We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb
In Richardson, a fleet of drones has started to deliver goods quickly. But the noise is drowning out life for some residents: ‘We can’t live like this.’
By Juliet Macur, Photographs by Jordan Vonderhaar
Juliet Macur reported from Richardson, Texas., Sept. 21, 2026
Amazon chose Richardson as one of the first cities to receive drone deliveries. Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times
It began as an unnerving high-pitched hum, like a mosquito flying around a dark room at bedtime, and it grew louder as it drew closer. A family lounging in a backyard pool in Richardson, Texas, just north of Dallas, couldn’t help but notice it.
“There’s another one coming this way!” shouted Eric Anderson from his pool float, pointing to an area above a tall line of trees. His 9-year-old daughter, Isla, removed her swim goggles for a clearer look at what could be a scene from science fiction.
Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees.
The drone’s mission: delivering an Amazon package.
The single cardboard box of cargo held a maximum of five pounds and was loaded into the drone at Amazon’s distribution center less than a mile from the backyard pool. It could have been bound for anywhere within a seven-and-a-half-mile radius of takeoff.
Richardson city officials gave Amazon zoning approval to start the drone delivery service in December as part of the company’s nascent Prime Air program. It promises customers tens of thousands of items — nail trimmers for pets, ankle bracelets, handcrafted, razor-tipped bread lames for scoring sourdough — in as little as 30 minutes. The delivery could be free or cost up to $4.99.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which governs U.S. airspace, gave Amazon clearance to fly its drones.
Now many other parts of the United States can expect their own drone deliveries, a welcome convenience for some, but an invasion for others.
Last month, Amazon announced that Prime Air deliveries would expand to 500 towns and cities by the end of the year. Other companies are also using drone deliveries, and the F.A.A. has forecast that by 2030 the number could explode to more than 3.5 million, up from the current number of 897,000 registered drones.
“What’s happening in Richardson is about to happen all over the country, and people are finally going to believe us that having all these drones flying around is actually a big, big problem,” said Scott Bratcher, who is the president of his homeowners’ association in a Richardson neighborhood that residents have called a drone highway.
He added, “The government and the F.A.A. have failed us.”
The agency said that it would soon be issuing new rules for drone flight. But in July, after studying the environmental impact of commercial delivery drones like Amazon’s, the agency decided that they did not pose a “significant impact.”
For some people, the futuristic novelty of the airborne deliveries has been something to celebrate. They have shared their delivery videos online, cheering as their packages are plopped, bounced and sometimes slid onto their yards and driveways.
Lindsay Hamilton, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said on Friday that the customer response to the deliveries has been “overwhelmingly positive” and “so far this year, fewer than 1 percent” of inquiries into the program have been related to noise. She compared the drone noise to a window fan on low, and said, during delivery, it’s quieter than a passing car.
But in the Richardson neighborhoods near the Amazon distribution center, any joy about the innovation has been muted by the sound of dozens of drones, if not more than a hundred of them, flying by every day, sometimes so loud that they sound like flying lawn mowers. (Other companies, including Walmart, are also using delivery drones, but different types, in the area.)
Under city regulations, deliveries can operate from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m., and Amazon has assured residents that the drones would fly outbound at an average of 225 feet high. The maximum they can fly, according to the F.A.A., is 400 feet.
Before the drones arrived, Richardson was a suburb known as a hub for tech and telecom, and its residents were already living with technology’s intrusions. A massive new A.I. data center sits across the street from one neighborhood, and as recently as last month, 20 Flock cameras, which read license plates and track vehicles, were used at 14 major intersections.
But for those people living closest to the Amazon flight paths, the ever-droning deliveries pose the most serious threat to their private and peaceful life.
“We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” said Nikki Anderson, whose extended family spotted the drone — and many more — one Friday earlier this month. She has long prized the serenity of her backyard, with its undulating pool and birds chirping from landscaping that included a shrub sculpted into the shape of a giant heart.
Now the drones have ruined that, Ms. Anderson said. She can hear them from inside, even with the television on, and especially on weekends, when deliveries seem to pick up.
She asked the city if Amazon could at least limit the hours or days that it flies drones but her requests were not granted. Greg Sowell, a city spokesman, said Richardson has not put any further timing restrictions on Amazon since the City Council approved the drones last year.
“Some people might think, wow, this is really, really cool, and the technology is really cool,” Ms. Anderson said. “But people around here, we’re thinking, ‘Ugh, is there anything we can do to stop this?’ We can’t live like this.”
During delivery, Amazon’s drones descend to about 13 feet above the ground and hover as the package tumbles out of an open door and onto a customer’s property — often with all the care of a bouncer tossing a rabble-rouser from a bar.
One online video shows an Amazon drone dropping a package into a pool. Another caught one smashing into an apartment building and crashing near a sidewalk. A recent video showed a drone atop a grassy median of a road in Baton Rouge, La., sitting there like a lost puppy.
Amazon said its program is always improving and Ms. Hamilton, the spokeswoman, added that the company had adjusted its operations, based on feedback from residents.
Kristi Graham, an administrator for a music education company, was one resident who complained to Amazon, upset about drones flying over her backyard, where her family swims and barbecues.
After her complaint, she said Amazon did change the route — to the front of her house.
She is now part of a neighborhood group fighting the company, but the appeal of fast delivery remains strong. Last May, Ms. Graham’s daughter ordered deli ham from Walmart using a coupon for drone delivery. She had been in a rush to make a sandwich.
Ms. Graham had only one thing to say: “How could you?”
She and some of her neighbors, including Ms. Anderson, are now sending emails to officials of other cities, including El Paso, Texas, and Richmond, Va., where Amazon’s drones are about to descend. Don’t trust Amazon’s claims, they say.
The drones, they write, “have been a disaster for the City of Richardson.”
Ms. Graham and others are also concerned with security.
According to Ms. Hamilton, of Amazon, its drones use multiple cameras and sensors for navigation. The images are stored on encrypted drives that only authorized personnel can access later, she said, adding that the data is solely used to improve safety and customer service.
Stephanie Puri, a researcher in the video game industry, is skeptical.
“Amazon hasn’t always been the most transparent with how they use and reuse data,” she said, wondering if she might start seeing ads for pool equipment after a drone spies her pool.
“If it’s your backyard and you want to sunbathe naked, that’s your property and you do you,” she said. “But, oh, Amazon can see you.”
Ms. Puri, like some of her neighbors, has set up a drone tracker. On Friday, she recorded what she called a slow day: 52 drones overhead, including three between 150 and 170 feet up, close enough to distract her while was inside. Her cat Eden growls when they fly that low.
When a protest was held in front of the Amazon distribution center in June, Ms. Puri took part. People waved signs like “Too low, too loud, too many.” And she said many Amazon delivery drivers, whose jobs may be at risk, honked their horns in support.
Brian Rowe, an executive in tech and cybersecurity, has shown up to City Council meetings to complain. He has considered many methods of clearing the drones above his home, even looking into commercial anti-drone technology. But that technology, mostly for military use, costs tens of thousands of dollars, he said.
“What can we do?” Mr. Rowe said.
He senses other problems looming. Nearly two weeks ago, a company began testing air taxis in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
They look like Amazon drones, but are much, much bigger.
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2) ‘I Was Sold a Bill of Goods’: Americans and the Distrust Election
Americans have a pervasive sense they are being lied to. That has created an unpredictability in politics unseen since Donald Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Photographs by Lauren Lancaster
Sabrina Tavernise has been talking to Americans about their lives for months. Distrust kept coming up, Sept. 22, 2026
Call it the distrust election.
For as much as Americans disagree these days, one common denominator runs through American life: a profound distrust of the institutions and industries that make the country run. Whether on data centers, chemicals in food, the Epstein files or the war in Iran, Americans across the political spectrum say they have the feeling that they are being lied to.
“I feel like I was sold a bill of goods,” said Paul Carroll, 66, an insulation salesman in New Orleans whose anger at President Trump for starting a war when he said he wouldn’t has gotten worse with the rise in diesel prices. “The goods I agreed to buy were nothing like what was delivered.”
It’s not just Republicans. Voter distrust is powering support for democratic socialists and other candidates on the left, while the Democratic establishment’s early support for data center development in the critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania is souring some voters there on their elected leaders.
Phyliss Paone, 65, a retired utility company worker in Archbald, Pa., said she was a lifelong Democrat, but that she would not vote for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s re-election because of what she described as his political about-face on a proposed data center in her town.
“I don’t trust him now,” she said. “He’s just saying what he needs to get votes.”
As for the data center developers, “they just lie to the people because they think we don’t know anything,” she said.
Political scientists and sociologists have said for decades that a healthy society needs trust, both in fellow citizens and in political institutions. It greases the wheels of collective action and political change. Without it, people do not cooperate with each other or with the authorities. That can lead to political paralysis.
In the United States, trust in government topped 70 percent in the 1950s, during the post-World War II economic boom, according to the Pew Research Center. It declined dramatically in the following decades during the tumult of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and Watergate.
It has fallen more in recent years, including during the pandemic in 2020. These days, outbreaks of food-borne intestinal diseases, airplane crashes and flight delays, the proliferation of Flock cameras and internet scams have Americans wondering if anyone has a hand on the rudder.
Past wars were aired on television, with news conferences at the Pentagon and reporters embedded with troops. Not so with the war in Iran. The “existential threat” of artificial intelligence is being aired by scientists and billionaire executives in language that is hardly accessible, while others, including Mr. Trump, tell voters to ignore it. People are dying of measles, public health officials say, though the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., continues to cast doubts on that fact.
A president who returned to the White House as Americans suffered through Covid-era inflation tells Americans “affordability” is a hoax as they experience sticker shock at the grocery store and the gas pump.
Pew’s most recent measurement, in September 2025, found that just 17 percent of Americans trusted the federal government.
But the collapse in trust has also brought a new fluidity to the electorate — for the first time in the Trump era, our politics are suddenly, strangely, unpredictable. The less Americans trust the establishment, the bigger the opening for populists and outsiders.
Perhaps most remarkably, Americans from warring political tribes are now joining forces to fight what they say is the bigger enemy — untrustworthy politicians working with wealthy industry.
Establishment politicians are feeling the heat. In Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro told CBS News last month that the executive order he issued in August to restrain data centers was not politics, but instead the result of listening to constituents about how developers were “running roughshod.” A spokeswoman said the governor came to Archbald, Ms. Paone’s town, in May.
The White House is also on the defensive. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers wrote, “President Trump has been clear and consistent for decades: Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. President Trump remains committed to unleashing American energy dominance, cutting costs, and putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working American families.”
For more than a decade, Mr. Trump’s brand of outsider politics has dominated precisely because he tapped into voter distrust. The durability of his approval among Republican voters seemed to ratify his brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without denting his popularity.
But that seems to be changing, particularly on the issue that voters care most about: the economy. In a poll released last week by The New York Times and Siena College, 60 percent of likely white voters without a college degree — Mr. Trump’s core base — disapproved of his performance on the cost of living. Among Republicans overall, just 29 percent said the economy was better than it had been a year ago, down from 72 percent in January.
“We drank the Kool-Aid, and we were wrong,” said Ryan Wagner, 41, a conservative in northern Michigan who was once an enthusiastic supporter of the president.
Mr. Wagner, a manager with a home restoration company, has had a slow-motion realization that Mr. Trump has been lying to Americans, he said.
It began last year with the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which Mr. Wagner thought did not add up. It continued when Mr. Trump started a war. Now, Mr. Wagner said, when he hears Mr. Trump talk about how much food prices have gone down, “my freaking eye is twitching.”
“I can’t even listen to him talk anymore,” he said.
“How many times has he said the war is over, the strait is open?” he asked, referring to the Strait of Hormuz. “No it’s not, you big liar.”
Mr. Wagner said he had taken down his American flag and considered the Republican Party mostly dead. He doesn’t think he will vote in this election.
His friend Jeff Sieting, the mayor of Kalkaska, Mich., where they both live, has turned away from Mr. Trump, too, after years of supporting him, even hanging a large banner in town during Mr. Trump’s first term. For Mr. Sieting, 64, a general contractor, it was the Epstein files.
“When Trump said, ‘Let’s move on,’ that pierced my heart,” Mr. Sieting said. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
He has even stopped watching Fox News, which he said he could no longer trust to tell the truth.
“If you listen to the media, you’ll hear that New York is in collapse, they’re doing government grocery stores,” he said. “The reality is, that is absolute bullshit.”
Mr. Sieting said Mr. Trump’s promise this month of $5,000 if Americans keep Republicans in power these midterms was “the most insulting, pathetic thing.”
He said that he did not plan to vote for anyone at the state or federal level in November, and that he had many friends, staunch Trump supporters, who are not planning to vote either. He added: “I full well expect the Democrats to sweep the midterms.”
For many people interviewed, Mr. Trump had essentially become the establishment he once railed against.
“It didn’t take a whole long time for him to march to the same tune as establishment Republicans and Democrats,” said Brandon Bell, a veteran who works part time as a security guard and is a township supervisor in Penn Forest Township, Pa. Mr. Bell, who is 30 and living with his parents, said he felt “hopeless” about the economy and being able to start life on his own.
Republicans and Democrats are “all part of the same system at this point,” he said. “It’s more about benefiting themselves and their donors.”
Trust is also at the heart of the data center issue, which has swept the country as technology companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build the centers. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, people said their opposition stemmed less from a fear of tech and more from a sense that they were being lied to by elected leaders who were at best too weak to stand up to or at worst in cahoots with wealthy industry.
The effect has been surprising: a growing mutual trust in one another against a common enemy.
Tamara Misewicz-Healey, 38, a mother of three in Pennsylvania, said she usually voted Democrat but otherwise was not politically active. Over the past year, she and her husband, Justin Healey, 36, have become a full-time force behind the 14,000-member Stop Archbald Data Centers Facebook group, doing things they never imagined, like starting a GoFundMe to pay for a lawyer to represent townspeople, and filing government right-to-know requests. She was so fed up with her state representative, a Democrat, that she began a write-in campaign to run against him.
“I’m no longer a Democrat,” she said. “I no longer believe in either party. They both abandoned us.”
In neighboring Carbon County, residents were so frustrated with their state representative, a Republican who ran unopposed in the May primary, that hundreds of people wrote in the name of Christian Bartulovich, a 37-year-old manager in the medical device industry and registered Republican, getting him the Democratic nomination for November.
“I am getting all these text messages saying, ‘I’ve never donated to a Republican in my life — I hope you win,’” Mr. Bartulovich said, speaking to the fluidity of 2026 politics.
Jeff Rechten’s house in Bridgewater Township, Mich., is about a mile from a hyper-scale data center construction site. But as an employee of a cybersecurity firm, his distrust is different — less about being lied to and more about his industry’s hubris. He said he believes the tech companies started out trying to develop A.I. safely, but “have lost their way” over time, with profits and competition crowding out caution.
“Now they are rushing toward the finish line without knowing what will happen when they get there,” he said. “All they are doing is saying, ‘trust us.’”
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3) The Climate May Have Some Surprises in Store
By David Wallace-Wells and Zeke Hausfather, Sept. 22, 2026
Mr. Wallace-Wells is an Opinion writer. Dr. Hausfather is the climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist with Berkeley Earth.
Thomas Albdorf
Every September, at Climate Week in New York, there’s a big scientific and diplomatic reckoning with the global state of play. This year, the mood is pretty confused.
To begin with, it was a brutal summer: wildfires tearing through neighborhoods and clouding cities with toxic smoke; heat waves killing tens of thousands across Europe; a glacial collapse and landslide in Nepal so huge it registered as a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, flattening thousands of homes and killing over 1,300 people. And now comes an absolutely staggering, off-the-charts “Godzilla” El Niño that is already a record for this time of year and forecast to become the strongest in modern history and push the planet into uncharted climate territory.
But compared to years past, when conferences like these sometimes commandeered the world’s attention for a moment, the climate alarm this year is a bit less loud. Politicians have mostly moved on, in the United States and around the world. Over the past year, you might have read that the clean energy transition has pulled the planet back from the brink, and that scientists are growing less concerned about the truly alarming climate futures that once inspired a global political awakening. Global warming is real, that story goes, but it is turning out to be less frightening than we were told.
There is some truth here. The world has made real climate progress over the past decade, projected future warming has fallen quite a bit, and a worst-case emissions scenario known as “RCP8.5” — in which coal use would roughly quintuple by 2100 — is being phased out as implausible.
But a new round of forecasts from the climate science community is pretty alarming. Scientists used to worry about the possibility of the earth warming by a global average of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That is now almost a certainty on the path we are on today. Scarier futures loom at three degrees and four. Thanks to the rapid rollout of green energy, those futures appear a bit less likely.
But because we’re still burning an awful lot of fossil fuel — and because the climate itself may have some surprises in store — harrowing temperature increases remain unnervingly possible. It’s not just that by moving too slowly we’ve lost the opportunity to avoid disruptive climate change. The high-end warming sometimes described as a “worst-case scenario” remains very much on the table, too. The world is busy with crises, and some policy leaders have tried to downplay or ignore climate change. But this is not the time for complacency.
Ten years ago, in Paris, the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius of warming, which would protect at least some of the world’s coral reefs, prevent a doubling of the global population living with extreme heat, avoid projected crop losses across much of the world and save low-lying island nations from disappearing. On current pathways, we are virtually certain to exceed two degrees of warming by the end of the century — with about a 50 percent chance of doing so in the next 25 years.
And it could get hotter still. In fact, it probably will. At three degrees higher, the world’s ice sheets would be committed to millenniums of retreat. The share of species on land facing a high risk of extinction could double.
How likely is this future? According to conventional modeling of today’s policies and pathways, the odds are about even by 2100 — and three in four by 2150. Those dates are a long way off, but this would mean packing millions of years of climate transformation into a single century.
There is also a voluminous scientific literature about an even more hair-raising level of temperature rise — between four and five degrees Celsius of warming this century. This is the true climate doomsday stuff, with most effects growing exponentially worse and damages compounding, likely arriving faster than farms, cities, coastlines and ecosystems can properly adapt. Recent models tell us that current policies give us about a 25 percent shot at exceeding four degrees by 2150.
Those odds look a bit better than they used to. But we shouldn’t overstate our scientific confidence about an experiment we get to run only once, in a climate system whose intricacies remain mysterious and in which all of us and all of our descendants are going to have to live.
Uncertainty is decidedly not our friend when it comes to climate change, though conventional climate forecasts tend to sound reassuringly precise. Hold today’s climate policies constant, for instance, and our best models tell us to expect a long emissions plateau producing about 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100. But that is just a central estimate. Perhaps we’d get lucky, and warming would hit only 2.2 degrees, which would still be very harmful. Or perhaps we’d get unlucky, in which case it might hit 3.9 degrees, which would be truly catastrophic.
The real risks — and the potential surprises in store — now dwell in a tangle of feedback loops: clouds and water vapor, the retreat of reflective snow and ice, wildfires that release carbon, and an ocean that soaks up less of it as the seas warm and turn more acidic. The result is a system that is quite hard to model with true precision even if we know exactly how much carbon we will be producing over the next century. As the climate scientist Wally Broecker memorably put it, “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.” Poke it with one or two fewer sticks, and it’s still likely to get pretty angry. It might also get very angry. We actually don’t know for sure.
Among the unwieldy variables is the planet’s rate of heat accumulation. Globally, warming has accelerated over the past 15 years, though the speedup is mostly as scientists expected given the decline of air pollution, which tends to cool the planet. But the earth’s energy imbalance measures how much sunlight is being absorbed by the planet, and how much heat is sent back out. The imbalance is the closest thing the planet has to a straightforward thermostat. It has roughly doubled in the past two decades. And scientists did not expect that.
There have also been worrisome signals from certain feedback loops. The earth’s ability to reflect heat back into space is declining, in large part because cloud cover is. Concentrations of some greenhouse gases have grown faster than predicted, which may be a sign that they are being released by natural processes we haven’t well captured in our models. One recent paper suggested that, for any given level of emissions, we should expect about 25 percent more warming — enough to bring a three-degree forecast above 3.5 degrees and a four-degree forecast to five degrees.
And these are all just questions about how the climate system might respond to all the ways we’ve already provoked it. Emissions, of course, are not fixed in stone but determined by human action. It may seem unlikely that humans will become less motivated to reduce climate change in the years to come. But anyone who believes policy can move only forward has not been watching American politics in recent years. Of course, better futures are possible, too, and the faster we can replace fossil fuels with clean energy alternatives and cut emissions, the more we reduce the risks of truly catastrophic warming.
In the meantime, don’t be fooled: Those risks are far too high and growing still with each molecule of carbon. The world still isn’t nearly concerned enough.
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4) Unions Rally Around the Threat of A.I.
The machinists union shows how workers are negotiating for a say in the ways artificial intelligence is used in their workplaces.
By Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Sept. 22, 2026
Rebecca O’Brien, who covers labor for The Times, was determined to write a story about A.I. without using the word “guardrails.”
“Unions are confronting A.I. as an existential danger to workers, not only because of the possibility of massive job losses but also because of its hand in the widening gap between wages and corporate profits. ...The threat has galvanized a labor movement that has been on its back foot for years. In terms of public opinion, unions are popular. A.I. is not. And yet union membership is at a low ebb — about 6 percent of American private-sector workers are represented by a union — and unions have been hobbled by state laws and a weakened National Labor Relations Board.”
Tim Suitter, president of the union that represents ship builders at Bath Iron Works, knows workers must be prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence. Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
Tim Suitter knows change is coming to Bath Iron Works, creeping up the adjacent Kennebec River in Maine like a foreboding fog.
Mr. Suitter, the president of the union that represents more than 4,400 workers who build ships for the U.S. Navy at the shipyard, knows the workers must be prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence.
“It’s going to be here,” said Mr. Suitter, 50, who has worked at the shipyard for nearly 30 years. “You have to wrap your head around it.”
Last month, when Local S6 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers negotiated a new five-year contract with the defense company that runs the shipyard, the union insisted on updating longstanding language about technology. Now the union must be informed at the “conceptual stage,” rather than at implementation, of “any proposed addition or modified technology, equipment or process,” including A.I. and robotics.
“It was the union trying to force the company’s hand about being more transparent when it comes to A.I.,” Mr. Suitter said. “The sooner we can be part of that conversation and represent the members’ side of it, the better off we are.”
Unions are confronting A.I. as an existential danger to workers, not only because of the possibility of massive job losses but also because of its hand in the widening gap between wages and corporate profits. In April, Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, called A.I. “the single biggest threat to working people of our lifetime.”
The threat has galvanized a labor movement that has been on its back foot for years. In terms of public opinion, unions are popular. A.I. is not. And yet union membership is at a low ebb — about 6 percent of American private-sector workers are represented by a union — and unions have been hobbled by state laws and a weakened National Labor Relations Board.
Putting A.I. at the top of the bargaining agenda is part of a strategy to overcome that disadvantage, using negotiations to establish boundaries and, labor leaders hope, direct A.I. from the ground up. As workers and employers try to make sense of the A.I. economy, these contracts could help shape policy.
“There is power, there is leverage right now,” said Moira Bulloch, a spokeswoman for the Communications Workers of America, which represents journalists, flight attendants and call center workers. A.I. policy is being set “contract by contract, employer by employer.”
The machinists union, which represents about 600,000 workers in the United States and Canada in industries like defense, aerospace, railroads and aviation, has been particularly proactive. Recognizing that A.I. portends promises as well as threats, the machinists have crafted model contract language and pushed for early, open conversations with companies that employ their members.
“Unions can set the pace,” said David Sullivan, the general vice president for the union’s eastern territory, who encouraged Local S6 to put in the new language.
Define the function
About a year and a half ago, Joseph Bonomo, a labor lawyer at Pitta, a law firm in New York, realized that while companies were incessantly talking about A.I. on earnings calls, the unions he represented were not. He set out to change that, starting at the bargaining table.
“A.I. is the hill to die on,” Mr. Bonomo tells union clients. “Because if you don’t have a job at the end of that contract, what good was the contract?”
Mr. Bonomo is working with the machinists’ air transport division as an adviser. Richie Johnsen, who runs the division, said he was fine with A.I. being used as a tool to improve corporate profits that can transfer to his members: “But it shouldn’t be replacing people.”
“We have to put in language into our contracts that addresses that,” he added. “Because that’s the only way that happens.” The machinists represent workers at nearly every U.S. airline. The union is in negotiations with United Airlines and Alaska Airlines, and will begin negotiations with Southwest before the end of the year and with American early next year, Mr. Johnsen said.
When Mr. Bonomo spoke to Mr. Johnsen’s team in June, he began by talking about language. “Define the Function, Not the Marketing Label,” read one of his slides. Corporate speak about A.I. can be euphemistic, vague and mind-numbing.
“Employers may not necessarily say, ‘Hey, there’s a new A.I. system,’” Mr. Bonomo said. “They’re going to label it, characterize it as a scheduling tool, a safety platform, a productivity system, a camera upgrade, some routing software.”
He challenged the machinists to interrogate the jargon. What does the system do? Does it collect data? Make predictions? Is it influencing discipline, staffing, scheduling, pay rates? Did the vendor consult with the union before writing the code?
Unions are particularly concerned that A.I. is going to be used to monitor and discipline workers. Mr. Bonomo urges his clients to press for contract provisions that guarantee human review of reports generated by an algorithm.
“I want to be able to say, at the top: ‘If we come back with a contract for ratification and it doesn’t have this, they’re not going to approve it,’” he said. “‘There’s going be a rat outside tomorrow morning, and there’s going be a line of 1,000 people saying that you’re trying to eliminate jobs.’”
Mr. Bonomo also encouraged the machinists and other unions to leverage A.I. to their advantage. Unions could build their own large language models to harness decades of institutional knowledge and records. They could use A.I. to organize more shops.
“Unions have to be in that driver’s seat,” he said.
‘It’s very real’
Like most Americans, the workers at Bath Iron Works primarily encounter artificial intelligence today in slop on social media, or web searches that spit out paragraphs instead of links. They may regard A.I. with distrust but fail to recognize that it’s already in use all around them.
This disconnect has made Devin Ragnar, who at 33 is one of the younger machinists at the shipyard, particularly nervous. Mr. Ragnar handles communications for Local S6 and has been pushing his colleagues, and the union, to be more aware of the reach of A.I. and more proactive about confronting it.
Last year, Huntington Ingalls Industries, a competitor to the shipyard, announced a partnership with Hyundai Heavy Industry that yielded a pilot program to bring A.I.-guided welding equipment to shipyards in Mississippi and Virginia.
“In construction, you hear a lot of ‘You can’t automate this!’,” Mr. Ragnar said. They think a robot can’t do the work, can’t climb a ship. But, he said “it’s very real — it’s happening.”
Mr. Ragnar served on the bargaining committee for the new contract at Bath Iron Works and pushed his fellow members to include language on A.I. He and Mr. Suitter said the company had seemed surprised by the request, as if they hadn’t put a lot of thought into the matter.
Recently, Bath Iron Works introduced a programmable arm that could weld — a co-bot, or collaborative robot, in modern parlance. “They didn’t exactly follow our contract language,” Mr. Ragnar said. The union filed a grievance, and is now working with the company to resolve it.
“A big part of our response was — imagine if this was a much more drastic, broad-reaching change?
In the past, the company might have just said, “Hey, we bought this $10 million machine,” according to Mr. Sullivan. In the future, the union would have warning. Mr. Ragnar said that since the contract was ratified, the company was coming to union leaders with questions about technology.
In response to questions, the company, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, said it was “committed to being transparent with all its employees about future A.I. and new technology initiatives.”
Mr. Ragnar said he did everything he could to avoid using A.I. “If we let A.I. do menial tasks for us, we are letting these machines think for us,” he said. If welders surrendered some of their work to a co-bot, their skills would erode.
“It’s one of the best things about being human — creating, thinking, and problem solving,” he said.
Mr. Sullivan is more optimistic about the constructive use of A.I. in shipbuilding. If an A.I.-guided machine can weld a seam in 15 seconds — a fraction of the time it takes a human, without the risk of injuries — it could mean more ships under construction, and, in turn, more jobs, with a healthier work force.
“Maybe the new technology would be great,” Mr. Sullivan said. “It’s the unknown.”
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5) How Much Has the U.S. Spent on the War in Iran?
The Pentagon has given its most detailed estimate to date of the cost of the Iran war: $43.6 billion. Here’s how that breaks down.
By Ashley Wu and Robert Jimison, Sept. 22, 2026
The Pentagon has given its most detailed estimate to date of the cost of the Iran war: $43.6 billion. Here’s how that breaks down.
Special operations: $636.6 million. For supporting Special Operations commandos in the region.
Army operations: $1.6 billion. For the support of soldiers in the region.
Navy operations: $2.2 billion. For the deployment of more than two dozen warships, including several aircraft carriers.
Air Force operations: $6.6 billion. For operating dozens of fighter and bomber squadrons.
Miscellaneous operations: $149.7 million. Includes support for military operations like medical services for injured service members, transportation supplies and technology.
Replacing destroyed weapons and equipment: $4.3 billion. Losses include aircraft and advanced radar systems destroyed during the conflict.
Bombs, missiles and other munitions: $28.1 billion. The U.S. has been using advanced munitions to strike inside Iran and to defend against Iranian drone and missile attacks.
The estimate is almost certainly on the low side because it does not account for a number of costs associated with the military conflict, like damage to bases and other military assets. And it is not clear that the Pentagon is being fully transparent even about the limited figures it has provided to Congress. But it is still the most comprehensive look at how much the conflict has cost, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his aides have largely kept under wraps.
The Pentagon has provided Congress with at least five estimates of the war’s cumulative cost since it began on Feb. 28. All the while, Congress has never approved the war. The House and Senate have held 19 Iran war powers votes, and on five different occasions, they have approved measures that call on President Trump to halt the war or seek congressional authorization. Mr. Trump has maintained that congressional authorization is not necessary.
In June, the White House requested an additional $67 billion from Congress, largely to continue funding the war in Iran. The House passed a budget blueprint in July for a party-line measure that would provide $73 billion in additional military funding for Iran. The Senate has yet to approve the blueprint.
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6) Videos Reveal New Details About ICE Shooting in Austin
A video analysis finds that a federal immigration officer was standing to the side of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez’s car when the officer apparently fired through the rear passenger window. But the events surrounding the shooting remain murky.
By Devon Lum, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Robin SteinAric Toler and Allison McCann, Sept. 22, 2026
Courtesy of Austin Councilman Mike Siegel
Shortly before 1 p.m. on Sunday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer opened fire on a blue Toyota Corolla after an apparent car chase and collision in northwestern Austin, Texas. The driver suffered a gunshot wound, according to Robert Luckritz, the chief of Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
While it remains unclear exactly what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, visual and audio evidence synchronized and analyzed by The New York Times shows that an ICE officer was standing to the side of the car, which was rolling forward, when the officer apparently fired through the rear passenger window. Footage shows Mr. Garces Perez with a wound on his back.
No other officers were visible near the car at the time of the shooting. Mr. Garces Perez was taken to a nearby hospital and is being held at an ICE detention facility.
Mr. Garces Perez, who is a Venezuelan immigrant, was not the target of an immigration operation, according to two people familiar with the shooting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the investigation. ICE officers in the area were checking license plates when they discovered that he had a deportation order on file, the people said.
The officers pulled Mr. Garces Perez’s car over at about 12:45 p.m. on Sunday while he was making DoorDash deliveries. They told him that they were ICE officers and that he was going to be arrested. Mr. Garces Perez fled in his car after that, the two people familiar with the shooting said.
A short chase ensued before ICE officers encountered Mr. Garces Perez again, the two people said. The shooting occurred after that.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a post on social media that Homeland Security Investigations, with the assistance of the F.B.I., was investigating the shooting. The department did not respond to questions about the shooting.
A video livestreamed on Facebook with a cellphone’s front-facing camera at approximately 12:48 p.m. briefly catches Mr. Garces Perez’s blue Toyota Corolla on a busy boulevard. An S.U.V. appears to be driving toward the Toyota’s passenger side. The audio from the livestream, which was out of sync in the original post, was synchronized by The Times.
Sirens blare and tires screech as the person filming switches to the cellphone’s main camera, causing the image to freeze briefly. It is unclear if the two vehicles made contact at this moment. When the video resumes, Mr. Garces Perez’s Toyota has not moved far, but it is now facing an entirely different direction. Pulled alongside it is an unmarked Ford S.U.V. driven by a federal immigration officer.
Photographs and videos recorded moments later show serious damage to the passenger side of the Toyota. Mr. Garces Perez said over the phone at a news conference that a federal vehicle hit his car twice before an ICE officer fired at him.
The livestreamed video shows an officer exiting the driver’s side of the unmarked S.U.V. and circling around to the rear passenger side of the Toyota with his arms raised and pointed toward the vehicle. The immigration officer remains to the side of the car as it rolls forward slowly. No other officers are seen standing at or near the front of the Toyota.
According to an audio analysis by Robert C. Maher, a gunfire acoustics expert at Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont., four gunshots are audible. The Toyota continues rolling forward slowly before coming to a stop. The video then shows the officer running to the driver’s side of the car.
The officer’s weapon is not clearly visible in the footage when the shots are heard. Photographs taken later of the Toyota show two holes in the rear passenger window. The location of the holes appears to align with where the officer was standing when shots were fired.
Footage recorded moments after the shots shows Mr. Garces Perez remaining seated in the driver’s seat, where he applies pressure to his left shoulder with his hand.
An officer wearing a vest marked “ERO” — denoting the Enforcement and Removal Operations branch of ICE — then walks from the unmarked S.U.V. back to the driver’s side of the Toyota, holding a phone to his ear.
Another video filmed more than six minutes after the gunshots rang out shows Mr. Garces Perez still in the Toyota, holding his shoulder without any signs of medical assistance.
Around 12:55 p.m., Austin police officers arrive on the scene. Much of the conversation is hard to make out, but one Austin officer can be heard asking an ICE officer, “He hit you?”
"Yeah,” the ICE officer replies. The rest of his response is unclear.
A few seconds later the Austin officer asks, “You shot him?”
“Yeah,” the ICE officer replied. The rest of the response is not clear. A few seconds later, he tells the local officer that E.M.S. in on the way.
Shortly after approaching Mr. Garces Perez, one of the police officers runs back to his vehicle and rummages around in its trunk. He returns with what appears to be a first-aid kit tucked under his arm, while pulling on rubber gloves. His partner and a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper remove Mr. Garces Perez from the car while an ICE officer handcuffs him. They seat him on the curb. A wound is visible in Mr. Garces Perez’s upper back.
It is approximately eight minutes after the shooting.
It’s unclear from the available footage what happens in the next few minutes.
According to Mr. Luckritz, the Austin-Travis County E.M.S. chief, an ambulance arrived around 1 p.m. Images taken shortly after it arrived show emergency workers unloading a stretcher from the back of the vehicle.
Mr. Garces Perez was taken to a hospital, and according to his attorney, was discharged and is being held at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas.
The episode is the latest in a string of shootings by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s crackdown: At least 24 people have been shot at, some of them fatally. This year, federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston; and Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.
Hamed Aleaziz and Sam Lerma contributed reporting.
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7) At the U.N., Trump Lays Out a Winner-Takes-All Vision of U.S. Power
President Trump’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly amounted to a rejection of the founding concept of the United Nations.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger, Sept. 22, 2026
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger cover the White House and reported from the United Nations.
President Trump spoke at the United Nations on Tuesday, threatening to “annihilate the Islamic republic” if a deal to end the war against Iran did not come to pass. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran or to declare that, in another conflict, “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Yet that was exactly what President Trump did on Tuesday, in threatening Iran if it failed to make a deal to end a war that had stretched far longer than Mr. Trump anticipated, and justifying his claims on Venezuelan oil reserves after American forces deposed its leader.
Mr. Trump has long made clear that he has little use for the United Nations, one of the post-World War II institutions that he has dismissed as outdated and ineffective. But his speech at the annual opening of the General Assembly amounted to a pure American rejection of the concept behind the U.N.’s founding in 1945: to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The global body’s charter, written largely by the United States, expressly prohibited members from threatening or using force against a country’s territorial integrity unless acting in self-defense, or with the U.N.’s authorization.
On Iran, Mr. Trump made it clear that he, and he alone, would decide whether to strike a deal with Tehran’s leaders or “annihilate the Islamic republic.”
It may have been largely a negotiating tactic. A little later in the morning, American officials quietly met with Iranians who were also in New York for the opening session, though it was unclear whether any progress was made or whether Mr. Trump himself would meet top Iranian officials.
But his threats were not limited to the war that has consumed his presidency for months since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran. He promised that Cuba’s government would fall, one way or the other. And if his “to the victor belong the spoils” line seemed drawn from the days of American gunboat diplomacy more than a century ago, that did not seem to bother the president. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he is willing to use the power of the U.S. military not only for the benefit of securing critical resources, like Venezuela’s huge oil reserves, but also to turn a profit.
Mr. Trump’s comments came at a moment when he appeared more isolated than ever from traditional allies, and when Americans were telling pollsters they overwhelmingly disapproved of his foreign policy. But none of that seemed to lead Mr. Trump to back away from the fiery threats that he has combined with military action in his second term.
Even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the speech seemed to disregard the foundational purpose of the U.N., an institution he has long derided as ineffective and unsuited to deal with the contemporary issues of the world.
It echoed a social media post earlier this year in which he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization. But it was startling to hear such explicit threats from the podium of the United Nations. That seemed to be the president’s intent, as he celebrated taking actions that past presidents and the U.N. itself shied away from.
“Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world?” Mr. Trump asked, before raising a far different prospect, with no apparent effort to differentiate between the country’s leadership and military and its civilians. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Mr. Trump said from the General Assembly podium, where world leaders typically present themselves as champions of peace. He made no mention of his frustrations that a war he boasted would last only days or weeks had now stretched to just shy of seven months.
His speech, in short, seemed to embrace the core doctrine of his second term: that the United States would use a combination of overwhelming military and economic power to suit its own ends — and to bolster the national economy — rather than work through the painful, often slow diplomacy of deal-making and economic coercion. But he made no acknowledgment of the role of international bodies like the U.N., and seemed to suggest that they should simply line up behind the United States.
Later in the speech, he changed course, ticking off the list of conflicts he claimed he personally resolved, boasting that he saved millions of lives by intervening to prevent a war between Pakistan and India. And shortly after Mr. Trump threatened Iran with annihilation, his own aides met for three hours with Iranian officials. It was unclear what, if anything, was accomplished.
This celebration of power over principle built upon a belief that Mr. Trump talked about in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, when he dismissed international law as a constraint on his actions. The only limit on his power, he said, was “my own morality, my own mind — it’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Venezuela was perhaps the most conspicuous example. He celebrated the swiftness with which Special Operations forces swept into Caracas, seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and delivered them to a detention center in Brooklyn, just a few miles from where Mr. Trump spoke.
Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, criticized Mr. Trump for promoting himself as both a president of peace and one that could wipe out a nation.
“Trump never misses a chance to humiliate himself in front of the world,” Mr. Kim said in a post on social media. “His war in Iran is a complete failure, and the American people are paying the price.”
And from the podium, other world leaders criticized Mr. Trump without mentioning his name. President Emmanuel Macron of France, a nation allied with the United States since the American Revolution, denounced a global retreat to the “law of the jungle.” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, the first world leader to speak on Tuesday, said that democracy was “once again under threat” and — without mentioning the U.S. operation against Mr. Maduro — insisted that the Venezuelan people had the right to self-determination. Mr. Trump has insisted that it is not the right time for an open election in the country.
Recent polling shows Americans are not on board with Mr. Trump’s approach. A CNN poll conducted last week showed that 29 percent of American adults approved of Mr. Trump’s handling of foreign affairs; 71 percent said they disapproved — reaching or exceeding levels of disapproval President George W. Bush faced in 2006, when the Iraq war was unraveling.
But to Mr. Trump, actions like seizing Venezuela’s leader and making claims on its oil were clear victories. “It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made,” he said. “If necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”
Mr. Trump also described Cuba as a “failed state” that would soon fall. “We’ll not allow a haven for foreign adversaries to threaten America on our own doorstep,” Mr. Trump said, prompting Cuban officials to walk out of the General Assembly.
“The US government proves incapable of accepting that #Cuba is, and has the right to be, a fully independent and sovereign country,” Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s foreign minister, later said on social media. “Cuba is not a threat to the US nor to any country.”
Mr. Trump also celebrated his administration’s recent deal on Greenland. Earlier this year he threatened a total takeover of the huge island, which is believed to have large underground reserves of rare-earth minerals used for making batteries, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.
Yet the prospect of the U.S. seizing a semiautonomous territory spurred intense backlash from European leaders and nearly upended the Western alliance.
After reaching a deal with Denmark and Greenland over the territory, Mr. Trump told the gathered crowd he planned to build two new military bases on Greenland — something the United States could have done in previous decades under an existing treaty.
Mr. Trump’s speech was also a pivot from his past remarks to the U.N., which were spent insulting world leaders and scolding them on their own policies. “Your countries are going to hell,” Mr. Trump said from the podium last year.
But now faced with a war in Iran with little sign of ending soon that has fueled discontent among his own supporters in the United States, Mr. Trump shifted from lecturing the international body to effectively selling them on his own actions — which have proved to be deeply unpopular with many Americans and allies overseas.
“I hope the Europeans realize that Iran’s goal was to complete their mad dash to a nuclear bomb,” Mr. Trump said in what amounted to a response to some of the world leaders that had criticized the war in Iran. “If they had succeeded, that wicked regime would have been free to spread terror and death forever.”
The declaration that Iran was building missiles that could reach Europe didn’t square with his earlier boasting of obliterating Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Trump claimed credit for ending the war in Gaza, even as humanitarian conditions there remain dire and a plan for disarming Hamas and withdrawing Israeli troops has been stalled for months.
Mr. Trump also attacked the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the war in Gaza, as a “rogue institution.”
The I.C.C. was established in a 1998 treaty to investigate and try people for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. The court cannot enforce its rulings and relies on its member states to detain people who are accused of crimes.
Mr. Trump called on all members of the International Criminal Court to resign immediately.
While the U.N. has said climate change is an existential threat and propelled the issue of artificial intelligence to the top of its agenda, Mr. Trump once again took a different approach. Climate change was nothing more than a “hoax,” Mr. Trump said.
And the United States rejected “any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” artificial intelligence.
Mr. Trump did have one suggested change to the way the world approached A.I., one that made use of his penchant for branding.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial,’” Mr. Trump said. “So it’s super intelligence.”
Mr. Trump then appealed for the leaders to refer to the rising technology as “S.I.” Whether they did, he said, would be a test of influence on the world stage — a question that has appeared to be consistently on the mind of the president.
“Let’s see if I have any power,” Mr. Trump said. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.”
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8) Trump Officials May Undo Nursing Home Mandates for Reporting Covid
The agency led by Dr. Mehmet Oz is proposing an end to weekly tracking of respiratory infections at the facilities where thousands of elderly residents died in the pandemic.
By Christopher Rowland and Carolyn Y. Johnson, Sept. 23, 2026
A nursing home in Worthington, Pa. During the peak years of the Covid pandemic, more than 200,000 nursing home residents and staff died after being infected by the disease. Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
Nursing homes would no longer be required to report each week how many residents were stricken by Covid and other respiratory diseases, under a Trump administration plan to repeal a key public health response to thousands of pandemic deaths.
A draft summary of the proposed rule obtained by The New York Times outlines how the administration agrees with the industry’s objections to weekly reporting of viral caseloads, calling it burdensome. In its waning days, the Biden administration made Covid reporting rules permanent, adding influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (R.S.V.) to the list of threats that facilities also must track and record. The policy took effect in January 2025.
Advocates for nursing home residents reacted with dismay to the proposed rollback. Elderly, frail residents are especially vulnerable to infections, and they live in close quarters, where viruses can spread rapidly.
“That’s crazy,” said Sam Brooks, director of public policy at the nonprofit National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care. “We know, if anything, that respiratory disease has a disproportionate and deadly impact on nursing home residents.”
He said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., which regulates nursing homes, would be blinding itself to an important method for tracking infection control and pinpointing problems.
The administration has cut back on data updates at other agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where a study published this year found that databases related to vaccine and respiratory diseases had gone dormant.
Nursing home industry representatives declined to comment on specifics, because the changes have not been announced. They contend infection reporting consumes too much staff time and is duplicative, because infection data is reported to the federal government and states in other ways.
C.M.S., which drafted the plan, declined to discuss the proposal or disclose when it would be made public.
During the peak years of the pandemic, from early 2020 through early 2022, more than 200,000 nursing home residents and staff members died after being infected by coronavirus, according to KFF, an independent health policy organization, which cited C.D.C. data.
The high death toll has been attributed in part to a lack of preparedness and weak infection controls. The Government Accountability Office said in 2020 that inspectors had cited 82 percent of nursing homes for infection control deficiencies from 2013 to 2017, and that half of those were found to be repeat violators.
In the internal document obtained by The Times, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the director of C.M.S., recommended to his boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that the agency pursue steps to undo the mandate.
“The agency does not comment on purported internal or pre-decisional deliberative materials,” a C.M.S. a spokesman said in an email. He said the agency evaluated regulations to ensure they “allow providers to focus time and resources on delivering care rather than unnecessary administrative burden.”
The draft memo from Dr. Oz to Mr. Kennedy said C.M.S. would reserve the power to reinstate weekly reporting if another public health emergency occurred.
The plan also would end a requirement that nursing home staffs be educated about Covid vaccines and offered the shots. Groups representing residents called the move unwise, pointing out that frontline caregivers were a key pathway for the coronavirus to enter nursing homes during the height of the pandemic. Covid vaccine rates among staff members in recent years have been below 10 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
The administration plan would continue to mandate that facilities offer the Covid vaccine to residents.
The nursing home industry has already achieved its biggest goal of President Trump’s second term: After a heavy lobbying blitz, the administration last year scrapped Biden-era minimum staffing rules that were intended to improve resident care.
Biden officials, in pushing the staff minimums, had cited Covid deaths along with decades of concerns about poor care, including deaths from bedsores, falls and medication errors. But the Trump administration said too many nursing homes, especially in rural areas, could not find enough staff to satisfy the requirements. Many workers who care for the elderly are typically paid less than janitors and retail employees, and the work can be grueling.
With the proposed change on infection reporting, the administration anticipates favorable reaction from the industry, according to the draft memo.
Two main nursing home lobbying groups — the American Health Care Association and LeadingAge — reiterated their opposition to weekly respiratory infection reporting, saying that other government programs track Covid infections and that respiratory illnesses are reported to many local health departments.
“This outdated reporting requirement is only adding hours of unnecessary administrative tasks to caregivers each week” said Holly Harmon, the American Health Care Association’s senior vice president of quality, regulatory and clinical affairs. “It’s time to streamline public health reporting and put patients over paperwork.”
But industry critics contend that operators are failing to heed the lessons of the pandemic. With low staffing levels and high turnover, infection control efforts are most likely in line with the prepandemic patterns flagged by the G.A.O., said Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.
“I don’t think there is any reason to believe they have beefed up what they are supposed to be doing,” Ms. Edelman said.
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9) The Democrats’ Policy on Palestine Is Detached From Reality
By Peter Beinart, Sept. 23, 2026
Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer.
Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
The debate inside the Democratic Party over Israel has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 30. In 2024, the party platform boasted that Joe Biden had given the Jewish state $14 billion in military aid. These days, among the Democrats jockeying for the 2028 presidential nomination, the prospect of eliminating all military aid appears likely to be a centrist position. Progressives will probably call for stopping most arms sales as well.
As dizzying as this transformation has been, something essential is still missing. While Democrats are rethinking their approach to Israel, they haven’t yet rethought their approach to the Palestinians.
As the party looks toward the midterms and beyond, Democrats should do more than pledge to stop subsidizing Israel’s crimes. They must also stop supporting Palestinian authoritarianism — whether practiced by Hamas or by Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah — and champion the right of Palestinians to choose their own leaders.
Today, unfortunately, top Democrats often ignore that right. In a speech at Tel Aviv University this summer endorsing American pressure to create a Palestinian state, the likely presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel advised Arab countries to be “the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership” and “stand up a governing authority capable of accepting the historic Jewish connection to this land.” He noted that “corrupt Palestinian leadership has never lived up to the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination” but said nothing about the need for Palestinian people to choose their own leaders.
This absence made Mr. Emanuel’s advice both patronizing and detached from reality. No Palestinian leader can legitimately commit his people to a vision for peace — be it two states, one state with equality for all or something in between — absent a mandate from Palestinians themselves.
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That mandate requires allowing Palestinians to vote. Under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Mr. Abbas has promised to hold elections for the Palestinian Authority’s Parliament in November, and for its presidency early next year. Unless Washington commits to fully supporting the effort, however, Israel may throw up roadblocks, which Mr. Abbas could use as an excuse to cancel the vote.
American presidents of both parties have been enabling Mr. Abbas’s dictatorial tendencies for the past 20 years. In 2006, the last time Palestinians held elections for the Parliament of the Palestinian Authority, which encompasses the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Hamas won a majority of the seats. The Bush administration responded by demanding that Hamas endorse a series of conditions set by international interlocutors and accepted by its rivals in Fatah as part of the Oslo Accords — which included forswearing violence and recognizing Israel.
During negotiations brokered by Saudi Arabia, Hamas still refused to recognize Israel but agreed to “respect” those commitments. That wasn’t enough for Washington. So, the United States reportedly tried to overturn the election results by force. It developed a plan that called for allies in the region to funnel weapons to Fatah fighters in the hopes that they would oust Hamas from its stronghold in Gaza. (The Bush administration denied this). The plan backfired and the Islamist group seized control of the Strip.
Mr. Abbas then declared a state of emergency. This allowed him to suspend Parliament, eventually seize control of the judiciary and rule as an autocrat. He’s been doing so ever since, and has transformed not only the Authority, but also the Palestine Liberation Organization — which historically included all Palestinian parties — into his personal fief.
This authoritarianism, argues Omar H. Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, has left Palestinians “saddled with a weak yet highly repressive leadership, buoyed by external support” but “unresponsive to its constituents.” Mr. Abbas’s despotic rule has clearly proved convenient for the United States and Israel, since a democratically elected Palestinian leader would be less likely to cooperate with the Israeli military while Palestinian territory remains occupied. When Mr. Abbas flirted with holding elections in 2021, the Biden administration did not publicly endorse the idea. A State Department spokesman at the time said the decision to hold elections was a “matter for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian leadership to determine,” thus implying that elections were a prerogative of Mr. Abbas. Mr. Abbas claimed that Israel was stonewalling efforts to allow Palestinians to cast ballots in East Jerusalem and used that as a justification to cancel the vote.
Democrats must learn from Mr. Biden’s mistake and support Palestinian elections now. But presidential elections will be hollow if the candidate most likely to win them remains in jail. According to a poll conducted in August by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Mr. Abbas’s popularity is dwarfed by that of Marwan Barghouti, a longtime Fatah activist who, if elections were held freely, would receive more than twice as many votes as the current leader of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya, and almost four times as many as Mr. Abbas.
Mr. Barghouti has been in prison for more than two decades. As a Fatah leader in the West Bank, he came to be seen by many Israelis as a key planner of the second intifada, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis. He was indicted in 2002 on charges of masterminding attacks that killed 26 people; he was ultimately convicted in the murder of five and for membership in a terrorist organization. Mr. Barghouti denied the legitimacy of the proceedings, and the ruling was criticized for containing “numerous breaches of international law” by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global organization of national parliaments.
The same year he went to prison, Mr. Barghouti said that while he had “the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom,” he has also sought “peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine.” His son, Arab Barghouti, told A.F.P. in April that despite being repeatedly tortured by his Israeli captors, his father still supports a Palestinian and Israeli state living alongside each other in peace.
Democrats should make Mr. Barghouti’s release a central part of their agenda in the run-up to 2028. They should also go further and call for allowing Palestinians to choose who runs in their elections, even though that probably means letting Hamas compete, either on its own or as part of a broader coalition. That prospect would outrage Israel’s supporters, and prove unpopular among many Americans. But no Palestinian election can be credible if the United States and other outside powers dictate who can take part. And the Fatah dominated P.L.O. can never regain its position as the representative of all Palestinian people if Hamas — one of the two largest Palestinian parties — remains outside of it.
This call will not be easy for many Democrats to make. Hamas has committed horrifying atrocities against Israeli civilians, has brutally repressed dissent in Gaza and has not recognized Israel. Democrats should not excuse Hamas’s crimes. But they should, finally, treat Israelis and Palestinians the same way. In both societies, political leaders have overseen grave violations of human rights and rejected the concept of two states. America’s principle should be this: The United States will not tell Israelis or Palestinians how to vote. And it will impose sanctions on anyone, Israeli or Palestinian, who violates international law.
Decades ago, the Palestinian American critic and activist Edward Said wrote an essay titled “Permission to Narrate” about the challenges Palestinians faced in being heard. Democrats need to support Palestinians’ right to do so where it matters most: at the ballot box.
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10) The Former Fracking Executive Selling Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Vision
Energy Secretary Chris Wright is pitching a future of fossil fuel abundance. It’s not always an easy sell while war drags on and oil prices surge.
By Brad Plumer, Sept. 23, 2026
Brad Plumer reported this story from Washington and Houston.
Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary, speaking before the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Abundance in Houston last week. Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
With oil and gasoline prices spiking amid President Trump’s war with Iran, it was an awkward moment for optimism about the world’s energy situation.
But Energy Secretary Chris Wright brought a sunny message to Houston last week at a gathering of energy ministers from the G20 nations. The Trump administration, he said, was ushering in an era of energy abundance by expanding oil and gas supplies in places like Alaska and Venezuela.
That pitch was often overshadowed by the effects of the conflict in the Middle East. Between lauding oil and gas deals, Mr. Wright fielded questions about a damaged Saudi oil pipeline and sparred on social media with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over surging gasoline costs.
Mr. Wright acknowledged some tension, though he insisted it was temporary.
“Everyone’s frustrated with higher energy prices,” he said of the mood at the meeting. “But I’ve not met one person who’s comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. So everyone gets what we’re doing and this is a critically important mission. It creates dislocations in the short term. But the only answer to short-term dislocations is the energy abundance agenda.”
The situation was familiar for Mr. Wright, 61, one of the most forceful defenders of Mr. Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.”
Over the past two years, the administration has dismantled efforts to tackle climate change and ended support for wind and solar power. Instead, officials have sought to expand the use of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy — sources they see as more reliable. The aim, they say, is to reduce consumer prices, increase U.S. fuel exports, and provide enough electricity to win the artificial intelligence race against China.
Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive, has been out front in articulating that shift.
Whereas Mr. Trump speaks bluntly about energy — chanting “drill, baby, drill,” calling wind turbines ugly, or claiming that global warming is a hoax — Mr. Wright gives his arguments an intellectual gloss.
He cites figures on how solar panels underperform during winter storms. Or he argues that global warming is not as big a problem as energy poverty, which he says can only be alleviated with more oil, gas and coal, even if that means more planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Administration allies say that has made Mr. Wright invaluable.
“He has been one of the most consequential picks for energy secretary I’ve seen,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a research group that promotes fossil fuels. “He’s very experienced, brings a lot of substance, and he articulates President Trump’s vision clearly.”
Critics say Mr. Wright’s approach ignores the real risks of climate change and dismisses two of the world’s fastest-growing power sources, wind and solar. They also point to rising energy costs — diesel prices have hit record highs and electricity rates are still increasing faster than inflation — as evidence that the administration’s policies aren’t working.
During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Wright appeared to reassure lawmakers that he supported all energy sources, including renewables. He cited his graduate work on solar power and called climate change a “global challenge that we need to solve.”
But since taking office, he has been more combative, deriding wind and solar power as a “parasite” on the grid, blasting Democratic-led states for environmental policies that have shut down coal and gas plants, and accusing Europe of being in thrall to a “climate cult” that is crippling economic growth.
The Energy Department infuriated Democrats in Congress last October by canceling nearly $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants located almost entirely in states that didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. Asked about the decision at a June congressional hearing, Mr. Wright said political considerations had nothing to do with the decisions.
But in court filings in July, administration officials conceded that the cancellations were targeted in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.
Energy Department officials have said that they recommended that grants be canceled in red and blue states alike but that the decisions on which terminations to announce were made by the White House.
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico was one of eight Democrats who voted to confirm Mr. Wright last year but has since become a vocal critic.
“Of all the Trump nominees, I am particularly disappointed in his conduct,” Mr. Heinrich said. “He obviously had an oil and gas history, but he also had a clean energy history. And he just threw all of that away to be a partisan mouthpiece.”
In response, Ben Dietderich, an Energy Department spokesman, said in a statement: “Secretary Wright doesn’t have preferred energy sources. He just believes in being honest about math and energy security. Unfortunately, many in the climate lobby don’t like that. The Department is proud to have ended energy subtraction policies that lead to higher prices, less energy security and human impoverishment.”
Mr. Wright first gained prominence as the founder of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based oil-field services company that was heavily involved in the fracking boom.
Even among oil and gas executives, Mr. Wright stood out as an evangelist for fossil fuels. In 2021, as world leaders and even many oil companies were pledging to slash emissions, Mr. Wright published a 180-page report criticizing what he saw as a “myopic focus on climate change.”
He argued that people in developing countries still lacked enough energy to enjoy a decent standard of living and that renewables couldn’t replace oil, gas and coal to provide that power.
“At the height of this era when everyone was saying energy policy should just be about climate, Chris Wright was one of the few C.E.O.s that ran oil and gas firms who clearly and vocally spoke out,” said Arjun Murti, a partner at the energy research firm Veriten.
Mr. Wright also had a flair for the dramatic. He once drank fracking fluid on video to show it was safe. In 2021, he rented billboards around Denver to heckle The North Face after the company declined to work with an oil firm.
He landed appearances on Fox News and won the job of energy secretary on the recommendation of Harold Hamm, a fellow fracking pioneer and major donor to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Wright quickly transformed the department. Out were programs to develop novel technologies to fight climate change, like green hydrogen or low-emissions steel. Instead, federal funds went to help utilities finance gas plants, nuclear reactors and transmission lines or upgrade older coal plants, which officials say are essential for meeting rising electricity demand.
Mr. Wright also lifted a Biden-era pause on expanding exports of liquefied natural gas, now the nation’s fastest-growing export, and has pressured Europe to ease rules on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, saying they could hurt U.S. exports.
“He brought a whole new attitude to the agency,” said Scott Segal, an energy lobbyist at Bracewell. “It’s all about how do we produce enough energy to support A.I. and economic growth.”
Some changes have attracted bipartisan support, such as Mr. Wright’s promotion of nuclear and geothermal energy, which don’t produce planet-warming emissions. His agency has dangled billions of dollars in loans to kick-start the largest expansion of nuclear power in a generation, while a program to help start-ups develop small reactors has moved faster than many expected.
Other moves have been more contentious.
To rescue the declining coal industry, an obsession of Mr. Trump’s, the Energy Department used emergency powers to keep plants running past their scheduled retirement dates, which could cost ratepayers billions. (This month, a federal judge struck down one such order, saying the agency had overstepped its authority.)
Last year, Mr. Wright picked five skeptics of mainstream climate science to write a report arguing that concerns about global warming were overblown. That report prompted furious pushback from hundreds of scientists, who denounced its findings as riddled with errors. A federal judge later ruled that Mr. Wright had acted unlawfully by secretly convening the authors.
Mr. Wright, who often criticizes wind and solar for not running at all hours, has cut renewable energy programs and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as the National Laboratory of the Rockies. While experts agree that the variability of wind and solar poses real challenges, many say it goes too far to call the sources “worthless.” Texas gets roughly one-third of its power from renewables and has kept costs low.
“It’s borderline petty how anti-renewable this Energy Department is,” said Samantha Gross, a director at the Brookings Institution. “Especially since we’re still building more renewables, particularly solar, than any other form of energy in the U.S. right now.”
Roughly 2,700 staff members have left the agency, which analysts and former employees said could make it difficult to carry out its mission.
Mr. Wright’s supporters say he has helped steer the country away from what they saw as the Biden administration’s unrealistic plans to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
Some say the debate is shifting in his direction. Many states and businesses are backing off ambitious climate targets, and Democrats are less vocal nowadays about climate change. Tech companies are using more natural gas to meet exploding demand for data centers. The International Energy Agency, after some browbeating by Mr. Wright, is revising up its projections for how long fossil fuels will stick around.
“There’s been a real shift in how investors and others now talk about energy,” said Travis Fisher, a director of energy and environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute who worked with Mr. Wright to organize the agency’s climate report. “Climate has become a lot less salient.”
The administration’s strategy faces its biggest test yet with the Iran war. While The Times reported that Mr. Wright was excluded from the decision to launch the war, he has been busy managing the energy fallout. He often appears on television to discuss U.S. military escorts of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. And he is quick to counter that Democratic-led states face high energy costs because of decisions to close refineries or oppose pipelines.
In the short term, the war and resulting energy shortages have benefited many U.S. suppliers, which are exporting more oil and gas than ever before. But in the long term, some experts and companies worry the chaos could hurt the market for fossil fuels, as countries seek to reduce reliance on energy imports.
Mr. Wright, for his part, says fossil fuels are too useful to recede anytime soon.
“We will never, ever come remotely close to running out of hydrocarbons, which means you need better technology and innovations to eventually eat into their market share,” Mr. Wright said at a Cato event in May.
He said he was excited about recent breakthroughs in areas like fusion. But, he added, “the biggest innovations the rest of my lifetime in energy are almost certainly going to be in oil, gas, and coal, because they are what matter.”
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11) Kennedy Keeps Finding New Ways to Undermine Trust in Vaccines
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, Sept. 23, 2026
Eleanor Davis
According to the state of Pennsylvania, four “total confirmed measles-associated deaths” have resulted from an ongoing outbreak of the incredibly infectious disease. These are the first deaths from measles in the state in 35 years. Measles has spread to nearly 800 Pennsylvanians this year, making the state the epicenter of the national outbreak. Ninety-nine percent of those infected in the state are unvaccinated, as were all four of the deceased.
There have been over 3,400 documented cases of measles and over 300 hospitalizations across the country since the beginning of 2026. The numbers are more than in 2025, which was a banner year for measles. But instead of trying to quell the spread, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump and other vaccine-skeptical ideologues in charge of our federal public health system have sought to distance the four Pennsylvania deaths from measles. As of Tuesday afternoon, the official national death count from the disease was zero.
In response to a news conference in August by Gov. Josh Shapiro about the first two deaths, Kennedy posted a bizarre and paranoid screed on X, where he claimed that the governor’s “performance was a replay of the Democrats’ COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.”
I’m not quite sure what if anything a politician gains from announcing two tragic and likely preventable deaths. But there have been two more deaths since then. On Sept. 16, Pennsylvania’s health secretary, Dr. Debra L. Bogen, wrote to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Erica Schwartz, to express her displeasure. “The C.D.C.’s choice not to publicly recognize the deaths undermines our response,” Bogen said.
Quibbling with state health officials is a novel tactic in the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine arsenal. Perhaps realizing that it’s difficult to fully block Americans from attaining the basic set of childhood vaccines, and that those vaccines remain popular, the administration has settled on partisan attacks, general chaos and conflicting messaging to continue undermining the public’s trust in one of the most effective disease-preventing tools we have.
Dr. Debra Houry and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, two former C.D.C. officials, explained in an opinion piece for Stat News in early September that when there were measles-related deaths in Texas in 2025, there was no such pushback from the federal government. Texas determined that these deaths were from measles, and the C.D.C. added them to its dashboard, even though at the time, Kennedy underplayed the risks of the virus. “It is unclear what was different other than the state being ‘blue’ and its governor’s criticism of the administration,” wrote Houry and Daskalakis, who quit their C.D.C. jobs last year in protest over political interference.
What appears to be a new strategy to undercount deaths comes after Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations about vaccines, last year. He replaced some of those experts with his vaccine-skeptical cronies. Kennedy continues to make the same false or misleading statements about the risks of common childhood vaccines that he has been making for decades.
Last week, Kennedy was the keynote speaker at the anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense conference in Washington. He founded the organization, and though he spoke for over an hour, he did not mention the current measles outbreak once. According to The Washington Post, the speaker who preceded Kennedy, the MAHA Institute president, Mark Gorton, said he wanted to end the government’s vaccine program. He added, “The time has come to stop caveating every introduction with, ‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer,’ but … vaccines are a nightmare.”
Trump issued an executive order last month recommending that the single measles, mumps and rubella vaccine be split into three separate shots, even though there is no evidence that the combined shot is riskier, and no other country offers the shots separately anymore. The executive order also pared the recommended list of diseases to vaccinate against down from 17 to 11, though it does not cite new evidence to explain this suggestion.
When he signed the executive order, Trump claimed, incorrectly, that the combined MMR shot was “quite lethal.” Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and an actual doctor, had to go on “Face the Nation” to clean up after Trump’s mess. “The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine, and it is offered in other countries,” Oz said. The White House is reportedly now working on an executive order that would give the president even more control over scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health, which is a terrifying prospect.
If we had a normal federal government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be maximally cooperating with states and laying the groundwork to prevent future outbreaks. Accurate reporting of deaths is one way to properly sound the alarm about the consequences of not being vaccinated.
That’s what happened in the aftermath of the last major measles outbreak in Pennsylvania, in 1990. Dr. William Roper, who was head of the C.D.C. from 1990 to 1993, wrote in 2007 about his tenure at the agency.
He described the 1993 passage of the Vaccines for Children program, which provided free vaccines to uninsured and underinsured children, as a triumph. He strongly endorsed vaccination, writing that “the lifesaving and health-preserving impact of immunizations exceeds almost all other public health interventions.” Now, the C.D.C. appears to be slow-rolling the delivery of the latest Covid-19 vaccine to the states, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
It is perhaps cliché to point out how abnormal, how tragically dysfunctional Trump’s leadership is. This has been clear for almost a decade now, and more and more Americans are finally waking up to it; Trump’s approval ratings are at a record low. But somehow, Kennedy’s favorability rating is still above water.
According to a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll of 2,100 registered voters from late August, 43 percent of voters have a net favorable view of Kennedy and 39 percent have a net unfavorable view — which makes him more popular than nearly any other politician the poll asked about. Kennedy remains somewhat popular because he’s been so successful at communicating his misinformation on social media over the years. The original 2024 bargain he made in endorsing Trump has paid off handsomely with a cabinet position, and the president’s ongoing support for Kennedy’s bad science means right-wing media have readily taken up the anti-vaccine cause.
The spread of disease will be a lasting stain, even after both of these men are out of office.
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12) New Matrix, Meet the Old Matrix
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Sept. 23, 2026
“The Hand of Man,” 1902. Alfred Stieglitz, via the J. Paul Getty Museum
At a fundamental level, artificial intelligence leaders, evangelists and their allies want you to believe that their novel technology demands a novel political approach.
Calls for self-regulation from the chief executives of Anthropic, OpenAI and other such companies rest on the idea that the A.I. labs and their funders are the only people equipped to handle and regulate this potentially dangerous technology. This is why, for example, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, recently called for antitrust waivers to allow “industrywide coordination” around A.I.
As my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom observed in a recent column, the ostentatious panic around the prospect of superintelligent A.I. seems to cash out, politically, in a call to abdicate democratic authority to the companies in question. “They want us to panic, instead of seriously deliberating at the polls, in community meetings and in Congress,” she writes. “Panic is chaos without direction, affect set free from the discipline of curiosity, debate and accountability.”
Even potential regulation is framed as a collaboration between government and the A.I. companies rather than a relationship of oversight and control. It is noteworthy, too, that as framed by these leaders, the conversation around A.I. safety is more about science-fictional scenarios and future apocalypses — rooted in a set of questionable assumptions about the nature of intelligence, among other things — than it is about more immediate concerns like the impact of A.I. on jobs, mental health and the environment.
But novel technologies do not actually require novel political solutions, especially when those technologies either evoke, replicate or recapitulate age-old problems of political and economic life.
There is, in fact, an American tradition of fighting to bring collective and democratic authority to bear on disruptive technologies — of using politics to try to shape and direct the impact of major economic transformations.
The United States of the late 19th century was an unimaginably fast-moving society in which new technologies enabled a theretofore unknown degree of connection between peoples. The railroad stood, in particular, as the innovation that disrupted the very fabric of American life.
In its vast scale and tremendous ability to produce wealth and power, the railroad was, the diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote in the late 1860s, “an incalculable force practically let loose suddenly upon mankind; exercising all sorts of influences, social, moral, and political; precipitating upon us novel problems which demand immediate solution; banishing the old before the new is half-matured to replace it.” It might be, he concluded, “the most tremendous and far-reaching engine of social change which has ever either blessed or cursed mankind.”
Railroads, which were wrestled and consolidated by industrial titans such as J.P. Morgan into national corporations of mammoth proportions beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, amassed enormous profits, most of which flowed to small cadres of creators and financiers at the top. As bureaucracies, railroads rivaled the federal government in size; as political entities, they rivaled most state governments in power. They could extract immense subsidies and shape the direction of economic development across entire regions. They incurred large debts, produced huge losses and grew to such size that when one or more collapsed, they took the whole economy with them.
Railroads were also politically powerful. “Their influence,” wrote William Larrabee, a former Republican governor of Iowa, in 1893, “extends from the township assessor’s office to the national capital, from the publisher of the small crossroads paper to the editorial staff of the metropolitan daily. It is felt in every caucus, in every nominating convention and at every election.”
The often oppressive power of the railroads invited hostility and critique from a broad cross-section of the American public. The novelist and critic William Dean Howells channeled these doubts in his 1888 reflection on the Burlington railroad strike of that year: “Shall the railroads fulfill their public obligations by agreement with their employees, or shall the government take possession of them and operate them? It is folly to talk of the withdrawal of capital and the consequent ruin of the country. The country belongs to the people and they are not going to let it be ruined.”
Still more dramatic was Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota populist who denounced the state of the nation and demanded reform in what would become the preamble to the platform of the People’s Party. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin,” he said, speaking at the 1892 St. Louis Industrial Conference. “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress and touches even the ermine of the bench.”
“The fruits of the toil of millions,” he continued, “are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.”
For the Populists, railroads were not just any business — they were public highways that allowed for public communication and public transportation. They were financed by public loans and built on public lands. The solution, then, was public ownership and democratic control. “The time has come,” reads the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, “when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.”
“Transportation being a means of exchange and a public necessity,” it continues, “the government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people.”
A.I. is not equivalent to railroads. For one, rail travel met an immediate need whereas, outside of highly technical fields, artificial intelligence is still a product looking for a market.
But like the railroads, the infrastructure of A.I. marks the built landscape; like the railroads, the wealth of A.I. companies shapes the overall political arena; and like the railroads, the sheer economic power and force behind A.I. is in tension with democracy and self-government. If A.I. promises to transform the entire society, then the entire society is entitled to have a say, even a decisive one, over the use, development and direction of the technology. And crucially, this does not require new and novel forms of accountability. The old ways, even the old laws, still apply.
“Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their C.E.O.s for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products,” observed Lina Khan, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, on X. “We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no A.I. exemption from laws already on the books.”
Rather than allow self-regulation or build some bespoke new regime, we can treat the A.I. companies like the powerful businesses of the past. If the laws apply, they should be enforced, and if these companies break them, they should be punished accordingly. Above all, the public must demand a role and a say in the future of this technology. New technologies must serve our needs, not the other way around.
Writing on the eve of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the economist Henry George asked from his perch in San Francisco whether the railroad would bring misery or prosperity to the people of California, and whether anyone could resist the consequences of a great new concentration of wealth and power. “Can we rely upon sufficient intelligence, independence and virtue among the many to resist the political effects of the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few?”
Well, can we?
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13) U.S. Citizen Injured After Mistakenly Detained by ICE Near Chicago
The Department of Homeland Security said agents released the man after he identified himself. He was taken to the hospital on Sunday with head and neck injuries, local police said.
By Billy Witz, Sept. 23, 2026
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas, on Sunday. Joel Angel Juarez/Associated Press
A U.S. citizen in suburban Chicago was left with injuries to his head, neck and teeth after he was mistakenly detained by federal immigration agents over the weekend, according to local police.
The police in Evanston, Ill., who responded to the incident on Sunday morning, said in a news release that the federal agents later determined that the man was a citizen and left the scene after he identified himself.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Wednesday that the agents were with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The man, who has not been identified, was taken to a hospital on Sunday, the police said. It was unclear on Wednesday the extent of his injuries and whether he had been released.
The confrontation — the latest in a series of violent episodes involving immigration agents as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign — happened the same day that ICE agents shot an immigrant in Austin, Texas.
In Evanston, just north of Chicago, the police said a man who identified himself as a federal agent told them that five federal agents had been operating in the area. The agents were seeking a person who had addresses in the Chicago area and had a warrant for that person’s arrest, the police said.
The federal agent told the police that the detained man had resembled the person they were seeking and that he had initially refused to provide identification. After a police officer observed that the agent had blood on his hands, the agent said he was injured while trying to handcuff the man, the police said.
The agent told police officers that the federal agents left the area after protesters gathered because they feared they would be attacked, the Evanston police said.
D.H.S. said in its statement that the man had refused to cooperate, but that “ICE officers relied on their training and later left the scene without further incident once the individual finally identified himself.” The agency added that ICE agents offered the man assistance but that he refused.
A man who said he witnessed the incident told a local TV news station that the detained man appeared to have been struck in the head and that he had said he was a U.S. citizen during the encounter.
Evanston police officers said they interviewed the man at the hospital. They said he was an Evanston resident and that they photographed his injuries.
Sanctuary Evanston, a community organization that assists immigrants, condemned the federal agents’ actions.
“As many families prepared for the week ahead, federal agents enacted a scene that is becoming terrifyingly familiar,” the organization said in a statement. “Our normalcy was once again quickly shattered and replaced with chaos and panic.”
Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
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14) Trump’s Signature Tax Bill Is Starting to Bite Before the Election
The tax cuts in President Trump’s signature achievement were the Republicans’ answer to voters’ economic struggles, but its health care and food assistance cuts are taking a toll.
By Audra D. S. Burch, Sept. 23, 2026
A free grocery store in Newark could help people cut off from food assistance by the Republicans’ signature achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
In a midterm election largely shaped by struggles with affordability, Republicans are hanging many of their hopes on President Trump’s signature domestic policy law, the sprawling package of spending increases and tax breaks dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But to partially offset its largess, which totals more than $3 trillion, the law also cut social services, including Medicaid, health care subsidies and food assistance, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. How voters view the law depends largely on which side of the federal ledger they find themselves — recipients of tax cuts or beneficiaries of programs that have been cut.
“This legislation touches everything,” said Ashley Whitlock, a substitute teacher from Belmont, N.C., who lost her SNAP benefits in the summer. “If it doesn’t impact you, it impacts someone you know.”
More than a year after passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, public opinion about its impact is entrenched mostly along partisan fault lines. But personal experience is beginning to come into play.
Some praise larger tax refunds and tax breaks that allowed them to take home more money earned from tips and overtime. But at a moment when the cost of living is rising faster than wages, many say the law has plunged Americans into financial uncertainty with the law’s cuts to programs that helped put food on the table and provide affordable health care.
“Can you imagine going from a monthly premium of zero to $850?” asked Dina Rose Friedman, 64, who lives in Irvington, N.Y., and lost her health insurance subsidy. “I remember freaking out.”
For more than a decade, Ms. Friedman has worked as an early childhood educator and Sunday school teacher. The work is gratifying, she said, but does not command a high salary. She felt lucky to have found affordable insurance through the New York State of Health exchange, established by the Affordable Care Act, which provided comprehensive care for her diabetes.
But in July, she joined the nearly half-million New Yorkers who lost their low-cost health coverage, known as the Essential Plan, after expanded federal subsidies signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were allowed to lapse.
Now, Ms. Friedman’s health care coverage takes a significant bite of her combined salary of about $41,000. To her, the changes felt like an attack on people who earn lower wages.
Losing insurance and trying to replace it with an affordable plan “has been overwhelming,” said Ms. Friedman, who now relies on help from family and her savings to pay the monthly premium.
The Big Beautiful Bill was supposed to be the Republican answer to frustrations with the rising cost of living. When Mr. Trump signed it, he said it would “turbocharge our economy” and “bring back the American dream.”
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, says it has.
“Tens of millions of Americans took advantage of at least one of President Trump’s signature tax provisions: no tax on tips, overtime or Social Security,” he said in a statement. The tax provisions, he added, were “fueling investment and private-sector job growth — creating opportunities for Americans to get off government coverage with meaningful employment that provides health benefits.”
Last year, about 29 million workers claimed the law’s deduction for overtime, while about 7.5 million claimed the tip deduction, according to the Treasury Department. More than 35 million seniors claimed an enhanced deduction, which was passed to come close to making good on Mr. Trump’s promise to end taxes on Social Security, and nearly 40 million took advantage of an expanded child care credit.
Jeff Zepp, 67, a small-business owner, said he benefited from the new senior deduction, which lowers taxable income by up to $6,000 for individuals 65 and older or up to $12,000 for married couples filing jointly. He paid about $1,200 less in federal taxes in 2025.
“I think the One Big Beautiful Bill is wonderful,” said Mr. Zepp, who lives in Kittredge, Colo., a mountain community near Denver. “If it weren’t for the law, we would have paid a lot more in taxes.”
The savings helped reaffirm his support of Mr. Trump and the Republicans, he said.
“The Democrats really only have one platform, and that is that the orange man is bad and that the One Big Beautiful Bill was cruel,” Mr. Zepp said.
The legislation also made significant cuts, which Republicans said were necessary to combat government bloat, fraud and abuse.
About $1 trillion in federal spending was cut from Medicaid through 2034, and eligibility was tightened. New Medicaid mandates on work and volunteer requirements do not begin taking effect until January 2027, months after the election. Millions of people will eventually have to prove they meet the work, school or volunteer requirements to remain eligible.
About five million people in the country have already lost SNAP benefits — the government’s primary anti-hunger tool — because of tighter requirements enacted in the legislation, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzed U.S. Department of Agriculture and state data.
One retiree in Ohio, who spoke on condition of anonymity to not bring attention to her situation, described SNAP benefits as a “lifeline.” Her benefits dropped to $44 from $250 in March.
Last year, Matti Puistolahti, a student at College of Lake County in suburban Chicago, relied on about $200 in monthly SNAP benefits. In October, he received a letter stating that he was no longer eligible; he did not meet the work requirements.
“I was working as a tutor for 12 hours a week at $15 per hour, but that wasn’t enough hours,” Mr. Puistolahti, 27, said. “You would think they would give some kind of leniency as a student, but they don’t.”
“All of a sudden,” he continued, “I had to think about food a lot more and be more cautious about what I was buying.”
Eventually, Mr. Puistolahti received a federal grant and scholarships, which freed up more of his part-time pay for living expenses.
Out of work and struggling, Ms. Whitlock, 46, the North Carolina substitute teacher, lost about $300 in SNAP monthly benefits in July because she didn’t meet the new work requirements. She found a substitute teaching job at a high school in April and worked a short time before the end of the school year.
She did not return to work until August. Since the benefits were cut, Ms. Whitlock has scrambled to find food.
“I have been going to churches and food pantries to survive,” she said.
She said she hopes the benefits will be restored after she submits her 2026 paychecks to document her work hours.
But another possible hurdle looms next year — Medicaid work mandates.
“This has been so confusing, trying to figure out how the legislation works and to make sure everything is documented,” Ms. Whitlock said. “I believe it is going to hurt a lot of people.”
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15) Wildfire Converted Me From Tree-Hugger to Tree-Worshipper
By Robert Moor, Sept. 23, 2026
Mr. Moor is the author of “In Trees: An Exploration.” He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.
Karin Bubaš
Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism — crowding in on this little forest from afar.
Each wildfire season, the sky outside my cabin now turns a shade of nicotine yellow I associate with Los Angeles in the 1970s. On the smokiest days, news headlines declare that our air quality is “worse than New Delhi’s,” which is to say, worse than in one of the most polluted cities on earth.
The inverse is true, as well. One hot day this July, as clouds of smoke oozed south from Ontario, I drove through New York City and saw the buildings washed in the same sallow light I’m used to seeing during wildfire season back home.
As the climate continues warming, this spooky entanglement between the urban and the sylvan will only deepen. In doing so, it has revealed to me what is normally hidden from view: We all live under the same vengeful sky.
A lifelong, bone-deep atheist, I didn’t used to view the earth’s climate as some kind of god to be feared and placated. In fact, I tended to look askance at people who used religious language to make sense of the essential chaos of natural disasters. Often, the places hardest hit by catastrophic droughts, floods and storms are rural communities in nations where the average person’s carbon footprint is minuscule, like Nepal and the Philippines. Here in Canada, Indigenous people make up just 5 percent of the overall population, but in 2025 they made up more than 50 percent of wildfire evacuees. Such is the nature of what the climatologist Friederike Otto calls “climate injustice.”
So when the smoke descends upon us each summer, I can’t find much wisdom in talk of “ecological sin” or “climate karma,” which presumes a tidy logic of personal comeuppance. In a time of climate chaos, the religious language I find myself drawn to is far older, wilder and more mysterious.
Every year, I undergo a kind of baptism by wildfire. This religious conversion always follows the same arc. First the smell of burned wood — sauna-scented, not altogether unpleasant — floats in on the breeze. Then the sky begins to mutate. In the warm, Egglestonian light cast down by an alien red sun, everything takes on an old-timey quality. Before long, the vibes are decidedly acrid: Smoke seeps into the house, leaving me headachy and short of breath. By Day 3, my husband and I find ourselves squabbling over nothing. By Day 5, my thoughts vacillate between apoplectic rage and apocalyptic despair.
After a week of yellow skies, I reach my breaking point. In these moments, I often fantasize about agreeing to give up one of my guilty pleasures — drinking expensive coffee, say — if only it would clear the air. I suspect this desperate pleading is similar to what my ancestors, living in the dark greenwoods and damp peatlands of Iron Age Britain, experienced in times of woe. The ancient Celts were known to discard precious objects into rivers and lakes to appease the gods. I don’t own a sword, but when the smoke gets really bad, I would gladly relinquish my espresso machine to be able to breathe freely again.
In these moments, I stop seeing the sky as a blank backdrop. I see it as a living thing, and an angry one. I see the spirit of the forest rising up, rageful and trickstery, to hurl down thunderbolts and sicken us while we sleep. Put differently, I feel myself drawn away from scientific atheism, and toward a creed that philosophers call “scientific animism.”
Animism, put very simply, is the belief that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who can either punish us or bestow favors. Scientific animism applies this ancient lens to modern science, showing how forces in the natural world (plants, rivers, entire planets) are self-organized, self-perpetuating and self-willed. In this view, nature is not an inert, passive backdrop to human progress. It actively responds to our actions — though not always in the way we would predict.
Take trees. Until fairly recently, I tended to view trees as ecologically angelic beings that purified our air, shaded our homes and helped stabilize our climate. But today, the halo around trees is rapidly dimming. One wide-ranging study found that Canada’s forests, thanks in large part to wildfires, officially became a net source of carbon emissions rather than a carbon sink around 2021. (Canada’s heavily logged “managed” forests” passed a similar tipping point all the way back in 2001.) This means that, in one of the largest and most forested nations on earth, trees are now releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they absorb.
A similar metamorphosis seems to be taking place in the Amazon and Congo rainforests. Moreover, the soot produced by wildfires can float up into the atmosphere and settle back down on snowy regions elsewhere, darkening them, which further contributes to global heating. It appears that a terrible feedback loop could be forming: Trees burn, warming the world; the world warms, and more trees burn.
Put another way, I worry our forests are now acting as amplifiers of our ecological actions; that if we continue to heat the climate, trees will only accelerate the warming.
This phenomenon jibes with the teachings of many Indigenous cultures, which hold that certain trees are inhabited by spirits who, if the tree is unceremoniously killed, will exact their revenge on you or your relatives. The kodama of Japan, the aos si of Ireland, the radande of Sweden, the yaksha of India, the jumbies of the Caribbean, the Iroko-Man of Nigeria, the kumaka akiri of the Amazon — all are variations on this theme.
The ancient Greeks and Romans held a similar belief regarding nymphs and dryads. In one of history’s most haunting ecological fables, Ovid recounts how the arrogant king Erysichthon, having felled a sacred oak inhabited by a dryad, is cursed by the gods with an eternal and all-consuming hunger. Trying to fill his bottomless belly, he eventually sells his daughter into slavery and then gnaws off his own limbs.
The Nuu-chah-nulth philosopher Umeek, rather than referring to nature “spirits,” sometimes substitutes the word “powers,” which is easier for us in urbanized cultures — who are raised with scant ecological knowledge, but a rich understanding of power relations — to grasp. For me, this tiny semantic shift is transformative. Looking at the natural world as a mosh pit of powers, I find it violently, gloriously reanimated. I understand that I am just one small frail human body, pushed around by larger powers, in a crowded universe.
The world’s forests are one such divine power — a god so vast it can be seen from outer space, a god so powerful it can scorch the planet, a god so wily that, even when it dies, it can turn to smoke and sneak into our homes, our lungs, up into the very vessels of our brains. Like all gods, the forest demands respect. It demands care. And, from time to time, it demands sacrifice.
Talk of “sacrifice” has fallen almost entirely out of the environmental discourse of late. After all, what good is personal sacrifice when A.I. data centers and crypto mining outfits are busy polluting the atmosphere at the same rate as entire nations? Many people have come to feel helpless before the demigods of the tech industry, and understandably so. But wildfires — and heat waves and hurricanes and droughts — remind us that there are powers much higher than any corporation.
The prophets of scientific animism — ecologists and climate researchers — are in near-unanimous agreement that, to save ourselves from ecological collapse, what is needed are not just small everyday acts of sacrifice, like forgoing a morning latte. We need to sacrifice something big. We need to replace the fossil fuels of coal and oil with wind and sun, and we need to transform a system based on maximizing profit into one aimed at balancing ecological, communal and personal well-being. In other words, we need to sacrifice carbon capitalism itself.
Otherwise, the forests, and the other awesome powers that inhabit this wild planet, will continue to punish us. This is no mere metaphor. It is a literal, bodily truth. The choice is clear: Either we give up carbon capitalism to appease our earthly gods, or our world will continue to burn.
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