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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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We need as many people there as possible to carry our message - no more of our tax dollars for endless wars. Can we count you in? Sign up here:
https://www.codepink.org/novdc26
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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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 ‘Freedom Zone’ launches important human rights event October 30 Global Festival in Support of Russian Political Prisoners _________________________________________________________ THE LOCATIONS: Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, New York, Minnesota, Budva, Melbourne, Helsinki, Haifa, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vilnius, São Paulo, Florianópolis, Batumi, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Riga, Paris, Yerevan, Milan, Vienna, London, Madrid THE AUDIENCE: Anyone concerned about political prisoners in Russia
Lectures, auctions, letter evenings, film screenings and other events will take place in more than 20 countries, including the US, Brazil and Australia, demonstrating worldwide solidarity with the prisoners of the Russian regime. Speakers in different cities will include such well-known opponents of the Putin regime as Daria Serenko, Mikhail Lobanov, Sasha and Nadezhda Skochilenko, Ivan Philippov, Alexey Ponomaryov and other prominent Russian exiles. Funds raised will go towards supporting political prisoners, covering the costs of legal representation, visits from loved ones and other needs. It is also possible to join the international campaign by making an online donation. This global festival will be a tangible expression of opposition to lawlessness in Russia and support for its victims. Let’s show that we stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have been unjustly convicted! ______________________________________________ ‘Freedom Zone’ was founded by Kseniia Kagarlitskaia, daughter of political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky. Since 2024, the organisation has been holding charity events (festivals) abroad to raise funds for political prisoners in Russia, raising awareness of the unlawful persecution and inhumane prison conditions faced by people in the Russian Federation, as well as campaigning for the release of political prisoners. Website: https://freedom-zone.com/festival Contact: Kseniia Kagarlitskaiazona.svobody@gmail.com +38268347993 Telegram @pruesha ___________________________________________________________________ Donation link: https://buymeacoffee.com/zonasvobodk 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) France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country
The National Rally, already ahead in the polls, presented itself as the party best placed to restore law and order.
By Catherine Porter, Reporting from Paris, Oct. 19, 2026
“Sunday was a day of mourning, shock and finger pointing in France. The day before, huge, peaceful protests for better school conditions and against rising living costs were overshadowed by black-clad and often masked agitators of unclear affiliation who attacked government buildings and shops across the country, sometimes stealing wine or electronics. For the National Rally, which bills itself as the party of law and order as well as an advocate for expelling unauthorized immigrants, Sunday was also a day of political opportunity. …The National Rally supports a bigger, stronger police force, and campaigned in legislative elections in 2024 for mandatory minimum sentences and an end to reduced sentences, as well as building more prisons. It also pledged to lower the age when defendants can be tried as adults by two years, to 16, and to cut state subsidies to the parents of juvenile criminals.”
The aftermath of protests in central Bordeaux on Sunday. Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After riots erupted this weekend in cities across France, its centrist government blamed the main far-left party, accusing its politicians of inciting the violence. That party blamed the government, accusing it of stirring public anger through years of bad governance and heavy-handed policing.
What did the main far-right party do? It blamed both, and launched into campaign mode.
“We are paying for decades of being soft on crime, of weak authority, of the moral, psychological, and material disarmament of our internal security forces,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said after emerging from a police station in central Paris on Sunday. He said had gone there to support police officers.
Then he addressed France’s “honest citizens” who were stunned on Sunday by the smashed storefronts and burned-out businesses destroyed by rioters the night before. He said they had a vital role to play in reinstating national stability. And that would be by voting in the coming election for his party.
“People need to wake up now,” Mr. Bardella said. “They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”
Sunday was a day of mourning, shock and finger pointing in France. The day before, huge peaceful protests for better school conditions and against rising living costs were overshadowed by black-clad and often masked agitators of unclear affiliation who attacked government buildings and shops across the country, sometimes stealing wine or electronics.
For the National Rally, which bills itself as the party of law and order as well as an advocate for expelling unauthorized immigrants, Sunday was also a day of political opportunity. It is six months before a presidential election that the party’s candidate, Marine Le Pen, is the favorite to win.
“The picture of France emerging this morning, in light of all the destruction, plays well into their hands,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. “We can clearly see that the National Rally is not a loser here.”
Ms. Le Pen has tried to detoxify the party, forcing out its founder, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was notorious for making racist, homophobic and antisemitic comments. But the party has never entirely disavowed him, many of its candidates have made racist or antisemitic remarks, and France’s top judges have maintained its formal designation as a far-right party.
The party’s approach to the riots mirrors how far-right groups across Europe are presenting themselves as the solution to different kinds of social and governmental challenges. In July, Spain’s government briefly lost control of the borders of a Spanish territory in North Africa, allowing a surge of migrants and handing the country’s far-right party, Vox, a new issue to campaign on. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, is leading national polls, in part by channeling anxiety over the country’s identity.
In France this week, as Mr. Bardella criticized the government’s policing, Ms. Le Pen seized the moment to criticize Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the main far-left party, France Unbowed, and one of her main rivals for the presidency. She said “legitimate social demands” had been “hijacked by the far left and the rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon” and his colleagues, whom she accused of fostering chaos by “legitimizing violence” — an accusation that the party denies.
The riots arrived at a sensitive time in France, with the country already dealing with a daunting budget deficit and a deadlocked Parliament in which no party has a majority.
“The far right are sure to gain from this,” said Alexis Veller, 53, a filmmaker, who stopped his motorcycle on Sunday morning to take photos of broken storefront windows and tagged walls in central Paris. “We are a very fractured country,” he said. “The situation is very, very worrying.”
Political analysts cautioned that the six months until the election is a long time in politics, and that voters’ motivations are complex and rarely focused on a single issue.
Still, the violence perfectly aligned with the image the National Rally has long painted of a France divided into two and battling for survival, said Vincent Martigny, a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur.
The party has portrayed the country as split between the France of the city centers — filled with woke students and rioters, it says — and the “good France” in the quiet countryside, he said.
“They try to oppose these two Frances, for an obvious reason, because their electorate is not in the city centers, nor in the suburbs, they are clearly in this other France,” Mr. Martigny said, adding that “this fuels the feeling decay, of decline.”
Whether the unrest offers a long-term bump in the National Rally’s fortunes will depend, in part, on if the protests continue, he said.
On Sunday evening, Ms. Le Pen released a video address in which she painted this very picture of a divided France. She was filmed sitting behind a wooden desk, with the French flag behind her, hands clasped — the image of a president in waiting.
“I condemn the hijacking of this anger by thugs who are sowing chaos in the cities of France,” she said.
“In six months,” she said, “the French people will be able to choose a different path: That of restored authority and security.”
The National Rally supports a bigger, stronger police force, and campaigned in legislative elections in 2024 for mandatory minimum sentences and an end to reduced sentences, as well as building more prisons. It also pledged to lower the age when defendants can be tried as adults by two years, to 16, and to cut state subsidies to the parents of juvenile criminals.
Since the current wave of protests broke out in working-class suburban high schools, Mr. Bardella has condemned students causing damage to schools and expressed support for police officers injured in confrontations with protesters.
Across the Atlantic, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who have both expressed support for Ms. Le Pen in the past, weighed in on the unrest in ways that amplified the National Rally’s critiques. Though the identities of the black-clad and masked rioters are largely unknown, the American leaders portrayed the unrest as caused by immigrants.
“France is burning!” Mr. Trump said on social media. “The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country. Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!”
Mr. Vance blamed the violence on “Western liberals” who “imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
He added: “I hope Americans are paying attention. This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”
Given how unpopular Mr. Trump’s government is in France, it was not clear whether those messages would help or hinder the National Rally.
At the police station on Sunday, Mr. Bardella was confronted by the area’s Green lawmaker, Pouria Amirshahi, who was touring his constituency wearing the tricolor sash of an elected official. It was scandalous, he said, that while he was working, Mr. Bardella was out campaigning.
“They spend their time, as you can see, rubbing their hands together over this violence as if their time has come,” Mr. Amirshahi said.
Mr. Amirshahi then turned to the camera.
“We in France should unite,” he said. “We should stand together in the face of the challenge ahead of us, and not fall into this pattern of division and this pornography of violence that seems to excite him right now.”
But Mr. Bardella wasn’t listening. He had already hopped into a car and left.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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2) France to Impose Curfews After Nationwide Rioting
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended police efforts and pledged to restore order as government ministers acknowledged failures.
By Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Reporting from Paris, Oct. 19, 2026
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of France said he had ordered localized curfews for Monday night in some French towns and neighborhoods, as the government moved to reassert control after the worst riots in decades hit cities around the country.
While ministers in Mr. Lecornu’s government acknowledged failures in handling the weekend riots, the prime minister struck a different tone, saying that the police had done a good job against a “shadowy network” of far-left instigators who he said were seeking to orchestrate “a profound disorder in the country leading up to the presidential election.”
“While we witnessed very difficult scenes involving violence against property, no one was killed, and that is a miracle,” Mr. Lecornu said, emerging from an emergency meeting of ministers on Monday afternoon.
He told reporters that a massive police operation was underway — with “practically” 200 investigators in Paris alone working to track down the looters.
“My determination to restore order is absolute,” Mr. Lecornu said, vowing to use “whatever tools are at the government’s disposal.”
He did not provide specifics on where the curfews were expected, saying only they were for places that had been especially affected by unrest and that a map would be provided later on Monday.
Earlier in the day, France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered a mea culpa on national radio, saying that the police had been underprepared to deal with the scale of the riots that spun off from the mostly peaceful protests held across the country. Mr. Nuñez said he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron but that it had not been accepted.
The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, also acknowledged that the authorities had “undeniably failed” in the face of the violence — the biggest unrest to hit France in years — and said on French television that there had been “a failure in intelligence.”
The government estimated that at least 3,000 businesses across the country had been pillaged over the weekend, double the figure given on Sunday by the federation of commerce and distribution.
Mr. Lecornu said that workers affected by the riots could access partial unemployment payments starting on Tuesday, and that the government was pushing insurance companies to accelerate the process of reimbursements.
“We must enable shopkeepers to get back on their feet very quickly,” he said.
It was unclear if those words would assure rattled citizens and furious mayors, many of whom demanded answers from the national government on Monday.
Benoît Payan, the mayor of Marseille, blamed the government and the police for “delivering” that city, France’s second largest, to “looters and rioters.”
Speaking on French radio, he accused the region’s prefect of inflating the number of rioters that had attacked city hall and local stores, and said that he was seeking “explanations” and “the guarantee that this will not happen again” from the government.
“I want compensation down to the last cent,” he added, saying: “You cannot let a country sink into a political crisis without an answer.”
After sporadic episodes of violence and looting persisted in several French cities on Sunday — including in Paris, where the police chief said 351 people had been arrested — several cities undertook measures aimed at restoring calm on Monday.
Even before Mr. Lecornu said he had instructed prefects to impose targeted curfews in certain places, a few cities had announced their plans to do so.
The authorities in Marseille banned gatherings throughout the city from 12 to 8 p.m. that day, a local official said on social media. In Denain, a small town in northern France, city officials said on social media that a curfew would be in place from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. through Oct. 25.
The mayor of Coulaines, in western France, made his announcement after the prime minister’s call, saying his town would have a curfew for minors after 11 p.m.
“I think that at the state level, it would be necessary to implement similar measures,” he said in a video posted on social media. “And why not declare a state of emergency if the raids and looting continue?”
Amid calls for calm and order, there were questions about what would happen next.
The students who started a protest movement more than a month ago by blockading their high schools to demand better conditions are now on a two-week vacation. However, other groups have joined the protests in solidarity and to highlight their own grievances, with some seemingly determined to keep the movement going.
A group of university students blocked entrances to the Louvre Museum on Monday morning, preventing it from opening its doors. Students also blockaded the Paris campus of Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities. The police were called to the scene, according to student unions and a spokeswoman for the university.
Some protesters who took part in the weekend’s huge demonstrations have already called for another mass action next weekend. On Monday, Mr. Nuñez said that police numbers would be reinforced across the country, “particularly this weekend.”
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3) To Find Criminals and Child Exploitation in Gold Mines, We Just Had to Look
Layers of people certify that gold is free from rights abuses and criminality. Nobody makes them leave their desks.
By Justin Scheck, Oct. 19, 2026
Labor abuses and criminality are not hard to find in the world’s unlicensed gold mines. Assuming someone visits. Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
In the past year, I’ve seen toddlers working in gold mines. I’ve met miners who pay a drug cartel for the right to dig, and watched a boy drink from an underground mine’s wastewater pipe. I met workers in Colombia whose hands tremble from mercury poisoning.
One thing they have in common is that they supply gold to the supposedly tightly controlled marketplace of Wall Street financiers, central banks and government mints.
As my colleagues and I unraveled how that was possible, we kept coming back to one key point: The people who are supposed to keep dirty gold out of the legitimate marketplace rarely actually visit the mines.
That’s the gaping hole at the center of the world’s mainstream gold market. The industry has layers of people tasked with certifying that supplies are free from abuse and criminality, but nobody makes them leave their desks in places like London and Geneva.
The Times this week reported that the London Bullion Market Association, the closest thing the industry has to a regulator, has repeatedly allowed gold into the market that has been mined by criminal gangs, a drug cartel and children. In one case, we found the association helped a refiner paper over apparent violations.
Human rights abuses and criminality are often obvious, if you show up and ask. Earlier this year, I visited a mine in Northern Colombia, where miners told us they pay a drug cartel for the right work there. The gold was certified as meeting the industry’s highest standards, and was sold to a supplier of the U.S. Mint.
Similarly, my colleagues revealed that President Trump hurriedly allowed gold imports from Venezuela before independent inspectors could visit the mines and before traders had finished their due diligence.
Venezuelan mines are notoriously linked to corruption and criminality; the national gold company is designated a U.S. security threat. The importer hired one of the world’s top supply-chain experts, who praised the import plan without ever visiting the mines.
A Times reporter visited and quickly found that gangs were profiting from the gold.
I visited mines in Madagascar where children panned for gold in raw sewage and workers hammered rock, with no helmets or shoes, in shafts hundreds of feet deep. Adolescents said the pull of gold is stronger than that of school.
“I’ve already tasted money,” said a 15-year-old boy named Fredo who hauls 20-liter water tanks for miners.
Four decades ago, the Bank of England regulated the gold market, effectively as an arm of the British government. But in 1987, it passed its oversight to the L.B.M.A., an industry group run by the world’s biggest banks and refiners.
For years the L.B.M.A. was mainly concerned with gold purity and weight, not rights abuses and environmental damage. Gold was so much cheaper then. So illegal gold mining, while problematic, was not nearly as profitable, widespread and catastrophic.
But over the past two decades, wealthy investors and governments fueled a price run-up that sent gold to record highs (today’s price is roughly four times what it was in 2010). A destructive illegal-mining boom followed in some of the world’s poorest places.
Miners, and criminals who profit from them, have rushed into areas that are ecologically and politically sensitive, and often dangerous.
Brazilian gangs have moved mining barges hundreds of miles upriver, into some of the Amazon’s most remote corners. Gold mines have dumped millions of tons of waste into Papua New Guinea’s rivers. Close to 200 people have died this year at mines in Uganda, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Sumatra.
In an effort to fight the worst abuses, the United States and the European Union passed laws attempting to exclude so-called “conflict minerals” from the global supply.
In response, the L.B.M.A. issued rules aimed at eliminating money laundering, corruption, organized crime and child abuse from the supply chain. Since 2012, refiners have had to conduct annual audits to show that they followed those rules.
One major requirement: Refiners who process gold from small-scale operations must inspect the mines. This is different from government inspections. Officials in corrupt governments or countries with weak human rights records have an incentive to say that their gold is mined cleanly. The industry inspections are meant to ensure it.
But loopholes and lax enforcement mean inspections don’t always happen. If gold from a high-risk mine passes through a middleman, for example, the refiner can obscure its source. That’s how drug cartel gold ended up at the U.S. Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint. The drug connections melted away in a cauldron of gold in Texas.
In Madagascar, gold from unlicensed mines sailed into the legitimate marketplace. Despite the L.B.M.A.’s written rules, the refiner said it did not need to inspect the mines itself. The gold was certified as meeting the highest levels in the industry.
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4) Israeli Police Detain 10 Over Violent Settler Attacks in West Bank
Israel has faced pressure, including from the United States, to investigate the attacks. Rights groups say most inquiries into extremist assaults on Palestinians go nowhere.
By Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 19, 2026
Masked Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians as they stormed an olive grove during the annual harvest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Friday. Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
The Israeli police said they detained at least 10 Israelis on Monday after recent attacks in the West Bank in which Palestinians were assaulted during the annual olive harvest, along with a U.S. citizen and European diplomats.
The detainees were all Israeli settlers residing in the occupied West Bank, according to Honenu, a pro-settler legal aid group representing them. The Israeli police statement did not say how many were detained in connection with specific attacks, adding that some of the settlers were detained for entering a closed Israeli military zone.
Israel has faced international pressure — including from the Trump administration — to crack down on settler violence. But rights groups say the vast majority of investigations into attacks on Palestinians end without convictions, effectively granting some impunity.
Israeli extremist attacks on Palestinians in the territory have spiked sharply in recent weeks as large groups of Palestinians have gathered to pick olives on the outskirts of their towns. The trade is an important economic lifeline for rural Palestinian villages, as well as a treasured cultural rite.
On Friday, masked assailants were filmed beating Heidi Levine, 63, a U.S. citizen who was photographing the harvest for The Washington Post. The attackers broke Ms. Levine’s rib, shattered her vertebrae and badly wounded her finger, according to her family, who said she later had to undergo surgery.
The violence in the West Bank continued into the weekend. On Saturday, a group of club-wielding men assaulted Palestinians and a European diplomatic convoy participating in the harvest in the largely Christian town of Taybeh, according to witnesses. A visiting French mayor said the attackers struck him and knocked him to the ground. The episode prompted condemnations from the European Union.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador, praised the arrests overnight on Monday as a “very positive development.” Mr. Huckabee, a longtime supporter of the Israeli settler movement, had previously denounced the assault on Ms. Levine, calling it a “despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards,” in a post on social media.
“We have called for a full investigation, arrest, and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law to whoever participated in this,” Mr. Huckabee said on Saturday.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers reside in the occupied West Bank alongside about three million Palestinians. While the Israelis generally enjoy the same rights and privileges as their compatriots inside Israel, Palestinians live under military rule, with their movements tightly controlled by Israel.
Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians there have risen sharply since the Gaza war began in late 2023, and are part of a broader campaign of violence that has prompted entire Palestinian communities to flee. Some former senior Israeli officials, including generals who formerly oversaw the West Bank, have called the violence “Jewish terrorism.”
While the Israeli authorities have prosecuted some of the more high-profile offenders, the vast majority of investigations do not lead to convictions, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group. Around 93 percent of investigations tracked by Yesh Din over the past two decades ended without indictments.
Critics of the current Israeli government say it has emboldened Jewish extremists by doing little to rein them in. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is currently facing a neck-and-neck election this month, has suggested the most recent attacks could be part of a “campaign to smear Israel.”
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister who oversees the police, was a lawyer before he entered government, and made a career of defending Israelis accused of attacks on Palestinians. A spokesman for Mr. Ben-Gvir did not respond to a request for comment on the recent attacks on Ms. Levine and the European diplomatic convoy.
The Israeli military previously used administrative detention — holding people without formal charges or a trial — to crack down on settlers accused of the gravest offenses. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, ended the practice against Israelis, although it is still widely used against Palestinians.
On Monday, Mr. Katz reiterated that he would not use administrative detention against Israeli settlers, calling it “a draconian measure.” More than 3,000 Palestinians are currently detained under the practice in Israeli prisons, according to HaMoked, an Israeli rights group.
Heedo Abu Laban and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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5) At a Last-Hope Health Clinic, Desperation, Kindness and Fear for What’s Next
These doctors and community health workers are a safety net for patients losing coverage as premiums soar and Medicaid cuts mount, even as their clinic struggles to stay afloat.
By Jan Hoffman, Photographs by Erin Schaff, Reporting from Nampa, Idaho, Oct. 19, 2026
The early morning caller to Dr. Sarah Hershman’s personal cellphone was a patient.
Dr. Hershman, who works at a public health clinic in Nampa, Idaho, isn’t supposed to give out her private number. But she has been sharing it with some patients who she knows have no other recourse, telling them, “You really need to be able to contact me.”
Sophia Perez, 28, whose family has no health insurance, spoke in a frightened voice. Her husband, John, had been welding, she told Dr. Hershman, when he felt a hot sting on his eyeball. Could it have been hit by a metal shard? They could not afford a visit to a hospital emergency room.
Dr. Hershman asked careful questions and slipped him into the clinic’s packed Saturday roster.
Full Circle Health, where Dr. Hershman practices family medicine, has long been a last-hope safety net in the American health system. It is one of 1,400 networks known as federally qualified health centers with thousands of sites that receive federal funds to care for patients regardless of their ability to pay.
Now their caseloads are growing, even as revenues are falling. With cuts to Medicaid mounting and the cost of Obamacare insurance plans soaring, the clinic’s doctors and counselors are going to new lengths to patch together care for people with complex medical issues who are underinsured and uninsured.
Dr. Hershman and her colleagues have been spending hours providing unpaid care, emailing advice, calling after hours. They forage for cheaper but sometimes less effective medicines and spend weeks adjusting doses to make them as effective as possible. They negotiate with specialists to accept patients and offer to perform the work-up exams and follow-ups themselves.
Idaho has been one of the most aggressive states to slash Medicaid rolls over the past few years, affecting patients as well as clinics like Full Circle’s, which rely heavily on those funds to stay solvent. Now pressures on patients as well as clinics are about to become even worse, not only in the state but also throughout the country.
As harvest season for sugar beets, onions and potatoes winds down here, two ominous events loom on the calendar.
The annual enrollment period for Your Health Idaho, the state’s Obamacare marketplace, began on Oct. 15, but the generous government subsidies that helped make plans affordable are no longer available because Congress declined to renew them. Like many people, Mrs. Perez, whose job at an orthodontist practice includes filing insurance claims for patients yet cannot wrangle health care for her husband and 2-year-old, found that even the cheapest plan was out of reach. “It was all so overwhelming,” she said with tears in her eyes during her half-hour lunch break.
And come January, many patients covered by Medicaid — whose incomes are well under the state’s limits — may lose coverage. On New Year’s Day, new work requirements for eligibility, enacted as part of President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, begin across the country. Idaho’s rules are among the nation’s most stringent.
Anxious Preparations
At 8 a.m., Debbie Lehnert, a community health worker at the clinic, replenished a filing cabinet drawer with patient stress busters for the day: Bubble wrap for popping and Little Debbie Swiss rolls, the primal ones with chocolate cake, cream filling and fudge coating.
Ms. Lehnert’s responsibilities include connecting distressed patients with emergency health coverage and support services.
For weeks, she and her peers in public health clinics across the state have been under a weighty new burden: The rapidly approaching Medicaid work rules. Community health workers have been convening regularly in videoconferences to puzzle through the rules, discussing patient hypotheticals that none of them can answer with certainty.
Starting in January, Idaho patients will have to show documentation that they have worked or volunteered at least 80 hours a month for the previous three months. (Most states will require one month.) Reauthorization for the program will double in frequency, from the traditional yearly review to every six months. The requirements are expected to eventually reduce Medicaid rolls nationwide by five million people, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
One of Ms. Lehnert’s most urgent tasks right now is to alert patients. She dialed the next one on her bottomless list. The young man, who can’t get his diabetes under control, had qualified for Medicaid after he lost his job at the post office for using too many sick days. Now his reauthorization date coincides with the start of the new work rules.
“I just wanted to see where you are in that process, if there’s anything I can do to help with that?” Ms. Lehnert said, gently prodding. “January is just around the corner.”
Given the man’s bleak health, it is unlikely he will be able to produce three pay stubs in time. Ms. Lehnert said that with the clinic’s records about his chronic diabetes, they could collaborate to seek an initial medical exemption.
“My hope is that would give you time to focus on getting better and finding employment, so that the second determination in six months would be easier,” she said.
“OK, yeah,” he replied dully.
Ms. Lehnert suggested they meet to attack the paperwork together. Or do a three-way call with a state assistant. Or he could file online, where, studies show, procedural errors, such as computer mistakes and confusion over directions, are the biggest reasons for lost coverage.
“OK, yeah,” he said.
“So which would you like to choose?” she pressed.
He chose online.
After they hung up, Ms. Lehnert buried her head in her hands.
“I truly feel like this is a calling, and I won’t do anything else,” she said, giving her dark curls an emphatic shake. “But these days, I’ve never hated doing my job more.”
Working, but Earning Too Much
It was just after 6 p.m. on a Thursday, but the buzzy restaurant was already slammed with people waiting for tables. Amid the kitchen chaos, Oscar Casarez, 37, a line cook and a patient at the Nampa clinic, kept his head down, juggling grill times and rhythmically seasoning burgers, steaks and salmon.
Just over a year ago, Mr. Casarez, lightheaded and gasping, drove himself to a hospital in septic shock. He was placed in a medically induced coma. By the time he was discharged nearly four weeks later, his employer had replaced him, leaving him uninsured as well as unemployed.
To cover Mr. Casarez’s six-figure bill, the hospital helped him get emergency Medicaid, which carried him through countless clinic visits, scans, blood transfusions and medications as well as hospital stays each time his newly diagnosed severe ulcerative colitis flared up.
Yet he managed to secure line-cook shifts. In May, he was booted off Medicaid because he started earning too much.
He works at two restaurants; neither offers health insurance. But his health problems continue: He also has a blood clot in his liver.
To help, Dr. Amanda Aman, his primary care doctor at the Nampa clinic, has been coordinating with a local gastroenterologist so she can monitor him at the clinic for lower fees than the specialist would charge. Case managers at the clinic scrounged for less expensive medication. After determining that the only drug that quells his colitis attacks requires an out-of-pocket monthly cost of more than $14,000, they helped enroll him in a special program that will provide the drug free for a year.
Still, given his precarious health, Mr. Casarez knows he needs insurance. His only option is to buy a plan on the state’s Obamacare marketplace.
He will likely have to select the most bare-bones policy, which has monthly premiums of about $310 and a deductible of $10,000. The plan doesn’t even cover his gastroenterologist.
At most, when he works 10 straight days of double shifts (to get an entire weekend with his 9-year-old son), Mr. Casarez can earn $3,800 a month. Rent takes a $1,400 chunk; then there are utilities, car payments, gas, child support, food, toiletries.
It comes down to this, he said: He can pay bills and insurance by working overtime at two jobs, almost guaranteeing a slow, steady death march. Or he can work fewer hours and get on Medicaid but have no money for housing and bills.
“I feel like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” he said.
‘Medicaid Tears’
Late one afternoon, Dr. Ty Waters, the tattooed director of Full Circle’s Nampa South clinic, unfurled himself into a chair in Ms. Lehnert’s office. He mused sarcastically about getting teardrops tattooed down one cheekbone, prison gang style, to signal the fights he gets into on behalf of his patients. He would nickname the tattoos his “Medicaid tears.”
Recently, a manual laborer without insurance injured his leg but held off coming in for weeks, wary of racking up a flurry of the clinic’s income-adjusted fees. When at last he limped in, Dr. Waters, who suspected that the man had torn his anterior cruciate ligament, treated him free of charge, put him in a stabilizing brace so he could return to work and coordinated with an orthopedist who would see him without requiring an expensive M.R.I.
“Our patients are basically people who are already struggling, who lose coverage and then get penalized for asking for help,” Dr. Waters said.
Dr. Hershman, who teaches family medicine to residents at the clinic, poked her head into Ms. Lehnert’s office, rubbing her face wearily. Every week, she allows a battered woman to sit in a clinic room for as long as she needs because the woman feels safe there. Dr. Hershman bills only a few dollars for the visit. It’s hardly conventional health care, she said, “but it’s that nexus of what we can do to improve their social situation and, therefore, their health outcomes.”
Her eyes glistened. “I love my patients, and I want to show up every day and be the person that they need,” she said. “Because even though this job is hard, being them is so, so much harder.”
(Dr. Hershman knows personally what it’s like to face crushing medical debt: After being treated for cancer recently, she discovered that her insurance doesn’t cover fertility preservation procedures. In addition, she owes $450,000 for her medical education.)
Too many times, Dr. Hershman said, she has sat with deathly ill patients who are nonetheless consumed with worries about cost, anxious about burdening their survivors with medical bills.
She treated a 59-year-old tech writer with a chronic gastrointestinal bleed that had turned life-threatening: Normal hemoglobin levels for men range between 13.5 and 17.5; his was 3.5. Or, as she put it: “He literally had no blood in the tank. I don’t know how his brain was functioning.”
She felt strongly that he needed to be hospitalized in intensive care because he required emergency surgery and, likely, a stay of five days. Chatting him up about his adored grandbaby, she almost got him to agree.
But then he dug in and, however reluctantly, refused. Her notes from that visit read: “Pt. doesn’t want to be here because of financial situation. Working to get insurance with open enrollment but has limited means.”
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6) The French Kids Are All Right. It’s the Rest of Us I’m Worried About.
By Glynnis MacNicol, Oct. 19, 2026
Ms. MacNicol is a contributing Opinion writer. She wrote from Paris.
Jack Taylor/Reuters
On Saturday, protests shut down large swaths of Paris. In parts of the city and around the country, pockets of these demonstrations turned violent. Looting and arson marked streets near Place de la République and in the First Arrondissement, where shop windows were broken and electric bikes were set on fire. In the city of Limoges, the 19th-century Hôtel de Ville went up in flames; in Lyon, a tourist office blazed.
Protests here began in late September with students in the suburbs exhausted by the conditions of their schools, including their inability to cool or heat classrooms, keep out rats or simply keep teachers. This weekend, hundreds of thousands of French men and women joined the students on the streets in an expression of mass frustration over the cost of living, extreme wealth disparity, government paralysis and a faltering social welfare system.
For the past decade, I have spent part of every year in Paris. Protests are a fact of life here, but Saturday’s were different, larger, more intense. Many groups, including the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) — a protest movement that seized the country in 2018 and 2019 over the falling quality of life — joined the students, along with labor unions.
I left the Left Bank and set out on foot for Bastille, 30 minutes away across the Seine, on Saturday around noon. The Bastille column was covered in graffiti from a demonstration the previous week. There I caught the tail end of a procession of people making their way toward Place de la République. It was a largely peaceful group of mostly young people, some holding signs mocking President Emmanuel Macron, some waving French flags. Intermittently, marchers would break out in chanting and clapping.
At République, police officers ringed the square, dressed in riot gear as though preparing to go to war. It was crowded but civil. Some people wore surgical masks, others gas masks, ready for tear gas, the faint smell of which was already in the air. Television crews interviewed protesters. A few climbed the statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, and waved French flags. Shortly after I arrived, flash bangs began going off on one of the side streets toward Canal St. Martin, and canisters of tear gas could be seen sailing through the air. Crowds began running back into the square. As the tear gas grew thicker, I sought a quick exit down the narrow path the police had provided for people to leave.
It was only on Sunday that I saw the shattered windows, looted stores and charred remains of electric bikes.
The violence of the protests, which were amplified on social media and apparently the result of rioters exploiting the moment, threatens to undermine the message of the students and risks resulting in the exact opposite of their goals, which is to petition for more government resources devoted to education and, by extension, a more sustainable future.
These days of protest and rage have struck me as more than just a rebuff to the French government. The students’ fury is giving voice to some larger social failures many of us, in France and elsewhere, often fail to face directly: the climate catastrophe, the terror of artificial intelligence, the faltering economic picture. The students’ determination to voice their anger and frustration over the future is a necessary and courageous reminder that we all need to be facing facts and acting on them.
On my bike ride home from République on Saturday, I encountered an impromptu gathering of students singing the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. As they passed the intersection, some set down bikes and other objects to block cars and make the trip more difficult for everyone. That’s as it should be, I thought, as I navigated past the makeshift barricades. Against the backdrop of so many destructive forces, none of us, anywhere, should be allowed to proceed easily.
Since late spring, a series of calamities, in quick succession, have taken a battering ram to the fantasy that Paris is some sort of respite from the problems plaguing the world. A number of punishing, record-breaking heat waves roiled the country, beginning in May. Temperatures in Paris soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit again and again this summer. Joyful images of young Parisians leaping into the Canal St. Martin and the Seine were sobered by a national death toll of nearly 8,000 and fires that burned tens of thousands of acres of land. The spectacle of haute couture shows held in the extreme heat felt especially grotesque. Walking through the city this fall, I still see the tattered remains of silver foil hacked together to keep out the heat fluttering from windows. Every piece of store-bought chocolate I’ve purchased since summer is white from having melted and resolidified. As October began, I wandered into the Pride parade rescheduled after the extreme heat made it untenable.
And then the streets were aflame.
All this is happening against the impending presidential election next spring, which currently favors the far-right candidate Marine le Pen. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, chronicler of the interwar period (another era known for its wild abandon), a restlessness approaches hysteria, with menacing undertones that have finally burst to the fore with the protests. Mr. Macron, the target of much of the students’ anger and derision, didn’t help matters much by spending his Friday night with Celine Dion, dancing at the city’s most coveted concert just before parts of Paris burned.
In a speech broadcast live Sunday night, Mr. Macron made a point to differentiate between the protesters’ “legitimate demands” and “those who destroyed, smashed and looted.” He said, “We all feel anger and shame.”
Americans, in particular, have always been susceptible to the country’s siren call. Last year, France had a 14 percent increase in first-time residency permits issued to Americans. As life and politics in the United States have grown ever more harsh and punishing, Americans have craved France’s monthlong vacations and universal health care (if not the tax burden that supports them).
But now, with Saturday’s enormous— and enormously destructive — protests, the dream that there is a place of escape may be nearing an end. With their anger and determination to tap into France’s long history of revolution, students are showing the rest of the world that the only way to march into the dark future is together.
Loudly. And with cleareyed resolve. Their challenge now is to keep the violence at bay. If there is a French fantasy to pursue in these tumultuous times, this must be the one.
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7) A ‘Doom Loop’ Threatens France as Populism Confronts Markets
The turmoil shows the profound challenges facing governments stuck between unhappy citizens and wary bond investors.
By Eshe Nelson and Jim Tankersley, Oct. 20, 2026
Eshe Nelson, who reported from London, writes about the European economy. Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief.
Police officers during civil unrest in Paris on Sunday. Abdul Saboor/Reuters
When protests over high gas prices ripped through France in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron offered to enact about $11 billion in tax cuts and wage increases to try to quell the unrest.
Today, after protests over education turned violent, Mr. Macron is in no position to use money to bring calm to the streets.
That’s because the French government is also fighting the prospect of a crisis in its bond market. Investors have been dumping French debt, unsure of the government’s ability to manage its budget amid high interest rates and political uncertainty.
Announcing a big financial commitment to mollify protesters would likely rattle investors further and lead to another jump in the government’s borrowing costs. Mr. Macron, approaching the end of his time in office, is leading a centrist government without a governing majority. He is left in a tight spot: Both inaction and more spending could exacerbate France’s troubles and give populist politicians running for his seat next year a bigger opening to attract aggravated voters.
France is not the only country facing a debt trap. As borrowing grows in many wealthy nations, populist political parties are surging. Experts warn the mix could combust into an economic crisis.
Governments face a “doom loop,” in which market turmoil and political tumult feed off each other, according to Michal Brzozowski and Joanna Siwinska-Gorzelak, researchers at Poland’s University of Warsaw, who published a research paper on the relationship between populism and fiscal policy.
“The risk is less about a sudden debt default and more about a slow-motion economic drag,” they wrote in an email.
At the root of the problem is a considerable tension: Amid deep political and fiscal uncertainty, voters and investors appear to want different things.
Buyers of debt want to be adequately compensated for the risk of lending to governments. In turn they are shunning lawmakers who seem unable to make difficult choices, such as spending cuts or tax increases, to reduce yawning budget deficits. They are demanding higher interest payments, amid expectations that governments will keep borrowing a lot. This dynamic is unfolding most forcefully in France, but Germany, Japan and the United States are also contending with higher borrowing costs.
Voters, though, are increasingly turning to populist parties that largely reject the idea that budgets require painful trade-offs. Instead, they promise to protect generous retirement programs and other spending, while often proposing to cut taxes.
The resulting tension could spiral like this: Economically anxious voters turn to extreme populists, who promise a pain-free return to better days, and buyers of government debt recoil.
In France, the government bond yields, a measure of borrowing costs, have climbed to the highest since 2002. And in another worrisome sign, the gap between yields on French and German 10-year government debt has jumped to its widest since 2011. German yields are typically lower than French ones, but the growing difference shows that investors are demanding an ever higher premium to hold French debt.
10-year government bond yields
Not all of the turmoil in bond markets comes from government policies. One of the largest triggers for rising bond yields worldwide has been the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Higher energy prices have revived inflation and forced several central banks to raise interest rates.
No matter the cause, higher yields aggravate the already difficult situation facing some governments, which must spend more on debt interest payments at the expense of other priorities like education.
In Europe, where economic growth is lackluster, fiscal policy must do much of the hard work of reducing debt burdens. But raising taxes or cutting spending has been frequently met with strong public resistance because people already feel overtaxed and demand more in public services and welfare benefits.
Eventually these problems will come to a head, said Simon Radford, the director for policy and programming for the Milken Institute in Europe.
“If you’re not going to solve it with new growth, and if interest payments are outrunning growth, then eventually what can’t go on forever, won’t go on forever,” he said.
The turmoil in France began as demonstrations by high school students who wanted better classrooms and more teachers. Protests over the cost of living and funding for education and other services have spread through Europe, including in Belgium and Italy.
These financial troubles are particularly a problem for centrist political parties, said Ludovic Subran, the chief investment officer and chief economist at Allianz, the German insurance company. In many cases, these politicians want to use pledges of fiscal discipline to attract voters. But it often doesn’t work and instead and can leave the public with the impression that those politicians are largely powerless to improve conditions, he added.
“That’s really the Catch-22 of politics today,” Mr. Subran said. The politicians who have felt the disciplinary hand of the market are punished politically. “Then it gives extreme parties a boulevard to say whatever they want to say,” he added.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, won a pair of state elections last month and now leads national polls. Its leaders have criticized the incumbent government, led by the center-right Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for proposals meant to shore up future budgets — including changes in some pension plans and a gradual raising of the retirement age.
In Britain, the center-left Labour government has been trying to fend off the rise of Reform U.K., a far-right party led by Nigel Farage. Earlier this year, as Reform led in the polls, the Labour Party ousted Keir Starmer as prime minister, who prioritized keeping bond markets calm, in favor of Andy Burnham, a mayor from a city in Northern England who promised sweeping changes to how the country was run.
France is at the sharp end of this predicament in Europe.
Even in 2018, Mr. Macron’s plan to stop the protests caused tremors in the bond market. The government promised its extra spending would be paid for by budget cuts and the deficit would stay in line with European limits. Today, the fiscal situation is much tougher. The annual budget deficit and the public debt, which is nearly 120 percent of the size of the French economy, are much larger than they were in 2018.
While holding emergency meetings about the protests, France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, is trying to pass a budget for next year to narrow the deficit. But his minority government is facing stiff opposition as parties prepare for a presidential election in about six months. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen is the current front-runner, and polls suggest that she would face off against a far-left candidate.
Though Ms. Le Pen has proposed a vow to reduce the deficit, economists question the credibility of her financial plan, which would lower the retirement age while slashing spending on state bodies and cutting the country’s contribution to the European Union. All those measures would be difficult to enact. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, has alarmed investors by proposing to effectively cancel some of the country’s debt instead of repaying it.
France faces “triple uncertainty” because of budget negotiations, the presidential election and legislative elections that are likely to follow soon after, said Mr. Subran, the Allianz economist. Therefore, France’s bond yields might not come down soon.
“A lot of people are holding their breath,” he said.
The cost of high yields will be felt quickly. The French government expects to spend more than 90 billion euros ($100 billion) on debt interest payments next year, which is more than planned spending on defense and education, according to the French finance ministry, another political headache.
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8) It’s Not Just France. Europe’s Political Center Is Crumbling.
Europe’s centrist parties are losing ground among young people and workers, who are increasingly tempted by populist promises of radical change.
By Steven Erlanger, Oct. 20, 2026
Steven Erlanger, based in Berlin, writes about European politics and diplomacy.
“'The centerpiece has to be creating jobs and wage growth and career paths for people without college degrees and diverse skills,' he said. 'There must be an agenda for shared prosperity, which is why artificial intelligence and how it is used is critical.'”
A burned-out vehicle on Rue Yves Toudic in Paris on Monday after a weekend of rioting. Kiran Ridley/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Centrist parties are in trouble in Europe’s largest and most important nations. Anger over low economic growth, high inflation, sizable government debt and poor prospects for the young are feeding protest and populist parties of the far right and far left.
The mass riots in France, which started as protests over underfunded schools, are a shocking example. But the phenomenon has been building for years, with the perceived failure of liberal democracy to make good on its promises of a better future, especially for the young and the salaried working class.
There is a growing perception among many Europeans that traditional parties of the center-left and center-right do not offer real alternatives and are led by an educated elite that has lost its connection to the poor, the workers and the young. Facing rising deficits, expenses and interest rates, governments feel constrained in what they can do to respond.
Instead, many people are supporting parties like the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, leading the polls for the French presidency on the far right, and France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the far-left, running second. In Germany, they are turning to the far-right Alternative for Germany and the far-left Die Linke party.
With major elections coming in the next year in four of Europe’s most populous states — Spain, France, Italy and Poland — there are significant challenges coming from more extremist parties. Even in Italy, where protests erupted over the weekend, the right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, faces a former general, Roberto Vannacci, who is running even further to the right.
Hard-right parties also sit in the governments of the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Croatia, while Slovenia’s government relies on outside support from one, Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Law at HEC Paris, recently noted. And competition from even farther to the right is already pushing some of them to harden their positions.
Satisfaction with how democracy is working has been declining dramatically, according to regular opinion polling from the Pew Research Center. In France, Pew found this year, 69 percent of the population is dissatisfied with democracy. In Spain, it is 68 percent. In Italy, 62 percent. In Poland, the newest democracy after years of Soviet occupation, it is 47 percent. In the United States, it is 69 percent.
There are many reasons put forward for the decline in optimism and faith in centrist politics. But Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics, puts it simply. “We started taking democracy for granted,” he said.
Liberal democracy has failed to keep faith with ordinary citizens, and especially with the larger working class. “If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” he said.
Shared Prosperity
The rapid nationwide spread of the French protests to include workers and pensioners angry at inflation and high interest rates, especially given rising prices for energy and for borrowing costs, points to a larger failure of President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right government and of liberal democracy writ large.
The violence of what became riots in many cities is expected only to help Ms. Le Pen and her anti-liberal complaints about immigration and lawlessness.
Mr. Acemoglu, a professor at M.I.T., has tried to provide both an analysis and some prescriptions in a recent book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” In it, he outlines “two broad lines of failure” over the last half-century, which have led to widespread alienation and anti-establishment sentiment.
The first is what he calls the failure to deliver on shared prosperity, especially for a salaried working class hit by automation, globalization and sharply increased inequality, and which now feels deep anxiety about artificial intelligence.
Leaders have forgotten that a key part of their pact with voters is to “take care of the drains,” he said, to ensure the good functioning of the infrastructure of daily life, from roads to education to health care.
The second, Mr. Acemoglu said in an interview, is “the rise of top-down cultural politics,” whereby a college-educated elite now dominates even traditional Socialist and working-class parties throughout the Western world and in his view patronizes or dismisses the concerns of those who traditionally supported them.
As a result, working-class voters are moving toward populist parties on the far left and especially the far right, as in France and Germany, threatening traditional values, shrinking historically “large church” parties of the center and threatening the working of parliamentary democracy.
In Britain’s 2024 election, the two long-dominant parties, Labour and Conservative, won their lowest combined vote share in more than a century. The far-right Reform UK party surged in the polls last year, though it has since fallen somewhat.
Centrist parties need to regain the trust of voters that they not only hear them but empathize with them, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “A constant in all these countries are the people who feel left behind, who feel they are no part of the prosperity and security they see all around them,” he said.
The Center Under Stress
Germany offers another example of the exhaustion and splintering of the center.
The Volksparteien, or “people’s parties” of the center-right and center-left — the Christian Democratic Union (and its partner, the Christian Social Union), and the Social Democratic Party — alternated running democratic Germany since World War II. But they are being hollowed out, said Mr. Sokol, with workers and the young moving to more extreme parties, like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Die Linke.
Given the difficulty of forming coherent coalitions now, the two Volksparteien are locked together in a squabbling coalition that is increasingly unpopular and perceived as failing to deliver economic growth and security.
Under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the C.D.U. moved to the center, but it was cautious, “risking nothing, even in the face of obvious challenges,” said Norbert Röttgen, a prominent legislator in the party.
Those challenges included increased migration, a declining export market with China, sharpened tensions with Russia and slow economic growth. The move to the center and Ms. Merkel’s embrace of large-scale immigration, he said, alienated many of the party’s traditional conservative voters.
That gave space to the right, filled by the AfD, which is now attracting traditional C.D.U. voters among the working class, Mr. Röttgen said. “But to seriously deliver on our problems requires majorities, and this,” he said, “is our paradox.”
As for the Social Democrats, they took the path Mr. Acemoglu described of many left-wing parties, where intellectual elites and left-wing academics “conquered the party and disconnected it from its traditional voters,” Mr. Röttgen said.
An average of current opinion polls in Germany shows how hard it is to construct a workable centrist coalition.
The AfD is the most popular party, with some 28 percent support, followed by the C.D.U./C.S.U., with 19.8 percent. The Greens have 15 percent, and the Social Democrats only 13.1 percent, barely ahead of Die Linke, with 11.3 percent.
Both mainstream parties are divided internally about how to proceed — for the Christian Democrats, to move closer to the AfD and not just copy some of its policies; for the Social Democrats, to move farther to the left to defend itself against both the Greens and Die Linke.
A Splintered Europe
With these four important elections and the pull of the far right in each of them “we’re going to have a major transformation,” with fragmented governments, said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Right-wing coalitions will likely contain small far-right parties “which will keep the mainstream far-right parties hostage and may prevent them from moving to the center.”
If they do well, “then very quickly you’re trying to normalize them, because otherwise the European Union cannot function, and this is not making people feel more secure,” he said.
The French presidential election next spring will be key. A victory by Ms. Le Pen could have major implications for Brussels, for the euro, for NATO and for European support for Ukraine.
Mr. Acemoglu argues for “a big-tent populism,” that channels the anger of voters in the name of inclusivity.
“The centerpiece has to be creating jobs and wage growth and career paths for people without college degrees and diverse skills,” he said. “There must be an agenda for shared prosperity, which is why artificial intelligence and how it is used is critical.”
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9) France Extends Curfews in Major Cities After a Night of Calm
The targeted restrictions are part of a state effort to reassert control after the country’s largest riots in years, as those arrested in the chaos face expedited trials.
By Ségolène Le Stradic, Reporting from Paris, Oct. 20, 2026
The city hall building in Limoges, in central France, sustained serious damage after it was set on fire during a protest on Saturday. Credit...Pascal Lachenaud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Several French cities extended curfews through Tuesday night after the measures helped quell days of riots and looting, as the government sought to reassure a rattled country ahead of fresh protests expected later in the week.
“These localized curfews are efficient,” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told lawmakers on Tuesday, after cities like Paris, Marseille and Lille enacted restrictions on nighttime movements in some neighborhoods. “They helped to restore calm last night,” he added.
Mr. Lecornu also vowed that there would be a “massive” security deployment for further demonstrations planned for Saturday.
The French state is trying to reassert its authority after the country’s largest riots in years. Several government buildings were attacked and more than 3,000 shops were looted in unrest that started on Saturday, leading to the arrest of more than 2,500 people across France, officials said. About 1,000 police officers and gendarmes were injured over the weekend, according to Mr. Lecornu.
The attacks and looting spun off from massive, largely peaceful protests about school conditions and the rising cost of living.
In an attempt to address some of the cost-of-living concerns, the office of President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Tuesday that he had secured the delivery of an additional 200,000 tons of diesel per month from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain while in the Gulf region.
That volume, added to 95,000 tons previously secured from Saudi Arabia, represents roughly 10 percent of France’s monthly consumption, Mr. Macron’s office said in a statement. The deliveries will “help lower energy prices for our fellow citizens,” the statement added.
The French government is also under intense pressure to deliver a firm and swift judicial response to the unrest.
Courts in Paris, Marseille and elsewhere are scrambling to process hundreds of cases tied to last week’s arrests, often by holding additional trials with expedited proceedings. Those typically involve prosecutors and court-appointed lawyers churning through straightforward cases in which the accused is caught in the act.
Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, told reporters on Tuesday that about 150 people had already been incarcerated and that more than 800 people were expected to be tried in the coming days.
Mr. Darmanin said in a broadcast interview that those arrested included “people from immigrant backgrounds, people who are foreigners, but there are also people who are fully integrated and who are French.” He gave no further details about their nationalities, but added that 95 percent of those arrested were men and that 70 percent were adults.
“There are many convictions resulting in prison sentences with immediate incarceration,” Mr. Darmanin said. “In Limoges, 10 protesters attacked police officers. All 10 are in prison.”
A person accused of setting fire to the city hall of Limoges, a small city in central France, was arrested with the help of an elite police unit, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The devastating fire, in a quiet town known for porcelain, caused a national outcry.
Mr. Lecornu blamed the violence in Limoges and other cities on “insurrectionary” plots carried out by small “far-left and extreme-left” groups. But he acknowledged that the police deployment on Saturday had been “too static” and had failed to prevent loose bands of hard-line activists or looters from swarming through several cities.
The curfews, which were enacted to stop that unrest, vary from one city to another, with the government instructing local officials to take measures appropriate to the situation in their jurisdictions.
In Paris and in Lyon, a ban on demonstrations and a curfew limited to some neighborhoods were extended through Tuesday night. In Marseille, the authorities said a curfew would be imposed for minors from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in specific areas of the city until Friday.
The unrest came at a politically charged moment for France, where presidential elections are set for next spring. Mr. Macron, who is term-limited, will not be running.
French lawmakers said this week that they would investigate the violence of the past days and the government’s response, as politicians across the spectrum sparred with government ministers in the lower house of Parliament on Tuesday.
Addressing the prime minister, a top lawmaker for the far-left France Unbowed party, Manuel Bompard, called the riots a “real fiasco for which you alone are responsible.” The government has accused France Unbowed of stirring up the unrest for political gain, which the party denies.
Laure Lavalette, a lawmaker for the far-right National Rally party, asked whether the government would be able to “maintain the state’s legal authority and prevent widespread collapse while waiting for a new president to restore order in France.” The party is ahead in the polls and has presented itself as best placed to restore security.
Some protesters and student union leaders have called for more demonstrations this weekend, although France’s main labor unions are focusing instead on a day of protests and strikes scheduled for November 5.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
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10) Mississippi Says It Won’t Bring Criminal Charges in Police Shooting of Toddler
Attorney General Lynn Fitch issued a terse statement, months after officers, responding to a report of stolen diapers, surrounded a car, guns drawn.
By Joseph Cranney and Mukta Joshi, Oct. 20, 2026
Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News. Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow.
Demonstrators marching down Norfleet Drive in Senatobia, Miss., in June, after Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old child, was shot and killed by police. Chris Day/The Commercial Appeal, via USA Today, via Reuters
The police officer who shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley while chasing two women accused of shoplifting was justified in shooting at their car as it pulled out of a Walmart parking space in June, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office announced on Monday.
The decision came four months after Hunter Foster, an officer with the Senatobia Police Department, was placed on leave while state authorities investigated his actions. Although he has not been directly named as the officer who fired, Mr. Foster is the only officer among those present that day who was placed on leave.
A letter from Attorney General Lynn Fitch, posted online Monday by the city of Senatobia, stated that her office would not file charges against Mr. Foster or any other officers because there was “insufficient evidence of criminal conduct.” It was not immediately clear if Mr. Foster would return to work in Senatobia, a small city about 30 minutes south of Memphis.
In a brief statement to the public, Ms. Fitch’s office announced it had completed its review and “found the use of force was justified.”
Many details of the incident remained unknown. State authorities did not say if or when they would release body cam footage or other surveillance video of the incident.
It was also unclear what other evidence state authorities had considered. Several witnesses, including Vellesiya Wiley, who was holding her son Kohen when the officer shot him, said as recently as this month that they had never been interviewed by investigators. Ms. Wiley also denied having taken anything from the store, and said she believed the woman she was with had paid for her items at self-checkout.
Video taken by bystanders around the time of the shooting shows at least five officers on foot intercepting a slow-moving vehicle in the close quarters of a parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. The officers, responding to allegations that a woman had stolen a box of diapers and baby clothes, surrounded the car. None of the video shared publicly so far clearly shows the car, or the officers’ actions, when the shots were fired.
Ms. Wiley said she had been holding her son in her arms in the front passenger seat when the driver, Latoya Ferrell, tried to back out of a space and then drive forward. Both women are Black. Mr. Foster is white.
In the hours after the shooting, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation issued a statement saying police had fired at a vehicle when it drove toward an officer, “almost striking” one.
Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Wiley family, reiterated his calls Monday for law enforcement officials to release video of the incident.
“How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?” Mr. Crump said in a statement.
“If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it,” Mr. Crump added. “We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”
Reached by phone on Monday, Ms. Wiley wept over the decision.
Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Mr. Foster, said Ms. Fitch’s decision was “expected” and “overdue.”
Veronica Roberson, Kohen Wiley’s grandmother, said on Monday she had learned of the attorney general’s decision when she logged onto Facebook. No state or local law enforcement official had reached out to the family, she said.
Mr. Foster, 33, is a former member of the U.S. Army National Guard and the son of a longtime law enforcement officer. Before joining the Senatobia department in March 2025, Mr. Foster made a name for himself at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, where he won a state award for issuing the most DUI citations of any law enforcement officer in Mississippi in back-to-back years, 2023 and 2024.
Mr. Foster was promoted to sergeant six months into his term at Senatobia. In the last year, he was twice accused of directing racially offensive language toward co-workers on the job, including referring to a Black officer with an expletive, Mississippi Today reported.
Senatobia’s former police chief, Harold Vanderford, who took no action against Mr. Foster in either case, was fired in September, less than two weeks after The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News revealed he had routinely used racist slurs in private texts with a colleague.
Angelica Maze, a Black woman who was serving as a lieutenant in the department, was named Mr. Vanderford’s interim replacement. She did not respond on Monday to a request seeking comment on the attorney general’s decision.
The city of Senatobia released a brief statement on Facebook on Monday, saying it “continues to extend its deepest sympathy to Kohen Wiley’s family and all those affected by this tragedy.”
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