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2026-05-02 15:01:00

Last fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention. 

At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy. 

“We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.  

They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert.

“You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.”

This week on Reveal, as a new flotilla recently set sail for Gaza, we’re bringing back our story about the Global Sumud Flotilla from last fall for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference. 

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2025.

2026-05-02 07:10:24

A federal appeals court packed with conservatives has handed abortion opponents a major victory against the US Food and Drug Administration, reinstating an in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion medication mifepristone and shutting down telemedicine providers—at least temporarily—from prescribing the abortion pill across the US.

In a 3-0 order issued Friday afternoon, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Louisiana’s request for an injunction against FDA rule changes from 2023 that have allowed blue-state telehealth providers to send mifepristone to thousands of patients every month in states where abortion is banned. Abortion pills now account for almost two-thirds of abortions nationwide, and more than a quarter of abortions occur via telemedicine.

The 2023 telemedicine rule “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” US Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the court. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions,” the Donald Trump appointee wrote, “and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person.” The ruling is expected to be quickly appealed to the US Supreme Court.

The injunction does not affect misoprostol, the second medication used with mifepristone under the FDA-approved protocol—and a powerful abortion drug on its own. Nor does it stop in-person prescription of abortion pills. Nonetheless, the greatest impact will likely be felt by women in the dozen or so states—many in the South—where lawmakers and attorneys general have sought to end abortion access completely.

For women of color and immigrants, “medication abortion by mail is one of the few ways people can overcome systemic barriers to care,” said Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. “Taking it away is deliberate and dangerous and puts politics over the health and well-being of our communities.”

“This isn’t about science—it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Telehealth has transformed healthcare. Selectively stripping that away from abortion patients is a political blockade.”

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed her lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to drop the in-person dispensing rule was “arbitrary” and “capricious,” and that abortion pills are too risky to prescribe remotely, even though scores of studies around the globe have shown otherwise. She also claimed the rule change was “avowedly political”—explicitly intended to get around the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade—and interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit.

In April, US District Judge David Joseph—another Trump appointee—put the lawsuit on hold pending the FDA’s own review of mifepristone’s safety, which has been underway since last fall. Even though the Trump administration has made clear its own concerns about the telemedicine rule, it has argued that rolling back the Biden rules while its study is ongoing amounts to “judicial intervention” in the agency’s long-established drug review process.

But abortion opponents have seen that study as a delaying tactic by a White House worried about the impact that cutting off access to abortion pills might have on the GOP’s already grim prospects in the midterm elections. Murrill quickly appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which encompasses Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi—one of the most conservative federal jurisdictions in the country.

It is the same appeals court that ruled in a similar but separate lawsuit three years ago that the FDA exceeded its authority when it relaxed an assortment of restrictions on mifepristone during the Obama and Biden administrations, including the telemedicine rule. The Supreme Court eventually rejected that case, because the anti-abortion doctors who brought it didn’t have standing to sue. But the SCOTUS ruling did not address the far bigger and thornier issue of whether the FDA’s rule changes were legal.

In Friday’s order, the Fifth Circuit panel harkened back to that earlier case. “Our court has previously concluded that [the] FDA’s actions here were likely unlawful,” Duncan wrote. The same reasoning, he said, “squarely applies” to the 2023 telemedicine rule change.

“Victory for Life!” Murrill’s office cheered on Facebook. “The Biden abortion cartel facilitated the deaths of thousands of Louisiana babies. . . Today, that nightmare is over.”

But abortion opponents are fooling themselves if they think medication abortion can be completely cut off by the Fifth Circuit or any other court, says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “Abortion is too important,” she says. “People are going to find ways around the law because [the ability to access care is] so critical to someone’s identity and autonomy and self-determination. There’s no world in which this genie goes back in the bottle.”

Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates have been making contingency plans. “We will do everything in our power to continue providing care to people in all 50 states,” says Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a telemedicine provider that sends pills to more than 3,000 patients a month. “We remain committed to ensuring that people can get the care they need, when they need it.”

Developed by French researchers in the 1980s, mifepristone is one of two drugs that make up the standard abortion-pill protocol in the US. It works by blocking the production of progesterone, the main hormone needed to support a developing pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, then causes the uterus to contract, expelling the embryo. Misoprostol—available over the counter in many countries to treat stomach ulcers—has also been shown in numerous global studies to be a safe and effective abortifacient on its own.  

The anti-abortion movement fought hard to keep mifepristone out of the US, claiming it was—and remains—too dangerous. When the FDA finally gave its approval to the drug in 2000, it imposed a number of restrictions, including limiting mifepristone’s use to early in the first trimester, requiring doctors to dispense the drug in person, and mandating multiple medical appointments. In 2011, mifepristone was consigned to a new program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs.

But the Obama-era FDA, buoyed by still more studies confirming the drug’s safety, began easing those restrictions in 2016, including allowing mifepristone to be used up to 10 weeks’ gestation and slashing the recommended dosage by two-thirds. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the FDA suspended its in-person office-visit requirement, and in 2023, it made the telehealth change permanent. The new FDA rules also made mifepristone more readily available in pharmacies.

In the four years since Dobbs, the revised rules have made it possible for large numbers of red-state patients—some 15,000 per month, according to the most recent data from the #WeCount project—to continue obtaining abortion pills despite draconian bans. Medication now accounts for more than 60 percent of abortions in the US, facilitated by shield laws—statutes that protect abortion providers in blue states who care for patients living in places where abortion is illegal.

The growing availability of mifepristone has enraged the anti-abortion movement, which was counting on Trump 2.0 to take quick action to stop the flow of pills. But so far, administration officials have resisted pressure to rescind the FDA’s approval of mifepristone or revive the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment. 

So red-state attorneys general and other anti-abortion activists have escalated their own attacks in court. Murrill has been a leader in those efforts, trying to extradite abortion providers in New York and California to face criminal charges, without success, and threatening to sue those states over their shield laws. Louisiana has some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, yet telemedicine providers are mailing close to 1,000 packages of abortion pills to patients in the state every month.

In its suit against the FDA, Murrill accused the Biden administration of forcing the state to bear the costs of Medicaid patients who suffer complications as a result of the pills’ use.

The Fifth Circuit panel cited those costs as one of the reasons Louisiana had standing to sue. “Louisiana identifies $92,000 it paid in Medicaid costs from two women who needed emergency care in 2025 from complications caused by out-of-state mifepristone,” Duncan wrote. “Such costs will almost certainly continue because nearly 1,000 women monthly—many of whom are on Medicaid—have mifepristone-induced abortions in Louisiana.”

The court rejected arguments by the drug’s manufacturers that an injunction now would be premature. “We conclude Louisiana has strongly shown a likelihood of winning” its challenge to the 2023 rules, Duncan wrote.

Murrill also claimed telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. Joining her as a co-plaintiff in the case is a Louisiana day care employee named Rosalie Markezich, who alleged that her ex-boyfriend used her email address to order drugs from a California doctor, then forced her to take the medication against her will. Markezich is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal powerhouse that has played a pivotal role in most of the significant anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policy and court battles of recent years. ADF also represented the anti-abortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s initial approval and regulation of mifepristone in the blockbuster case that went to the Supreme Court in 2024.

At a hearing in February, the judge overseeing the Louisiana case told Murrill that he doubted an injunction on telehealth would stop the flow of abortion pills.  “The war on drugs has been going on for 50 years,” Joseph pointed out, “and yet there was more cocaine produced last year than any other.” 

Donley, the law professor, agrees that activists and patients will find ways to get around medication restrictions and bans. “You shut off access to mifepristone, people will switch to misoprostol-only abortions,” she says. “Even if you were to shut down shield providers in this country, people would just switch to international providers and start shipping from other countries.”

Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections—something Donald Trump has been hoping to avoid, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she says. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” Voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be complacent any longer, she says. “It’s going to be a major political pressure point.”

This is a developing story.

2026-05-02 03:01:20

After last month’s No Kings protest, Indivisible, the group that describes itself as a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian people-powered movement, joined May Day Strong’s actions to take a page out of Minnesota’s one-day strike playbook from this past January.

On its surface, Indivisible’s participation appears to be a slight pivot, engaging in more disruptive labor-directed actions. But for Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, May Day Strong is part of their movement—one that can’t succeed without growing its broad coalition. “Society cannot function without workers, and our political system won’t function unless more non-billionaires and non-mega corporations get involved in how politics works,” Levin told me when we spoke by phone on Thursday.

Politics feel brutal for most workers these days. It’s equally hard to measure the impact of protest groups like Indivisible. That’s especially true in a week where the Supreme Court dismantled voting rights and the Trump administration doubled down on its war in Iran despite rising costs and thousands of people killed. But Levin was, at times, evasive about looking too far in the future. For him, it’s impossible to measure the success of a pro-democracy movement on whether authoritarians are doing damage. It’s more useful to measure impact by how much a movement grows and tries new tactics.

This strategic alignment with May Day is an example. Levin was focused on building a coalition now—including opening the door for people who are not advocates or organizers. He also seemed clear-eyed about his group’s role: “Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country. We are a piece of it.”

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Where do you think Indivisible’s work stands within the larger US ecosystem of organizing? 

I don’t think there’s a pathway to getting a real democracy that reflects the world of people that doesn’t depend on coalition. There’s not going to be any one organization or any one individual movement that succeeds in significantly changing our political system and bends it to the will of the people—you need to build across coalition. 

For us, that’s core to just about everything Indivisible does. That shows up in the Hands Off coalition that came out a year ago. The Good Trouble Lives On [protests] on the John Lewis Day of Remembrance, and the No Kings coalition itself, which is made up of hundreds members. 

May Day is not by Indivisible and it’s not led by the No Kings coalition. It’s being led by the May Day strong coalition with an emphasis on union participation. You’re not going to build a pro-democracy movement that’s successful without having heavy involvement from union leaders. You can’t succeed in what we’re trying to do without welcoming new members to your coalition and without showing up for them when they’re leading a day of action like tomorrow.

How are you measuring the impact of your work with No Kings, considering we’re in a week where the Supreme Court has fully gutted voting rights?

How you judge the success of a pro-democracy movement is with a couple of criteria: One, are you bigger than you were before? Two is, are you more aligned than you were before? Three is, is the authoritarian regime less popular than it was before? And four is, are your tactics proliferating? Are you trying new things? Are you developing new muscles?

We had three million people at the 1300 Hands Off protests last April. Then for the first No Kings, we had five million people at 2100 protests at the second No Kings. We had 7 million people at 2700, protests at the third No Kings. We had 3300 protests and more than 8 million people, which is to say three of the largest protests in all of American history are in ascending order.

The growth is pretty evident, and I don’t think it’s just us saying that. Some of the experts like Erica Chenoweth who are looking quantitatively at the scale of protests over the course of 2025 and into 2026. It dwarfs what we saw in 2017. The scale of mass mobilization and organizing is historic.

What are the challenges of growing No Kings?

The challenges in growing No Kings are the president repeatedly systematically using the powers of the presidency to go after his opponents. There are challenges of convincing people to care about politics. A lot of people believe that politics is bullshit, that both sides are corrupt, and that the whole system is broken and it’s not worth their time to get involved. That cynicism and nihilism and fatalism about the state of the country and our politics is the primary enemy that we have and the one that we have to slay. Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country.

We are a piece of it. And if we’re doing our work to build a truly representative and powerful movement, we’ve got to be helping and showing up for other organizations, other movements, went into their time to lead, and I would be May Day tomorrow as an example that, like I said, it’s not an Indivisible action. This is being led by May Day Strong.

What do you think of larger disruption actions formed by coalitions over longer periods of time like the general strikes in India, Panama, and Italy? Do you think that is possible in the US?

In 2025, the regime was targeting the organization of America, which is straight out of [the playbook of] Hungary. One of the lessons of Orbán’s downfall is that the best way to remove an authoritarian is electorally, so it depends on building a mass movement.

When it comes to disruption, you don’t have to look abroad. You can look at the Twin Cities. The Day of Truth and Freedom was a mass disruption event and intended to bring society to a halt. And I think it was very successful. The federal government had to retreat because of the PR disaster as a direct result of the incredible organizing on the ground. If Trump tries to sabotage the midterm elections, you’re going to need something that looks like the Twin Cities but at the scale of something that looks like No Kings. 

Going off what you brought up about disruption actions in the US, what do you think about tactics that try to get around restrictive US labor laws such as the proposed UAW strike in 2028?

I’m one battle at a time right now. There are a lot of questions about what happens in the Democratic primary, how we position ourselves in that race, and what happens if Trump runs again. These are all interesting questions that I look forward to digging into after we crush the regime in the midterms and elect some Democrats who are interested in using the powers of the Senate and the House to prevent the regime from doing more damage and bringing accountability to people who violated the Constitution. That is the single best thing we can do to set up democracy for a successful 2028.

2026-05-02 02:54:34

Matt Multari has been driving for Amazon—and organizing with the Teamsters—for about a year and a half. His days are mostly spent delivering packages. But he thinks of his role as a worker-organizer as something much more historically significant than just maximizing delivery efficiency. 

“After the Assyrians lost their state, they survived in their homeland of Iraq for thousands of years. After facing a genocide that forced them to flee that homeland, they went to Russia, and then to Iran, and then some of them went to New York. Now I’m here,” he said. “And I’d like to tell Amazon: fuck you!”

Early on the morning of May 1, Multari took the megaphone in front of a hundred or so sign-toting Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and software engineers, who had traveled in from Queens and Staten Island to march on an Amazon office building for International Workers’ Day. 

“Each of us here has a story of generational struggle,” Multari, 25, said. But to him, working for Amazon means the obliteration of identity. “Amazon is trying to erase that.” Every day, as he puts on his blue vest and delivers packages from Amazon’s DBK-1 warehouse in Queens, the company surveills him: “You have an app that tells you the exact stop order you’re supposed to go in. You’re under a time quota, basically.” 

If you take too long, or take too many stops, Multari said, the app tells you to go faster. “You get a scorecard every week that says how you’re performing.” Five months ago, Multari and his DBK-1 coworkers unionized with the Teamsters, joining thousands of unionized Amazon workers nationwide. They’ve been able to extract some concessions from the e-commerce giant, though Amazon has refused to bargain with their unionized workers. Nonetheless, during this year’s record-breaking winter storms, they were paid for days they weren’t able to work; and when they needed new hand-trucks, Amazon paid up. 

Nonetheless, Multari and his coworkers are aware that they’ll have to do much more to win real job security in an age of automation. “Amazon, at its core, is a tech company,” Multari said. “Our main asset to them is our data from our routes, so that it can train its algorithm, so it can make us more and more replaceable.” 

Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platform is more profitable than all the company’s retail operations combined. And AWS sells cloud-computing services to clients throughout the American government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement: According to Forbes reporting, ICE spent at least $25 million on AWS during the second Trump administration. Amazon Web Services also holds contracts with Palantir, the surveillance-tech company behind much of ICE’s deportation operation. (And Amazon has served as an inspiration for ICE, too: acting ICE director Todd Lyons has said he wants deportations in the US to run “like Amazon Prime for human beings.”) 

That’s part of why, at Monday’s rally, non-union tech workers stood alongside unionized warehouse workers. 

Zelda Montes, a former software engineer at Google who was fired in 2024 for holding a sit-in with their coworkers, said they’ve spent much of the past two years trying to help organize tech workers at places like Amazon. With the group No Tech for Apartheid, Montes works to build power within tech companies against the contracts that Amazon and Google hold with the Israeli government. “For a lot of tech workers, the work that they’re doing is helping to create these systems of surveillance that affect warehouse workers, that affect delivery workers, that create more difficult working conditions for them,” Montes said. “So it’s really important for us to be able to unite with them on the labor front.” 

At some Amazon warehouses, more than half of workers are immigrants. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has shown no interest in walking back the company’s contracts with agencies targeting those immigrants. “Amazon’s abuse of workers bankrolls their ability to do this,” said Sultana Hossain, an organizer with Amazon Labor Union. So, workers in New York told Mother Jones, they’re going to keep fighting. 

“We will demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect,” Multari said. 

2026-05-02 00:09:49

On Friday, Nebraska became the first state to enact Medicaid work requirements, mandatory for states with Medicaid expansion due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Notably, the state did it seven months before the deadline.

Now, around 70,000 adults below the age of 65 in Nebraska who have Medicaid through its expansion could risk having their health insurance ripped away from them.

Medicaid work requirements do not increase employment. Instead, the administrative burden of work requirements only serves to kick people off this governmental health insurance. Additionally, a majority of people on Medicaid, who are not on Supplemental Security Income, work full or part-time jobs. This underlines how rhetoric around work requirements is just false.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also highlighted that there is not enough time to implement what could be considered less cruel systems for Medicaid work requirements. The center called for work requirements to be pulled, “but short of that, states need more time to ensure their policies, systems, and staffing plans are in place to minimize the number of eligible people whose health care is taken away.” This also highlights the cruelty of Nebraska’s implementation of work requirements before the January 1, 2027 deadline.

Especially because an interim rule from the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not even due until June 1. I previously raised concerns about what an interim rule could look like from Kennedy:

A person with debilitating chronic pain, or a serious autoimmune illness, may appear “able-bodied” by the standards RFK Jr. appears poised to implement—even as they face hurdles in qualifying for Social Security disability due to not being considered disabled enough. HHS declined to answer a series of questions for this article, instead offering a general statement that the agency “remains committed to protecting and strengthening Medicaid for those who rely on it…while eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.”

There are some exemptions to Medicaid work requirements, including for people with chronic illnesses and pregnant people. According to Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services’ website, the state will be considering work requirement exemptions during checks every six months. There is a list of conditions for people on Medicaid that qualify for people with exemptions, but understandably, not every serious health issue is on there. Notably absent is Long Covid, a post-infectious disease caused by a Covid infection that can very much impact someone’s ability to work.

“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts,” Georgetown University professor Edwin Park told me last year before Republicans voted to enact Medicaid work requirements and nearly $1 trillion worth of Medicaid cuts.

Now, it’s a waiting game to see how draconian Medicaid work requirements roll out throughout the country.

2026-05-01 22:34:19

Fresh on the heels of a lackluster Mar-a-Lago “luncheon” party for his struggling $TRUMP meme coin, President Donald Trump appears ready to launch his next crypto-coin-for-exclusive-access project: Trump Coin Club.

In the wake of the Mar-a-Lago bash, the official $TRUMP coin website was updated with a new offer. The details are sparse but apparently meant to be enticing. “MEMBERS ONLY · LIMITED ACCESS,” the site promises. “The Trump Coin Club — invitation-only luxury suites at the biggest sporting events in the world, private dinners, and the most elite and extraordinary experiences.”

There is no information as to what specific “biggest sporting events” that might include. I sent an email to the $TRUMP coin website and the Trump Organization, but no one replied.

The website has a sign-up prompt and what appears to be a mockup of a “leaderboard”—apparently similar to the ranking system used to doll out slots to the top 297 $TRUMP coin holders who were invited to last weekend’s Mar-a-Lago luncheon. Independent crypto researcher Molly White first reported the new Trumpian offer Wednesday evening. While it seems anyone can join can join the Trump Coin Club for free, White writes that the leaderboard “appears designed to rank members by both the amount of the token they hold and the duration they’ve held it.” And the prospect of invitations to “elite” events could be intended to incentivize crypto enthusiasts to hold onto their $TRUMP coins for the long term.

$TRUMP is a meme coin, which means it doesn’t have any inherent use or value—it simply exists as a digital endorsement of Trump, as a concept. If it becomes popular, it can also become useful for financial speculation. But other than a huge spike in price in the hours immediately before and after Trump officially announced the coin’s creation, the price’s trajectory has been almost exclusively downward.

Depending on the crypto exchange you use, the price of the coin was once as high as $74, giving it a $15 billion market cap. But since February, each coin has been worth less than $4. After last weekend’s event at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump attended, the price slipped even further. As of this writing, it is currently hovering below $2.40.

But even with the plunging price, $TRUMP is a great deal for its namesake. The president created the coin out of nothing, so any price is a win for him.