’s bullet. It’s an inspiration to everyone in this room.”
Sacks earlier this week promised to make more details about his divestment from crypto holdings public later, a promise that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., challenged him to follow through on immediately in a letter Thursday. Warren noted that all five of the crypto tokens that Trump listed as possible holdings in a U.S. crypto reserve also had been held by one of Sacks’s companies.
“The planned Crypto Strategic Reserve is just the most recent example of a Trump Administration crypto policy with the potential to benefit a wealthy, well-connected few at the expense of taxpayers,” she said.
Sacks is a special government employee, the same status wielded by Elon Musk as he oversees the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Another White House official with ties to the crypto world, Bo Hines, oversees Trump’s crypto council. Before moving to D.C., Hines’s media company joined forces with a meme coin that launched amid accusations of a pump-and-dump scheme.
Hines sat to Sacks’s left during the summit Friday.
