What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
“President Trump claimed former President Biden’s pardons, including those for political opponents, were invalid due to use of an autopen, a baseless claim. The Trump administration faces legal challenges over deportations and potential violations of court orders. Economic projections show a potential slowdown due to trade wars and policy shifts, while consumer spending remains a key indicator.
President Trump arriving at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Monday.Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Where Things Stand
Pardon claims: President Trump claimed pardons issued by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were void, calling them invalid in a social media post that embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory that the Biden administration misused a common presidential tool, an autopen device. Mr. Trump said he considered null and void pardons issued to some of his political opponents, including members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but later told reporters that the matter would have to be decided by a court. Read more ›
Ukraine talks: Mr. Trump said he would speak with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday about the U.S.-backed proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Ukraine. Mr. Trump said there had been discussions over the weekend about “dividing up certain assets.”Read more ›
Deportations: The legal fight over the Trump administration’s attempt to use an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process could heat up on Monday. Lawyers asked the federal judge handling the case to seek an “immediate clarification” from the government about whether it had violated an earlier order, which the White House denied doing.
President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.
There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen. But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.
March 17, 2025, 10:19 a.m. ET36 minutes ago
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and minority leader, has postponed his book tour, citing security concerns. There had been backlash from Democrats against his decision last week to pass the funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, and protests were expected at the book tour events this week. “Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.
The growing trade war and rapid policy shifts are expected to drag down economic growth in the United States and around the world, according to projections released on Monday.
The resilience that was evident last year is slipping, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in its latest interim economic report, which estimated that global growth would dip to 3.1 percent in 2025 and to 3 percent in 2026, from 3.2 percent last year. The United States is likely to see a sharper drop, falling to 2.2 percent this year and to 1.6 percent next year, from the 2.8 percent growth in 2024.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental group based in Paris, said Monday that the type of tariffs President Trump was enacting would cut economic activity around the world.
The group calculated that a 10 percent increase in tariffs on non-commodity goods headed to and from the U.S. would result in a 1.3 percent drop in gross domestic product in Mexico, a 0.72 percent decline in the U.S. and a 0.64 percent reduction in Canada. The tariffs would also drag on economic activity in Japan, Europe, India and China, and weigh on global G.D.P. by 0.27 percent, the report said. “Significant changes have occurred in trade policies that if sustained would hit global growth and raise inflation,” the group said.
March 17, 2025, 8:51 a.m. ET2 hours ago
American shoppers spent less than expected in February, the Census Bureau reported this morning. Retail sales, which are not adjusted for inflation, rose 0.2 percent from the previous month, but economists had anticipated a bigger rebound after a steep decline in January. Excluding cars and gasoline, retail sales rose 0.5 percent in February. Investors are watching closely for signs of a pullback in consumer demand, the engine of U.S. economic growth, as concerns about the inflationary effects of President Trump’s tariff policy mounts.
President Trump reiterated his tariff plans this morning, saying that he will not offer exclusions to the steel tariffs. He said that April 2, when he plans to introduce what he’s calling “reciprocal” tariffs, would be a “liberating day” where the country gets back wealth past presidents have lost.
March 17, 2025, 8:31 a.m. ET2 hours ago
The legal fight over the Trump administration’s attempt to use an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process is expected to continue today. Overnight, the lawyers asked the federal judge handling the case to seek an “immediate clarification” from the government — through sworn declarations — about whether it violated an order he had issued barring the removal of any detained noncitizens under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
March 17, 2025, 8:32 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Over the weekend, the administration flew dozens of suspected gang members to El Salvador, raising concerns that officials simply ignored the judge’s order. The White House has denied violating the order.
The Kremlin said on Monday that work was underway to prepare the second phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin and President Trump but refused to disclose what would be on the agenda, as American officials continued to project some optimism about a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal with Ukraine.
The highly anticipated phone call, scheduled for Tuesday, will be the first known conversation between the two leaders sinceUkraine agreed to support a U.S.-backed monthlong cease-fire, as long as Russia does the same. While Mr. Trump has unequivocally stated his desire to broker some sort of truce as quickly as possible, Mr. Putin seems to be seeking to exploit the moment to win more concessions.
President Trump said he would speak with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday about the war in Ukraine, noting that there had already been discussions about “dividing up certain assets” as the president continued to express some optimism that Moscow would agree to a cease-fire proposal.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
The Justice Department has informed European officials that the United States is withdrawing from a multinational group created to investigate leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to a letter sent to members of the organization on Monday.
The decision to withdraw from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which the Biden administration joined in 2023, is the latest indication of the Trump administration’s move away from President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s commitment to holding Mr. Putin personally accountable for crimes committed against Ukrainians.
Mirelis Casique’s 24-year-old son last spoke to her on Saturday morning from a detention center in Laredo, Texas. He told her he was going to be deported with a group of other Venezuelans, she said, but he didn’t know where they were headed.
Shortly after, his name disappeared from the website of the U.S. immigration authorities. She has not heard from him since.
Many Democratic lawmakers continued to express deep frustration at Senator Chuck Schumer on Sunday for having broken with most of his party to allow a Republican spending bill to pass, as the Democratic base increasingly demands stauncher resistance to President Trump’s far-reaching agenda.
Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the Senate minority leader, joined nine other Democrats in allowing the bill to come to a vote, which averted a government shutdown. It was an abrupt reversal from Wednesday, when he said he would oppose the bill.
A kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school has been deported from the United States, even though she had a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer and court papers.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, is a Lebanese citizen who had traveled to her home country last month to visit relatives. She was detained on Thursday when she returned from that trip to the United States, according to a court complaint filed by her cousin Yara Chehab”
The writer, surgeon, and former U.S.A.I.D. senior official Atul Gawande on the Trump Administration’s decimation of foreign aid and the consequences around the world.
Sign upfor our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.
It is hard to calculate all the good that Atul Gawande has done in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard, he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. A contributor toThe New Yorkersince 1998, he has published widely on issues of public health. His2007 article in the magazineand the book that emerged from it, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” have been sources of clarity and truth in the debate over health-care costs. In 2014, he published “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” a vivid, poetic, compassionate narrative that presents unforgettable descriptions of the ways the body ages and our end-of-life choices.
Gawande’s work on public health was influential in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and, starting in November, 2020, he served on President Joe Biden’sCOVID-19 Advisory Board. In July, 2021, Biden nominated him as the assistant administrator for the Bureau of Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked to limit disease outbreaks overseas. Gawande, who is fifty-nine, resigned the position on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency.
When we spoke recently forThe New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande, usually a wry, high-spirited presence, was in a grave mood. There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. He was, after all, watching Trump and Elon Musk dismantle, gleefully, a global health agency that had only lately been for him a source of devotion and inspiration. As a surgeon, Gawande had long been in a position to save one life at a time. More recently, and all too briefly, he was part of a vast collective responsible for untold good around the world. And now, as he made plain, that collective has been deliberately cast into chaos, even ruins. The cost in human lives is sure to be immense. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
President Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., a job that you’ve described as the greatest job in medicine. You stepped down on Trump’s Inauguration Day, and he immediately began targeting U.S.A.I.D. with an executive order that halted all foreign aid. Did you know, or did you intuit, that Trump would act the way he has?
I had no idea. In the previous Trump Administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the “normals.” They had a head of U.S.A.I.D. who was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkle on it, which I didn’t disagree with. They called it “the journey to self-reliance,” and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, to enable stronger economies, more capacity—and we weren’t doing enough of that. I actually continued much of the work that had occurred during that time.
Tell me a little bit about what you were in charge of and what good was being done in the world.
I had twenty-five hundred people, between D.C. and sixty-five countries around the world, working on advancing health and protecting Americans from diseases and outbreaks abroad. The aim was to work with countries to build their systems so that we protected global health security and improved global outcomes—from reducing H.I.V./AIDSand other infectious diseases like malaria and T.B., to strengthening primary health-care systems, so that those countries would move on from depending on aid from donors. In three years, we documented saving more than 1.2 million lives afterCOVIDalone.
Let’s pause on that. Your part of U.S.A.I.D. was responsible, demonstrably, for saving 1.2 million lives—from what?
So,COVIDwas the first global reduction in life expectancy in seventy years, and it disrupted the ability across the world to deliver basic health services, which includes H.I.V./AIDS[medications], but also included childhood immunizations, and managing diarrhea and pneumonia. Part of my target was to reduce the percentage of deaths in any given country that occur before the age of fifty. The teams would focus on the top three to five killers. In some places, that would be H.I.V.; in some places that would be T.B. Safe childbirth was a huge part of the work. And immunizations: forty per cent of the gains in survival for children under five in the past fifty years in the world came from vaccines alone. So vaccines were a big part of the work as well.
What was the case against this kind of work? It just seems like an absolute good.
One case is that it could have been more efficient, right? Americans imagine that huge sums of money go to this work. Polls show that they think that a quarter of our spending goes to foreign aid. In fact, on a budget for our global health work that is less than half the budget of the hospital where I did surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of millions of people, with programs that saved lives by the millions. That’s why I describe it as the best job in medicine that people have never heard of. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine experiencing. So the case against it—I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money laundering, that this was corruption.
Where would he get this idea? Where does this mythology come from?
Well, what’s hard to parse is: What is just willful ignorance? Not just ignorance—it’s lying, right? For example, there’s a statistic that they push that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s dollars actually got to recipients in the world. Now, this is a willful distortion of a statistic that says that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding went to local organizations as opposed to multinational organizations and others. There’s a legitimate criticism to be made that that percentage should be higher, that more local organizations should get the funds. I did a lot of work that raised those numbers considerably, got it to thirty per cent, but that was not the debate they were having. They’re claiming that the money’s not actually reaching people and that corruption is taking it away, when, in fact, the reach—the ability to get to enormous numbers of people—has been a best buy in health and in humanitarian assistance for a long time.
Now the over-all agency, as I understand it, had about ten thousand people working for it. How many are working at U.S.A.I.D. now?
Actually, the number was about thirteen thousand. And the over-all number now—it’s hard to estimate because people are being turned on and off like a light switch—
Turned on and off, meaning their computers are shut down?
Yeah, and they’re being terminated and then getting unterminated—like, “Oops, sorry, we let the Ebola team go.” You heard Elon Musk say something to that effect in the Oval Office. “But we’ve brought them back, don’t worry.” It’s a moving target, but this is what I’d say: more than eighty per cent of the contracts have been terminated, representing the work that is done by U.S.A.I.D. and the for-profit and not-for-profit organizations they work with, like Catholic Relief Services and the like. And more than eighty per cent of the staff has been put on administrative leave, terminated, or dismissed in one way or the other.
So it’s been obliterated.
It has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean, at this point, it’s six weeks in. Twenty million people with H.I.V., for example—including five hundred thousand children—who had received medicines that keep them alive have now been cut off for six weeks.
A lot of people are going to die as a result of this. Am I wrong?
The internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.
I’m sorry, Atul. I have to stop my cool journalistic questioning and say: This is nothing short of outrageous. How is it possible that this is happening? Obviously, these facts are filtering up to Elon Musk, to Donald Trump, and to the Administration at large. And they don’t care?
The logic is to deny the reality, either because they simply don’t want to believe it—that they’re so steeped in the idea that government officials are corrupt and lazy and unable to deliver anything, and that a group of young twentysomething engineers will fix it all—or they are indifferent. And when Musk waves around the chainsaw—we are seeing what surgery on the U.S. government with a chainsaw looks like at U.S.A.I.D. And it’s just the beginning of the playbook. This was the soft target. This is affecting people abroad—it’s tens of thousands of jobs at home, so there’s harm here; there’s disease that will get here, etc. But this was the easy target. Now it’s being brought to the N.I.H., to the C.D.C., to critical parts of not only the health enterprise but other important functions of government.
So the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other such bureaucracies that do equal medical good will also get slammed?
Arebeing slammed. So here’s the playbook: you take the Treasury’s payment system—DOGEand Musk took over the information system for the Treasury and the payments in the government; you take over the H.R. software, so you can turn people’s badges and computer access on and off at will; you take over the buildings—they cancelled the leases, so you don’t have buildings. U.S.A.I.D.—the headquarters was given to the Customs and Border Protection folks. And then you’ve got it all, right? And then he’s got X, which feeds right into Fox News, and you’ve got control of the media as well. It’s a brilliant playbook.
But from the outside, at least, Atul, and maybe from your vantage point as well: this looks like absolute chaos. I’ve been reading this week that staff posted overseas are stranded, fired without a plane ticket home. From the inside, what does it look like?
One example: U.S.A.I.D. staff in the Congo had to flee for their lives and watch on television as their own home was destroyed and their kids’ belongings attacked. And then when they called for help and backup, they could not get it. I spoke to staff involved in one woman’s case, a pregnant woman in her third trimester, in a conflict zone. They have maternity leave just like everybody else there. But because the contracts had been turned off, they couldn’t get a flight out, and were not guaranteed safe passage, and couldn’t get care for her complications, and ended up having to get cared for locally without the setup to address her needs. One person said to me, as she’s enduring these things, “My government is attacking me. We ought to be ashamed. Our entire system of checks and balances has failed us.”
What’s been the reaction in these countries, in the governments, and among the people? The sense of abandonment must be intense on all sides.
There are broadly three areas. The biggest part of U.S.A.I.D. is theFEMAfor disasters abroad. It’s called the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and they bring earthquake response; wildfire response; response in conflicts, in famines. These are the people who suit up, and get assistance, and stabilize places where things are going wrong.
The Global Health Bureau, which I led, is the second-largest part of the agency, and that does work around diseases and health threats, as well as advancing health systems in low- and middle-income countries around the world. There’s coöperation on solving global problems, like stopping pandemics, and addressing measles outbreaks, and so on.
The third is advancing countries’ economies, freedom, and democracy. John F. Kennedy, when he formed U.S.A.I.D. in 1961, said that it was to counter the adversaries of freedom and to provide compassionate support for the development of the world. U.S.A.I.D. has kept Ukraine’s health system going and gave vital support to keep their energy infrastructure going, as Russia attacked it. In Haiti, this is the response team that has sought to stabilize what’s become a gang-controlled part of the country. Our health teams kept almost half of the primary health-care system for the population going. So around the world: stopping fentanyl flow, bringing in independent media. All of that has been wiped out completely. And in many cases, the people behind that work—most of the people we’re working with, local partners to keep these things going—are now being attacked. Those partners are now being attacked, in country after country.
What you’re describing is both human compassion and, a phrase you used earlier in our conversation, “soft power.” Describe what that is. Why is it so important to the United States and to the world? What will squandering it—what will destroying it—mean?
The tools of foreign policy, as I’ve learned, are defense, diplomacy, and development. And the development part is the soft power. We’re not sending troops into Asia and Africa and Latin America. We’re sending hundreds of thousands of civilians without uniforms, who are there to represent the United States, and to pursue common goals together—whether it’s stemming the tide of fentanyl coming across the border, addressing climate disasters, protecting the world from disease. And that soft power is a reflection of our values, what we stand for—our strong belief in freedom, self-determination, and advancement of people’s economies; bringing more stability and peace to the world. That is the fundamental nature of soft power: that we are not—what Trump is currently trying to create—a world of simply “Might makes right, and you do what we tell you,” because that does not create stability. It creates chaos and destruction.
An immoral universe in which everybody’s on their own.
That’s right. Anamoraluniverse.
Who is standing up, if anyone, in the Administration? What about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom you mentioned. What’s his role in all of this? Back in January, he issued a waiver to allow for lifesaving services to continue. That doesn’t seem to have been at all effective.
It hasn’t happened. He has issued a waiver that said that the subset of work that is directly lifesaving—through humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and so on, and the health work that I used to lead—will continue; we don’t want these lives to be lost. And yet it hasn’t been implemented. It’s clear that he’s not in control of the mechanisms that make these things happen.DOGEdoes not approve the payments going out, and has not approved the payments going out, to sustain that work.
The federal courts have ruled that the freeze was likely illegal and unconstitutional, and imposed a temporary restraining order saying that it should not be implemented, that it had to be lifted—the payment freeze. Instead, they doubled down. And Marco Rubio signed on to this, tweeted about it earlier this week—that over eighty per cent of all contracts have now been terminated. And the remaining ones—they have not even made a significant dent in making back payments that are owed for work done even before Trump was inaugurated.
There’s always been skepticism, particularly on the right, about foreign aid. I remember Jesse Helms, of North Carolina, would always rail about the cost of foreign aid and how it was useless, in his view, in many senses. I am sure that in your time in office, you must have dealt with officials who were skeptical of the mission. What kind of complaints were you getting from senators and congressmen and the like, even before the Trump Administration took over in January?
It was a minority. I’ll just start by saying: the support for foreign-aid work has been recognized and supported by Republicans and Democrats for decades. But there’s been a consistent—it was a minority—that had felt that the U.S. shouldn’t be involved abroad. That’s part of an isolationist view, that extending this work is just charity; it’s not in U.S. interests and it’s not necessary for the protection of Americans. The argument is that we should be spending it at home.
They’re partly playing into the populist view that huge portions of the budget are going abroad, when that’s not been the case. But it’s also understandable that when people are suffering at home, when there are significant needs here, it can be hard to make connections to why we need to fight to stop problems abroad before they get here.
And yet we only recently endured theCOVIDepidemic, which by all accounts did not begin at home, and spread all over the world. Why wasCOVIDnot convincing as a manifestation of how a greater international role could help?
Certainly that didn’t convince anybody that that was able to be controlled abroad—
Because it wasn’t.
Because it wasn’t, right. AndCOVIDdid drive a significant distrust in the public-health apparatus itself because of the suffering that people endured through that entire emergency. But I would say the larger picture is—every part of government spending has its critics. One of the fascinating things about the foreign-aid budget, which has been the least popular part of the budget, is that U.S.A.I.D. was mostly never heard of. Now it has high name recognition, and has majority support for continuing its programs, whether it’s keeping energy infrastructure alive in Ukraine, stabilizing conflicts—whether it’s Haiti or other parts of the world—to keep refugees from swarming more borders, or the work of purely compassionate humanitarian assistance and health aid that reduces the over-all death rates from diseases that may yet harm us. So it’s been a significant jump in support for this work, out of awareness now of what it is, and how much less it turns out to cost.
So it took this disaster to raise awareness.
That’s human nature, right? Loss aversion. When you lose it is when you realize its value.
Atul, there’s been a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and R.F.K., Jr.—who’s now leading the Department of Health and Human Services—has advised some people, at least, to use cod-liver oil. We have this multilayered catastrophe that you’ve been describing. Where could the United States be, in a couple of years, from a health perspective? What worries you the most?
Measles is a good example. There’s actually now been a second death. We hadn’t had a child death from measles in the United States in years. We are now back up, globally, to more than a hundred thousand child deaths. I was on the phone with officials at the World Health Organization—the U.S. had chosen measles as a major area that it wanted to support. It provided eighty per cent of the support in that area, and let other countries take other components of W.H.O.’s work. So now, that money has been pulled from measles programs around the world. And having a Secretary of Health who has done more to undermine confidence in measles vaccines than anybody in the world means that that’s a singular disease that can be breaking out, and we’ll see many more child deaths that result from that.
The over-all picture, the deeper concern I have, is that as a country we’re abandoning the idea that we can come together collectively with other nations to do good in the world. People describe Trump as transactional, but this is apredatoryview of the world. It is one in which you not only don’t want to participate in coöperation; you want to destroy the coöperation. There is a deep desire to make the W.H.O. ineffective in working with other nations; to make other U.N. organizations ineffective in doing their work. They already struggled with efficiency and being effective in certain domains, and yet they continue to have been very important in global health emergencies, responding and tracking outbreaks. . . .
We have a flu vaccine because there are parts of the world where flu breaks out, like China, that don’t share data with us. But they share it with the W.H.O., and the result is that we have a flu vaccine that’s tuned to the diseases coming our way by the fall. I don’t know how we’ll get a flu vaccine this fall. Either we’ll get it because people are, under the table, communicating with the W.H.O. to get the information, and the W.H.O is going to share it, even though the U.S. is no longer paying, or we’re going to work with other countries and be dependent on them for our flu vaccine. This is not a good answer.
I must ask you this, more generally: You’re watching a President of the United States begin to side with Russia over Ukraine. You’re watching the dismantlement of our foreign-aid budget, and both its compassion and its effectiveness. Just the other day, we saw a Columbia University graduate—you may agree with him, disagree with him on his politics, but who has a green card—andICEofficers went to his apartment and arrested him, and presumably will deport him. It’s an assault on the First Amendment. You’re seeing universities being defunded—starting with Columbia, but it’ll hardly be the last, etc. What in your view motivates Donald Trump to behave in this way? What’s the vision that pulls this all together?
What I see happening on the health side is reflective of everything you just said. There is a fundamental desire to remove and destroy independent sources of knowledge, of power, of decision-making. So not only is U.S.A.I.D. dismantled but there’s thousands of people fired—from the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration—and a fundamental restructuring of decision-making so that political judgment drives decision-making over N.I.H. grants, which have been centralized and pulled away from the individual institutes. So the discoveries that lead to innovations in the world—that work has a political layer now. F.D.A. approvals—now wanting a political review. C.D.C. guidance—now wanting a political review. These organizations were all created by Congress to be shielded from that, so that we could have a professional, science-driven set of decisions, and not the political flavor of the moment.
Donald Trump’s preference, which he’s expressed in those actions and many others, is that his whims, just like King Henry VIII’s, should count. King Henry VIII remade an entire religion around who he wanted to marry. And this is the kind of world that Trump is wanting to create—one of loyalty trumping any other considerations. So the inspectors general who do audits over the corruption that they seem to be so upset about—they’ve been removed. Any independent judgment in society that would trump the political whims of the leader. . . . The challenge is—and I think is the source of hope for me—that a desire for chaos, for acceding to destruction, for accepting subjugation, is not a stable equilibrium. It’s not successful in delivering the goods for people, under any line of thinking.
In the end, professionally organized bureaucracies—that need to have political oversight, need to have some controls in place, but a balance that allows decision-making to happen—those have been a key engine of the prosperity of the country. Their destruction will have repercussions that I think will make the Administration very unpopular, and likely cause a backlash that balances things out. I hope we get beyond getting to the status quo ante of a stalemate between these two lines of thinking—one that advances the world through incremental collective action that’s driven around checks and balances as we advance the world ever forward, and one in which a strongman can have his way and simply look for who he can dominate.
Right now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the head of H.H.S. His targets include not only vaccine manufacturers but the pharma industry writ large. But he’s talked a lot, too, about unhealthy food in the American diet—to some extent, he’s not wrong. Do you see any upside in his role in pushing this so-called Make America Healthy Again idea?
Of course there is good. I mean, we as a country have chronic illness that is importantly tied to our nutritional habits, our exercise, and so on. But for all our unhealthiness, we’ve also had an engine of health that has enabled the top one per cent in America to have a ninety-year life expectancy today. Our job is to enable that capacity for public health and health-care delivery to get to everybodyalive, I would argue, and certainly to get it to all Americans.
What’s ignored is that half the country can’t afford having a primary-care doctor and don’t have adequate public health in their communities. If R.F.K., Jr., were taking that on, more power to him. Every indication from his history is that this is an effort to highlight some important things. But how much of it’s going to actually be evidence-driven? He’s had some crazy theories about what’s going to advance chronic illness and address health.
I’d say the second thing is the utter incompetence in running things and making things work. They’ve utterly destabilized the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A.
Explain that destabilization—what it looks like from inside and what effects it’ll have.
One small example:DOGEhas declared that all kinds of buildings are not necessary anymore. That includes the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. They’re saying, “Oh, everybody has to show up for work now, but you won’t have a building to work in anymore.”
No. 2 on the list is F.D.A. specialized centers around the country. There’s a laboratory in St. Louis where they have specialized equipment for testing food and drugs for safety. And so that whole capability—to insure that your foods and your medications are able to be tested for whether they have contaminants, whether they are counterfeit—that’s a basic part of good nutrition, good medicine, that could be pulled away.
Whether it’s maintaining the building infrastructure, maintaining the staff who are being purged sort of randomly left and right, or treating them not like they’re slaves but actually bringing good work out of everybody, by good management—that is what’s not happening.
I have the feeling that you, even in a short time, loved being in the federal government. What I hear in our conversation is a sense of tragedy that is not only public but that is felt very intimately by you.
I did not expect that going into government would be as meaningful to me as it was. I went into government because it was theCOVIDcrisis and I was offered an opportunity to lead the international component of the response. We got seven hundred million vaccines out to the world. But what I found was a group of people who could achieve scale like I’d never seen. It is mission-driven. None of these people went into it for the money; it’s not like they’ve had any power—
I assume all of them could have made more money elsewhere.
Absolutely. And many of them spent their lives as Foreign Service officers living in difficult places in the world. I remember that Kyiv was under attack about eight weeks after I was sworn in. I thought I was going to be working onCOVID, but this thing was erupting. First of all, our health team, along with the rest of the mission and Embassy in Kyiv, had to flee for safety. But within a week they were already saying, “We have T.B. breaking out, we have potential polio cases. How are we going to respond?” And my critical role was to say, “What’s going to kill people the most? Right now, Russia has shut down the medical supply chain, and so nearly a hundred per cent of the pharmacies just closed. Two hundred and fifty thousand H.I.V. patients can’t get their meds. A million heart patients can’t get their meds. Let’s get the pharmacies open.” And, by the way, they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put the hospitals under cyberattack and their electronic systems aren’t functioning.
And this team, in four weeks, moved the entire hospital record system to the cloud, allowing protection against cyberattacks; got oxygen systems back online; and was able to get fifty per cent of the pharmacies open in about a month, and ultimately got eighty per cent of the pharmacies open. That is just incredible.
Yes, are there some people that I had to deal with who were overly bureaucratic? Did I have to address some people who were not performing? Absolutely. Did I have to drive efficiency?
As in any work . . .
In every place you have to do that. But this was America at its best, and I was so proud to be part of that. And what frustrated me, in that job, was that I had to speak for the U.S. government. I couldn’t write for you during that time.
Believe me, I know!
I couldn’t tell the story. I’ve got a book I’m working on now in which I hope to be able to unpack all of this. It is, I think, a sad part of my leadership, that I didn’t also get to communicate what we do—partly because U.S.A.I.D. is restricted, in certain ways, from telling its story within the U.S. borders.
If you had the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and Donald Trump what you’ve been telling me for the past hour, or if they read a long report from you about lives saved, good works done, the benefits of soft power to the United States and to the world and so on—do you think it would have any effect at all?
Zero. There’s a different world view at play here. It is that power is what matters, not impact; not the over-all maximum good that you can do. And having power—wielding it in ways that can dominate the weak and partner with your friends—is the mode of existence. (When I say “partner with friends,” I mean partner with people like Putin who think the same way that you do.) It’s two entirely different world views.
But this is not just an event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions, including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?
This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”
That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.
It’s tragic and outrageous, no?
That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people who reported to Gawande at U.S.A.I.D
Atul Gawande on Elon Musk’s Attack on U.S.A.I.D.: Hundreds of Thousands Will Die | The New Yorker
Abdi Latif Dahir, Justin Scheck and Kiana Hayeri spent months visiting cities and remote villages in Kenya and Uganda.
On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.
While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return,often ground downby unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.
There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.
But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”
Dorcas Syombua Munyao was sent to Saudi Arabia by a company owned by a Kenyan government official, Fabian Kyule Muli.
Margaret Mutheu Mueni was another recruited by Mr. Muli’s company. She said her Saudi boss claimed that he had “bought” her.
In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.
The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.
Mr. Muli’s labor committee, for example, has become a prominent voice encouraging workers to go overseas. The committee has at times rejected evidence of abuse.
Last month, four Ugandan women in maids’ uniforms sent a video plea to an aid group, saying that they had been detained for six months in Saudi Arabia.
“We are exhausted from being held against our will,” one woman said on the video. The company that sent her abroad is owned by Sedrack Nzaire, an official with Uganda’s governing party who is identified in Ugandan media as the brother of the president, Yoweri Museveni.
Nearly every staffing agency refused to answer questions or ignored repeated requests for comment. That includes Mr. Muli, Mr. Nzaire and their companies.
Kenya and Uganda aredeep in a yearslong economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income. Even after other countries negotiated deals with Saudi Arabia that guaranteed worker protections, East African countries missed opportunities to do the same, records show.
Outside a domestic-work training center in Kampala, Uganda, last year. Remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income in the country.
Studying at the training center in Kampala. Classes can include Arabic lessons as well as practical skills, like how to operate washing machines.
Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justicedeclaredin 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”
Undeterred, Kenya’s president, William Ruto, says he wants to send up tohalf a million workersto Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency. Mr. Kuria’s brother, a county-level politician, still does.
A spokesman for Mr. Ruto, Hussein Mohamed, said that labor migration benefited the economy. He said the government was taking steps to protect workers, including weeding out unlicensed recruiting firms that are more likely to have shoddy practices. He said that Mr. Kuria, the presidential adviser, had no conflict of interest because he does not work on labor issues.
Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well connected. Descendants of King Faisal have been among the largest shareholders in two of the biggest agencies. A director of a Saudi government human rights board serves as vice chairman of a major staffing agency. So does a former interior minister, an Investment Ministry official and several government advisers.
Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.
A Kenyan housekeeper, Eunice Achieng, called home in a panic in 2022, saying that her boss had threatened to kill her and throw her in a water tank. “She was screaming, ‘Please come save me!’” her mother recalled. Ms. Achieng soon turned up dead in a rooftop water tank, her mother said. Saudi health officials said her body was too decomposed to determine how she died. The Saudi police labeled it a “natural death.”
Eunice Achieng on the day she left for Saudi Arabia. She was found dead in a rooftop water tank.
One young mother jumped from a third-story roof to escape an abusive employer, breaking her back. Another said that her boss had raped her and then sent her home pregnant and broke.
In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa said that when he learned his wife had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa said.
A Saudi autopsy found that his wife, Aisha Meeme, was emaciated. She had extensive bruising, three broken ribs and what appeared to be severe electrocution burns on her ear, hand and feet. The Saudi authorities declared that she had died of natural causes.
Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who havelong publicizedworkerabuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labor laws.
Isiko Moses Waiswa with his son and daughter in Kampala. When Mr. Waiswa learned that his wife, Aisha Meeme, had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
The Times interviewed more than 90 workers and family members of those who died, and uncovered another reason that things do not change. Using employment contracts, medical files and autopsies, reporters linked deaths and injuries to staffing agencies and the people who run them. What became clear was that powerful people profit off the system as it exists.
The interviews and documents reveal a system that treats women like household goods — bought, sold and discarded. Some company websites have an “add to cart” button next to photos of workers. One advertises “Kenyan maids for sale.”
A spokesman for the human resources ministry in Saudi Arabia said it had taken steps to protect workers. “Any form of exploitation or abuse of domestic workers is entirely unacceptable, and allegations of such behavior are thoroughly investigated,” the spokesman, Mike Goldstein, wrote in an email.
He said the government had raised fines for abuse and made it easier for workers to quit. He said domestic laborers were capped at 10-hour workdays and were guaranteed one day off per week. He said the government now requires employers to pay their maids through an online system and will one day track people who repeatedly violate labor laws.
“Workers have multiple ways to report abuse, unpaid wages or contract violations, including hotlines, digital platforms and direct complaint mechanisms,” he said.
But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said that abuse remained rampant.
“We get complaints on a daily basis,” he said.
Selling a Dream
Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga, a slim woman with a warm but detached air.
“We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter. She shares a triple-decker bunk bed with her mother and children.
Faridah Nassanga and her toddler in Kampala. “We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said of her family.
Ms. Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent from Marphie International Recruitment Agency, whose co-owner, Henry Tukahirwa, recently retired as one of Uganda’s highest-ranking police officers. Ms. Nassanga agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.
She found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. She had her own room. The woman she worked for sometimes even helped with chores.
Then one day, she said, her boss’s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterward, she said, he kicked and slapped her. He threw her underwear at her as she retreated to the kitchen, Ms. Nassanga said.
When she became pregnant, Ms. Nassanga’s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.
Ms. Nassanga knows her employer’s name but not her phone number. The only records she has are from the recruiting agency.
Ruth Karungi, who owns the agency with her husband, the retired police official, said that when Ms. Nassanga showed up at the office with an infant, the company contacted the Saudi partner agency, which did not respond.
The company then notified the Saudi Embassy. “We trusted that they would address the case through the proper diplomatic channels,” Ms. Karungi said by email.
She said she did not know if anyone had followed up.
Now, Ms. Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler — a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.
‘An Important Destination Country’
Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month.
Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages.
That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data show. Five years later, the number was 85,928.
African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Mr. Muli’s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”
“The current notion that foreign workers in Saudi Arabia go through suffering” needed “to be corrected,” the committee added.
Mwanakombo Ngao was hospitalized in a mental institution after returning home. She has no recollection of what happened in Saudi Arabia.
Esther Kerubo Moranga said her Saudi boss abused her. Now, she says, her uncle beats her for returning home without money.
Josephine Uchi says she worked a demanding housekeeping job while also caring for a Saudi family of 12. She was allowed four hours of sleep a night.
The African countries provide a “new and lower-cost services market,” one of Saudi Arabia’s largest staffing agencies, Maharah Human Resources Company, wrote in 2019.
Some of King Faisal’s descendants, through a holding company, have been important shareholders in both Maharah and in another major staffing agency, Saudi Manpower Solutions Company, or Smasco.
Al Mawarid, yet another big staffing company, also has deep government ties. Its chairman, Ahmad al-Rakban, was executive director of administration for the Saudi National Guard. The chief executive, Riyadh al-Romaizan, is chairman of a government-backed industry council. Tariq al-Awaji, a former top official at the Interior Ministry, is a company director. Another board member, until recently, was an official in the Investment Ministry.
In recent years, Al Mawarid has paid about $4 million to acquire workers from Macro Manpower, the firm owned by Mr. Nzaire, the brother of Uganda’s president, corporate filings show.
(East African recruiting agencies make money from per-worker fees from Saudi companies. Those companies, in turn, get fees from people who hire maids.)
Al Mawarid’s chief executive, Mr. al-Romaizan, declined to answer questions.
Attacked With Bleach
Mary Nsiimenta, a single mother with big, mournful eyes, cleaned house for a family with five children in Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia. She said the children, ages 9 to 18, hit her with a stick and put bleach in her eyes.
(Several women told The Times that they were assaulted with bleach or forced to soak their hands in it as punishment.)
According to Ms. Nsiimenta, her employer was stingy with her salary. After she repeatedly asked to be paid, she said, the family locked her on a third-story rooftop.
As time dragged on, she felt sure she would die there, she recalled.
“The sun was too much,” she said. “Hot. No food. I lost control.”
Mary Nsiimenta says she was locked on a rooftop under the hot sun for asking to be paid.
The scar on Ms. Nsiimenta’s back from spinal surgery after she jumped from the roof.
She jumped, landing hard.
“I crawled out like a snake” to the street, she said. Passers-by brought her to a hospital where, medical records show, doctors repaired her spine. She reported the abuse to doctors and the police, she said, but they told her to return to work.
Ms. Nsiimenta refused, and the Saudi placement agency returned her to Uganda in 2023. In chronic pain and incontinent, she cannot work. Friends and relatives are raising her children. “My life is destroyed,” she said.
Trading Abuse for a Type of Prison
Saudi law says that, when a worker needs to go home, an employer, recruiter or the Saudi government is obligated to pay.
“Under no circumstances does a worker bear any financial responsibility for repatriation,” wrote Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman.
But workers and worker-rights advocates say that laborers are often forced to pay. Those without money can be detained.
Because visas are tied to employment, workers who leave their jobs can lose their legal status. To help address that, the Saudi government paid a company, Sakan, to provide housing and legal assistance to foreign workers in trouble.
Hannah Njeri Miriam ended up at a Sakan center in 2022, about a year after she left Kenya’s Rift Valley for Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Miriam’s employer fired her after a dispute. Jobless and homeless, Sakan was the only place to go. Once there, according to her family, the staff said she could leave only if she paid about $300 for her travel.
She called home, saying she was being mistreated and underfed. Nobody could afford to help. The Kenyan agency that had sent her abroad had gone out of business.
Finally, her family got a call from another woman at the center. She said Ms. Miriam had tried to escape through an air-conditioning opening but had slipped and fallen two stories. A forensic report said that Ms. Miriam had died of head wounds. The Saudi police later said that she died of “congestive cardiac and respiratory failure.” Sakan’s chairman declined to comment.
Jackson Tutuma feared that work in Saudi Arabia was too dangerous. But his wife, Hannah Njeri Miriam, set off anyway. “I begged her,” Mr. Tutuma, said. “I was heartbroken.”
Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman, declined to comment on individual deaths but said that every case was thoroughly investigated. He did not comment on the inconsistencies between autopsies and police reports and would not say how many people had been arrested or prosecuted in labor cases.
Mr. Goldstein said the government stopped funding Sakan in 2023. Now, he said, it pays the recruiting agency Smasco to run worker-assistance centers.
Three Kenyan women spoke to The Times from inside a Smasco center. The women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they could not go home unless they paid about $400. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Returning Home
As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.
People should not have been surprised. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda had ample warning of abuse, yet they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia that lacked protections that other leaders demanded.
The Philippines deal in 2012, for example, guaranteed a $400 monthly minimum wage, access to bank accounts and a promise that workers’ passports would not be confiscated.
Kenya initially demanded similar wages, according to a government report, but when Saudi Arabia balked, Kenya agreed to a deal in 2015 with no minimum wage at all.
The treaty contained little beyond a promise to establish a committee to monitor labor issues. The commission was never formed, a government report said.
Mr. Mohamed, the Kenyan president’s spokesman, said that the government later negotiated $225 monthly wages. He said Kenyan workers were simply not as highly regarded in Saudi Arabia. “Philippines is able to dictate the price,” he said.
When Uganda cut its agreement with the Saudi government, they made no mention of a minimum wage. The issue of worker mistreatment was well discussed at the time. The Saudi ambassador to Uganda even wrote a column in a Ugandan newspaper assailing critics who “offend and abuse the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” by publicizing abuse.
Friends and family at the Nairobi airport in October with a hearse carrying the body of Lucy Nyambura Kimani.The New York Times
A label in Arabic on the coffin of Ms. Kimani, who died while working in Saudi Arabia.The New York Times
In 2021, a Kenyan Senate committee found “deteriorating conditions” in Saudi Arabia and an “increase in distress calls by those alleging torture and mistreatment.” The committee recommended suspending worker transfers.
When Mr. Ruto was elected president in 2022, though, the campaign to send workers abroad intensified. His government reached a new Saudi labor agreement the following year without a wage increase or substantive new protections.
“It’s a cycle of abuse that no one is addressing,” said Stephanie Marigu, a Kenyan lawyer who represents workers.
Now, a few times a month, rural Kenyans head to Nairobi to collect a coffin from the airport.
Hundreds of people gathered in September at a village school in southwestern Kenya. They paid respects to Millicent Moraa Obwocha, who had left her husband and young son behind months earlier.
Her employer sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband, Obuya Simon Areba, said. Things got so bad last summer, he said, that she asked her Saudi recruiter to rescue her.
A few days later, her husband got the call that she was dead. She was 24. The Kenyan government attributed her death to “nerve issues.”
Her employer, Abdullah Omar Abdul al-Rahman Hailan, said that Mr. Areba’s account was “misleading and incorrect” and called a Times reporter “a clown.”
At the funeral, Ms. Obwocha’s body lay in an open coffin in a white dress and veil.
Beside her was a six-foot-tall photograph. In it, she smiles with her fingers held up in a V. She is standing outside the airport, brimming with optimism.
The grave of Millicent Moraa Obwocha in Kisii, southwestern Kenya. Her employer in Saudi Arabia sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband said. She died age 24.
Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for The Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He covers a broad range of issues including geopolitics, business, society and arts.More about Abdi Latif Dahir"
