Lebanese officials were furious, claiming the city erased Gibran’s identity. Yet there was a time when Arab immigrants in the US thought ‘we were all Syrians’

• This is Muslim New York: artists, thinkers and politicos on defining a new era for the city

On the morning of 30 April, in the shadow of the financial district’s skyscrapers, a gold cloth slid off a bright yellow sculpture of painted stainless steel, 7ft (2 metres) tall, that spells an Arabic word: “al Qalam”, the pen.

The monument, Al Qalam: Poets in the Park, stands in Elizabeth H Berger Plaza and honors the writers of the vanished neighborhood that New Yorkers once called Little Syria: an Arabic-speaking immigrant community that ran along Washington Street, blocks from where the World Trade Center would later rise. The monument was the first commemorative artwork unveiled under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Little Syria produced one of the most famous poets ever to live in New York: Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, a book of poetic prose that has never gone out of print. The monument honors the Pen League, the circle of writers Gibran led in Little Syria in the early 20th century.

Ukraine has opened its first war-crime case against a ship captain for carrying off its stolen grain. Ukraine’s Security Service and Prosecutor General’s Office have charged the captain of the cargo ship Matros Pozynich with illegally shipping more than 54,000 tons of Ukrainian wheat that Russian forces stole from occupied territory, the Security Service said on Telegram.

Russia has looted grain across the Ukrainian land it occupies and sold it abroad as its own, a trade Ukrainian intelligence puts at more than 2 million tons in 2025 alone. The case against the Matros Pozynich captain is the first time Kyiv has classified a ship captain’s role in that trade as a war crime, prosecutors said.

The captain, a Russian citizen, twice sailed wheat from occupied Sevastopol in Crimea to the Syrian port of Latakia in 2022 and 2023, according to the Security Service. The first shipment of more than 27,000 tons left Crimea in 2022, and another 27,000-plus tons followed in January 2023.

A crime ordered from the top, investigators say

The shipments were no freelance smuggling run. The grain was removed on the decision of the Russian state’s top political leadership, the Security Service stated, in breach of the Geneva Conventions, which forbid pillaging property in occupied territory.

To hide the voyages, the captain periodically switched off the ship’s automatic identification system and transmitted false coordinates, investigators found. He was notified of suspicion in absentia under two articles of Ukraine’s Criminal Code, including the violations of the laws and customs of war. The service said it is working to identify others in the scheme.

One ship in a fleet that feeds the war

The vessel is a single thread in a much larger theft. Russia has taken roughly 15 million tons of Ukrainian grain from occupied territory between 2022 and August 2025 and earned at least $1 billion from it, money that helps fund the war.

Much of it moves through Russian-controlled ports such as Sevastopol, often relabeled as Russian produce or passed between ships at sea to hide its Ukrainian origin. Buyers have included Syria, Egypt, Türkiye, Lebanon, and others, though Egypt has since pledged to stop accepting grain tied to occupied territories.