We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Cisco Likely Allowed Harassment of Pro-Palestinian Workers, Agency Says
The finding by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said there was reason to believe that the tech giant subjected employees to a hostile environment.
By Noam Scheiber, Sept. 14, 2026
Few issues have divided American workplaces in the past few years more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At Cisco, the rancor spilled into internal message boards, where pro-Palestinian activists were derided as animals and one worker told colleagues to “quit living.”
Now, in a rare move, a federal enforcement agency has found that Cisco likely failed to protect Muslim, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian employees from harassment as they and their co-workers debated the Hamas-led surprise attacks on Israel in 2023 and Israel’s military response in Gaza.
In a letter dated June 9, a local director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said that there was reasonable cause to believe that Cisco, which makes computer networking technology, “subjected a class of individuals to a hostile work environment based on their national origin (Middle Eastern), religion (Muslim), and/or their association with Muslim and/or Middle Eastern individuals.”
The letter is not a binding ruling, and both sides said the E.E.O.C. has indicated that it won’t file a lawsuit. (An E.E.O.C. spokesman said the agency couldn’t comment.) But such findings tend to bolster employees’ cases if they decide to go to court on their own. “It’s helpful, but not determinative,” said Chai Feldblum, a former E.E.O.C. commissioner.
Christopher Ho, a lawyer who brought the case to the E.E.O.C. on behalf of current and former Cisco employees, said they made the letter public last month after failing to make progress on a settlement with the company.
“My clients felt like Cisco believed they were worthy of less protection,” Mr. Ho said. “This is a belated but welcome validation of the fact that what was going on with them is very illegal.” The case argues that the harassment continues.
Robyn Blum, a Cisco spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company disagreed with the E.E.O.C. finding and that it “thoroughly investigated all concerns and took appropriate action.”
The finding is striking amid a shift in enforcement priorities by the Trump administration, whose E.E.O.C. chair has pledged to rein in what she sees as excesses in protecting certain minority groups.
“The E.E.O.C. rarely finds cause in any case,” said Mr. Ho, a lawyer with the nonprofit group Legal Aid at Work. “But I was also surprised that it took place under this administration.” Ms. Feldblum said that professional staff have traditionally produced such findings without the involvement of political appointees.
At Cisco, the hostile language toward Muslims, Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists began shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. It frequently occurred on a company-hosted forum of an employee group known as the Connected Jewish Network, according to several former Cisco workers and screen shots they shared.
In late November 2023, an employee wrote in the forum that “Israeli passers-by killed 2 members of a Palestinian family in Jerusalem this morning, and I for one am extremely grateful.” A March 2024 comment about an anti-Israel protest in Montreal referred to the protesters as animals. Other Cisco employees posting in the forum appeared to equate support for Palestinians with terrorism.
Reyhan Bilici, a former Cisco lawyer who recently announced her resignation from the company on LinkedIn, citing Islamophobia, said that such language created the impression that it didn’t matter how many professional credentials she brought to the table. “At end of the day, I will be reduced to these certain offensive terms: terrorist, animal, whatever it is,” Ms. Bilici said. “It’s completely dehumanizing.”
Wired has reported that the sense of grievance went both ways, and some Jewish employees also felt that the company did not protect them from harassment by employees sympathetic to Palestinians. The company said it investigated multiple complaints on each side and that it sought to maintain balance along the way.
In June of 2024, a group of employees calling themselves Bridge to Humanity, who were supportive of Palestinians, circulated an open letter to the leadership of Cisco calling on it to stop providing technology to the Israeli government among other demands.
A few days later, a Cisco official emailed leaders of the company’s “inclusive communities” — groups of employees who share similar identities, like ethnicity or religion — and said the open letter was under review. The official asked that leaders of inclusive communities not forward the letter and that they “escalate any concerning discussions to employee relations.” (Another Cisco official later told Bridge to Humanity members that the company wasn’t impugning its open letter, but simply asking for patience while Cisco formulated a response.)
More abusive posts followed. In July, a Cisco employee wrote in the Connected Jewish Network that co-workers who signed the letter should “just up and quit (not just quit Cisco, but quit living and make this world a better place for all.)” Another post said the letter felt like it was orchestrated from outside the company and suggested it was part of a “coordinated campaign.”
Ms. Bilici, who is part of Bridge to Humanity, said that the company’s posture, such as its cool response to the open letter, invited further harassment. “Cisco created the conditions in which people felt emboldened to ratchet up objective Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian discrimination,” she said.
Not long after, the company informed Bridge to Humanity that it was shutting down the internal site that hosted the group’s open letter and the bot that helped it collect signatures, citing internal complaints and violations of its policies. It told the members of the group in August 2024 that it had fired the employee who said signers of the letter should “quit living,” about seven weeks after members flagged the comment.
Former Cisco employees involved in Bridge to Humanity say the company has signaled that harassment of Muslim, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian employees is more acceptable than harassment of other employees.
For example, it took the company more than two months to conclusively respond to a 76-page complaint to employee relations documenting a pattern of harassment toward Muslims, Palestinians and their supporters. The company said it took down some of the offending posts and disciplined and coached some of the employees involved.
But Cisco appeared to move more quickly later the same month on a grievance in the Jewish forum. There, an employee complained about a photo in which the company’s chief people officer appeared with workers who wore T-shirts featuring the Cisco logo and a map of Israel covered in the Arabic word for Palestine, which the employee analogized to calls for Israel’s destruction.
Several hours later, the chief people officer issued an apology in the Jewish forum saying the shirts violated company policy and that she had unwittingly joined the photo at a conference. “Again, I’m sorry for being unaware of the symbolism depicted on the T-shirts,” she wrote. “I feel awful.”
Cisco said the two situations were not comparable — that the company needed weeks to investigate dozens of questionable comments, whereas the photograph incident involved a single executive apologizing for what could have been interpreted as a political statement.
The workers filed their charge with the E.E.O.C. a few months after the incident, frustrated by a perceived double standard. “In a matter of hours after people complained over a map of Palestine, she joined the space to publicly apologize,” said Sophia Filipe, a former Cisco employee who is part of the Bridge to Humanity group as well as the E.E.O.C. case, referring to the chief people officer.
“Meanwhile, death threats that are made to us, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment, were ignored. The contrast of that was huge in pushing us to go to the E.E.O.C.”
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2) E.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants
Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.
By Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman, Reporting from Washington, Published Sept. 13, 2026, Updated Sept. 14, 2026
“Under the Trump administration, the E.P.A. has stopped estimating the public health benefits of reducing pollution in the cost-benefit analyses necessary for clean-air regulations. Instead, the agency has estimated only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules.”
E.P.A. administrator Lee Zeldin speaking next to President Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year. Mr. Zeldin is expected to announce on Monday that the agency will no longer limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The Trump administration plans to announce Monday that the United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, according to two people familiar with the proposal.
The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency would complete the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, is expected to announce the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe the proposal before it is made public.
Representatives for the E.P.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday evening.
Environmentalists and energy experts have opposed the move, which has been in the works since last spring. They have noted that if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.
“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The E.P.A., he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”
President Trump has derided climate change as a “hoax,” and in his second term, the E.P.A. has systematically dismantled policies aimed at slowing global warming that have been criticized as costly by oil, gas and coal companies. The administration has tried to make it easier and cheaper to produce and use fossil fuels, especially to generate electricity that can meet growing demand from artificial intelligence data centers.
Earlier this year, the E.P.A. eliminated greenhouse gas standards for car tailpipes and eased restrictions on planet-warming chemicals used in air-conditioners and refrigerators. Most consequentially, the agency repealed the scientific determination that gave it the legal authority to create climate regulations in the first place.
Under the plan expected Monday, power plants would still be subject to some limits on mercury, arsenic and other contaminants, though the E.P.A. has already loosened restrictions on how much mercury they can emit.
The agency plans to argue Monday that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the environment, and therefore it lacks the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act, according to the people familiar with the matter. If courts uphold this argument, it could prevent future administrations from restoring the restrictions.
“They are swinging from the fences to try to prevent any administration from regulating one of the largest sources of emission for the United States,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.
The Biden administration’s climate rules for power plants, finalized in 2024, applied to coal-burning plants that were in operation and gas-burning plants that could be built in the future. To comply, coal plants could have installed technology to trap carbon emissions before they are released into the air and store them deep underground. Gas plants could have operated on cleaner fuels like hydrogen, which produces no planet-warming emissions when burned.
The Biden administration estimated that the regulation would also prevent other pollutants, such as soot, from escaping into the air, resulting in $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047. It projected that in 2035 alone, the rule would prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360,000 asthma attacks, 48,000 school absence days and 57,000 lost workdays.
Under the Trump administration, the E.P.A. has stopped estimating the public health benefits of reducing pollution in the cost-benefit analyses necessary for clean-air regulations. Instead, the agency has estimated only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules.
The coal industry had complained that Biden-era restrictions on emissions were costly and unworkable. It had predicted that many coal plants would have closed instead of spending billions of dollars on new pollution controls.
Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels; when burned, it produces more air pollution and more greenhouse gases than any other source of energy. The economics of coal are also unfavorable; experts say new coal plants are more expensive to build and operate than gas plants and renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.
The use of coal in the United States has been declining for decades. While coal generated more than half of the nation’s electricity in 1990, that share fell to roughly 17 percent in 2025.
U.S. electricity generation by source
Many of the country’s coal plants are more than 40 years old and are scheduled to shutter in the coming years. Since 2010, 330 coal plants have retired and 60 others have announced plans to close by 2031, according to the Sierra Club, an environmental group.
But many utilities are racing to build new gas plants to power energy-guzzling A.I. data centers. More than two dozen gas plants were built in the United States last year, according to Cleanview, an energy data company.
Democratic-led states and environmental groups have said they intend to challenge the E.P.A.’s plan in court. Legal experts have called the plan vulnerable.
Courts have wrestled with the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate climate pollution from the power sector for more than a decade. The Supreme Court in 2016 blocked the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Obama’s signature effort to curb carbon emissions from coal plants.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the E.P.A. could limit these emissions but could not force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal. Instead, it allowed the agency to pursue only narrower policies that dictated the operations of individual power plants.
Congress should have done its job and not given away this power to the executive branch.
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3) Mahmoud Khalil Says Columbia Failed to Protect Pro-Palestinian Students
In a federal lawsuit, Mr. Khalil and other former student activists say the university was deliberately indifferent to their harassment even before the 2023 Hamas attacks.
By Sharon Otterman, Sept. 14, 2026
Mahmoud Khalil said his asks to Columbia University administrators to help protect him against the threats he was receiving went unanswered. Scott Heins for The New York Times
A group of pro-Palestinian former student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil, sued Columbia University in federal court on Monday, accusing the institution of failing to address the persistent and severe harassment they said they encountered as a result of their advocacy.
Mr. Khalil, 31, became the face of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement on March 8, 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested him at his Columbia University apartment building, even though he was a legal permanent resident and not accused of a crime. He spent 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his first child.
In the days and weeks before his arrest, he had repeatedly asked Columbia administrators to help protect him against the escalating threats he was receiving for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, he said in an interview on Sunday. He said he did not receive assistance.
Columbia’s failure to support him was part of a pattern of “deliberate indifference” against him and other pro-Palestinian students that began even before the Hamas-led terror attacks of Oct. 7, according to the lawsuit that he and fellow former students filed on Monday in Manhattan.
“I’m not suing Columbia for what ICE did,” Mr. Khalil said. “I’m suing Columbia for creating the conditions for ICE to do what it did.”
Columbia declined to comment on the litigation, but released a general statement in response.
“Creating a campus environment where every member of our community feels welcome, supported and safe is fundamental to who we are as a university,” said Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman. “Columbia is committed to protecting our community from discrimination and harassment, and responding promptly and appropriately when concerns arise.”
Mr. Khalil, who still faces deportation, emerged as a foil for the Trump administration during its aggressive crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protests. He has also filed a lawsuit accusing Trump administration officials, pro-Israel groups and a conservative think tank of colluding to suppress his constitutional rights.
In addition to faulting Columbia for its treatment of Mr. Khalil, the lawsuit filed on Monday seeks to hold Columbia responsible for failing to end the harassment it claims was also faced by other members of the SIPA Palestine Working Group, an advocacy organization that Mr. Khalil led while a student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The student group, formed in 2018 to “encourage a more holistic understanding of Palestine,” according to its mission statement, sponsored annual study trips to the Palestinian territories and hosted discussions and lectures. The lawsuit charges that when the fliers for the group’s events were torn down, or when group members faced anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic rhetoric from fellow students, Columbia did not do enough to stop it.
The lawsuit says that the treatment of the group worsened under the current dean of SIPA, Keren Yarhi-Milo, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. After she began as dean in 2022, the group faced extra roadblocks and hurdles when organizing lectures and events compared with other organizations, the lawsuit claims. When its events did take place, Columbia sent security personnel, which pro-Palestinian students found intimidating.
After the Oct. 7 attacks, an outside organization, Accuracy in Media, got a hold of photographs and names of student group members that are accessible only to people with Columbia passwords, the lawsuit said. The students were publicly shamed on a truck circling campus with their faces under the words “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”
When students met with Dean Yarhi-Milo to ask that she investigate who leaked the photographs, she initially dismissed their concerns, the lawsuit stated. The photos were removed from the Columbia platform several days later, but the damage was already done.
“It felt like they didn’t bother to look or do the bare minimum,” said Bhavana Bellamkonda, one of the suit’s 11 named student plaintiffs. Websites that Accuracy in Media created that accuse her and other students of being antisemitic remain active.
In a statement, Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media, said his group had “repeatedly delivered accountability to Columbia’s pro-Hamas radicals,” using language that echoed the Trump administration’s description of pro-Palestinian campus protesters.
Dean Yarhi-Milo did condemn the doxxing campaigns and form an anti-doxxing task force. In 2025, Columbia introduced a comprehensive anti-doxxing and online harassment policy explicitly prohibiting the malicious publication of personal identifying information. She did not respond to a request for comment.
In September 2025, the Palestine Working Group itself was indefinitely suspended. An office at Columbia created after the Oct. 7 attacks to investigate civil rights claims, the Office of Institutional Equity, claimed that the group had co-posted two Instagram posts that contributed to a harassing environment. Mohammed Ibrahim Zubairi, who took over as group president after Mr. Khalil’s detention, said in an interview that Dean Yahri-Milo had particularly objected to being called “Killer Keren” in the posts.
While he did not fully defend the term, Mr. Zubairi said that it was common among protesting students at Columbia to use insults aimed at administrators in their public capacity and that the barring of the group was a disproportionate and unfair punishment. The group has refused to comply with conditions for reinstatement, including revealing who had access to its Instagram account and attending an in-person training, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit claims that Columbia violated Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act by creating a hostile environment for the pro-Palestinian students. It seeks the reinstatement of the Palestine Working Group, monetary damages and access to campus for Mr. Khalil, who has been blocked repeatedly from accessing the main Columbia campus since his release from prison.
This is Mr. Khalil’s second lawsuit against Columbia. The first, filed on March 13, 2025, challenges Columbia’s disclosure of student disciplinary records to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Separately, another group of pro-Palestinian students and faculty sued Columbia in New York State court in August for discriminating against them and failing to protect them from a hostile campus climate after the Oct. 7 attacks.
Mr. Khalil said that Columbia created a volatile situation by not pushing back against claims from Congressional Republicans, the Trump White House and others that its own pro-Palestinian students were dangerous and antisemitic. It is a charge that he and other activists strongly reject.
“I don’t want any student, regardless of their background and identity, to go through the hell that I went through the past three years because of Columbia’s actions,” he said.
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4) A Teen Autopsy Marks the Arrival of a Deadly Drug in San Francisco
City officials — and one determined mother — are working to stop the spread of cychlorphine, which is far more potent than fentanyl.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from San Francisco, Sept. 14, 2026
It was a stressful Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and Christina Lacourte went to her son’s bedroom to roust him for school. The door was locked, so she had to wrangle it open with a coat hanger.
Inside, she saw her son in his bed, under the neon storefront “Open” sign he had wanted for his birthday in sixth grade. His face was turning blue, and his veins were visible. Black fluid oozed out of his nose and mouth and pooled on his sheets.
She raced to retrieve the two doses of Narcan she kept in her kitchen drawer for exactly this moment, the one she had long feared, but they did not revive him. She remembers bawling and screaming as she called 911. Her apartment, normally charming with splashes of pink, suddenly became a gray blur of paramedics, police officers and medical examiners.
Her son left in a body bag.
Surely, she figured, her son had died from fentanyl, but the autopsy report came back with no mention of it. Instead, it included a word new to her — “cychlorphine.” It remains the only time it has appeared on a San Francisco coroner’s report.
Dante Paul Lacourte was 16 years old.
A novel drug reaches San Francisco
The death occurred in Ms. Lacourte’s three-bedroom apartment in the affluent Lower Nob Hill neighborhood on April 7.
Seventeen days later, San Francisco health officials held a news conference to warn that a synthetic opioid had emerged that was deadlier than fentanyl, which was still killing dozens of people in the city each month.
Cychlorphine is one of an array of new, deadly drugs upending the illicit drug market and confounding cities that are only now beginning to get a handle on fentanyl. These novel drugs can be made by amateur chemists anywhere, and they are harder to trace, their effects on the human body harder to reverse.
Experts say cychlorphine is 10 times as potent as fentanyl. Test strips can detect fentanyl but not cychlorphine, and it can take numerous doses of Narcan to reverse the new drug’s effects, though most people carry only one or two doses at a time. It has shown up in Europe and the East Coast over the past couple of years, its presence spreading like tentacles.
Dante had appeared in The New York Times once before, as part of a photo project documenting the first decade of the millennium. Ludovic Lacourte, a tech consultant and winemaker who lives in Sausalito, just north of the city in Marin County, had submitted a snapshot of his newborn twins, Dante and Marco, wearing matching knit hats and tucked under a hospital blanket.
The tremendous joy of that day, Oct. 1, 2009, gradually faded. Ludovic and Christina Lacourte divorced in 2017, and the boys split time between their father in Marin and their mother in San Francisco. Dante struggled with the family rift and with A.D.H.D., anxiety and depression, his mother said.
By 13, he was smoking marijuana. Not long after, he was buying pills, including Xanax and Percocet, from dealers he found on Snapchat. His parents had him see numerous therapists and psychiatrists and placed him in three different rehabilitation programs. Nothing stuck.
Fentanyl Overdoses: What to Know
Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose.
Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy.
Talk to your loved ones. The best way to prevent fentanyl use is to educate your loved ones, including teens, about it. Explain what fentanyl is and that it can be found in pills bought online or from friends. Aim to establish an ongoing dialogue in short spurts rather than one long, formal conversation.
Learn how to spot an overdose. When someone overdoses from fentanyl, breathing slows and their skin often turns a bluish hue. If you think someone is overdosing, call 911 right away.
Buy naloxone. If you’re concerned that a loved one could be exposed to fentanyl, you may want to buy naloxone. The medicine can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose and is often available at pharmacies without a prescription. Narcan, the nasal spray version of naloxone, has received F.D.A. approval to be sold over the counter.
Marco Lacourte, the younger twin by one minute, said he has avoided drugs and said in an interview that he had grown increasingly worried about his brother. He said he had talked to him, telling Dante, “You know it could get you killed.”
Ludovic Lacourte said he, too, had felt helpless watching Dante relapse. Sitting at his Sausalito home, where skis leaned against the wall and a boar’s head from a hunting expedition was mounted, he said he felt treatment programs were “a completely broken system.”
In hindsight, he believes there was only one solution. “You’ve got to run out the clock,” he said, explaining that his family was just trying to keep Dante alive until he “figures it out himself.”
Belgian lab origins
The drug that killed Dante was created in a Belgian research lab in the 1960s, part of a group called orphines, in an effort to find powerful painkillers that could ease patients’ misery from diseases like bone cancer.
Such drugs were not approved for medical use because they were deemed too strong and dangerous. The recipe for making them, though, was published in journals and is now available in the dark corners of the internet, said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who served as a senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration.
That means individuals can make them in their kitchens, without the expensive farmland needed for cocaine, heroin or marijuana, he said. Now, most illegal drugs are made in unregulated labs, or even in random apartments.
“You don’t need to be a big pharma company,” Mr. Humphreys said.
Some people addicted to fentanyl have developed a tolerance and seek an even stronger opioid to get high, he said. Others unwittingly buy pills that turn out to be laced with cychlorphine.
He recommended that cities test wastewater to detect new substances in the local drug supply. San Francisco was doing so until federal funding ran out in 2024, and then resumed wastewater testing only in July. The city this fall will begin publishing what it finds, including novel drugs, according to a Department of Public Health spokesman.
“The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy,” Mr. Humphreys said.
Dante was the kind of boy who lit up a room. He was a gymnast who could do a standing backflip. He regularly traveled with family and friends to the Alps and could do aerial ski stunts down the steepest sections.
But his adventurous nature slid into recklessness, as his mother described it. He would try to scale San Francisco’s skyscrapers with his friends, she said. He stole from his family. He once brought a loaded gun home while high on drugs. The weekend before he died, he broke into a neighbor’s apartment while high and stole a laptop.
On his last night, he hung out with a close friend, Leo Wingate, 19, smoking weed and talking about a possible fishing trip. Mr. Wingate said in an interview that he dropped off Dante at his apartment late that night and did not hear from him again.
Mr. Wingate said that Dante had used drugs to cope with school pressures, anxiety and depression, and that Dante frequented the Tenderloin neighborhood, where dealers were always changing and their wares could not be trusted. Dante would take pills even if he thought they could be laced with “fetty,” Mr. Wingate said, using the slang term for fentanyl.
“He was just a kid trying to feel better,” Mr. Wingate said.
More than 4,000 people have died of drug overdoses in San Francisco since 2020, mostly from fentanyl, far more than those who died of Covid-19, homicides and car crashes combined during the same time span.
Ms. Lacourte knew there was a chance her son would die from a street pill laced with fentanyl. “It just takes one pill,” she said she had told him repeatedly.
The double-whammy of the pandemic and fentanyl jolted the city six years ago. Drug dealing occurred in plain sight, and people were frequently seen in the Tenderloin bent over at the waist, a common symptom of using fentanyl. Residents were frustrated, recalling the city’s progressive district attorney in 2022 and ousting the mayor in 2024.
The new mayor, Daniel Lurie, has directed the police to arrest users and dealers and prohibited the distribution of city-funded fentanyl smoking supplies without mandatory drug counseling.
Still, pills containing fentanyl remain prevalent on the streets, and Ms. Lacourte fears those deaths will climb as cychlorphine enters the supply.
An investigation yields arrests
An investigator with the San Francisco Police Department assured Ms. Lacourte for months that detectives were still investigating Dante’s death. She finally got some answers on Friday.
Police officers last week arrested Nicholas Wallace, 46, at his home in the Tenderloin neighborhood, about a 10-minute walk from Ms. Lacourte’s apartment. There, the police say, they recovered 34 oxycodone pills and cocaine. At the same location, they arrested Sharonee Hyson, 44, who was on parole and had cocaine base and a loaded firearm.
Police officers later arrested Leander Pitts, 46, and Starr Lamare, 39, in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, about five miles south of the Tenderloin. There, they seized 20,000 pills, including suspected counterfeit Xanax and oxycodone, as well as other drugs including fentanyl. They also seized a semiautomatic assault rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and cash.
The four suspects could not be reached for comment, and requests for jailhouse interviews were not answered Friday.
All four were booked into the county jail on numerous felony charges related to narcotics sales and firearms, though Ms. Lamare appeared to have been released by Friday afternoon.
Evan Sernoffsky, a police spokesman, said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was expediting testing of the pills recovered during the arrests to see whether they included cychlorphine. The White House in April warned the public about cychlorphine, saying that it had killed scores of people around the United States.
Ms. Lacourte received a phone call from the mayor Friday afternoon, and said he had promised her he would “yell from the rooftops” about the dangers counterfeit pills pose to teens.
Ms. Lacourte said she had mixed emotions. She was glad that the police had removed people suspected of drug dealing from the streets. But she was doubtful that she would ever know exactly who sold the fatal pill to her son, who manufactured it or how it ended up in San Francisco.
The police tied the suspects to Dante’s death after investigators worked backward from the April day they found pills and Dante’s cellphone in Ms. Lacourte’s apartment.
Through the phone, they determined whom he had texted in the previous days about buying the pills. Officers then went undercover as drug buyers and purchased substances from the suspects, police said, which allowed them to secure warrants for their arrests.
The police also had disconcerting news for anyone who thought Dante’s cychlorphine case was an isolated incident. Pills recovered in earlier, unrelated arrests have tested positive for the drug, suggesting it was also in circulation from other sellers.
Ms. Lacourte regularly visits the cemetery in Mill Valley, Calif., where Dante’s ashes are buried under an oak tree.
She got rid of much of the furniture in the bedroom where Dante died. But she kept the neon sign reading “Open” that hung above his bed.
Every morning, she turns it on, and she can see the glowing light from other parts of the apartment. Every night, she turns it off.
With each flick of the switch, she said, she thinks of Dante.
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5) Dario Amodei’s Essay Was Gutsy. It Didn’t Go Far Enough.
By Sebastian Mallaby, Sept. 14, 2026
Mr. Mallaby is the author of “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.”
Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times
It takes courage to stand in front of an express train and yell at it to slow down. That is what Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the leading artificial intelligence lab Anthropic, has just done.
Anthropic has the world’s strongest A.I. models. It most likely has the fastest revenue growth in the history of capitalism. Its lead is set to grow because it is probably closest to the takeoff point of recursive self-improvement, when A.I. autonomously creates stronger versions of itself. Yet on Saturday Amodei published an essay calling for an A.I. slowdown. He declared that recursive self-improvement “must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
It’s hard to think of another chief executive who has done something this gutsy — especially one simultaneously planning a blockbuster initial public offering. He deserves all due credit for grappling with a major problem. That’s not the same as saying he has the solutions.
Mr. Amodei is channeling his fear, and that of Anthropic’s internal brain trust, that a “swarm” of A.I. agents could be capable of “taking over the entire internet” in the next six to 12 months. He worries that, in the absence of advanced safety guardrails, “the scale of damage would continue to increase from there.”
He therefore proposes “pacing” — a slowing of A.I. capability to allow A.I. safety to keep up. As a first step, Anthropic will grant outside experts permanent access badges and system permissions. These embedded evaluators will monitor Anthropic’s safety practices and report incidents to the public.
The industry rejected earlier calls for slowing or pausing A.I. development. This time, because of the technology’s alarming progress, three rival A.I. executives — Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis — have commended Mr. Amodei’s essay; and Mr. Altman says that he will follow Mr. Amodei’s example by embedding evaluators in his company, OpenAI.
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In the past, the A.I. labs didn’t know what they would do during a pause. They have reversed their position because they now have a to-do list as long as their arms.
Many recent A.I. safety incidents could have been prevented if the labs had been more careful about operational details. Of five mishaps known to have occurred in quick succession over the summer, three involved errors in the configuration of so-called sandboxes — contained digital testing environments that A.I. agents are not supposed to be able to exit.
To eliminate such glitches, the labs need to tighten their quarantine of experimental models, scrub training data of material that encourages models to behave badly and fix countless other protocols. “There is precedent for operating technologically complex, safety-critical systems millions of times without anything going wrong — for example, commercial airplanes,” Mr. Amodei observed in his essay. “But it takes time to get it right.”
Some officials at Anthropic’s competitors, notably Jensen Huang, boss of the chip designer Nvidia, implicitly accuse Mr. Amodei of exaggerating A.I. risk for business reasons. By announcing that A.I. is dangerous, Mr. Amodei is really just trumpeting the fact that A.I. is powerful, Mr. Huang argues, without naming Mr. Amodei. Calling for safety, to Mr. Huang, is a marketing trick.
But impartial authorities — academic experts, the British government’s respected A.I. Security Institute, the recent independent report on rogue A.I. agents’ hacking of the website Hugging Face — support Mr. Amodei’s claim that A.I. risk is genuine. Mr. Huang, who wants his company to sell lots more of its A.I.-enabling chips, is the one taking positions that accord with his company’s bottom line.
A variant on Mr. Huang’s claim holds that Mr. Amodei is playing up A.I. risk to ensure government regulation, and that this is a cynical ploy to throttle competitors and cement Anthropic’s lead. But this “regulatory capture” story is also backward. The biggest reason to suspect that competitors might lose out from regulation is that they are often more dangerous. Many produce “open-weight” A.I. models — ones that allow users to remove safety guardrails.
The reasonable critique of Mr. Amodei’s proposal is that it wouldn’t result in the A.I. slowdown that he wants. He presents his embedded evaluators as a step toward coordinated pacing: If all labs in democratic countries embrace them, the evaluators can verify that no opportunist is taking irresponsible shortcuts.
But it’s not clear that all labs, or even most labs, will follow Anthropic’s example — or, if they do, that the evaluators will help. The Google subsidiary DeepMind previously invited independent evaluators to monitor its work on A.I.-enabled health products. Anxious to signal credibility, the evaluators exaggerated DeepMind’s shortcomings until Google dismissed them.
To be fair to Mr. Amodei, he is proposing evaluators because Congress is unlikely to act quickly to create a government regulator that forces labs to act responsibly — the most obvious route to coordinated pacing. But he only briefly mentions another coordination mechanism that might prove useful: an industry-financed but government-endorsed self-regulatory body, as proposed two months ago by Mr. Hassabis, the chair of DeepMind.
America’s A.I. titans should create such a body immediately. The government can help by ensuring that any potential antitrust concerns around this kind of industry coordination are minimized or waived.
Even this would not be enough, though. The larger coordination problem for any A.I. slowdown concerns China. “Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Amodei wrote. Since the U.S. lead over China stands at only a few months, Mr. Amodei is saying that a Western slowdown must be modest. But he also suggests that safer A.I. development might require additional breathing room of one or two years.
How to buy more time for safety without falling behind China? Here, Mr. Amodei restated his view that China should be denied the tools of A.I. progress. American controls on exports of chips and chip-manufacturing equipment should be tightened. “Distillation,” the practice of using advanced models to train new ones, should be combated, since China employs this shortcut ruthlessly. Security at Western labs should be strengthened to stop China from stealing A.I. secrets. These measures could expand the Western A.I. lead, enabling slower pacing.
This playbook has been tried already, and the results are not encouraging. The Biden administration imposed chip-export controls on China in 2022; the loopholes have been obvious for some time, but neither the Biden team nor the Trump team closed them enough to halt China’s progress.
Meanwhile, Western frontier labs have enormous incentives to prevent distillation and guard against theft of their intellectual property. If they have not succeeded yet, it is probably because they don’t know how. Despite America’s best efforts to hobble China’s A.I. industry, Chinese models account for a growing share of A.I. usage in the United States.
The alternative to keeping China down is to make China a partner in safety and pacing. Until now, Mr. Amodei has embraced the U.S. foreign policy consensus that negotiating an A.I. deal with China is near-impossible. So perhaps the most significant section of his essay is the last one, in which he appeared to soften his stance. He avoided calling out China’s techno-authoritarianism and oppression of ethnic minorities and listed a series of areas on which collaboration might be possible. During the Cold War, the United States competed fiercely with the Soviet Union. That did not prevent them from striking arms-control deals.
On Sept. 24, President Trump is scheduled to meet China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The summit is expected to yield something modest on A.I. diplomacy, but the good news is that the leaders may meet twice more before the end of this year. The superpowers share an interest in preventing superhuman A.I. models from causing havoc, as China’s leaders clearly recognize. However difficult U.S.-China coordination, the consequences of not coordinating make it essential to try.
The icy state of U.S.-China relations is what makes an A.I. slowdown so elusive. The technology’s positive potential will be realized only if the Trump administration — and tech leaders like Mr. Amodei — throw their full weight behind A.I. talks with Beijing.
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6) If You Thought Immigration Policy Couldn’t Get Any Crueler
By Stephen Yale-Loehr, Sept. 15, 2026
Mr. Yale-Loehr is a retired professor of practice at Cornell Law School.
Rose Wong
In 19 months in office, the second Trump administration has imposed more than 760 immigration restrictions. A new regulatory change may prove to have the most devastating reach of them all: It could keep hundreds of thousands of people from getting green cards based on the idea that they or one of their family members might one day need public services. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that the rule could reduce federal and state benefit payments by roughly $13 billion a year as families leave or avoid public services for fear of risking their status. The bulk of the cost will be the burden on immigrants, even those with children or family members who are U.S. citizens.
This isn’t a new idea. Congress added public charge as a ground for inadmissibility into the United States in 1882. In plain terms, the public charge rule made it possible for immigrants who rely on public benefits to be denied a green card or even deported. For most of the past three decades it was rarely invoked. In the few instances it was used, it mainly involved people receiving cash assistance, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In fiscal year 2024, for example, fewer than 200 people who applied for family-based green cards at U.S. consular posts abroad were denied because of public assistance concerns. Over 471,000 people received family-based green cards overseas that year.
The first Trump administration already tried to change that. A 2019 rule expanded the list of public benefits officials could weigh when deciding whether to issue a green card and adopted a broader standard for determining who might be a public charge. Courts eventually blocked it, and the Biden administration scrapped it for good. Fear spread through immigrant communities anyway. One study found that in 2019 alone, 31 percent of adults in families with at least one member who lacked a green card avoided enrolling in programs like Medicaid out of concern that it might jeopardize their immigration status.
The second Trump administration tried again in January 2026, barring all immigrant visas from 75 countries whose citizens, it claimed, were likely to use public benefits. A federal court recently struck that down as unlawful; the administration is likely to appeal.
This month brings a fresh attempt, and it is the most sweeping yet. The rule — which is set to take effect on Friday — includes both cash and noncash benefits, including Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance. But unlike earlier efforts to use public benefits to limit immigration, this new public charge rule offers officers almost no clear standards to follow. An immigration officer in the United States or a consular officer abroad needs only to believe that an applicant might apply for public benefits at some point in the future to deny him a green card. Because these decisions will be made one applicant at a time, with few objective criteria to point to, they will be nearly impossible to challenge.
Perhaps most troubling, the rule allows officials to weigh benefits received by an applicant’s family members, including children who are U.S. citizens. That means a citizen’s Medicaid or coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, relied on by 38 percent of American children in 2024, could be held against her immigrant parent applying for a green card.
The scale of the disruption this could cause is hard to overstate. When the Migration Policy Institute studied the first Trump administration’s proposed rule, it found that up to 69 percent of recent green card recipients could be put at risk of denial. Because the new rule hands officials even broader discretion and, for the first time, lets them weigh a family member’s benefit use, the real percentage could be even higher. Like the 2019 rule, this one is likely to hit women, children and older populations hardest, and could privilege future legal immigration further toward Europeans and away from citizens of the rest of the world.
Even those who remain eligible for benefits may simply stop using them out of fear. In December of last year KFF, a health research group, estimated that a new public charge rule would mean as many as four million people could leave public assistance rolls such as Medicaid and CHIP, including hundreds of thousands of citizen children. Such fears are likely to deepen following news that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started sharing Medicaid data with immigration enforcement officials.
In other words: The new public charge rule will reduce health coverage, nutrition assistance and other sources of support for immigrant families, including U.S. citizen children in those families. Nationally, one in four children lives in a family with at least one immigrant parent. Reduced participation in health coverage and other assistance programs will hurt immigrant families and their children. And when community health safety nets disappear, local police departments and jails face higher demands to manage untreated health crises.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the public charge rule will reduce federal spending — even as states worry they will lose billions each year, largely because people will unenroll or avoid public benefits. D.H.S. acknowledges the ripple effects that will follow: lost revenue for hospitals and nonprofits that participate in Medicaid, for pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, for grocery stores that accept food stamps and for the farmers who grow the food those stamps buy. Add to that the probable toll in worse health outcomes, more uncompensated hospital care and broader strain on communities and the work force, and the cost of this rule looks less like a policy trade-off than a self-inflicted wound.
Dozens of state and local governments filed two lawsuits on Monday to try to stop the rule from taking effect. But litigation is slow and the harm may already be done, simply because of the fear the new rule has created.
Congress still has the power to stop this before it starts, by using its authority under the Congressional Review Act to block the rule from taking effect. If lawmakers fail to act, the courts may be the only thing standing between this rule and what could become one of the most damaging immigration policies in decades.
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7) U.S. Has Deployed Weapons in Space, Air Force Secretary Says
Troy E. Meink’s comments were the first public acknowledgment of American weapons in orbit. The Pentagon has been preparing for potential conflict in space with Russia or China.
By Francesca Regalado, Sept. 15, 2026
Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink speaks during the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs in May. Pool photo by Matt Rourke
The United States has stationed weapons in Earth’s orbit, Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink said on Monday, the first such public acknowledgment by a Pentagon official after years of preparations to counter potential deployments by Russia and China.
“We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” he said at a convention in Maryland, according to a news release published on the Air Force’s website.
Mr. Meink did not provide details about the type of weapons or say when they had been deployed. He made his remarks in a keynote speech at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., an annual forum hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association, a nonprofit organization for members of both services.
The Space Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday.
The Pentagon has long feared that China and Russia are making advances in space operations that could threaten U.S. ground forces as well as American satellites.
Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday in response to a question about Mr. Meink’s comments that China opposed an “outer space arms race.”
“We urge the U.S. side to stop expanding its military force and preparing for war in outer space,” he said in a regular news briefing.
In 2024, The New York Times reported that American intelligence agencies had raised concerns that Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon in space, a threat that could disrupt satellite networks that are vital to everything from communications to military operations.
Shortly after President Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive order to expand American air defenses, including the development and deployment of “space-based interceptors.” The project, named the Golden Dome, would be designed to guard against weapons such as hypersonic missiles, which Russia has deployed in Ukraine.
In May, Mr. Trump said that Gen. Michael Guetlein, the vice chief of space operations at the Space Force, would oversee the project.
The United States, Russia and China began testing weapons capable of destroying satellites decades ago, but the United States has since disavowed such arms because they leave destructive debris fields in orbit.
In recent years, the Air Force started developing “low-debris-causing weapons” capable of disrupting or disabling enemy satellites, Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force secretary under President Joe Biden, told The Times in a 2024 interview.
Gen. Chance Saltzman, who served as the Space Force’s chief of space operations during the Biden and second Trump administrations until his retirement last month, told a Senate committee in 2023 that the new space weapons systems would be fully operational by 2026.
Neither Mr. Kendall nor Gen. Saltzman specified how the systems would work. Other former Pentagon officials have said they likely would include lasers, high-powered microwave systems or even U.S. satellites that can grab or move enemy satellites.
Mr. Kendall said in 2024 that it was prudent to recognize that space “is a place that can be used for military advantage.”
“The threat is there,” he said at the time. “It’s a domain we have to be competitive in.”
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
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8) Trump Approves $2.8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Including 40,000 One-Ton Bombs
The package would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions to Israel.
By Michael Crowley and Edward Wong, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 15, 2026
Smoke rising after an Israeli bombardment of Gaza last year. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in the crowded enclave has caused widespread civilian harm. Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Trump administration has approved a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, according to a U.S. official, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as American public support for the country declines.
The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.
Human rights groups and some foreign governments have condemned Israel for dropping the giant munitions in densely populated areas, sometimes killing dozens of civilians in strikes targeting just one individual.
The package would include 20,000 each of America’s 2,000-pound MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs. It would also provide Israel with 20,000 bunker-busting I-2000 penetrator warheads, which explode on delay after smashing through an outer surface like soil, rock or concrete. The plan was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The blast from a 2,000-pound bomb can be lethal at more than 1,000 feet and leave a crater as deep as 50 feet. Israel provoked a fierce outcry after it dropped hundreds of the heavy bombs on Gaza.
The State Department recently sent the proposed deal to two congressional committees to get informal approval, the U.S. official said.
Production and delivery of the munitions usually takes months or years, but there are ways to expedite the process.
In mid-2024, the Biden administration paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concern about their use in crowded civilian areas. President Trump allowed the shipment to proceed days after taking office last January.
Then in February, the Trump administration agreed to sell roughly $2.7 billion in munitions to Israel, a package that included 35,000 of the one-ton MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs.
While congressional leaders can tell the Trump administration that they oppose the deal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio can exercise emergency powers to proceed with the sale regardless, as he has done repeatedly, or just say he is moving forward with it. The administration would then bypass getting informal approval from Congress and formally announce the sale is happening.
In those cases, both the House and Senate would need to pass a resolution to block the deal. Such a resolution would require the support of two-thirds of each body to guarantee it can overcome a presidential veto.
The Biden administration also declared an emergency in the region to bypass congressional approval and expedite shipments of arms to Israel twice during the Israel-Gaza war. One of those packages included 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition, and the second included artillery munitions.
The State Department’s approval of such a large package of devastating munitions reflects Mr. Trump’s continued strong support for Israel despite his recent disputes with its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the country’s military operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Mr. Netanyahu is expected to be in New York next week to address the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.
The State Department said in a statement that as a matter of policy it would not confirm or comment on a proposed arms sale that has not been formally notified to Congress.
The proposed deal is sure to draw strong opposition among Democrats in Congress, some of whom have called for ending all U.S. aid to Israel in response to the huge civilian toll of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.
But anger toward Israel has also risen among Mr. Trump’s traditional supporters. The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson posted a tirade on social media that excoriated Israel for what he called the “slaughter” of Palestinians in Gaza.
Mr. Carlson also said that the added destructive power would embolden Israel and fuel the conflict with Iran launched jointly by the U.S. and Israel in February. Mr. Carlson has adamantly opposed the offensive and blames Mr. Netanyahu for convincing Mr. Trump to approve it. “If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do,” Mr. Carlson wrote.
Israel argues that Hamas fighters in Gaza and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon intentionally embed themselves among civilians — sometimes in bunkers or tunnels that require heavy munitions to penetrate — to force Israel to kill innocent civilians and face international pressure.
But many former U.S. officials and military analysts question whether Israel has been too quick to pass up less destructive alternatives. The U.S. provides Israel a base line of $3.8 billion a year in military assistance, including $3.3 billion in financing that Israel largely uses to purchase American weapons, which includes the latest sale of bombs.
Another $500 million in U.S. aid is earmarked annually for joint missile-defense programs. Mr. Trump has repeatedly butted heads with Mr. Netanyahu over Israel’s military operations outside its borders, which have on several occasions complicated U.S. efforts to negotiate lasting peace in Gaza and to resolve the conflict with Iran — to Mr. Trump’s great frustration.
But Mr. Trump has expressed far less public concern about civilian casualties than did Mr. Biden, who also was sharply criticized for being too tolerant of such deaths.
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9) Trump Bars Some South Africans Over Claims of Anti-White Discrimination
Washington says South Africa has not done anything to fix what President Trump sees as discrimination. South Africa’s president has called Mr. Trump’s policies racist.
By John Eligon, Sept. 16, 2026
President Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa meeting in the Oval Office in Washington last year. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Trump administration imposed visa restrictions on selected South Africans on Tuesday and warned that it could take further punitive actions if South African leaders did not address President Trump’s concerns over what he sees as discrimination against white people.
The visa policy expands the administration’s efforts to punish South Africa since Mr. Trump last year accused the government of seizing land from Afrikaners, a white South African minority, and allowing them to be killed in what he has labeled genocide. Claims of genocide against white South Africans are widely acknowledged as false, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has said Mr. Trump’s policies toward South Africa are racist.
The visa restrictions will prevent selected individuals from entering the United States. Under law, the government is not allowed to publicly disclose who is affected.
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States remained “gravely concerned about racially motivated crime and government-sponsored discrimination occurring against the Afrikaners and other minority populations in South Africa.”
He said the restrictions would target South Africans involved in race-based discrimination, those responsible for a law that enables the government to seize land without compensation and those who incite violence against racial minorities.
In a statement, South Africa’s foreign minister, Ronald Lamola, said Washington’s unilateral action “once again aligns with the misrepresentation of South Africa’s domestic policy by fringe groups.” He called on the United States to respect South Africa’s sovereignty on handling domestic issues.
The policy was announced less than three weeks after Mr. Ramaphosa met with the American ambassador, L. Brent Bozell III. The South African government described the engagement as “an opportunity to strengthen and recalibrate” the relationship between the countries.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Bozell said he had “attempted time and again to express” that South Africa could face severe consequences if it did not take action on the administration’s demands, which include exempting American companies from Black ownership requirements and rolling back a land expropriation law.
“This visa restriction policy is only the first step in a series of escalatory measures that will show America’s firm resolve in this matter,” Mr. Bozell wrote.
The U.S. move was the latest sign of the deteriorating relationship between the United States and South Africa. Here is a timeline of the key moments.
Feb. 2, 2025: In a social media post, Mr. Trump wrote, “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” He added that he would cut all American funding to South Africa pending an investigation.
Feb. 3, 2025: Mr. Ramaphosa disputed Mr. Trump’s claims, saying in a statement that the country was not seizing land. “We look forward to engaging with the Trump administration over our land reform policy and issues of bilateral interest,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.
Feb. 5, 2025: Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on social media that he was boycotting a Group of 20 meeting in Johannesburg because South Africa was “doing very bad things,” including seizing private property.
Feb. 7, 2025: Mr. Trump issued an executive order allowing Afrikaners to resettle in the United States as refugees. The order also halted American aid to South Africa.
March 14, 2025: The United States kicked out South Africa’s ambassador in Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, after he said during an online forum that Mr. Trump was leading a “supremacist” movement.
May 21, 2025: A meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Ramaphosa in the Oval Office went off the rails when the American leader played a video and held up news clips as he insisted that white farmers were being killed in large numbers in South Africa.
Aug. 7, 2025: A 30 percent tariff on South African goods entering the United States came into effect despite months of efforts by South African officials to broker a trade deal with Washington. That rate was tied for the highest tariff that Mr. Trump issued to any African country.
Nov. 7, 2025: Mr. Trump posted on social media that no American officials would attend the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg.
Nov. 20, 2025: The United States and South Africa got into a testy exchange after Mr. Ramaphosa announced that the Trump administration had issued a late request to participate in the Group of 20 meeting. Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, accused Mr. Ramaphosa of “running his mouth.”
Nov. 26, 2025: Mr. Trump said that South Africa would not be invited to the Group of 20 summit in 2026, which he is planning to host in Florida in December.
March 11, 2026: Less than a month into his job as U.S. ambassador in Pretoria, Mr. Bozell was summoned by South African officials to explain what they called his “undiplomatic remarks.” Mr. Bozell had criticized the South African government in an address at a business forum the previous day.
Sept. 15, 2026: Mr. Rubio announces visa restrictions against selected South Africans, writing on social media that “the South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority.”
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10) Turkey Begins Broad Crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. Community
The government has called the campaign an effort to protect families. Rights organizations have accused the authorities of criminalizing L.G.B.T.Q. people and of seeking to thwart political activism.
By Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur, Safak Timur reported from Istanbul., Sept. 16, 2026
Security forces in Istanbul on Tuesday arrested demonstrators protesting the detention of L.G.B.T.Q. activists. Credit...Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The authorities in Turkey have arrested dozens of people since early Sunday as part of a broad crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. activists and associations, according to officials, rights groups and lawyers for the detained.
The government has called the campaign an effort to protect Turkish families, but rights organizations have accused the authorities of criminalizing L.G.B.T.Q. people and lifestyles they don’t like, and of seeking to stomp out rights activism.
Some critics of the campaign say the government is also targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people because members of that community are an active part of the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Emma Sinclair-Webb, who monitors Turkey for Human Rights Watch, said the actions were “a dramatic escalation in Turkey’s campaign against L.G.B.T. rights and civil society.”
The government, she noted, was conflating gay rights advocacy with prostitution, drug use and obscenity in a way that “smears L.G.B.T. people.”
“Their very identity is really being criminalized here,” she added.
Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, but Mr. Erdogan’s government has frequently demonized L.G.B.T.Q. people and sought to push them out of public life. The authorities have banned Pride parades in Turkish cities, and Mr. Erdogan has referred to L.G.B.T.Q. people as “deviants” who were “spreading like the plague.”
Mr. Erdogan has also promoted a conservative view of the family in which marriage is between a man and a woman, men are the breadwinners and women are encouraged to have at least three children. This year begins what Mr. Erdogan has called the “Decade of Family and Population,” during which the government hopes to push up Turkey’s sagging birthrate with cash incentives and other child-friendly policies.
The arrests began early Sunday, when the security forces in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities detained more than 60 people in their homes, and raided gay bars and the offices of gay rights organizations. On Monday, scores of demonstrators protesting the detentions were arrested in Istanbul.
The government also blocked numerous social media accounts belonging to gay rights groups, as well as the accounts of a sexual health organization, a legal monitor, reporters who wrote about the arrests and the Turkey office of Amnesty International.
In a post on social media on Sunday, Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said that the operation was called “My Family is Safe.” He said the efforts had targeted 162 people, nine associations and 13 businesses suspected of involvement in prostitution and the production and dissemination of “obscene content,” including to minors.
He noted that searches by the security forces had turned up digital materials, drugs and indications of foreign funding for groups that were encouraging homosexual activity and “indecency.”
“We are steadfastly continuing our efforts to protect our children, the institution of the family and the social order,” he added.
Mehmet Sinan Birdal, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, said the Turkish government was going after L.G.B.T.Q. people because of the community’s political opposition to Mr. Erdogan.
“Obscenity is a very vague term,” he said. “I see this as a step to further pressure civil opposition.”
Those detained in the operation included a women’s rights activist, a journalist who had written an article about gay rights in the Republic of Georgia and two founders of a health association that supports people with H.I.V.
Multiple members Kaos GL, a prominent gay rights association, were also detained.
Oya Aydin, a lawyer for the detainees from the Kaos GL association who was present during the police questioning, said that officers had asked about pictures used with news stories in the group’s online magazine that showed men and women kissing.
Yildiz Tar, editor of the association’s online newsmagazine, denounced the government’s crackdown, saying, “They call the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. obscene” and noting, “This is discrimination.”
Also arrested was Arif Sacli, a male dancer from the city of Izmir on the Aegean coast in western Turkey.
Mr. Sacli was detained earlier this year on obscenity charges after videos of him performing spread online. A Turkish court acquitted him.
The police detained him again on Sunday, and he was charged with obscenity and prostitution, according to his lawyer, Alperen Cihan Cetinkaya.
He said his client had nothing to do with either charge.
“They don’t like Arif,” Mr. Cetinkaya said. “He represents something not in line with their lifestyle.”
The arrests followed other cases in which the government tried to use obscenity laws to criminalize certain types of behavior.
Twice this year, Mabel Matiz, a singer, has faced obscenity charges over his music. A judge acquitted him in the first case, focused on some of his lyrics. A second case, focused on a video clip that shows a groom at a wedding party dancing with another man, is ongoing.
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11) At Least 21 Dead in Gaza After Building Collapse, Officials Say
The building was previously damaged by an Israeli strike, the local rescue service said. Its fall underscored the precarious conditions for people living among Gaza’s ruins.
By Natan Odenheimer, Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir, Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv, Sept. 16, 2026
Excavating rubble from a collapsed building to recover bodies in Gaza City on Wednesday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A war-damaged building in Gaza collapsed on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people, including children, and trapping many more beneath the wreckage, according to local officials.
The incident shines a light on the perilous conditions in Gaza after the devastating war that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Officials have warned that many more damaged buildings are at risk of collapse. The lack of progress on reconstruction has forced residents to choose between living in seriously compromised buildings or in tents.
Dozens of people were living in the Saada residential building in Gaza City when it caved in at around 2 a.m. local time, according to the Civil Defense rescue service, which is part of the Hamas-run interior ministry in Gaza.
The officials added that the building had previously been hit by an Israeli strike, though it was unclear when. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
Search-and-rescue teams pulled survivors from the wreckage on Wednesday morning as they searched for missing residents.
“We can see people still trapped under the rubble,” said Raed al-Dahshan, director of Civil Defense in the Gaza City area. “We’re doing everything we can to extract them.”
Mr. al-Dahshan said the authorities in Gaza had warned residents that the building was unstable, but that many did not leave because they did not want to be displaced and potentially end up in worse conditions. He added that there were roughly 70 buildings in the Gaza City area at risk of collapse.
Humanitarian groups warned that there could be more such deaths in the coming months.
“With the heavy rains and winds of winter approaching, the risk of damaged buildings collapsing will only increase, putting more lives in danger,” Pat Griffiths, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said by telephone from Gaza.
“Choosing between life in a tent — with little privacy or space and exposed to harsh weather — or a building that is damaged and at risk of collapse, just to have a roof over one’s head, is not a choice any family should have to make.”
The deadly collapse underscores the devastation across Gaza after years of war, which has left entire neighborhoods in ruins. Much of Gaza’s population was displaced by the conflict, and many are now living in damaged buildings.
After a U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement was reached in October 2025, Palestinians had hoped that Israel would allow a significant amount of heavy machinery and construction materials into Gaza to begin the long process of removing rubble and rebuilding the territory. Thousands of bodies from the war are still beneath the rubble across Gaza, according to local officials. On Tuesday, the United Nations human rights chief called for international investigators to be allowed into the enclave to recover the remains of Palestinians from beneath damaged buildings.
Efforts by President Trump’s Board of Peace and regional mediators to advance the cease-fire and pave the way for reconstruction have stalled. Israel has continued to target the territory, despite international pressure to halt its attacks there.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed a Civil Defense worker and a teenager, according to an official in the rescue service. The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hamas militants, and that the attack was under review.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and Egyptian-backed rescue teams assisted local emergency crews on Wednesday in their search for survivors of the building collapse.
In a statement, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, urged international authorities to allow heavy equipment into Gaza to assist in search-and-rescue operations, along with humanitarian aid.
“Every possible effort must be made to save lives, protect people from further harm and provide families with safer places to live,” he said. “Every minute counts.”
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12) Trump’s Minnesota Surge Threatened Democracy, Judge Warns
In a rare interview, Patrick Schiltz, who served as the federal court’s chief judge last winter, called the administration’s actions “a grave threat to the rule of law.”
By Mattathias Schwartz, Sept. 17, 2026
Mattathias Schwartz visited the Twin Cities and spoke with Judge Schiltz and six other judges who serve on Minnesota’s Federal District Court.
The legality of the administration’s tactics during its immigration enforcement operation, known as Metro Surge, in Minneapolis early this year was challenged by a series of federal lawsuits. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz’s warning was stark.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated nearly 100 orders issued by Minnesota’s Federal District Court during the month of January, including some mandating the release of undocumented immigrants from detention.
The violations needed to stop immediately. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Judge Schiltz wrote in his Jan. 28 order.
Judges around the country took notice, not only of the scale of the allegation but because such a harsh reproach was coming from the pen of Judge Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee with almost 20 years of experience on the bench. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s and has enjoyed close ties to the conservative legal establishment for decades. This was not the profile of a judge likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the White House.
In a rare 90-minute interview seven months later, Judge Schiltz said his order had been prompted by concern that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.
What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”
He said he thought the violations were largely the result of incompetence and staffing shortages, but also worried that the Justice Department had not taken their corrosive effect seriously enough.
“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he added, referring to the violated orders and other unusual behavior by the Justice Department. He was in his chambers, which has signed photos of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the wall. Earlier in his career, he helped found a law school at a Catholic university in Minneapolis, and wrote a renowned law review article about the moral perils of the legal profession.
Judge Schiltz, who served as the district’s chief judge from mid-2022 through June 2026, declined to discuss ongoing cases. But he and six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench agreed to speak to The New York Times about last winter’s tumult, to describe how an intense national spotlight, a deteriorating relationship with the Justice Department and a flood of lawsuits had combined to put their court under tremendous pressure.
In the view of the Department of Homeland Security, it operates “in line with the U.S. Constitution and all applicable federal laws,” said Chandler Rebel, a D.H.S. spokesman.
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the administration “will continue to fully comply with court orders.” She asserted that in most instances where there was an issue, “the underlying substance of the order was satisfied even where a secondary deadline was missed.”
Ms. Pels added that it she found it “remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews” criticizing the administration, and suggested that they consider recusing themselves if they “have made public comments on pending or related matters.”
It is indeed unusual for federal judges to give extensive interviews that reflect on periods when their rulings have made headlines.
The seven judges who spoke to The Times were appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. They included six of the seven judges who held active status in Minnesota last winter.
“We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence,” said Judge Nancy E. Brasel, whom Mr. Trump appointed in 2018. “And so we should, in order to keep it.”
The tensions in Minnesota eased after the administration announced an end to its surge in mid-February, following the killings of two civilians by federal agents.
Judge Schiltz said he hoped the portrait of how the bench had handled the crisis would help Americans better understand how the United States’ system of government depends on the rule of law.
“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body,” he said. “It is something that you absolutely need to survive, and yet it’s something that people just take for granted.”
Stirring the Pot
On Jan. 23, Judge Schiltz was at home cooking lunch when he received an email informing him the Trump administration had gone over his head to an appeals court.
Out in Minneapolis, ICE officers were arresting undocumented immigrants and putting them on planes bound for detention centers in Texas. It was the second month of Operation Metro Surge — the administration’s latest push to flood a Democratic-led city with armed personnel tasked with delivering on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations.
Tear gas filled the streets as protesters skirmished with uniformed D.H.S. personnel. Federal officers had already shot and killed one Minnesotan in her car; they would shoot and kill another during the coming weekend.
When a group of protesters disrupted a church service in St. Paul, the Trump administration sought warrants for their arrest, including Don Lemon, the former cable news host who has said he was reporting on the group as a journalist. One of Judge Schiltz’s colleagues, Magistrate Judge Douglas L. Micko, had granted three of the eight warrants, but not the one for Mr. Lemon. (Judge Micko, who was not among the judges interviewed by The Times, declined to comment.)
Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, then took the unusual step of requesting that another judge review Judge Micko’s decision. Judge Schiltz had told Mr. Rosen that he would decide on that after the bench met in person the following week.
That timeline wasn’t fast enough for the Justice Department. The Jan. 23 email informed Judge Schiltz that the administration had gone around him. It had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to force him to issue the other warrants. He had less than three hours to make his case to the appeals court for why it shouldn’t intervene.
Outside, it was 20 degrees below zero. The cold had closed the daytime center that looks after Judge Schiltz’s adult son, Peter, who has Down syndrome.
Judge Schiltz turned off the stove and settled Peter in his room with a movie. Then he went to his office.
“I had to sit down and represent myself,” he recalled.
When Judge Schiltz found himself in the spotlight, he said he drew on his experience clerking for Justice Scalia, who he recalled was “utterly unmoved by criticism,” and taught him that “you have to have a thick skin and, you know, uphold your oath.”
That afternoon, Judge Schiltz fired off two letters to the appeals court. He disputed the government’s claim that a warrant for Mr. Lemon’s arrest was, in his words, a “national security emergency.”
Justice Department officials were blasting Judge Micko, noting that his wife works in the office of Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat.
“I don’t even want to say ‘judge,’” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a senior department official, said in an interview that day with the journalist Megyn Kelly. Judge Micko, she said, “exhibited bias.”
The condemnation of Judge Micko by Trump-aligned media outlets was followed by a series of violent threats, which have not been previously reported. In the interview, Judge Schiltz revealed that Judge Micko and his family had to be moved to a secure location, where they remained for several days. Judge Schiltz said that the administration’s statements were part of what had put Judge Micko in danger.
The Eighth Circuit sided with Judge Schiltz, rejecting the government’s request. But the administration eventually got the additional warrants through a different route, by convening a grand jury. Months later, another judge is reviewing that process to see if prosecutors may have misinstructed the grand jury.
The cases cited in Judge Schiltz’s January list of violations have largely concluded, and in many cases, the administration eventually fixed the issues he had flagged.
The ‘Worst of the Worst’
For the clerk of court, Kate M. Fogarty, Operation Metro Surge brought echoes of the fraught atmosphere that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Even as public pressure on the court increased, she still had to monitor protests and handle shutdowns of the district’s courthouses, sometimes with a few minutes’ notice.
“You’ve got thousands of people demonstrating outside your window, whistles blowing nonstop,” Ms. Fogarty said. “And an inbox full of critical cases that need to be assigned.”
By late January, the immigration sweeps had led to hundreds of habeas corpus petitions — lawsuits from detainees demanding to be set free. Previously, undocumented immigrants could generally go on living in their communities for years while challenging deportation in immigration court. Then the Trump administration decided they could be detained as if they were still seeking admission to the United States.
During the first three months of 2025, Minnesota’s Federal District Court fielded two habeas corpus petitions. Over the same period in 2026, it received 1,116 of them. The clerk’s office stayed open 16 hours a day, seven days a week to process incoming petitions. None of the district court’s employees receive overtime, so the court’s staff were essentially working as volunteers.
Homeland Security officials claimed that the agency was targeting immigrants who were “the worst of the worst.” But the district’s judges said most of the detainees who appeared on their dockets seemed to be ordinary people with homes and jobs.
“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” said Judge John R. Tunheim, who was appointed by Bill Clinton.
District court judges work alone, but as the number of cases ramped up, the judges recalled seeking one another’s counsel, meeting regularly and consulting in running email threads. Eventually, some of their clerks made an informal spreadsheet showing whom to consult on particular legal questions. Some judges built templates of legal orders so they could respond quickly to some of the detention issues that were arising again and again.
The judges said they stayed glued to their devices, fearful of missing a petition. Judge Katherine M. Menendez said she responded to one request on her iPad from the coat room of a restaurant. At dinners with friends, Judge Schiltz said he would apologetically explain why he needed to check his phones constantly. “The cost of me enjoying a movie could be somebody waking up in New Mexico the next day when they shouldn’t have,” he recalled.
A Game of Keep-Away
As tensions in the Twin Cities rose, the district’s judges were also facing many other kinds of lawsuits — over the government’s conduct toward protesters, the rights of legally admitted refugees, criminal charges against the protesters themselves, attempts by the Trump administration to subpoena state and local officials and some suits questioning whether the whole operation was legal in the first place. Any decision they made was potentially subject to appeal to the Eighth Circuit, where four of the 11 active-status judges were Mr. Trump’s appointees.
But some of the district court’s most significant curbs on Operation Metro Surge came from its own Trump appointees.
“Due process is not a game of keep-away,” Judge Brasel wrote in a ruling requiring that detainees be given access to counsel.
Judge Eric C. Tostrud, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2018, issued a temporary order for the government to preserve evidence gathered at the scene where federal agents had shot and killed Alex Pretti, a protester.
Judge Tostrud, as the longest-tenured active judge, took over as chief this summer when Judge Schiltz decided to take senior status, a form of semiretirement. In an interview, he said that Judge Schiltz had been “the perfect person to lead us” during Operation Metro Surge. “Independent, brilliant, courageous. And not faint of heart.”
Behind the scenes, the district’s judges were dealing with a deluge of violent threats. After major rulings, the phones in judges’ chambers would sometimes ring nonstop, with clerks logging hundreds of incoming communications each day. Judge Jerry W. Blackwell shared one anonymous email vowing to “kill u soon.” The volume of hostile communications led the bench to create its own internal system for tracking people responsible for multiple threats, supplementing the U.S. Marshals Service, which normally handles judicial security.
The U.S. attorney’s office, headed by Mr. Rosen, was losing career attorneys, some of whom quit in response to how the Justice Department was handling the civilian killings. The administration tried to shore up head count by borrowing lawyers from the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. In a hearing before Judge Blackwell, one melted down, saying that the system was “broken.”
In the interview, Judge Schiltz said that normally government agencies act as “partners” to judges in tackling challenges to the system.
“But they weren’t this time,” he said. “We were really on our own.”
Anarchy or Authoritarianism
After Judge Schiltz’s January warning, judges in other districts around the country began using their rulings to sound the same alarm — the administration’s approach to detaining immigrants was jeopardizing the rule of law.
In West Virginia, a judge threatened to hold administration officials in contempt. In New Jersey, a judge ordered the Justice Department to make its own list of cases where it had failed to comply. In Texas, a judge decried the administration’s actions, and what he called “the perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
“If there is one single issue that would unite judges of all persuasions, it is the sanctity of court orders,” said Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, by email. Judge Wilkinson, appointed by President Reagan, is one of several Republican-appointed judges who have criticized the Trump administration in their rulings. “There is a brotherhood of judges on this question, of which Judge Schiltz is an esteemed and valued part.”
In the interview, Judge Schiltz said that many of the government’s violations of his court orders appeared to be inadvertent, the result of sloppiness and a lack of legal staffing to accompany the immigration surge.
“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” he said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.”
At the same time, he said, the violations needed to be taken seriously. The lack of resources led to a result, he said, that should have been anticipated, and that threatened the foundations of the legal system.
Obedience to court orders, Judge Schiltz said, is why people feel secure owning a home, saving money, getting married and having children.
“You walk down the street, and you assume you’re generally safe because of the law,” he said. “It’s the rule of law. If you don’t have it, you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.”
Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting.
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13) Locals Call It the World’s Largest Cesspool, and Blame It for Surging Cancer
For decades, the Mexican authorities have sacrificed a rural valley to flush away the capital’s waste and power the economy. Now, local communities are paying for that decision — often with peoples’ lives.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Visuals by Alejandro Cegarra, Sept. 17, 2026
The reporters visited several communities surrounding the Endhó Dam, in central Mexico, which locals call the world’s largest cesspool.
The old church of San Francisco Bojay in Hidalgo state, in Mexico, was partially submerged after the area was flooded in the 1950s for a reservoir called the Endhó Dam.
Yury Uribe traced an invisible map of death in her neighborhood, pointing to house after house, nearly all of them touched by cancer, she said.
On that corner lived Doña Agustina, claimed by cancer in her stomach just like Coco, her neighbor across the street. Farther down was Eva, whose death from a ruptured throat tumor left her autistic son on his own. Colon cancer took Doña Juanita, who went to the hospital on a Friday and died the following Monday. And Estela lived over there until about two years ago, when lung cancer spread through her body.
By the end of the tour of her hometown, General Pedro María Anaya, Ms. Uribe had tallied an incomplete yet grim ledger: at least 42 cancer-related deaths, 15 survivors and six active cases, all clustered within a few blocks.
“It’s a lot of pain,” said Ms. Uribe, 45, a former seamstress who turned to activism after seeing her town besieged by unexplained illness. “It’s not normal to have this many sick people in a community”
For many residents of more than 20 communities surrounding a reservoir known as the Endhó Dam in Mexico’s Hidalgo State, cancer is just another symptom of a crisis decades in the making.
In the 1970s, the federal authorities quietly diverted Mexico City’s storm runoff and wastewater into the region, effectively transforming it into the dumping ground for more than 20 million people. Effluent from a heavy industry corridor — including more than 100 factories and an oil refinery fueling Mexico City and other states — has compounded the crisis, with the vast majority of those plants dumping their untreated waste into the Tula River, which empties into the Endhó.
The resulting stew has turned the reservoir into what residents call the world’s largest cesspool.
The United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights has classified the Endhó basin as one of Mexico’s longest-running “sacrifice zones,” an area where local health and ecosystems are intentionally compromised to benefit the capital and its surrounding industries.
Sacrifice zones are a trade-off of modern urban planning. Areas where some people lose so the majority can thrive. The pattern spans the globe, from Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and Italy’s steel plants, to Canada’s oil sands and Mexico’s Endhó Dam.
Around the reservoir, the air is thick with sulfur and rot. White clouds of chemical foam float by homes and roads, while heavy organic waste in the water feeds an unstoppable carpet of aquatic weed.
“What we live through day after day is hell,” said Magnolia Sánchez, 51, a resident of San Mateo La Curva, another riparian community, whose cousin Maira died of breast cancer.
Older residents still remember when the polluted water arrived unannounced. Feliza Camacho was a newlywed in 1972 when she noticed the reservoir turning murky and smelly.
Then came the first victims.
“The lake was white with dead fish,” said Ms. Camacho, 73.
The decision to route Mexico City’s sewage lines and industrial runoff to the Endhó was initially seen as a win-win. As the capital grew, engineers desperate to shield the city from catastrophic flooding also realized the reservoir’s waters, loaded with organic nutrients from the sewage, could double as irrigation and a free fertilizer for the naturally arid valley.
Decades later, the massive influx of nutrients has sustained the region’s agricultural boom while also transforming the Endhó into an environmental dead zone.
Microbes have depleted the dam’s oxygen reserves. Aquatic life has vanished. In 2024, a thick carpet of invasive water hyacinth choked out the surface, growing over 27 times its initial size in just a few months, according to government estimates.
The labyrinth of crannies, nooks and holes within the tangled vegetation has turned the Endhó into a prolific mosquito factory.
When evening falls, people lock themselves inside. Cookouts and quinceañeras have been canceled because of the swarms. Families burn cardboard indoors, hoping the smoke scares off the insects, and purchase up to three cans of bug spray per week — a severe drain on their finances. Bedroom walls are speckled with people’s own dried blood, marks of their nightly battle with the creatures.
“We are living on edge. Being shut inside like this, we’re becoming aggressive. I see it in my own children, I see it in myself,” said Pablo Tinajero, 59, the community leader in Santa María Daxthó, a town by the dam.
At a nearby primary school, Daniela Álvarez, a teacher and principal, struggles to keep her students focused. Children constantly shift in their seats to shake off the mosquitoes, she said, and going to the bathroom, where the bugs congregate, has become a source of dread. Even Ms. Álvarez, 41, avoids pulling books from shelves for fear of releasing hidden insects.
“We’ve normalized the pollution, the bad air and the bad water,” she said. “But normalizing a plague is going too far. We shouldn’t have to teach our kids that this is normal.”
When Leticia Sánchez González’s right breast swelled last year, the pain was so intense that she said she had to quit her two jobs. Doctors told her not to worry, she said. It was likely an infection.
In June, new tests confirmed her suspicions: cancer. Her oncologist prescribed six rounds of chemotherapy to be followed by a mastectomy.
“So many people are getting sick now,” said Ms. Sánchez, 48, who lives near the dam in Santa Ana Ahuehuepan. “You have it, but so does the neighbor.”
The true extent of the illness is unclear.
According to raw data from Mexico’s statistics agency, cancer death rates in Tula de Allende — one of the two municipalities where the dam sits — have surpassed the national average every single year since 2016, at times spiking more than 50 percent higher than the rest of the country. In the neighboring municipality of Tepetitlán, mortality rates for kidney failure and urinary tract diseases have routinely dwarfed the national average, sometimes doubling it.
No public health data exist for the towns in the immediate vicinity of the dam, however.
The results of a census conducted by state and federal health brigades in 2024 were never disclosed. And the government has refused to fund epidemiological studies in the region, according to two researchers who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing public funding. Without that evidence, it remains close to impossible to know whether the surge in cancer cases is indeed caused by the pollutants in the Endhó, something else entirely or the result of random chance.
But to others, there is a clear connection between the Endhó’s polluted waters and the public health disaster. “The pattern is unequivocal,” said Juan Francisco Martínez, Hidalgo’s former director of epidemiological surveillance. “There is a correlation that is obvious, strong and coherent, even if there are no epidemiological studies to prove causality.”
Mexico’s Ministry of Health and the country’s health regulatory agency did not respond to a list of detailed questions.
As for residents, they say the proof they need is in their own backyards.
After Mexico City’s waste arrived, communities dug seven wells seeking clean water as the reservoir fouled. Yet for nearly 20 years, government studies have repeatedly confirmed that the wells — the main source of drinking water — are contaminated.
Arsenic, mercury and lead have all been found in the wells, violating maximum limits set by Mexican safety standards, according to reports by the country’s federal water authority seen by The Times. So have toxic levels of nitrates and fecal bacteria, as well as industrial solvents and byproducts of the petrochemical industry.
In 2024, an official report detected an identical chemical and molecular fingerprint shared between the reservoir and the local drinking supply, concluding that the Endhó’s toxic brew has seeped into the towns’ wells.
But Mayela Godínez, an official with Mexico’s water authority, dismissed that research as flawed, insisting that the agency’s technicians had assured her the well water “is not contaminated, that the quality is good.”
However, change may be slow.
Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree in 2024 legally binding the government to remediate decades of environmental neglect at the dam, eliminate the weeds and the mosquitoes. So far, the government has fumigated 27 communities and extracted the equivalent of 42 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water hyacinth.
But the plan, which the authorities called “the most important act of environmental justice in the history of the country,” feels hollow, critics say. The decree prohibited allocating new funding to clean up the dam, relying instead on exhausted public budgets. Efforts to treat the wastewater face fierce resistance from farmers who depend on the nutrient-rich runoff as crop fertilizer. And crucially, the program excludes public health initiatives.
“Once the environment is restored, our health will improve, they tell us,” said Ms. Uribe, the activist. “It’s an insult to our pain. Cancer doesn’t wait. Illnesses don’t wait.”
Chantal Flores and Alejandro Cegarra contributed reporting.
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14) Trump’s Economic Vise Leaves Cubans Desperate for Food and Medicine
The U.S. says its sanctions are not aimed at depriving Cuba of essential goods. Thousands of stranded shipping containers tell a different story.
By Ed Augustin and Frances Robles, Ed Augustin reported from Havana, Sept. 17, 2026
Ships unloading humanitarian aid at the Port of Havana this year. The challenges in shipping to the island nation are intensifying a humanitarian crisis. Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu, via Getty Images
Thousands of containers filled with food, medicine and other goods bound for Cuba have been stranded throughout the Caribbean since two shipping giants stopped deliveries to avoid tough U.S. sanctions, according to diplomats, Cuban officials, merchants and others involved in the imports.
The containers stranded in various ports include humanitarian aid, from solar panels to medication to colostomy bags. Dozens of containers of aid purchased by different United Nations agencies are among them.
U.S. sanctions have also hobbled shipments by air, and forced the World Health Organization to scrap planned deliveries of cancer drugs.
The challenges of delivering vital materials have sharply aggravated longstanding shortages, added to an enormous backlog of patients awaiting surgery and sent grocery prices soaring as Cubans live through the island’s worst humanitarian crisis since the 1959 revolution. With food becoming prohibitively expensive, hunger is rising and soup kitchens are struggling to fill the gap.
The Trump administration has imposed an economic vise on Cuba and its ruling communist party to try to force political and economic change.
In January, the administration imposed an oil blockade on the island. Then in May, it cranked up the pressure by announcing that foreign companies working with certain Cuban state entities risked having their assets frozen and being locked out of doing business with U.S. companies and banks.
Shortly after, Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping company, and CMA CGM, a French one — which experts say together delivered at least half of Cuba’s imports, including most of its food — quit delivering to the island.
The development adds another layer of misery for Cubans already struggling under daily blackouts, fuel and food shortages and a collapsing health system. It also puts more pressure on the Cuban government as it tries to survive the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.
Dr. Valia Rodríguez, a Cuban doctor in Britain who runs a charity called Aid for the Caribbean, said a Hapag-Lloyd container her organization filled with more than $500,000 worth of resuscitation kits, colostomy bags and intravenous tubes left Northern Ireland in April. It arrived at the Port of Mariel in Cuba on June 4, a day before the new sanctions aimed at foreign companies went into full effect.
“They decided to stop unloading the containers,” said Dr. Rodríguez, referring to Hapag-Lloyd.
The containers were instead sent to Panama, where the charity says it has had to pay more than $6,000 in storage fees, as patients who have had colon surgery turn to desperate measures. “Right now, people in Cuba are using shopping bags, because there are no colostomy bags,” Dr. Rodríguez said.
Spare parts from a dismantled power plant in Uruguay, donated to Cuba by the South American nation’s state-owned power company, have been unable to leave because no shipping line will take them to the island, according to diplomats. Cuba has suffered at least five nationwide blackouts this year as its aging power grid repeatedly collapses.
Though the U.S. government has explicitly stated that its sanctions are not intended to prohibit the delivery of food and medical supplies, Francisco Pichón, the U.N. coordinator in Cuba who runs its humanitarian response, said sanctions were jamming up the organization’s relief effort because shippers were wary of taking any chances.
“We are facing something very real, which is a phenomenon called ‘overcompliance,’” Mr. Pichón said. “Overcompliance is a really excessive precaution from companies to not expose themselves to sanctions.”
As of last week, the U.N. humanitarian relief effort was still awaiting delivery of 30 containers holding water treatment kits, antibiotics, contraceptives and pregnancy tests.
A lack of jet fuel has also decimated air traffic to Cuba, shutting off another cargo delivery route.
Despite months of attempts, thousands of donated vials of a cancer drug called doxorubicin failed to reach the island after several airlines stopped flying to Cuba, according to the Pan American Health Organization.
The World Health Organization said tuberculosis medication it purchased from an Indian pharmaceutical firm meant to leave by air via D.H.L. was returned to the manufacturer in May without explanation. Other humanitarian aid shipments had to be airlifted on special charter flights, U.N. agencies said.
Businesses have considered routing their cargo through the United States because shipments are still coming from there. But the cost of the extra shipping more than doubled the price of cheaper products like rice, making much of it too expensive to sell in Cuba, a person involved in Cuba business trade said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect business operations.
Business owners have been debating whether to abandon their cargo in foreign ports, the person said.
The State Department, has said that sanctions hold the “corrupt” Cuban regime and its financial backers to account, including GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls large parts of the island’s economy.
In a statement to The New York Times, the State Department said the government’s “blatant kleptocracy” and its economic mismanagement directed scarce resources for the benefit of officials, the military and the intelligence apparatus rather than the Cuban people.
“Our tough Cuba policy restricts financial transactions with entities owned or controlled by Cuban security services in order to cut the regime off from resources used to line its pockets and violently oppress the Cuban people,” the statement said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in September that “if Cuba is a humanitarian disaster, it is because their regime is a disaster, because the economic model they follow doesn’t work.”
Rodolfo Benítez Verson, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told the U.N. Human Rights Council last week that more than 7,000 containers bound for Cuba were stranded.
“The cruelty knows no bounds,” Mr. Benítez said. “They will have to answer to the Cuban people, and they will not be forgiven.”
Hapag-Lloyd, the German shipping line, said in a statement that it had made a “business decision” not to continue the Cuba maritime route and that it was working toward a “swift and practical solution” for the cargo.
CMA CGM, the French company, said in a statement that it had resumed limited services of “compliant cargo” to the island, such as agricultural products, medicines and medical devices.
Given the scale of the backlog it would take months for all the containers to reach the island, businesspeople, diplomats and humanitarian workers said.
The People’s Forum, a left-wing organization based in New York, said it had three containers stranded with roughly 1,000 solar panels costing over $750,000 meant to power hospital intensive care units. Purchased in Mexico, they are now stuck there, said Manolo De Los Santos, an organizer with the group.
“The bigger thing for us is the anguish of knowing there are literally surgical rooms without electricity and 100,000 patients waiting for surgeries,” he said.
The Cuban government, in a new report detailing the effects of the U.S. oil blockade, said 100,000 patients were awaiting operations, including 12,000 children.
With few viable commercial shipping routes available, exports to Cuba have plummeted.
Brazilian and Mexican exports to Cuba were both down over 90 percent in July compared with the same month last year, according to Brazilian and Mexican government official statistics.
“Up to two-thirds of the overall container shipping capacity has disappeared,” said Gordon Wilmsmeier, a professor of shipping and global logistics at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
It has become so difficult to ship supplies to Cuba that some sympathetic nations have turned to their militaries. Mexico, which stopped shipping oil to Cuba in January after President Trump threatened tariffs, used Navy ships to deliver items like thousands of tons of rice and beans, as well as bags of powdered milk. The Brazilian Air Force flew in shipments of powdered milk.
Celso Amorim, a top foreign policy adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, said in an interview that Brazil would like to provide Cuba with fuel and more aid, but is wary of Washington’s reaction.
“This is part of the reality of the present world,” he said. “It’s complicated. Every company here — even state companies or quasi-state companies — have interests in the United States, and they are afraid of being affected.”
At markets in Havana, the price of frozen chicken has doubled in recent months, while the price of a carton of 30 eggs has tripled to $11 — higher than the average monthly salary.
Food prices increased 60 percent from January to August, according to Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, a Cuban economist.
Soup kitchens have proliferated in Havana, the capital, but are running short of goods.
Quisicuaba, a state-linked religious nonprofit that, said it was waiting for five food containers. The quantity of chicken and eggs has dwindled, said Luis Enrique Alemán, who is in charge of Quisicuaba’s kitchen supplies.
“Such a drastic reduction in supplies forces us to work miracles and rethink our recipes,” he said.
Amid hundreds of people waiting to fill plastic tubs with food, Carmen Carballo García, 66, sat on a bench while her 5-year-old granddaughter, Yaquelin, sucked her thumb.
“The doctors tell me she is underweight,” Ms. Carballo said. “She needs milk, but she doesn’t have any.”
Jack Nicas contributed reporting from Brasília.
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15) To a Binational Tribe, Trump’s Border Wall Feels Like Betrayal
An escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson threatens to upend decades of uneasy cooperation between the Tohono O’odham Nation and the United States.
By Reis Thebault, Visuals by Anna Watts, Sept. 17, 2026
Reis Thebault and Anna Watts reported from the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They traveled nearly the entire length of the tribal reservation’s 62-mile border with Mexico.
“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Reis Thebault and Anna Watts reported from the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They traveled nearly the entire length of the tribal reservation’s 62-mile border with Mexico.
The first fence to slice through the Tohono O’odham Nation was simple barbed wire meant to keep cows from roaming south into Mexico. The second, which rose nearly a century later, was a sturdier steel barricade that stopped smuggler trucks from barreling north into the United States.
The binational tribe, whose land stretches from modern-day Arizona into the Mexican state of Sonora, has long been caught in the middle of disputes over a border between two countries that did not exist when the O’odham’s ancestors first settled here thousands of years ago.
The tribe’s leaders have adapted, working with the American government as it ratcheted up immigration security on their territory. But now they are facing the biggest wall yet, and they are drawing a line.
The Trump administration wants to build a towering 62-mile barrier that would bisect the Tohono O’odham homeland along the international boundary with Mexico, and construction could begin as soon as October. Leaders of the Native American nation say it will restrict member movement, endanger wildlife, destroy sacred burial sites and undermine tribal sovereignty while doing little to tamp down illegal activity.
“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation. “We don’t matter to the U.S. government. They want to erase us. They want to take our land, they want to desecrate it, they want to hit us where it hurts.”
The tribe has sued to prevent construction, but the federal government is pushing ahead as it seeks to wall off most of the southern frontier. Last month, masked and armed Border Patrol agents escorted a group of contractors through the reservation to do survey work at the planned wall site. O’odham leaders accused the workers of trespassing.
It is one of many battles simmering along the southern border, where President Trump’s wall has drawn bipartisan outrage in national parks, on private ranches and among environmentalists and Catholic priests. But this escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson stands out because it upends decades of uneasy cooperation between the tribe and the United States.
The Tohono O’odham Nation, which occupies a reservation roughly the size of Connecticut, has for years allowed federal immigration authorities to operate bases and surveillance towers on its land. The tribe spends $3 million a year on border security, and its police force works closely with Border Patrol agents.
“We’ve bent over backwards to work with the federal government,” Mr. Jose said. “But we will never agree to a wall.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the tribe successfully lobbied against a wall. But since Mr. Trump’s re-election, O’odham leaders say they have found federal officials unwilling to compromise.
The administration, which has waived environmental reviews to speed wall construction, has argued that the tribe’s vast and varied territory is a hot spot for cartel-sponsored crime.
“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border,” Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in a statement.
The Tohono O’odham, whose enrolled members number near 40,000, have long moved freely among the Sonoran Desert’s sky-scraping saguaros, Seussian ocotillos, herds of javelina and packs of coyotes.
In the 1850s, the Gadsden Purchase divided O’odham land nearly in half as a new boundary was drawn between the United States and Mexico. Today, Mexico is home to some 2,000 tribal members, as well as ancestral cemeteries and ceremony sites. But to cross, the O’odham must call a Border Patrol agent, who then checks documentation and unlocks one of three gates along the existing barrier.
Illegal immigration and drug smuggling through the reservation surged in the 1990s, raising fears among tribal members and prompting O’odham leaders to increase collaboration with Border Patrol.
“We’ve been homeland security,” Mr. Jose said. “We care about who’s coming through our borders.”
The tribe now says the federal government has betrayed that partnership. If the C.B.P. proceeds, Mr. Jose said the O’odham could seek to cancel leases allowing the agency’s offices and towers on the reservation.
The tribe sued in June, claiming the wall would illegally reduce the size of its reservation without congressional approval. Its lawyers asked for an emergency court order to stop construction. Last month, a federal judge denied the request, writing that the government’s security needs outweighed the O’odham’s concerns. The tribe is appealing.
Critical to the court challenge is a 60-foot-wide ribbon of federal land that runs along the border from California to New Mexico, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, where the Trump administration has claimed broad authority to build walls.
The tribe argues both that its borderland is exempt from the Roosevelt Reservation and that wall construction would inevitably spill beyond the strip.
A few feet from the border fence, a group of O’odham members has been tending a fire of creosote branches for weeks while praying for a halt to the wall construction. Tribal members at the prayer camp said the idea that C.B.P. would listen to them was far-fetched.
“We don’t trust the government,” said Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, a Marine Corps veteran who lives a few miles from the border.
Some see the dispute as a continuation of abuse and exploitation that dates back to Spanish colonization of the area.
“It’s just opening old wounds again,” said Samuel Fayuant, a cultural affairs specialist with the tribe. “They have never healed. It just continues and continues, and I don’t know if it’s ever going to stop.”
If the tribe loses in court, many members have said they would put their bodies on the line to stop a wall, citing the massive protests in support of the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight against an oil pipeline in 2016.
The tribe also has concerns about construction outside the reservation. In nearby Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where C.B.P. built a wall during the last Trump administration, it is now building a second barrier that will run parallel to the first.
Bulldozers have already begun clearing miles of desert to make way for construction, and the tribe is worried the work will wreak havoc on a sacred site known as Quitobaquito Springs.
The spring, a rare desert oasis, hosts three endangered species — a fish, a turtle and a snail — and was long the site of religious rites for the Hia-C’ed O’odham, a band of Tohono O’odham.
“Quitobaquito is the aquatic, biological gem of that broader desert landscape,” said Russ McSpadden, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. Because the Trump administration waived environmental laws, “contractors are pretty much working blind,” he said.
C.B.P. conducts cultural and environmental reviews before construction and hires monitors to oversee the contractors, said Hilton Beckham, an assistant commissioner at the agency.
Illegal immigration also threatens the environment, she said, when border crossers leave “trash, pollution and damage to natural resources.” Ms. Beckham said construction would “avoid Quitobaquito Springs and minimize impacts to sensitive resources.”
But activists and tribe members say the government has a poor track record. Six years ago, border wall construction in the area unearthed human remains and destroyed protected saguaros. In April, contractors plowed through a 1,000-year-old O’odham archaeological site.
Lorraine Marquez Eiler, whose great-grandparents lived near Quitobaquito Springs, fears the cherished place will not survive a second wall. “How much more damage can it take?” she said.
The atmosphere around the reservation is tense these days. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Jose was driving along the planned wall site to monitor construction preparation when a Border Patrol agent flashed his lights and swerved his truck in front of the chairman’s S.U.V.
“Why are you stopping me?” Mr. Jose demanded.
“I’m trying to get your attention,” the agent replied. He asked Mr. Jose to roll down his windows and identify the passengers in his car, saying he was checking for smugglers. “We don’t normally have a lot of vehicles coming down this way.”
Mr. Jose refused, saying: “This is my territory.”
The chairman fumed as he drove on, angry that a federal agent would accuse an O’odham leader of wrongdoing on his own land. Mr. Jose continued his survey until he reached a hill on the reservation’s eastern boundary.
Leaning on a dried saguaro rib for support, Mr. Jose walked to an overlook and gazed out. Far below, the old steel border fence faded into desert scrub, almost out of sight.
Bora Erden contributed reporting.
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16) What Is E1, Where Israel Is Pushing a Disputed Settlement Plan?
Israel’s right-wing government is opening bidding for thousands of housing units in a patch of the West Bank, a move that would thwart efforts at Palestinian statehood.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 17, 2026
An area this month in the E1 zone, near Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
Israel’s hard-line government is pushing forward contentious plans for construction in a strategically significant area of the occupied West Bank. Critics say the effort, which defies international censure, aims to lock in the plans on the ground before elections next month.
Previous American administrations vehemently opposed Israeli housing construction in the area, a patch of land east of Jerusalem that is about 4.5 square miles and is known as E1.
But Israel’s current right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has made moves suggesting construction there may begin soon, bucking the internationally accepted parameters for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here’s what to know about E1.
Where does the project stand?
The settlement project, which plans for about 3,400 housing units, stalled for years under international pressure. But the Israeli government granted final approval for it about a year ago.
This month, weeks after publishing an initial tender for the construction of more than 1,234 settler housing units in the area, the government said that it would open bidding on Oct. 25 for another 2,167 units.
Ir Amim, an Israeli group that advocates a Jerusalem shared by Israelis and Palestinians and that opposes settlement in the West Bank, publicized the new tender this week, after it was issued by a government office. The move underscores “the limits of domestic avenues in preventing the advancement of E1 and reinforces the urgency of international intervention and accountability,” the group said in a statement.
Why is it so opposed?
Most of the world considers settlement in the occupied territories to be a violation of international law and sees the West Bank as a core part of any future Palestinian state. Plans for Israeli settlement construction in E1 were first laid decades ago, but Israeli governments held off building there because of sensitivities about the location.
E1 is small but strategic. Building there would largely sever the northern half of the West Bank from the southern half, complicating the prospect of a viable, contiguous Palestinian heartland. The project would link Jerusalem with Maale Adumim, a large, urban Israeli settlement east of the city.
The name E1 refers to a bureaucratic designation for planning and zoning purposes, with the “E” standing for “east of Jerusalem.”
Location of the Proposed Israeli Settlement in the West Bank
Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister and the government’s chief promoter of settlements, has prioritized the development of E1, saying it “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office and several other government agencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the latest developments regarding E1.
The Trump administration has so far avoided openly condemning the E1 project, though it has opposed Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
Why advance building now?
The bidding for the first 1,234 housing units opened in mid-August and is due to close on Oct. 19, just a week before national elections scheduled for Oct. 27. The latest tender is expected to open for bids two days before the election and to close on Dec. 21, by which time a new government might be in place.
Opponents of the settlement say the current government is trying to curry favor with right-wing voters and to lock in as many bureaucratic moves as possible regarding E1 while it still can.
The Israel Land Authority, a government agency, posted an online announcement about the upcoming tender on Sept. 7, a day before Britain, Canada and France — once staunch allies of Israel — announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
That step illustrated Israel’s deepening isolation after the devastating war in Gaza, set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, and during intensifying settlement building and settler violence in the West Bank.
In a speech announcing the sanctions, Ed Miliband, the British foreign secretary, described the issuing of the E1 tender in August as “the crossing of a longstanding red line.”
“Let us be absolutely clear what this means: the creation of a set of facts on the ground to make the two-state solution unviable,” he added.
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who opposes settlement and who founded Ir Amim, said that announcing the tenders reflected “a clear decision to move ahead” and would not have been done without Mr. Netanyahu’s knowledge and consent. Mr. Netanyahu, he said, was in “defiant mode,” flouting international criticism, and is “going places he didn’t dare go in the past.”
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17) How Sexism Helps Put Women on Death Row
By Rachel Louise Snyder, Sept. 17, 2026
Ms. Snyder is a contributing Opinion writer.
Jude Weir
In 2004, during the trial for the murder of an Oklahoma man named Rob Andrew, the prosecutor dangled a pair of red thong underwear belonging to his wife, Brenda Andrew, in front of the jury. Ms. Andrew was accused of orchestrating the shooting that killed her husband. As a piece of evidence, the underwear was irrelevant to the case, but as an image it was potent. It said to the jury that this woman, with her provocative undergarments, will trespass the boundaries of marital vow and bed, so then every boundary, including taking a life, must be breachable to her.
The jury convicted Ms. Andrew and sentenced her to death. But in January 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence such as the underwear and Ms. Andrew’s dating history could render a trial “fundamentally unfair” and sent the matter back to the 10th Circuit. Last month, the 10th Circuit declined to reconsider the case, holding that any gender-based evidence used to convict her did not affect her sentence or taint the jury.
Ms. Andrew is just one of dozens of women awaiting execution across the United States who were subjected to prosecutorial tactics so deeply mired in sexism that they should be manifestly unconstitutional. This term, the Supreme Court will have an opportunity to consider Ms. Andrew’s case again when her lawyers file an appeal — with the hope of obtaining a new trial and enforcing a standard long missing from criminal law: a standard that would prohibit sexism and gender bias in criminal trials.
The Supreme Court and lower courts have repeatedly affirmed that racial bias can undermine the fairness of a criminal trial. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that relying on race “to impose a criminal sanction ‘poisons public confidence’ in the judicial process.” In that case, an expert witness deemed the defendant, Duane Buck, potentially dangerous in the future because he was Black. The justices determined that such blatant racism, relying as it did on the stereotype of the violent Black man, rendered his trial unfair. But there is a striking lack of firm precedent around gender discrimination.
In Ms. Andrew’s case, the prosecutor pushed the Oklahoma jury to see her through the lens of a former Sunday school teacher turned Jezebel, able to control her partners through seduction and manipulation — a not uncommon framing for women facing the death penalty. Throughout the trial, prosecutors questioned witnesses about Ms. Andrew’s skimpy outfits, her sexual partners going back decades and the frequency of her having sex in a car. None of these salacious details were connected with the alleged plot to murder Mr. Andrew, but they would collectively paint a portrait of a woman so morally compromised as to render her every word unreliable and ultimately help send her to death row.
The legal system is rife with misogyny and racism, both of which can work against defendants in courtrooms across this country. But with women at the center of so few cases involving capital punishment — they make up just 2 percent of the country’s death-row population — criminology research has tended to focus on larger demographic populations. Recently, in a paper titled “Sex on Trial,” the researchers Nathalie Greenfield and Sandra Babcock examined the trial transcripts of all 48 women who were sentenced to death between 1990 and 2022 to determine whether and how they were sexualized by prosecutors and defense lawyers. Ms. Greenfield is also representing Ms. Andrew in her appeal to the Supreme Court, and Ms. Babcock is representing her in a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
They found a full 34 out of the 48 cases, or 71 percent, featured prosecutors using sexualizing language or arguments in their attempts to secure convictions. “In most of these cases prosecutors made no attempt to link the descriptions of women’s bodies and undergarments to the elements of the crime or aggravating factors relevant to punishment,” wrote Ms. Greenfield and Ms. Babcock. Over and over, women’s clothing, hair, body parts, extramarital affairs, relationships, sexual proclivities and accusations around bad mothering appeared in their trials, even when these details were irrelevant to the crimes.
Wendi Andriano, now on death row in Arizona for murdering her husband, used lube to have sex with her husband and was questioned about whether or not she also needed lube with her lover, the insinuation being that the lube itself was evidence of her wifely failings. Darlie Routier, sentenced to death after being accused of killing two of her sons in Texas, had the misfortune of leaving the house braless on several occasions after she had breast augmentation surgery, a detail the prosecutor asked at least two witnesses about on the stand. Unless needing lube or having breast implants directly implicates a defendant — and in neither of these cases was that true — such items should be barred from evidence since they serve no other purpose than to humiliate, objectify and dehumanize the woman on trial.
Nearly all the women in the report were subject to physical or sexual violence. During trial, that violence was often ignored, minimized or reframed as the women’s choice — another way in which sexism infiltrates a courtroom. Take the case of Brittany Holberg, a sex worker who claimed she’d killed a former client in self-defense after he pulled out clumps of her hair, refusing to let her go. The prosecutors said Ms. Holberg’s claim of self-defense was a fabrication. They argued that the fact that she pretended to enjoy sex for a living made her inherently deceitful. “Instead of viewing the woman who’s on trial as a victim-survivor,” Ms. Babcock told me, “they’re viewing her as somebody who has agency and who exercises her sexual power to seduce and manipulate.” These sordid details can have an accumulated effect of poisoning a jury’s mind against a defendant. This kind of poisoning is what denying due process looks like.
“A jury can only make proper decisions about somebody’s credibility,” Ms. Greenfield told me, “about their testimony, about who they are and what they might have done in their story and their defense if they’re devoid of those moral judgments and those stereotype-based judgments.”
The fact that more than 20 years later the news pieces written about Ms. Andrew or her case (including this one) still refer to her thong underwear reflects how powerfully the prosecutor’s narrative has taken hold. A not insignificant point in “Sex on Trial” is that 88 percent of the judges were men and 96 percent of the death-penalty cases were tried under an elected male district attorney.
In an effort to see if male defendants are subject to this same treatment, a team of researchers led by Ms. Babcock has begun research on men’s death-row cases in the same geographical areas and jurisdictions where the women were convicted. Of the 52 cases they’ve analyzed so far, they have yet to find a single one in which a man’s appearance is sexualized or his consensual sexual relationships are examined in detail. In their research, men were not asked about the number of sexual partners they’ve had or the type of undergarments they wear. The report has not yet been released, but so far evidence of sex acts typically appears in two ways, Ms. Babcock told me: either the defendant was charged with a sex crime or the defendant was a childhood victim of sexual abuse.
It seems that two different practices exist in our legal system: one that prejudices juries and judges by relying on gendered stereotypes and biases, and another that doesn’t. To condemn someone to death, evidence of guilt ought to be strong enough in its own right without prosecutors’ having to rely on shady tactics of sex discrimination. Women, Ms. Babcock told me, “are being condemned not just because of what they were convicted of doing, but because of their sex lives. Because of their appearance. Because they didn’t wear a bra.”
If the Supreme Court grants Ms. Andrew the opportunity to readjudicate her case, it will have taken an important step toward correcting this judicial blind spot and firmly establishing a much-needed new precedent for courts — and for women — across the country.
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18) Side hustles aren’t just for ‘Ted Lasso’s’ plot, they’re many professional footballers’ reality
By Asli Pelit, Sept. 17, 2026
When Lewes FC was in England’s second tier of women’s football, the league had yet to become fully professional. Jasper Wax/The FA via Getty Images
This week’s episode of Apple TV’s ‘Ted Lasso’ opens with a scene familiar to many working mothers: a professional woman juggling childcare and her job. In this case, that job is playing professional soccer for a second-division women’s team in England.
AFC Richmond Women’s team knows that being a professional soccer player does not necessarily mean soccer gets to be your only profession. The fictional team’s portrayal mirrors the reality of many real athletes facing the same challenges.
When Lizzie (Faye Marsay) loses her childcare support at the last minute, she decides that her only option is to bring her son to training. Meanwhile, Gemma (Abbie Hern) learns that a coveted law-firm internship interview conflicts with practice. The dean of the law school calls it “your football thing”, as though playing professionally is little more than a hobby. When Shannon (Shannon Hayes) makes a food delivery for her other job, a customer recognizes her: “You play for Richmond, right?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“And you deliver food?”
“Welcome to second-division football,” Shannon says.
These are not just obstacles thrown in the way of a fictional team’s progress, as they struggle to make an impact on the pitch in the second division of English football. This Hollywood drama is very much real life.
“We would be in with the club Monday for about a half-day, Wednesday for most of the working day, Friday for most of the working day and then Saturday morning for matchday minus-one and then matchday on Sunday,” Lauren Heria, who played for Lewes FC Women during the 2022-23 season when the club was in England’s second division, recalled.
“The majority of the girls worked alongside that schedule. And they had jobs that were sympathetic to the fact that they were footballers.”
Heria’s teammates worked in restaurants or bars, while others were attending university.
“You’ll probably see more of that in tier 3 to 4,” she said. When Heria was playing for the London Bees, a semi-professional team, in 2021-2022, all of her teammates had full-time jobs to balance with two evening training sessions a week. “Football was kind of what they did on the side.”
After decades of being categorized as a part-time gig for players, last September, the WSL2 became fully professional, meaning players became eligible for membership in the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), with access to the union’s support and services. The move also introduced mandatory salary floors for both the WSL and WSL2. In the second division, clubs must pay players at least £17,500 ($23,400) for players aged 18-20, £22,200 ($29,440) for players aged 21-22 and £26,900 ($36,000) for players aged 23 and older.
“This initial floor establishes a baseline and it’s a foundation we are fully committed to building upon,” a WSL spokesperson said at the time. “There was no salary floor for players up until this season, and minimum salaries have been implemented as the result of an 18-month consultative process involving key stakeholders. The floor is higher than the minimum wage for an equivalent age, based on 20 hours per week.”
Before the new standards were introduced, WSL 2 players were mostly earning significantly below those rates.
Take Blackburn Rovers, one of the second-division clubs from Lancashire, for example. According to The Athletic’s Megan Feringa, who broke the news that the club decided to self-relegate from the second division in May 2025, the players were reportedly earning about £9,000 ($12,000) a year, with the highest salary of £15,000.
While the new rules satisfy the regulatory definition of professional soccer, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate the economic pressures that lead someone to consider a second job.
The £22,200 ($29,440) minimum required salary is below what someone working a conventional 37.5-hour week would earn annually in the United Kingdom.
For a worker aged 21 and over working full time, the minimum wage yearly salary is approximately £24,785 ($33,167) for a 37.5-hour week or £26,437 ($35,375) for a 40-hour week before tax. Despite the benchmark, WSL’s governing body says its salary floor exceeds the applicable minimum wage when calculated against the league’s required 20 hours of weekly contact time.
Unfortunately, efforts to create better financial conditions for players have also produced unintentional consequences.
In 2024, faced with the new requirements, then-club owner Dai Yongge voluntarily withdrew Reading F.C. Women’s team from the WSL 2 before having to meet the requirements to compete in the league. Rovers followed a year later, choosing to withdraw its women’s team from the second tier rather than meeting the increased financial obligations, including the required salaries.
The fight for decent wages and better working conditions hasn’t been limited to second-division women’s soccer in the UK.
In the United States, a country whose women’s national team has won the World Cup four times, you don’t have to look back even a decade to find professional players struggling to make ends meet.
In 2021, players in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the top-flight soccer league in the United States, launched an unambiguously named campaign to fix a similar problem: #NoMoreSideHustles.
“Professional athletes, regardless of gender, shouldn’t have to work two, three, and four jobs to support themselves,” the campaign said. At the time, roughly one-third of NWSL Players Association members earned the minimum $22,000 salary per year. About 75 percent earned $31,000 or less. For a league in its ninth season, in full expansion mode with 12 teams in 2022, the NWSLPA said it was not going to wait “another decade to achieve fair contracts, equal pay and professional playing conditions.” At the time, the minimum salary for an MLS player was $84,000.
“I was cleaning toilets, mopping floors, cleaning up after customers, etc. After that, I’d train myself, train with a boys team at night when I could find one, and referee in between so I could afford the gas money for all of the above,” Darian Jenkins, the now-retired pro player and a pundit of CBS Sports, who was working at a cycling studio, said at the time of the campaign.
Former players Jessica McDonald, Kristen Hamilton, DiDi Haračić, Emily Menges, Tori Huster and Kat Williamson all talked about having second jobs to continue their professional careers in soccer, from packing boxes for Amazon to driving for DoorDash and cleaning floors.
For the NWSL players, the turning point came through collective bargaining. In 2022, the NWSLPA ratified its first collective bargaining agreement. Among other things, it established a $35,000 minimum salary and protections including pregnancy and parental leave.
The parties renegotiated in 2024, and the league minimum rose to $48,500 in 2025 and $50,500 this season. By 2030, it is scheduled to reach $82,500. The base salary cap, encompassing every player’s salary on a team, was $3.3 million in 2025 and will rise to $5.1 million in 2030.
The current CBA, which will be renegotiated before the 2030 season, guarantees player contracts, provides unrestricted free agency, eliminates the draft and prevents players from being traded without their consent. It also expanded parental leave, childcare and caregiving assistance, family-building benefits and housing support.
These are all particularly relevant to the latest Ted Lasso episode.
If they were playing in the NWSL, Lizzie could receive a dependent-care stipend of up to $10,000 per season to help with childcare. The twins could take advantage of the league’s housing support. Gemma might not feel the same urgency to pursue a law degree alongside soccer or could feel the freedom to choose to pursue both. Boots would likely be able to afford a better car and only perform her own maintenance if it was her choice.
If this episode gets one thing right, it’s that putting “professional” in a league’s name does not necessarily make the lives of its players better.
True professionalization means building a proper employment structure with wages, benefits and protections that allows athletes to actually make soccer their job.
And no more side hustles.
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