Category: New York Times

An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a family member and state media news reports. The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.

The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced last week at a closed trial in Qom province along with eight band and crew colleagues.

A video of the 2024 performance, in which the singer’s hair, arms, and shoulders are uncovered, in defiance of Iranian law, went viral on YouTube.

Ahmadi and her colleagues were also banned from performing or leaving the country for two years, said the family member who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisal for speaking to the media. Two of the nine individuals sentenced were not in Iran when the verdict was announced, the family member said.

The sentencing came just days after Iran and the United States tentatively agreed to end a monthslong conflict that has killed thousands across the Middle East and sent shock waves throughout the global economy.

The government’s crackdown on artistic expression and women’s dress has dampened hopes among some Iranians for a more moderate postwar order.

“Besides being an inhumane and humiliating punishment, the 74-lash sentence against Parastoo Ahmadi simply for singing without compulsory hijab is a dangerous signal that the regime, emboldened by the peace deal with the U.S., may intensify its crackdown on women,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights.

The strikes against Iran by the United States and Israel that began in February killed several key figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who oversaw the violent and repressive theocracy over nearly four decades.

President Donald Trump justified the war, in part, by saying the United States intended to help Iranians overturn their leaders. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media in January.

That month, Iranian authorities responded to widespread protests by killing thousands of people. Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, called it a “state-orchestrated massacre.”

Now, it is not clear that the war has left Iran in less restrictive hands than before. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his father as supreme leader, and a group of hard-line senior members of the Revolutionary Guard has assumed an expansive role in running the country.

In 2022, there were also hopes that change might come for Iranian women. Large protests erupted after the death of a young woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of people.

During the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement that followed, more Iranians decided to flout the hijab rules, and violent crackdowns appeared to abate slightly, according to a U.N. report documenting the aftermath of the protests.

It was in that context that the video of Ahmadi’s 2024 performance, in which she crooned a set of patriotic folk songs while wearing a simple black dress, went viral. The caption read: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately.”

Ahmadi and two of her collaborators were briefly detained after the video was posted.

Now, with a postwar political order appearing to solidify in Iran, some in the country are looking at the sentencing of Ahmadi and her bandmates and wondering what it may mean for the future.

“Will this country ever be fixed one day?” said Mariam, 30, a teacher in Mashhad who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of reprisals. “Where in the world is a woman’s singing punishable by lashes?”

Iranian authorities have attempted to “project an image of normalcy” after the war, said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. But, she said, “cases like Parastoo’s expose the reality of the human rights situation in Iran: Women continue to face profound discrimination under the law, and defiance results in punishment and state violence.”

It was unclear when the authorities planned to lash Ahmadi and the other defendants. Since the 2022 protests, there have been multiple documented cases of the authorities whipping women accused of violating hijab rules or speaking out against them.

Court documents related to the trial have not been made public.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume using a fast-track deportation process throughout the country that is typically reserved for people apprehended shortly after crossing the southern border.

The decision revived a pillar of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, after a lower court ruled last August that attempts to use the procedure to potentially remove millions of people without immigration hearings most likely violated their due process rights and risked wrongful detentions.

In a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that it did not violate immigrants’ rights to use the policy to the maximum extent allowed by law. Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee. Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a dissent that he would have let the lower court’s ruling stand.

Writing for the majority, Walker wrote that Congress had delegated to the executive branch decisions about which migrants to designate for expedited deportations.

“For many years, while some were designated, others were not,” he wrote. “But that changed in January 2025 when the executive expanded expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress,” he wrote.

He added that the Homeland Security Department was not legally required to tell those arrested that they could avoid expedited removal if they could prove they had been in the country continuously for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” the opinion said.

Immediately upon taking office in January, Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use the process, known as expedited removal, against an expanded population of immigrants lacking legal status.

Expedited removal had been used narrowly for migrants lacking legal status who are detained near the southern border. It allows officials to deport people who have been in the country for less than two years without hearings in immigration courts.

Trump’s expanded policy encouraged agents to detain and designate for rapid removal migrants questioned even deep in the country’s interior if they could not produce proof on the spot that they had been in the country beyond that two-year threshold.

But judges have been deeply skeptical of the policy, noting that throwing out immigrants’ rights to challenge their removal in court could lead to abuse when carried out at scale.

During a hearing last December, the three-judge appeals court panel focused on how immigration agents had used the policy in 2025 before it was blocked by a lower court. Judges pressed Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the government, for specifics.

The three judges questioned why the government had waited until October 2025 to share with the court a policy memo circulated at ICE last February, which explained how and when expedited removal should be used.

The guidance instructed agents that if someone apprehended by immigration agents professed to have been in the country longer than two years, they should be given “a brief but reasonable opportunity” to provide documentation to avoid being placed in expedited removal. Walker wrote in the opinion Tuesday that as long as migrants are provided that “reasonable opportunity,” the requirements of the law had been fulfilled.

In his dissent, Wilkins wrote that the Department of Homeland Security had not disputed that in using the policy, it had deported a number of individuals who had been in the country longer than two years.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” he wrote.

In a statement, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the ruling. He wrote that the department had long “arbitrarily limited expedited removal,” though the law allows it to be used more broadly.

He said the appeals court had “vindicated” the Trump administration’s practices.

Anand Balakrishnan, a lawyer representing Make the Road New York, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, argued during the hearing last year that such groups had been in the dark about how the procedure had been used. He said that the decision to give migrants lacking legal status an opportunity to state their case and avoid being placed into fast-track deportation was being made by individual agents with little oversight.

“I don’t have any clue how this process is supposed to work in practice, particularly when the only check on it is that individual officer who is supposedly, in their discretion, providing them with time,” he said.

Balakrishnan said the aggressive expansion of the policy effectively left everyone without full legal status vulnerable to being placed on a fast track for deportation, including those who had lived in the country for decades and had deep ties to their communities or to U.S. citizens.

But Balakrishnan had faced skeptical questioning from Rao and Walker. At one point, Walker appeared to dismiss the case as an attempt to stall the deportation process nationally, rather than maintain what had for decades been a more circumscribed use of the expedited removal process.

Walker observed that all of the people challenging the policy were in the country illegally.

“So whether they get expedited removal or nonexpedited removal, the proper result is removal, right?” he said.

“I don’t know whether the proper result is removal,” Balakrishnan said. “I mean, the proper result would be procedures to access the relief that Congress has afforded them.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Crews began dismantling a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on Monday, signaling its closure even as state and federal officials continued to say little about the shutdown of a year-old facility that they once praised on a near-daily basis.

State officials informed vendors in a call Monday morning that they could begin “demobilizing,” or taking down, the tents, fences, trailers, and other structures at the detention center, known as Alligator Alcatraz, according to three people familiar with the call. Vendors are supposed to make significant progress on the work by Wednesday, two of the people said.

The directive came days after the Department of Homeland Security said that all detainees had been transferred out of the remote center, which opened a little less than a year ago to much fanfare from President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, his fellow Republican.

“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility,” the department said in a statement last Tuesday, referring to the detention center. “For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities.”

Last year, however, thousands of detainees spent the bulk of hurricane season at the center, which became the nation’s first state-run facility to hold federal immigration detainees. The tropical storm season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

Immigration lawyers and activists took last week’s statement from DHS as the latest evidence that the facility would soon close.

On Friday, Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management chief, whose agency operates the center, insisted that it remained open. “At this point in time, we have not been told to stand down, so we are still in a posture to receive detainees,” he told reporters, according to the Miami Herald.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Monday morning’s call between state officials and the detention center’s vendors was first reported by CBS Miami.

The New York Times first reported last month that federal and state officials were considering closing the facility, which has cost Florida hundreds of millions of dollars to operate, by June.

When asked about a closure since then, DeSantis has said that the Homeland Security Department is reassessing its detention needs now that Markwayne Mullin is in place as the agency’s new secretary. The agency plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain immigrants, the Times reported last week.

On Monday, DeSantis’ office referred questions about the center to the emergency management division. James Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general who was instrumental in opening the center, said Monday that he could not confirm if it was closing, though he knew that the number of detainees had been dropping.

“Alligator Alcatraz actually stayed open longer than it was intentionally planned,” he said at a news conference in Tampa. “It was never expected to be a long-term thing.”

To many who have closely followed the center over the past year, the inconsistent messaging about whether it is closing — and, if so, for what reason — has left the impression that Alligator Alcatraz, with its hefty price tag and ongoing reports of troubling conditions, has become too much of a political liability.

“It’s been an expensive failure,” said Jeff Brandes, a Republican and former state senator who now runs the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “Nobody would say this was a success.”

The facility has cost state officials more than $1 million per day to operate, including for trucking in water and trucking out wastewater. The federal government had committed to pay the state more than $600 million to defray costs, but it has provided only a fraction of that amount so far.

This year, Florida lawmakers imposed new rules on the emergency fund that the state has been using to cover the center’s operating costs. Those rules take effect July 1, the start of Florida’s new budget year.

State officials hastily erected the detention center on a training airport about halfway between Miami and Naples, hailing it as the showcase of Florida’s cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown. They also erected an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign on a road leading to the facility, ignoring criticism that the moniker — and jokes they made about any escapees being intercepted by alligators — was cruel.

Detainees, their relatives, and their lawyers have regularly denounced what they have described as unsanitary and inhumane conditions at the center, allegations that state officials deny. Environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the state and the federal government, arguing that the facility was illegally constructed in sensitive wetlands.

Last week, after Homeland Security officials said that detainees had been moved out, a lawyer for the environmental groups vowed to continue the lawsuit over what he called the “secret Gulag in the Everglades.”

“They hope that they can slink away in the middle of the night without explaining to anyone what they did, why they did it, or how they proposed to clean up the mess that they’ve made,” the lawyer, Paul J. Schwiep, said at a virtual news conference Wednesday. “And we don’t intend to let them get away with it.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

JERUSALEM — Israel and Hezbollah appeared to maintain a tense ceasefire in Lebanon for a second day on Monday, as mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks announced a mechanism aimed at ensuring the truce holds, and Israeli troops operated under new orders designed to lower the risk of flare-ups.

Israel’s top diplomat, however, warned that the country would not withdraw its forces from the self-declared “security zone” it has established in Lebanon up to about 6 miles north of the border.

“Israel will respect the ceasefire in Lebanon as long as it won’t be breached by Hezbollah,” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar wrote in a social media post on Monday. “We don’t have territorial ambitions in Lebanon, but we will not withdraw from the security zone and expose our citizens to Hezbollah’s attacks and possible invasion.”

Saar’s post came hours after Pakistan and Qatar, the mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks, announced an agreement to create a “deconfliction cell” to ensure the “adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” It would include representatives from Iran, the United States, and Lebanon.

The quiet on the Lebanon front was still settling in after a furious round of hostilities on Friday and Saturday that began when four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, were killed when their tank exploded.

A fifth soldier was killed in the same area Saturday, setting off waves of Israeli retaliatory strikes. The military said Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, had launched more than 50 rockets targeting its soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.

The fighting centered around the area of Kfar Tebnit and nearby Ali Taher, a strategic ridgeline overlooking the large city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military recently issued an updated map of its security zone that placed Kfar Tebnit and Ali Taher just within the area under Israeli control.

That appeared to be more than coincidental.

The Israeli military said that Ali Taher was the location of a fortified underground Hezbollah stronghold that has long served as the militia’s southern headquarters from which it directed fire against Israeli forces and communities in northern Israel.

Should the militants inside try to leave that stronghold without surrendering, it could pose a threat to the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire.

Ceasefires in Lebanon have been declared, broken, and reinstated numerous times in recent weeks, but the fighting has persisted amid disagreements over what constitutes defensive actions by Israeli forces.

An Israeli military statement Monday said that it had gained control of the area of the Hezbollah compound and encircled it, adding that “dozens of Hezbollah operatives are currently trapped with no ability to exit.”

Hezbollah said Saturday that it had attacked Israeli forces advancing toward Ali Taher.

Later on Saturday, the Israeli military said it had received “updated directives” from the country’s political leaders and would no longer be “conducting proactive strikes” in Lebanon. The military reserved the right to respond if Hezbollah did not abide by the ceasefire and targeted Israeli troops or civilians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted in a video statement Monday that his directive to the military, and that of the defense minister, remained clear and unchanged: “Our fighters in southern Lebanon have full operational freedom to thwart any direct or emergent threat against them or residents of the north.”

He did not address whether the military had been ordered to refrain from offensive action, and a spokesperson would not elaborate.

Israeli commanders received new orders Saturday restricting them to defensive actions in Lebanon, stating that troops may only fire to counter an immediate threat unless authorized by the military’s chief of staff.

The new orders specifically bar Israeli soldiers from firing warning shots at civilians attempting to return to southern Lebanon unless they get too close to the soldiers, according to two Israeli officials who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The orders also bar Israeli soldiers from blowing up homes and other infrastructure inside the security zone without the approval of senior officers, the officials said.

Spokespeople for the military did not respond to repeated requests for comment Monday.

Sarit Zehavi, president of the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on Israel’s northern border, said she feared that the ban on offensive operations would put Israeli soldiers in the position of having to be responsive rather than proactive.

“On the ground, it takes time till you understand what’s a threat,” she said. “This will eventually cost the lives of soldiers.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

NEW YORK — The Supreme Court on Monday reversed a lower court decision that had reopened the case of the man convicted in the killing of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose 1979 abduction in Manhattan reshaped American childhoods.

The court’s unsigned opinion restores the conviction of the man, Pedro Hernandez, who the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had said last year was entitled to a new trial.

The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted their objection to the majority’s order.

Hernandez was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Etan, but an appeals court overturned that judgment in July. Months later, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Hernandez, asked the nation’s highest court to review the decision.

On Monday, a defense lawyer for Hernandez, Harvey Fishbein, said the Supreme Court’s order meant his client would not get a new trial and that his team was “terribly disappointed.”

“We firmly believe that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” Fishbein said.

In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the case had “changed a generation of New Yorkers.”

“This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s action sends the matter back to the lower courts and is the latest development in a case that stumped investigators for decades. Hernandez, a handyman who lived in New Jersey, was arrested in 2012 and first put on trial in 2015. But after 18 days of deliberations, the trial ended in a hung jury. The case went back to trial and, in 2017, a Manhattan jury convicted Hernandez after nine days of deliberations.

The reversal of Hernandez’s conviction last year reopened a case that had appeared finally settled. From the first days Etan went missing, when he was walking the two blocks from his home in the SoHo neighborhood to a school bus stop, the case generated intense public interest. Etan’s abrupt disappearance — and the killing of 6-year-old Adam Walsh two years later — ushered in an era of heightened caution among American parents.

In its 10-page opinion Monday, the Supreme Court said the 2nd Circuit got it wrong and exceeded its authority.

The lower court opinion “appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions,” the majority said, but the relevant statute does not permit federal courts to “disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence.”

The liberal justices did not explain their disagreement. The ruling was issued as part of the court’s routine orders and without the justices holding oral arguments.

For decades, investigators in Manhattan struggled to figure out what happened to Etan. His body was never found, and in 2001, he was declared legally dead.

The critical break in the case came in 2012, when one of Hernandez’s relatives contacted investigators. New York police officers traveled to Hernandez’s home in Camden, N.J. After about seven hours of questioning, police said, Hernandez confessed — first before being read his rights, and twice more after.

Hernandez was 18 at the time of Etan’s disappearance and worked at a bodega where investigators believed Etan had been killed.

There was no scientific evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and his confessions to investigators were quickly called into question.

Hernandez’s lawyers argued that the statements were invented to placate the police. They asked the court to suppress them, saying they were a result of Hernandez’s low IQ and the product of psychotic delusions. The judge nonetheless said that they could be used as evidence.

During jury deliberations at the second trial in 2017, the jury asked the judge whether they should disregard one of Hernandez’s later confessions if they found that his first one was not voluntary. The judge gave a one-word answer: No.

A federal appeals court found that the judge should have explained a Supreme Court precedent about such serial confessions and ordered that Hernandez be released from his 25-years-to-life sentence or get a new trial.

Prosecutors in Manhattan, led by Bragg, argued to the Supreme Court that Hernandez’s conviction should not have been overturned because it was not based on an “error in the decades-long investigation, in the admission of Hernandez’s confessions or in the evidence presented at trial.” The appeals court had said that the judge overseeing the trial, Maxwell Wiley, had violated federal law and therefore invalidated a jury’s verdict.

In their response, Hernandez’s lawyers said that the judge’s instruction to the jury had touched on the central issue in the case.

“Far from exhibiting the kind of clear error for which summary reversal is typically reserved,” his lawyers wrote, “the 2nd Circuit’s decision is correct.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

HAVANA — Axisa and Aron Alfonso, 6- and 7-year-old siblings in western Cuba, are luckier than most of their classmates: Their father takes them on their 1-mile commute to school on horseback.

The children and teachers who live farther away rely on a spluttering, yellow Soviet-era school bus that no longer shows up. Teachers often do not make it to class, so the Alfonso family and their horse, Chocolate, turn around and go home.

A U.S. oil blockade has set off an increasingly agonizing energy crisis that has brought transportation largely to a standstill. Fewer cars and buses are on the streets, and, as a result, fewer students and teachers are in school.

“My children rarely go to school. They go, but the teachers don’t come,” said Sergio Alfonso Vásquez, 33, a farmer and the father of Axisa and Arona. “I’m afraid because they aren’t learning anything.”

To save energy, the Cuban government in February cut school to half-days and resorted to COVID-era remote learning for college students.

Then Cuba decided to end the school year two weeks early and scrapped college entrance exams for high school seniors after acknowledging that sleepless nights without electricity and a lack of school meals were exhausting students and teachers alike.

The Cuban government’s measures are the latest blows to the country’s once vaunted public education system, which had long been a signature triumph of the country’s socialist revolution.

Schools were already reeling from Hurricane Melissa last fall, which damaged hundreds of buildings; a mass departure of teachers in recent years; and shortages of textbooks, uniforms, and even pencils and paper.

The extreme gasoline shortage finally brought the strained system to a stop.

The Trump administration’s pressure campaign, including an executive order that prohibited countries from delivering oil to Cuba, is aimed at forcing Cuba’s government into making political and economic changes.

But experts say the damage to the educational system is a striking example of the negative consequences of U.S. measures on regular Cubans and that, in the case of schools, amounts to a serious long-term threat.

“Education in Cuba is at risk due to the current energy crisis,” Anne Lemaistre, the regional director of UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, said on Instagram. “It jeopardizes the future of an entire generation.”

All 240 of Cuba’s boarding schools had to close this semester, Lemaistre, who is based in Havana, told the New York Times.

The Cuban government did not respond to requests for comment, but government officials have publicly discussed the schools crisis.

“After a night without electricity, getting a kid to school, figuring out how to engage him, and the class itself, is a challenge,” Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, Cuba’s minister of education, said in February on state television. “And for the teachers, who also suffer just as much, without electricity or with the problem of whether or not they have water at home, concentrating on giving classes has been quite a challenge.”

Even before the Trump administration started imposing stricter measures against the Cuban government, the country had already been in a steep economic decline for several years.

The Cuban government said the school system was facing a shortage of roughly 26,000 teachers, many of whom had quit for better-paying jobs in the private sector.

In Camagüey, a city in eastern Cuba, nearly 1,000 teachers had left the country for good in recent years, state-run media reported.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the country experienced a record-breaking exodus. More than 1 million people, including thousands of teachers who earned an average of $11 a month, left the country.

President Donald Trump cut off international fuel deliveries in January and introduced a new package of aggressive economic measures aimed at starving the Cuban government of cash.

The Trump administration argues that the United States is not to blame for Cuba’s energy crunch, but instead faults Cuban officials for not investing enough in infrastructure while diverting “energy resources to line their own pockets.”

The State Department, in a statement, questioned why the Cuban regime claims it has no fuel for schools, while Interior Ministry officials who quash protests have enough gas to carry out their operations.

Remote learning for college students, one of the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government, has proved all but impossible. Blackouts stretch over 20 hours a day, and most students and teachers cannot pay for enough data on their phones to support remote classes.

Instead, professors have sent lessons using WhatsApp voice notes.

Leonard Gómez León, a third-year law student at the University of Havana, described the semester as “hellish.”

“The power outages have been constant, the lack of internet connection, and so on, and it’s truly terrifying to see how badly we students are doing,” he said. “I feel like this is almost a lost semester.”

Gómez, 21, is the vice president of the University Student Federation of Cuba, a state-run organization that has traditionally toed the government line. But he helped organize a protest in March outside the university, demanding the semester be canceled until in-person classes could resume.

The vice minister of education, Modesto Ricardo Gómez, told the protesting students that the Trump administration was “massacring an entire society.”

The collapse of education is a stark contrast to the gains that the country made after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator and seized power in 1959.

He made education a priority at a time when the illiteracy rate was higher than 20% and mobilized 250,000 students and teachers to teach adults to read, particularly in the countryside.

Illiteracy was all but eradicated. The island’s universal, free university system steadily expanded over the decades, churning out doctors and engineers.

But the government, which has a near monopoly on such professions, has for decades paid minuscule salaries, undercutting economic incentives to study or teach. And the quality of Cuba’s education has deteriorated since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country’s main benefactor, which led to budget shortfalls.

Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York’s Baruch College who has written extensively about Cuba, said the education system is now “a shell of its former self.”

University education in particular, she said, is largely on pause.

“What is happening online is very poor in quality,” she said. “There’s only one, or two, or less, hours of electricity a day, and people in that time are trying to do everything to survive, from washing to cooking.”

Alejandro Paradero Almenarios, 20, had enrolled at the University of Guantánamo, hoping to become a biology teacher, but dropped out in January, five months into his freshman year. He decided the effort was not worth it given the paltry wages he would earn teaching high school, the equivalent of $7 a month.

“I was studying and studying for nothing,” he said.

He now works full time making charcoal, which people now rely on to prepare meals because cooking gas is unavailable.

Raúl Cabrera Oliva, 18, was in his last year at a vocational high school in Artemisa, west of Havana, that specialized in veterinary medicine.

With few transportation options for most students, the school closed.

“No transportation, no school,” Cabrera said.

The government’s push to reduce school hours to half a day caused another set of problems. By the time parents and children, many of whom hitchhiked, arrived at school, there was no time for parents to go home and then return in time for dismissal.

Mothers killed time waiting outside.

Yaymaris Rodríguez López said she would leave her house in a village in western Cuba every morning at 7 a.m. with her two sons, ages 12 and 4, and stood on the side of the road, hoping someone would drive by offering a ride to her children’s school.

Sometimes, 10 a.m. came and went, and they would still be waiting.

“What am I going to do? I have to take them to school,” Rodríguez said. “They can’t grow up to be dumb.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Treasury Department on Monday issued a 60-day license allowing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil as part of the preliminary U.S.-Iran deal signed last week.

Iran stands to reap significant financial rewards from the reprieve, which represents a sharp reversal of U.S. policy. Most importantly, it clears a path for the country to export its oil at market rates after many years of being forced to sell at a discount to find buyers willing to take the risk of running afoul of U.S. economic restrictions.

But the Trump administration has signaled that it’s ready to provide Iran with financial rewards for opening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war, which has destabilized the global economy.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on social media that the sanctions exemption was the result of “ongoing productive” talks with Iran that are taking place in Switzerland.

“Iran has committed to free and open transit in the Strait of Hormuz and to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors into their country,” Bessent wrote in a post on social platform X.

The Trump administration provided Iran with temporary sanctions relief earlier this year as it tried to curb oil prices by allowing more crude supplies to flow to global markets. The U.S. then ramped up sanctions and created a military blockade preventing the sale of Iranian oil as part of an effort to cripple its economy.

The new license, which expires Aug. 21, gives Iran greater access to U.S. currency by allowing the country to conduct oil transactions using U.S. dollars. It also allows U.S. importers to buy Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products, and petroleum products.

Iran produced less than 5% of the world’s oil before the war, with the vast majority of its exports going to China. But it was forced to sharply curtail production in recent months because of a U.S. blockade. Time will tell how quickly the country will be able to restart those wells, which can be a tricky process. Iran will also have to repair energy infrastructure damaged in the war.

The Trump administration has faced criticism for striking an initial agreement with Iran that critics say is overly accommodating and more generous than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the Obama administration and other world powers reached with Iran to curb its nuclear program.

“It’s also important to note that sanctions relief was not provided immediately when the JCPOA was enacted, it happened at ‘Implementation Day’ — six months after the IAEA verified the nuclear commitments were fulfilled,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served as the Office of Foreign Assets Control compliance coordinator for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.