  Panel, Socialism 2026Russian Neofascism: Imperialism Abroad, Repression at HomeSunday, September 6, 2026TIMES: Los Angeles 08:00 | Chicago 10:00 | New York, Montreal, Vermont 11:00 | Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires 12:00 | England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland 16:00 | Central European Time 17:00 | Ukraine 18:00 | Moscow 18:00 | Tbilisi 19:00 | Karachi 20:00 | New Delhi 20:30 | Taipei, Hong Kong 23:00 | Tokyo 24:00| Sydney 01:00 Monday | Auckland 03:00 Join Zoom Meeting https://stmarys-ca.zoom.us/j/98753615148?pwd=qS20DZjbnSX1uajdOmPNUbahyHBpVW.1 Meeting ID: 987 5361 5148 Passcode: 020808 Join instructions https://stmarys-ca.zoom.us/meetings/98753615148/invitations?signature=PUXtC4Y5l5eoYLs7OiomRsGqPxMebm5wlJtz17LMoUM Vladimir Putin responded to democratic uprising in Russia’s former empire by repressing domestic dissent and launching an imperialist war on Ukraine. In a discussion of their new book, Russia’s New Imperialism, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev will be joined by Robert Brenner and Yulia Yurchenko to examine Putin’s neofascist project, Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination, and today’s inter-imperial rivalries. Speakers: Ilya Budraitskis, co-author of Russia’s New Imperialism Ilya Matveev, co-author of Russia’s New Imperialism Robert Brenner, Professor Emeritus UCLA, editor at New Left Review, author of Economics of Global Turbulence Yulia Yurchenko, author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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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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) Deaths of 2 Men in Los Angeles Police Custody Set Off Investigations
Mayor Karen Bass questioned police training to handle mental health crises after the city released graphic video footage of officers’ actions.
By Jill Cowan and Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2026
The Los Angeles Police Department has released footage showing officers involved in the deaths of two men. Credit...via Los Angeles Police Department
Graphic footage showing the deaths of two men in the custody of the Los Angeles Police Department prompted calls this week for additional oversight of the department. Experts raised questions about how officers had responded to two recent encounters, both of which appeared to involve mental health crises, and Mayor Karen Bass said she had doubts about how officers had been prepared for such challenges.
“What is the training?” Ms. Bass said in an interview on Tuesday. “My impression is that it does not seem to be adequate.”
Video footage of the two deaths, which was captured by law enforcement cameras, jarred the nation’s second-largest city when authorities released it late last week. Police accountability laws in California are among the more stringent in the United States, a response dating to riots in 1992 that were sparked by the beating of Rodney King.
Videos from July 15 show detention officers in a city jail converging on a man brought there after family members had called the police, saying he was brandishing a knife at them.
After an hourslong standoff with crisis negotiators and SWAT officers, the man, Jose Carlos Hoyos-Munoz, 58, had been arrested. At the holding facility in the San Fernando Valley, however, police said he resisted their efforts to fingerprint him. In the video, officers can be seen moving him to a fingerprinting area, where they hold him down while they cover his head with a “spit sock” — an effort, officials said later, to stop him from biting and spitting on them.
Later footage from a cell shows officers swarming him as he stands on top of a toilet with his hands cuffed behind his back. Several officers wrestle him onto a cot, face down, the video shows, then back away from his prone body several minutes later.
Mr. Hoyos-Munoz was pronounced dead a short time later. The authorities have yet to release a cause of death.
In a second video, officers can be seen shooting a man who was reported to be swinging an aluminum baseball bat at pedestrians and cars along a Los Angeles sidewalk on July 29. The man, Alejandro Luis Garcia, 33, died in the shooting.
In the footage, officers shout at the man to drop the bat. Seconds later, an officer opens fire.
Los Angeles police officials said that both deaths were under review by internal investigators and outside agencies, including Los Angeles County prosecutors. No criminal charges have been filed or disciplinary actions taken against the officers.
“Our officers are committed to protecting the public, preventing violent crime, and responding with compassion to individuals experiencing a mental health crisis or severe emotional distress, often in rapidly evolving and complex situations,” a statement from the department said. “In these moments, officers must make split-second decisions to safeguard innocent lives.”
Law enforcement officers are allowed to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or someone else.
In Los Angeles, detention officers at city jails are not sworn officers, but civilians who receive some training in handling people with mental illness, according to department officials. Los Angeles police officers receive at least 40 hours of mental health intervention training, and mental health professionals are deployed with every SWAT call, according to the department’s policy.
Jeff Wenninger, a retired Los Angeles police lieutenant who consults on use of force issues, said that footage of the jail death raised concerns. At several points, he said, officers appeared to have pinned Mr. Hoyos-Munoz down in a way that might have restricted his breathing. A spokesman for the police department declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.
In 2021, after the death of George Floyd led to a national reckoning on police abuses, California made it illegal for law enforcement officers to use any restraint or transport method that puts people at substantial risk of so called “positional asphyxia.” City policy requires that officers be trained to restrain people without restricting their breathing.
Nithya Raman, a City Council member who is challenging Ms. Bass in the mayoral race, has sparred with the mayor over police funding and the police union’s support for Ms. Bass.
On Tuesday, Ms. Raman said that she would strengthen oversight of the police.
“What happened to Jose Carlos Hoyos-Munoz and Alejandro Garcia is disturbing and demands justice,” she said. “Both cases need a full, independent investigation with real accountability.”
A woman who identified herself as Mr. Garcia’s sister declined to speak with a reporter.
Mr. Hoyos-Munoz’s brother described him as a kind man who took particular care of their mother after their father’s death several years ago. The brother, Jorge Hoyos, said Mr. Hoyos-Munoz had moved from Peru roughly two decades ago and worked in the dental field.
He struggled with his mental health, his brother said, requiring medications that he had stopped taking last year after complaining that they were affecting his sleep.
On the day that Mr. Hoyos and his mother called the police, the family had hoped that officers would take Mr. Hoyos-Munoz to the hospital.
“He was not taking the medicine by himself and he refused to take it from me,” Mr. Hoyos said. “What he did was very small, but the police considered him like a criminal.”
Mr. Hoyos said he told officers he didn’t want to press charges, only to get help for his brother, whom the family called Pepe.
“We’re missing him,” he said.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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1) Wondering How Nuts Trump’s Tariffs Are? Consider Aluminum.
By Bill Saporito, Mr. Saporito is an editor in Opinion, Sept. 2, 2026
Tobias Nicolai/Connected Archives
The list of Canadian imports now subject to 50 percent tariffs in the United States includes steel, seaweed, ink, animal hides, dog leashes, saddlery, suitcases, plywood, knit hats (toques, to Canadians), floating docks, furniture, whiskey, honey and, of course, hockey sticks. But the tariffs on aluminum show most starkly the irrationality of President Trump’s trade war with our northern neighbor.
Canada shipped nearly $10 billion in aluminum products to the United States last year. The metal is used in construction, cars, furniture, drink cans and countless other things. Mr. Trump has every obligation to enforce trade laws and prevent other nations from taking unfair advantage of us. But the Canadian aluminum industry hasn’t bilked the United States. America needs aluminum to keep its auto plants running and to keep food and drink prices down, and Canada is just better at making it.
Aluminum isn’t cooked like steel; it’s made from alumina, a powder refined from bauxite ore and zapped with electricity until it renders into a metal. The electric bill alone can account for up to 40 percent of the manufacturing cost. When you think about trade with Canada, it’s useful to imagine aluminum not as a metal but as electricity in solid form.
With its abundant snow, lakes and rivers, Canada has huge hydroelectric power resources, often in sparsely populated areas. As a result, the country has lots of reliable, inexpensive electricity, which gives it an edge over the United States in aluminum smelting. Today there are eight smelters operating in Quebec and one in British Columbia, producing about 3.6 million tons of metal annually. The United States gets 60 to 70 percent of its imported aluminum from Canada.
The United States tried to develop a competitive domestic aluminum sector. It began to expand with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era project that was a model for rural electrification initiatives across the country. Low-cost energy attracted increased investment in aluminum smelters, like the one in Alcoa, Tenn., the ultimate company town. Alcoa, founded in 1888 as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, became the biggest aluminum smelting operation in the country. But the population grew after World War II, and in the second half of the 20th century the energy crises helped flip the cost calculus. Many American smelters shuttered.
Canada’s often less expensive, more reliable energy supply — nobody’s moving into northern Quebec to compete for it — proved decisive.
Since 1980, almost 30 American smelters have shut down, with companies typically citing inadequate guarantees about the supply and price of power as the reason. You can’t just hope that there’s enough juice to run the smelter.
Alcoa led the retreat to Canada. The company today operates three aluminum plants in Canada and has just two operational plants in the United States. It’s looking to sell some 10 of its shuttered or curtailed sites to the data center industry. One of its remaining smelters, in Massena, N.Y., depends on a New York State allocation of low-cost power and recently received several million dollars in incentives. Alcoa is investing nearly $60 million in the plant through 2028. Canada might call that a state subsidy — cheating — but without it, the company can’t operate competitively.
The closure of struggling American smelters means that the United States must import — and that the cost of tariffs is destructive to American industry. As of March, the automobile industry had paid more than $35 billion since 2025, thanks to tariffs on aluminum, steel and car parts and other items. This is money that carmakers could have spent on research and development or lowering car prices.
Mr. Trump wants to reverse history and create domestic manufacturing jobs in industries such as aluminum. He’s not the only one. The dream of increasing well-paying manufacturing jobs was what inspired states such as New York to shell out money to open factories and keep them in business. Alcoa’s plant in Massena pays $37.71 an hour for a general mechanic.
The president has largely failed, at least so far. Manufacturing jobs have declined in his second term. On aluminum specifically, Mr. Trump is promoting a $4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, backed by the United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum, along with $500 million in federal dollars and a couple of hundred million in state incentives, including tax breaks. This factory might get built, but few — if any — others will.
Even with all the incentives, building smelters in the United States isn’t all that appealing. Our electric grid is in terrible shape, electricity rates are rising, and the Trump administration is actively discouraging new sources of power, such as renewables. And no one knows whether Mr. Trump will waver on tariffs again. Try selling your board of directors a multibillion-dollar, two- or three-year investment on that basis. Emirates Global might be willing to shoulder the risk, but few other companies are.
It’s not cheating when Canadians undersell American aluminum producers. It’s an advantage. It’s logical for the United States to import lower-cost Canadian aluminum and invest in industries in which America enjoys its own advantages — chip design and artificial intelligence, for instance.
Who would flout this logic, trashing a 150-plus-year relationship with a close ally in a disruptive attempt to separate two interdependent economies? Oh, right.
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3) Judge Blocks Trump’s Second Try to Restrict Birthright Citizenship
The ruling raised concerns that babies already defined as citizens by the Supreme Court could have their citizenship revoked under an order the president signed in August.
By Zach Montague, Sept. 2, 2026
President Trump signed executive orders last month seeking to limit birthright citizenship. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked much of President Trump’s latest effort to withhold citizenship from babies born in the United States to noncitizen parents.
The judge ruled that the Supreme Court had already settled questions reopened by an executive order Mr. Trump signed in August.
While the decision was limited to children born after Feb. 19, 2025, including those born in the future, Judge Deborah L. Boardman wrote that the order would likely affect babies the Supreme Court had already defined as citizens. The ruling delivered a sharp rejection of the president’s renewed efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, after the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in July that a previous, more sweeping executive order from 2025 was unconstitutional.
“No presidential executive order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” she wrote.
Judge Boardman’s order took a dim view of the Trump administration’s reasoning, which she characterized as a thinly veiled attempt to get around the Supreme Court’s decision. She wrote that the president and others named in the lawsuit “completely misread” the majority’s opinion and embraced a “distorted interpretation” of its conclusions.
In a 35-page opinion, she described the latest order as only the most recent attempt to curtail birthright citizenship by any means that could survive legal scrutiny.
“Since his second term in office began on January 20, 2025, the president has tried, through executive order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” she wrote.
Judge Boardman described a number of ways that children covered by the lawsuit could have their citizenship rescinded, including if the Trump administration moved to label their parents members of terrorist groups or “alien enemies” under arbitrary legal determinations. She cited a pattern in which the administration has accused Venezuelan nationals of being affiliated with the criminal organization Tren de Aragua, often without evidence, in deportation proceedings.
While she stressed that it was too soon to find that the order itself was unconstitutional, she wrote that it already appeared clear that it was unconstitutional as applied to the class of babies defined when immigration groups initially sued last year to block Mr. Trump’s first order.
The order this year had included other measures to create novel categories of babies that could be disqualified from citizenship, including those born to parents engaged in so-called “birth tourism,” through which mothers deliberately traveled to the United States to give birth.
It was unclear how the Trump administration planned to tag those it suspected of traveling to the United States to have their children. But Judge Boardman noted that the executive order was broad, describing anyone who engaged in a “commercial transaction” — such as purchasing a plane ticket — as traveling to access birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court’s decision upholding birthright citizenship “is the law of the land,” Judge Boardman wrote. “The president must follow it.”
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4) Trump Moves to Strip Tax Exemption From Schools That Aid Minority Students
The Treasury Department released rules that would prevent schools with race-based programs from qualifying for tax-exempt status, a threat to both higher education and other private schools.
By Andrew Duehren and Michael C. Bender, Sept. 3, 2026
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy, and Michael C. Bender writes about the Trump administration’s education policy.
The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.
The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.
Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s push to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students, efforts meant to address the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and segregation. Trump officials, however, view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.
The threat of losing tax-exempt status would tighten the financial squeeze the administration has applied to higher education by withholding federal research funding. Last year, President Trump called for the I.R.S. to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status, which experts said would be contrary to a federal law prohibiting the I.R.S. from carrying out politically directed audits.
While schools may still not owe much in federal income taxes even if they lost their tax-exempt status, the exemption is valuable because it allows donors to deduct donations they make directly to the school, helping fund-raising efforts. The rules will take effect after May 31 and apply to as many as 18,000 schools, the Treasury said, though legal expert said they expect the regulations to be challenged in court.
“This just opens up the door to the weaponization of tax-exempt status,” said Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at the Catholic University of America. “It potentially gives the I.R.S. a weapon to use to chill speech or try to leverage behavior at schools.”
Beyond education, the Trump administration has more broadly sought to push the I.R.S. to be more aggressive in investigating left-leaning nonprofits, including those that Trump officials accuse of supporting terrorism. I.R.S. officials have in recent weeks discussed creating a faster process for revoking tax-exempt status from nonprofits, according to people familiar with the conversations.
“Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Today’s Treasury and I.R.S. proposed regulations establish a clear standard, and the institutions that continue to use discriminatory practices will no longer receive the benefits of federal tax-exempt status.”
The Trump administration said the tax regulations would draw on a 1983 Supreme Court case that found an organization could not receive tax-exempt status if it was in opposition to a “fundamental public policy.” In that case, the I.R.S. revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian school, because the school had a policy banning interracial relationships. The Supreme Court upheld the I.R.S. decision because “racial discrimination in education violates a fundamental public policy.”
But what counts as a fundamental public policy has otherwise been left largely undefined, and the standard has been rarely used to deny a group’s tax exemption. The Trump administration first said last year that it would develop guidelines on the application of the fundamental public policy concept. In June, the Treasury Department submitted regulations on the topic to a White House regulatory office, which approved them last month.
Based on how the Trump administration had described its plans for the regulations, nonprofit experts had expected they will state that giving a preference to Black or other minority applicants in admissions runs counter to fundamental public policy. The administration said it would rely on a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, in the Students for Fair Admissions case, to set a standard for what counts as a fundamental public policy.
In the majority opinion in that case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared that any applicant “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.” He also said, though, that the court’s opinion should not be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
University officials have said that the ruling allows schools to consider race as part of a broader review of an applicant’s character. But the Trump administration has adopted a narrow view of the ruling, dismissing holistic reviews of applicants as workarounds for universities to pursue diversity goals.
“They will state that what we used to call affirmative action is now a violation of fundamental public policy,” said Darryll K. Jones, a law professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. “They have announced that they are going to use the new regulations to implement Students for Fair Admissions as far and as wide as possible.”
But Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was skeptical of whether courts would agree with how the Trump administration defines a fundamental public policy.
“Fundamental public policy is not something that the I.R.S. can just go and grab; it needs to be something that is deeply anchored,” he said. “Clearly, we are quite divided on this issue right now, there is nowhere close to overwhelming agreement.”
The proposed regulations themselves do not provide much detail into how the I.R.S. might evaluate what policies or school activities it considers to be racially discriminatory. The Treasury said the final rules “would further define race-based action for the purpose of ameliorating societal discrimination as a form of discrimination” and delete previous I.R.S. guidance allowing schools to favor minorities in admissions, programs and financial assistance as part of an effort to create a more equitable campus.
The Treasury also said that programs targeting at students from specific geographic areas or socioeconomic backgrounds could continue, an alternative way that, the department said, donors and schools could, in effect, still support minority students.
The Treasury’s proposed regulations will be subject to a potentially lengthy public comment period that could result in changes. Once the rules are finalized, their enforcement is likely to involve I.R.S. audits of the schools and universities to determine whether they were impermissibly considering race.
Such audits could go on for months and give a university the opportunity to challenge any revocation of tax-exempt status in court, where a judge could strike down the Treasury’s regulations.
“If a new administration is ever in position, I would think they would revoke these regs, but in the meantime a lot of damage can be done because people are running scared,” said Ellen Aprill, an expert in nonprofit taxes at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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5) Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92
She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.
By Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 3, 2026
Gloria Steinem speaking at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.” The New York Times
Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, helping millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.
Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.
For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.
She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.
But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.
Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.
She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.
And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.
The magazine served as the movement’s manifesto, an incubator for social transformation and a blueprint for action. As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.
“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Ms. Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”
Decades after the movement dissipated and progressive women faced renewed setbacks, Ms. Steinem continued to push for their rights and equality. Indefatigable, she wrote essays and lectured into her 90s, and the news media never stopped seeking her opinion. She was the author of nearly a dozen major nonfiction books; her latest, “An Unexpected Life,” is scheduled for publication in late September.
Despite her fearless public persona, Ms. Steinem was somewhat diffident, initially terrified of speaking in public and wrestled with a lack of self-esteem.
She was also insecure about her looks. She said in an interview for this obituary in January 2026 that she wore her large aviator glasses and cloak of long hair partly to hide her face. “What I felt like inside,” she wrote in “Revolution From Within,” her 1992 book about self-esteem, “was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding faced.”
Even as she personified the women’s movement, Ms. Steinem defied the stereotype of “women’s libbers” as sexless, humorless and dateless. She led a glittering social life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men, including Mike Nichols, the director, and Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing mogul. In the 2026 interview, she called Franklin A. Thomas, the pathbreaking president of the Ford Foundation, the love of her life, the man with whom she felt most in sync.
But she spurned marriage (mostly) and remained child free, a choice she said she never regretted.
“Not for a millisecond,” she said at 82. “Not everybody with a womb has to have a child, like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer. It’s a choice, and it’s a wonderful choice, but if everybody has to do it, it’s no longer a choice.”
Her lifestyle and unapologetic feminist beliefs made her a lightning rod, adored (though not always) by liberals, demonized (always) by conservatives. She and other single women were caricatured as man-hating, bra-burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the American family. When Ms. Steinem appeared on “Larry King Live” in 1990, a female caller memorably told her to “rot in hell” for what she had wrought.
Much of the hostility toward her was public and overt — especially with the rise of the religious right and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly — but it was also woven into the fabric of her everyday life.
While the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the movement’s spokeswoman (to the annoyance of its many other leaders and of the decidedly anti-hierarchical Ms. Steinem herself), it simultaneously patronized and marginalized her as a rebel with a pretty face.
When she was first job-hunting in New York, an editor at Life turned her away. “We need a reporter,” he told her, “not a pretty girl.” An editor at The New York Times Magazine propositioned her, she said. Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine and Ms. Steinem’s mentor, said he gave her an assignment because she had “great legs.”
She broke through with a witty exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” for Show magazine in 1963. Squeezing into a too-small, electric-blue satin corset, with a bow tie at her throat and a pair of satin rabbit ears bobbing on her head, she worked undercover as a cotton-tailed waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article was praised for revealing the degrading work conditions in that male-fantasy cocoon. But she regretted writing it, for a time anyway, because some used it to dismiss her as frivolous.
One was the journalist Gay Talese. In her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” Ms. Steinem recalled that Mr. Talese said of her in 1964: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”
But it was as a writer — journalist, columnist, essayist, author — that Ms. Steinem made her name. She also had a knack for pointed aphorisms.
“The truth will set you free,” she liked to say, “but first it will piss you off.” (Variations on this theme have existed since the Bible; Ms. Steinem popularized this one and used it as the title of a 2019 collection of essays.)
Another: “Self-esteem isn’t everything — it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”
One of her best-known quips was about aging.
When a reporter remarked, “Oh, you don’t look 40,” she responded with characteristic bluntness: “This is what 40 looks like! We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”
Some of the achievements of the women’s movement — greater economic independence, more legal rights and protections, inroads into all levels of virtually every profession, more men sharing domestic responsibilities — may be taken for granted today. But they were unimaginable when the movement began.
And for Ms. Steinem and many others, that struggle never ended.
Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollar made by a man, according to the 2024 census). The Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on account of sex, was belatedly ratified but is still not part of the Constitution. The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, a central goal of the movement, was overturned in 2022; some states went on to reverse or curtail other hard-won reproductive rights. No woman has been elected president. Anti-female bias remains entrenched.
“I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” Ms. Steinem told The Times in 2022. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”
‘The Big Click’
Ms. Steinem, who grew up in the Midwest, began her career in New York as a freelance writer in 1960. By 1968, she had become a co-founder of New York magazine. Writing a monthly political column, “The City Politic,” she found her voice.
Her column led to political advocacy. She marched with Cesar Chavez, the head of the United Farm Workers, who was revered until reports emerged in 2026 that he had sexually abused girls and women. She served as treasurer of the legal defense fund for Angela Davis, the revolutionary Black feminist who was in prison awaiting trial for murder, and was later acquitted. Ms. Steinem supported Norman Mailer in his losing campaign for mayor of New York in 1969 and briefly considered running for city comptroller on the ticket with him. (Despite Mr. Mailer’s notorious sexism, she did not regard him at that point as an enemy of the women’s movement.)
She was jolted into feminism that year when she reported on a group of women in Greenwich Village discussing their illegal abortions. Angered that they had been made to feel like criminals, Ms. Steinem, who had had a secret abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first openly feminist essay, titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”
At that moment, she viewed herself as part of something bigger than herself. “It was the big click,” she said in “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” a 2011 HBO documentary. “It transformed me.”
Her essay appeared just as the women’s movement, sparked by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), was gaining steam. The book, which alerted society to women’s frustrations and stifled ambitions, was an instant best seller.
Three years later, Ms. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, whose statement of purpose said, “The time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America.”
Women were second-class citizens, with few legal rights, little financial independence and no autonomy over their bodies. They needed a man’s signature to get a credit card or a bank loan. States had a “marital exemption” that allowed a husband to rape his wife without fear of legal consequences.
In 1971, a powerhouse group of feminists — Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, both Democrats from New York, and others, including Jill Ruckelshaus, a prominent Republican activist — founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to advance the Equal Rights Amendment and elect women to public office.
Activist women were starting to gather in small groups all over the country, including at Ms. Steinem’s shared one-room walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (She eventually bought the unit, which occupied the second floor of an 1880s brownstone; she acquired other floors over time and lived there for the rest of her life.)
It was in her living room that she held some of the first organizational meetings for Ms. magazine. She and several like-minded women wanted to create a publication that would speak to women’s lives in a way that the women’s magazines, devoted mainly to tips on beauty, how to catch a man and 25 exciting ways to make a hamburger, did not.
The magazine’s founders did not invent the term “Ms.,” an honorific that signified a woman’s individual identity regardless of her marital status. It had been seeping slowly into usage since the early 1900s. But by branding their magazine with it, they elevated the title into the nation’s lexicon and gave women a calling card.
The first issue was published in December 1971 and ran as an insert in the year-end issue of New York, thanks to Mr. Felker, who financed and promoted it.
The first full stand-alone issue came out in January 1972, again with Mr. Felker’s backing. The cover article, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” explored the conflicts inherent in juggling work and home life. It also notably featured a signed list of 53 well-known women who acknowledged that they had sought illegal abortions — among them, the tennis star Billie Jean King, the singer Judy Collins, the playwright Lillian Hellman and the historian Barbara Tuchman.
Though the magazine appeared on newsstands in January, it was labeled “Spring” so that if it didn’t sell, it wouldn’t look stale. But all 300,000 copies sold out in eight days, thousands of letters from grateful readers poured in, and Ms. began publishing monthly that July.
Skeptics abounded. Harry Reasoner, a prominent television news anchor, dismissed the whole enterprise, saying, “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.” (He subsequently apologized.) President Richard M. Nixon denigrated the term “Ms.,” wondering aloud to Henry Kissinger, “How many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?”
The magazine attracted prominent writers, including Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Vivian Gornick. It covered a range of topics, including sisterhood, gender-neutral child rearing, battered wives and maternity leave. It rated political candidates by their stands on issues that were important to women.
For a time, Ms. thrived. But the expanding women’s movement — never a monolith — splintered into factions and faced backlashes (see the divisive feminist sex wars over pornography in the 1980s). Schisms divided the magazine, too. Anger was often directed at Ms. Steinem, whom some saw as a fence-sitter, trying to please everyone. More radical women and some women of color found the magazine wishy-washy and not inclusive enough, and they broke away.
Among the messier dramas of the period was one that developed between Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem.
The two shared certain goals, including equal pay, more women in public office and legalized abortion. But Ms. Steinem also sought broader cultural and social change that included liberating women from media stereotypes and recalibrating the power dynamic between men and women. Significantly, she also wanted to expand the movement beyond the white, middle-class housewives of its early days — those inspired by “The Feminine Mystique” — to include younger women, working women and women of color, as well as lesbians and other marginalized groups.
Ms. Friedan saw the focus on sexual politics as a distraction and famously warned that including lesbians (the “lavender menace”) threatened the movement’s goal of achieving mainstream acceptance. (She later supported lesbian rights.)
But the real tension between them was personal. Ms. Friedan, 13 years older and widely acknowledged as the “mother” of second-wave feminism (the first wave was driven by suffrage), was being eclipsed by the more popular and photogenic Ms. Steinem, a media darling, and Ms. Friedan resented it.
“There is more than one voice in this movement,” Ms. Friedan said icily at one point. She began attacking Ms. Steinem publicly, calling her a feminist “chauvinist,” accusing her of trying to profit from the movement and dismissing her abilities, saying: “The media tried to make her a celebrity, but no one should mistake her for a leader.”
Ms. Steinem told HBO in 2011 that Ms. Friedan had resented “anybody who threatened her ownership of the movement.” Ms. Friedan, she said, “didn’t really identify down, she identified up,” ignoring the needs of poorer, working-class women.
Their souring relationship was examined by Nora Ephron in a 1972 essay in Esquire that depicted Ms. Friedan as unhinged by her jealousy of Ms. Steinem, to the point that she no longer cared how her animosity hurt the movement.
Ms. Ephron, squarely on Team Steinem, cast Ms. Friedan as being on the wrong side of history.
Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.
“He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.
For years, the family spent summers in Clarklake, a tiny rural town in southern Michigan, where her father ran a small dance pavilion and booked musical acts. When fall came, they traveled to warmer climes in a house trailer, stopping in towns along the way while her father peddled antiques.
Ms. Steinem grew up an itinerant with no full year of formal schooling until sixth grade. She said she learned to read from road signs along the highway and buried herself in books.
Her mother had been one of the first female reporters and editors at The Blade of Toledo. She loved the work and had continued doing it for a decade after marriage — after all, someone had to pay the bills. She also had an affair, and then a nervous breakdown, became addicted to a sedative and spent two years in a sanitarium, all before Gloria was born.
When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”
Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.
While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.
Caring for her mother shaped much of her life, consciously and otherwise. This included her decision not to rush from New York to her father’s side in California after he was in a serious car accident in 1961.
“I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s — and never come back to my own life,” she wrote in her memoir. By the time she realized he was dying, it was too late. “I will never stop wishing I had been with him,” she wrote.
Her dysfunctional youth — mothering her mother — also colored her view of marriage and children, both of which she viewed as a trap. That fear kept her from settling down. By her own estimate, she spent half of her life on the road for more than four decades.
She kept quiet about the trauma of her childhood for years. Given her upper-crust manner of speaking and precise diction, she sounded like a child of privilege; in fact, she lived in fear of hitting the skids at any moment.
“I had always worried that I might have inherited something,” she told The New Yorker. “That I’d start disappearing into the street in my nightgown, the way she had.”
To India and Back
During her senior year of college, Ms. Steinem planned to marry her boyfriend, but then decided against it. She would have been settling down and having children, she realized, only because that was what society expected.
She said in the 2026 interview that she saw marriage “not as a beginning but as an end”— an end to her identity, an end to whatever she might want to do with her life. She left her engagement ring under her fiancé’s pillow — “This was not an act of courage,” she said — and “fled,” in her words, to India in early 1957.
On her way, she stayed in London while awaiting her visa and discovered that she was pregnant. She managed to get an abortion. The alternative, she said, would have been going home, marrying the wrong person and living a life that wasn’t hers.
She was drawn to India, just a decade into its independence, by the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. She had won a Chester Bowles Asian fellowship to study there, but she quickly abandoned her classes. Wearing a sari and carrying only a towel, a cup and a comb, she walked through southern India with followers of Gandhi, absorbing lessons about “talking circles” and grass-roots organizing.
After returning to the United States, she spent a year in Cambridge, Mass., as a director of the Independent Research Service, a nonprofit educational foundation that recruited and provided government support for American students to attend Communist-run youth festivals in Europe. The magazine Ramparts subsequently reported that the foundation had been partly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, and Ms. Steinem came under criticism from the left. She dismissed the entire venture as harmless, telling The Times in 2016 that no one in the C.I.A. had ever told her what to do or say and that she had never reported to the agency.
She moved to New York in 1960 and began working as a freelance journalist. At the time, women were not taken seriously as writers; she wanted to cover politics but was stuck with celebrity profiles and fashion.
Still, she was prolific. Her articles appeared in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Family Circle and Life, among other magazines. She was a contributing editor at Glamour and New York.
As her profile rose and she became increasingly visible, she wrestled with an unexpected problem: an almost pathological fear of public speaking. She dreaded standing at a podium alone, afraid that her mouth would go dry. Her solution was to bring speaking partners with her. One was Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a forceful activist who ran a child-care center and expounded on issues of race, class and motherhood in roiling debates about feminism. A 1971 photograph of the two, their fists raised in solidarity, became an iconic image of the era.
At the same time, Ms. Steinem moved comfortably in the sophisticated milieu of New York’s intelligentsia and dated powerful men. In addition to New York stars like Mr. Nichols, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Thomas, they included J. Stanley Pottinger, a prominent civil rights lawyer in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Most remained her devoted friends and public supporters long after the romances faded.
In 2000, Ms. Steinem overlooked her antipathy toward marriage and wed David Bale, a social justice activist born in South Africa (and the father of the actor Christian Bale). She was 66. She initially denied rumors that she had married him because he needed a green card, but years later conceded that this had been the case. The marriage lasted for three years before he died in 2003, at 62, from brain lymphoma.
Ms. Steinem had faced her own recurring battle with cancer (breast), starting in 1986, after which she suffered from total exhaustion and depression and underwent psychoanalysis. She then spent several years writing and rewriting “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self Esteem.”
It was her first long public look at herself, and it disappointed some feminists, who saw her introspection as a retreat from much-needed social activism. The writer and editor Deirdre English, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The strategic vision of social revolution here has all but been replaced with a model of personal recovery.”
Interviewers were nonplused that a woman as seemingly self-confident and purposeful in public as Ms. Steinem was beset by a lack of self-esteem.
“I was a neglected child, so I guess I didn’t think I existed,” she explained to the BBC. “And if you’re treated badly, you come to feel you’re a bad person, and to some extent, even a very good thing like being a social activist can be a drug, you know, that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself. You keep trying to fill up this emptiness, which, of course, can’t be filled up with anything external.”
“Revolution From Within” wasn’t the only time that she disappointed her natural allies.
Over the years, her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton landed her in political hot water. In an opinion column in The Times in 1998, she defended President Clinton against numerous sexual allegations, saying that his advances toward various women had not been unwelcome or coercive.
She enraged many again during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, when she said in a television interview that young women were supporting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont over Mrs. Clinton because “when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” She eventually apologized and said she had misspoken.
Writing and Organizing
Ms. Steinem devoted much of her life to writing. One of her best sellers was “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983), her first collection of essays. Other books included “Marilyn: Norma Jean” (1986), a sympathetic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, whom she found fascinating in her vulnerability and complexity, and “Doing Sixty and Seventy” (2006), a reflection on women and aging.
She hated wasting time and rarely did. Having cared for her mother for so long, she said, she felt a compulsive need to be useful. But as a writer, she said, she should have challenged herself more.
“I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do,” she told HBO. “Or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn’t get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.”
But writing, she knew, was not a waste of time. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” she said.
She spent a great deal of time tending to Ms. magazine. It reached its peak circulation in 1989, with 540,000 subscribers, but its finances were constantly in peril, and it went through a series of owners. In less than a decade, its circulation fell to 200,000, and the owner threatened to close it.
That was more than Ms. Steinem could bear. Cobbling together a group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, she formed Liberty Media for Women, which acquired Ms. for $3 million. In 2001, the Feminist Majority Foundation took over and kept the magazine alive, though its influence — and its brand of feminism — had waned significantly; the magazine now publishes quarterly.
Over time, Ms. Steinem traveled less, and her apartment became more of a home. For years, it was simply a place where she dropped her suitcase. But after she acquired another floor in the brownstone, she brought in comfortable furniture, painted the walls a deep, warm yellow and festooned the space with accent pillows. She covered nearly every available inch with framed photographs, posters and memorabilia, making her walls a showcase of a life spent on the front lines of the women’s movement. Architectural Digest published a feature on her home in 2024.
“Gradually, the rooms that I had used mostly as an office and a closet were filled with things that gave me pleasure,” she wrote in her memoir. “I had a kitchen that worked, a real desk to spread papers on, and a welcoming room where visiting friends could stay, something I’d always wanted as a child when I was living with my mother in places too sad to invite anyone.”
Ms. Steinem is survived by what she called her “chosen family” — her close friends. Her mother died in 1981, and her sister, Susanne Steinem Patch, in 2007.
Her home is part of her permanent legacy. Ms. Steinem put it in a trust with Gloria’s Foundation, which acquired another floor of the brownstone, so that women could continue to meet, organize, write and stage “talking circles” there, as Ms. Steinem often did. The foundation’s website says that the home and its contents will remain “a living organ of the feminist movement.”
That movement was repeatedly declared passé during Ms. Steinem’s lifetime. Nevertheless, she persisted.
“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m ‘passing the torch,’” she wrote in “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.” “I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much — and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”
Deirdre Carmody contributed reporting.
Her passing feels like the closing of an extraordinary chapter. But the confidence she inspired, the doors she helped open, and the conversations she began will live on. A thousand thank yous. Rest in Power.
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6) ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says
An official who oversaw the vetting of ICE recruits cited an “unprecedented lowering of standards” amid a hiring surge.
By Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 3, 2026
Federal ICE agents outside Delaney Hall, in Newark in June.Credit...Lexi Parra/The New York Times
In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.
The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates into ICE’s ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency — and its law enforcement operations — to “grave national security risks.”
Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.
The official, a unit chief who directly oversaw more than 100 employees who evaluated thousands of ICE applicants, was so troubled by what he saw that he outlined these concerns not to his superiors, but in a formal whistle-blower complaint to the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security.
In the complaint, he asked for an independent, outside investigation into the matter. He was later interviewed twice by officials with the inspector general’s office and his concerns have become part of an ongoing audit into vetting practices.
The complaint, which has not been previously reported, underscores the rising worries about the suitability — as well as the tactics — of scores of agents who have been rapidly deployed across the country within the last year. It also outlines the extent to which ICE weakened its standards, and points to dissension among the upper reaches of the agency as it was pressed last year to carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The whistle-blower, a 17-year ICE veteran who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his claims, said the agency had cut corners in its rush to fill the ranks.
“We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said, describing the agency’s decision to reduce scrutiny of recruits in order to expedite hires. “By doing so, there was a potential to put lives at risk and to jeopardize national security.”
The whistle-blower complaint was obtained via a public records request. The concerns within it broadly mirror those made by other current and former ICE employees who said that the agency had abandoned best practices as it rapidly scaled up. An ICE lawyer who worked at the agency’s training center resigned earlier this year and went public as a whistle-blower, citing concerns about a “deficient, defective and broken” training program.
In response to questions, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors.”
The agency declined to comment about the whistle-blower, who retired from the agency in July, or his complaint.
The scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices has intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.
The two ex-wives of the ICE agent David Brouillette, one of whom identified him as the person who fired the fatal shots, have accused him in interviews and court records of being abusive. In a filing for a protection order in December 2019, one ex-wife wrote that he had broken her door down, destroyed her belongings and dumped her clothes over a bridge.
The women also have said Mr. Brouillette, a former military serviceman and Veterans Affairs police officer who was hired amid the recruiting surge last year, had post-traumatic stress disorder related to his deployment in Afghanistan. A local official in Maine told The Portland Press Herald that Mr. Brouillette sought jobs with the Hallowell Police Department in 2024 but was denied because there were “too many red flags.” Mr. Brouillette could not be reached for comment.
After the shooting, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said that the D.H.S. investigation into the episode will include whether the agent was properly vetted before being hired.
A White House spokesperson referred questions to D.H.S.
A Rush to Recruit
The concerns in the August 2025 whistle-blower complaint exposed shortcuts in the agency’s preliminary vetting process. No credit checks. Fingerprints unconfirmed. Final job offers absent preliminary vetting.
Before the surge, a recruitment team made documents available to a unit within ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility for each new hire, including fingerprints and a security form with extensive questions. The vetting team would then initiate a preliminary check, running each applicant’s name through law enforcement databases and searching for criminal violations or other major red flags. Some recruits would be sent for a polygraph test if concerns arose.
These recruits then underwent a full background check, conducted by outside contractors, to determine whether the candidate was trustworthy enough to have access to sensitive computer systems, federal facilities and classified information. It wasn’t unusual for this to occur while recruits were in training.
The preliminary vetting process, which took seven to 10 days, was upended last summer. The vetters were told to make determinations on recruits without having the full security form, fingerprints or any polygraph testing, according to the former unit chief and a former federal official familiar with the process who was granted anonymity to speak freely about it.
That meant new hires were heading to training without having their identities, criminal histories and other basic information checked and verified, the unit chief said.
The agency also sped up its training program, cutting it from roughly 10 weeks to six. This resulted in agents reporting to their full-time positions while their full background checks were pending.
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Meanwhile, recruits with prior law enforcement experience were able to take online courses rather than complete on-site training. They faced even less scrutiny in their background checks.
In July, the agency said, it increased the length of its training program for academy classes, and it instructed past graduates to attend additional training.
Ryan Schwank, the former ICE lawyer who worked at the agency’s training center, testified before Congress this year that new recruits appeared unfit for service.
“We were concerned about ICE recruiting a loose cannon or somebody who was just mentally unfit for the role,” Mr. Schwank said in a recent interview. “We knew that kind of person would get through. But the thing that I think kept some of the other instructors up at night was the possibility of organized crime getting access to the agency or penetrating the agency.”
Mr. Schwank, who taught recruits during the surge, said that’s exactly what happened. Last fall, several students were removed from the academy in Georgia in the middle of training because officials determined that they were all linked to a criminal gang. Mr. Schwank began work at the training academy last September and left the agency in February.
In a statement, an ICE spokesperson said “ICE has received NO credible evidence that any of its trainees were linked to a common criminal gang.”
In the interview, Mr. Schwank said it was rare for students to fail out of the academy before the surge, but that about half of his students flunked out after the hiring push. This was after the academy made its tests open book and no longer failed students who made fatal errors during enforcement simulations.
By this spring, hundreds of new recruits hired amid the surge had already been removed from the force, according to the former federal official who was granted anonymity.
The hiring surge was set in motion in part by the passage of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill last summer. Congress allocated $30 billion in new money for ICE to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, more than doubling the number of deportation officers.
Concerns About Political Appointees
The unit chief who filed the whistle-blower complaint said he chose to alert the D.H.S. Office of Inspector General because ICE leadership had created these issues and he thought an outside, independent investigation was necessary.
In addition to the vetting concerns, he also mentioned in the complaint that Trump administration political allies had received favorable treatment and obtained security clearances even though troubling information about them had surfaced in background checks. He cited Corey Lewandowski, a former top adviser to D.H.S.
The concerns about Mr. Lewandowski had been outlined in a memo written last year by the D.H.S. head of security and was viewed by the whistle-blower, who told The Times that a higher-up had asked him to vet Mr. Lewandowski for an ICE credential. The red flags in the memo included allegations that Mr. Lewandowski had been paid years earlier for work by a Chinese government agency, according to the whistle-blower and a report last year in the Daily Mail. That allegation has not been substantiated outside of that memo.
In a statement, Mr. Lewandowski denied he was ever vetted by ICE. He said he had “never worked for the Chinese Communist Party - Full Stop.”
In a follow-up statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Lewandowski said any suggestion that he “received favorable treatment in connection with his security clearance is categorically false.”
Ten days after the unit chief filed his whistle-blower complaint — and a few days after the Daily Mail article published — a lawyer from the department’s Office of General Counsel reached out to him. This lawyer, who was not from the inspector general’s office, asked to meet the whistle-blower at an agency field office in Texas, separate from where he typically worked.
The whistle-blower believed he was being interviewed about his security worries, but a different focus of the inquiry became apparent: Had the unit chief talked to the news media about his concerns?
The lawyer grilled him over four hours and seized his laptop, according to the former unit chief and his lawyer. The full contents of the meeting, they said, are protected under a nondisclosure agreement, a common practice for internal investigations.
“My client was of the belief this investigation by the agency’s attorneys was in good faith to vet his disclosure,” said Kevin Owen, a lawyer for the whistle-blower. “Instead they threatened him and put him on leave.”
It remains unclear how D.H.S. officials came to target the unit chief.
The agency said it couldn’t comment on personnel matters with people no longer there.
The former unit chief said the inspector general’s office first reached out to interview him in February, about six months after the complaint was filed. Investigators interviewed him again in April for an audit into vetting, he said.
In a statement, the office said it had to delay some of its work due to government furloughs. The office in April opened an audit into the process for giving out security clearances to political appointees.
The inspector general’s office said it couldn’t comment on its investigations, but the agency noted that it did not reveal the name of the whistle-blower to anyone outside of its office.
Meanwhile, the whistle-blower remained on leave for 10 months for what D.H.S. said were “allegations of serious misconduct,” the unit chief and Mr. Owen said.
The alleged misconduct went unspecified, they said, and he was eventually reinstated with no punishment or finding of wrongdoing. He retired immediately after, in July.
He said D.H.S. officials had never told him specifics for why he was on leave for such a long time.
In an effort to learn more, he submitted a records request to ICE for documents related to his case.
The former unit chief said the stress of the investigation weighed heavily on his mental health. He checked himself into a treatment program that lasted several months.
The man, a longtime Republican who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and 2024, said he grew disillusioned with the agency as it acted in haste to fulfill the president’s immigration enforcement mandate. He said he has always supported ICE’s mission, but was troubled by the way the agency was taking shortcuts in vetting recruits.
“It’s a betrayal of the public trust and everybody’s trust,” he said.
Danny Hakim contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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7) Israeli Military Kills Two Palestinian Youths in Village Raid, Residents Say
Al Mughayir, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has become a focal point for rising settler violence, with the latest deadly episode starting in a dispute over livestock.
By Isabel Kershner and Fatima AbdulKarim, Sept. 3, 2026
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem and Fatima AbdulKarim from Ramallah, West Bank.
A funeral on Thursday for two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Al Mughayir. Ammar Awad/Reuters
Israeli security forces killed two Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during a nighttime raid on Wednesday, according to local witnesses, the latest deadly episode in an area where Jewish settlers are encroaching on farmland and Palestinian homes.
The Israeli military acknowledged it fired on “instigators” among Palestinian villagers in their confrontation with settlers and security forces. It said there were “hits,” without confirming fatalities.
The village, Al Mughayir, in the Ramallah district, has long been the target of attacks and intimidation by extremist Israeli settlers who have set up outposts in the surrounding hills, largely under the protection of the Israeli military. Palestinians and human rights groups say they are intensifying their attacks in an effort to take over the land.
Violence has frequently erupted over sheep grazing rights and accusations by both settlers and villagers that the other has stolen livestock. That was the case on Wednesday, local residents and the Israeli military said, when a day of escalating tensions culminated in Israeli security forces fatally shooting two youths identified by local officials and relatives as Khalil Abu Alia, 16, and Omar al-Naasan, 19.
Settler violence in the West Bank has soared to record levels, drawing international scrutiny and condemnation. The number of attacks increased after the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, which was led by the Palestinian armed group Hamas and ignited the war in Gaza.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel who is generally supportive of the Israeli settler movement, recently condemned settlers who had besieged two Palestinian families in their homes, including one that was owned by an American citizen.
Mr. Huckabee referred to those intruders as “Israeli terrorists.” He is expected to hold a town hall meeting on Saturday in Turmus Aya, another West Bank town that has been targeted by settlers.
The violence on Wednesday spiraled out of competing accusations of stealing livestock; The New York Times was unable to verify the claims of either side regarding the ownership.
Local residents of Al Mughayir and Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli anti-occupation activist, who was present in the village on Wednesday and Thursday, said that a group of settlers were grazing their sheep next to Palestinians’ homes on the edge of the village.
Wahid Marzouk Abu Naim, 40, an English teacher in a village school near the edge of Al Mughayir, said in a telephone interview that the settlers were being protected by Israeli security forces. He said the settlers accused some of the villagers of stealing 15 of their sheep, which he said was untrue.
Mr. Pollak said he watched from a rooftop as settlers “rummaged around” for about two hours, besieging houses and searching for sheep. He said he saw the settlers steal about 10 sheep belonging to Palestinians, before they left, accompanied by security forces.
Then, at around 9 p.m., more soldiers and border police officers arrived in Al Mughayir, advancing into the center of the village, searching for sheep and deploying snipers on rooftops, residents said.
Security forces entered a house adjacent to the home of Khalil Abu Alia, one of the dead youths, according to a neighbor and member of his extended family, Aisha Abu Alia.
She said that, when Mr. Abu Alia came out of his house, as other villagers approached, she saw the military open fire. “They shot Khalil in front of his house,” she added.
Mr. Pollak said that residents told him that Mr. Naasan, the second victim, was also shot outside his house, although he did not witness the killing. He said that the road in Al Mughayir was strewed with stones thrown by Palestinians trying to defend residents’ homes and livestock.
Residents said that when the forces eventually left, they took another 90 sheep with them, loaded on pickup trucks.
The military said in a statement that soldiers had entered the village in order to “facilitate the return of livestock belonging to Israeli civilians that had been found in the area of the village.”
“The livestock was identified based on distinguishing marks indicating that it belonged to Israeli civilians,” the statement added.
During the forces’ activity in the area, the military said, a violent riot broke out. Villagers hurled cinder blocks and stones at the forces and they responded by firing at “key instigators,” the military said.The military said that the events leading up to the shooting, and during it, were under review.
Elisha Yered, a spokesman for the outpost settlers, said on social media that during the past two months, residents of Al Mughayir had twice stolen sheep and goats from herds belonging to two nearby outposts.
The European Union imposed sanctions on Mr. Yered in 2024, accusing him of human rights abuses against Palestinians.
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8) Something Alarming Is About to Happen in Germany
By Hans Kundnani, Sept. 4, 2026
Mr. Kundnani is an expert on European politics and the author of “The Paradox of German Power.”
Nikita Teryoshin
The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is set to make a major breakthrough.
Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state of around two million people, is relatively small. But the significance of the election there on Sunday could be seismic. The AfD is on track to win overwhelmingly and perhaps even secure an overall majority, which would mean that it could form a state government for the first time in its history. Long confined to the opposition, the AfD now stands on the cusp of wielding power — regionally, at least.
The rise of the AfD has already made coherent and stable government difficult at the national level. Its success in last year’s federal election, in which it came in second, with 20 percent of the vote, forced the center-right Christian Democrats to form a government with the center-left Social Democrats. The two parties have squabbled since Friedrich Merz became chancellor, and the AfD has surged in the polls. Now it is by far the most popular party in Germany.
What makes the AfD’s rise especially shocking is that it is much more extreme than other European far-right parties that are either already in power, like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, or could be soon, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Whereas those parties have sought in some ways to detoxify and moderate themselves, the AfD has become more radical over time, deepening its ties to neo-Nazis and promising to repatriate migrants. As it has done so, it has grown more popular.
Last year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the party as “right-wing extremist.” But the scale of the party’s support means it is too late to ban it. Instead, it has fallen to Mr. Merz’s government to stop it. Yet preoccupied with remilitarization and foreign policy, it is seemingly incapable of doing so. For Germany — and the rest of Europe — the implications are truly alarming.
At the heart of the matter is the economy, which is going through a deep structural crisis. Over the past two decades, the German economy was often described as Europe’s strongest. In reality, its extreme dependence on exports made it quite fragile. This fragility has now caught up with it: Germany’s manufacturing industry, the basis of its economic success, is being hit by a combination of American tariffs and Chinese competition — what is often referred to as China Shock 2.0. This economic decline underpins the AfD’s recent surge in support.
The AfD actually began with economic issues. It was created in 2013 as a direct response to Angela Merkel’s insistence that there was no alternative to bailing out Greece — hence its name — and was originally a party of fiscal hawks who opposed a redistributive European Union. After the refugee crisis in 2015, it repositioned itself as an anti-immigration, anti-Islam party; two years later it got into the Bundestag, leading some to imagine that it had become focused only on cultural issues. But alongside xenophobes and nativists, fiscal hawks retained a home in the AfD.
Central to their concerns was maintaining the so-called debt brake, a constitutional amendment that limited government borrowing. During his 2025 campaign, Mr. Merz promised to keep it, even as it prevented much-needed investment. But after the Christian Democrats won the election, he reached an agreement with the Social Democrats and the Greens before the new Parliament had been formed to amend the constitution, exempting military spending from the brake. This democratically dubious move alienated many right-wing voters. It was around this point that the AfD overtook the Christian Democrats in the polls for the first time.
Mr. Merz didn’t dismantle the debt brake entirely. That would have made it possible to begin to solve some of Germany’s problems. Instead, as nonmilitary spending remains subject to the debt brake, Mr. Merz has continued to cut back the welfare state and told Germans that they need to work harder so that the economy can regain its “competitiveness.” This approach — increasing military spending while cutting elsewhere — may appeal to foreign policy analysts, but it is politically disastrous. A significant part of the AfD’s appeal lies in its focus on job losses and declining prospects.
Germany’s remilitarization has also been disastrous in another way. Since 2022, centrist parties in Germany have largely abandoned their commitment to the idea of Germany as a “Friedensmacht,” or force for peace, and now speak more about preparing for a full-scale war with Russia. Mr. Merz, for his part, says he wants Germany to possess “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” This has allowed the AfD to present itself as the party of peace — not unlike the way that President Trump positioned himself in opposition to the “forever wars” undertaken by American Democrats and Republicans alike.
The increase in military spending has caused some to wonder whether Germany could become “Europe’s next hegemon.” But that is a fantasy. For one thing, it is far from clear that Germany’s spending plans will translate into real military capabilities, to say nothing of reviving the economy. For another, Germany is increasingly isolated within the European Union, not least because of its unconditional support for Israel and willingness to block any measures against it, like suspending the European Union’s association agreement with it. Perhaps most important, there is little support for military power, let alone war, among German voters.
When Mr. Merz was running to be chancellor, he promised to reduce the AfD’s popularity — chiefly by taking tougher measures against immigration, including what in the coalition agreement was called a “deportation offensive.” Then, on the night of the election, he declared that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,” producing much excitement among supporters of greater European autonomy. A year and a half in, both objectives remain further away than ever.
Two more regional elections later this month are likely to produce further advances for the AfD, deepening the sense of national crisis. Some Christian Democrats, in a panic, are already speculating about Mr. Merz’s future. Yet what the country needs is not a different chancellor but a completely different approach. Until then, the AfD will continue to inch closer to power.
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9) This Is the Real Point of College
By Michael S. Roth, Sept. 4, 2026
Dr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.
James Gallagher for The New York Times
Three cheers for students starting college! They’ve heard doubts about whether it’s worthwhile; they’ve heard Silicon Valley’s claim that A.I. can feed them all the information (and misinformation) they could possibly want; they know college is expensive. Yet right around now, thousands and thousands of them are starting their undergraduate careers with enthusiasm.
Colleges and universities, like almost all institutions, have suffered from a decline in trust, but that isn’t stopping families from New Orleans to Appleton and from Berkeley to Tuscaloosa from gathering their financial and emotional resources to launch their young people toward a memorable educational experience. Parents will cry; kids will check one another out.
Even the Trump administration, which enjoys berating schools (for not protecting Jews or admitting too many Black people or just not promoting its preferred version of American history), has softened its tone for the moment. Last month, the secretary of education took a break from dismantling her department to issue a national call to action, asking college and university leaders to “advance American security interests, deliver academic programs that meet urgent work force needs, and contribute materially to the nation’s prosperity.” Laudable goals to be sure, and nothing to be neutral about, despite the call’s insistence elsewhere on institutional neutrality. But these are not the goals of students.
A significant percentage of first-year students are entering community college, and many of them will be looking for classes that prepare them for jobs in the near term. Nursing, information technology, the electrical trades and education will appeal to many, but the most popular areas of study are in the liberal arts. That’s no surprise because the liberal arts prepares students to pivot in many directions given shifting labor force needs.
And those shifts will be significant. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how tasks are completed almost everywhere. That’s why students at community colleges, like their counterparts at four-year schools, hope to learn to use large language model tools and develop the human capacities for discernment, for making sense of when and how to use the powerful research and analytic powers of A.I. The students are learning specific skills, to be sure, but they are also learning how to add human value to work in a marketplace infatuated with the wonders of automation.
Despite the pressures of a perilous job market, students often use the first semester for exploration. Course catalogs will include titles that baffle recent high school graduates and lead to head-scratching moments for parents and pundits. But this is nothing new. Some schools provide a core curriculum, and despite oft-repeated stories of far-left professors pouring woke doctrine down the throats of naïve youngsters, the writings of Plato, Machiavelli and Mary Shelley remain among the most assigned college readings in America.
Students in my humanities course this fall will begin with Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas. Very few of my undergrads will major in philosophy but almost all, I expect, will approach the material with energetic curiosity. They always do. Why? Because they are taking the opportunity to discover who they are as readers, as conversation partners, as people. They are figuring out what kind of work they find fulfilling, what they love to do.
That said, it is essential that students also learn how to get better at the work they’ve signed up for. Discovering one’s passion is not enough. Through vigorous practice students should learn to work harder and better, so they can go further than they’d thought possible. If they use A.I. to avoid having to work hard, they’ll learn little.
Grade inflation, too, is pernicious, because it signals to young people that they’ve already mastered a task when they’ve really just begun to get the hang of it. Teachers must get over their fear of alienating students by setting high standards, and undergraduates must come to understand that they can do much better than they’ve already done. And they need to learn without undue dependence on technology.
I’ve been teaching college students for over 40 years, and one of the great pleasures for me at the beginning of the school year is seeing students develop friendships in their new surroundings. It may happen in a science lab or on a sports team, or through a discussion begun in class and carried over into the dining hall or the dorm. Every year I meet alumni in ripe old age who are still buddies with (or even married to) people they got to know in the first weeks of school. I’m convinced that there is something about young folks opening themselves to new possibilities in college that sets a durable foundation for long-lasting relationships.
Yes, college is less affordable than it should be; yes, there’s still a long way to go in improving intellectual diversity and pluralism on campus. Yes, it’s all too easy to mock the bombast or simple riotousness of the young. From Thomas Jefferson to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, people have raised complaints about college students. After all, these students are learning how to practice freedom — the opposite of trying to figure out just how to fit into the world that is being left them.
Today’s students are trying to work out what it means to be decent humans in world growing more heated, hostile and, sometimes, heartless. We should cheer them on, for their sake and ours.
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10) Behind the Investigations Into the Venezuelan Oilman Partnering With Trump
Alejandro Betancourt has been targeted by multiple investigations. Now he’s the U.S. government’s unrivaled partner in President Trump’s bid to control Venezuelan oil resources.
By Simon Romero, Julie Turkewitz, Edward Wong and Alan Feuer, Sept. 4, 2026
Simon Romero and Julie Turkewitz have covered Venezuela for years. Edward Wong reports on U.S. foreign policy, and Alan Feuer covers the U.S. Justice Department.
“The deal with Mr. Betancourt holds some parallels with the transition from state socialism to market capitalism in post-Soviet Russia, when the West worked with newly anointed oligarchs to gain access to Russian oil reserves.”
A refinery operated by the Venezuelan state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, in Punto Fijo. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
Prosecutors in Spain targeted the Venezuelan oilman Alejandro Betancourt in one money laundering inquiry. Swiss authorities investigated him in another. Both countries requested his extradition from Britain, where Mr. Betancourt lives in a 14-bedroom country estate, and British authorities arrested him less than a year ago, barring him from traveling abroad.
All of it hardly mattered.
As part of the Trump administration’s takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry, the United States is forming an extraordinary partnership with Mr. Betancourt. Under the arrangement, the Pentagon could seek to take a large stake in his company, a deal that defies easy comparison in recent American history, oil analysts say.
That would make Mr. Betancourt the main partner of the Trump administration as it pushes not just to control the sale of Venezuela’s oil, but to own a chunk of it directly. And it would place Mr. Betancourt at the core of Venezuela’s deepening transformation from a sovereign nation into essentially a vassal state of the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio brought up Mr. Betancourt in a White House meeting in the spring. He had decided that Mr. Betancourt could be a viable partner for the United States because he had experience forging oil deals in Venezuela and increasing production there, said a person familiar with U.S. efforts to support Mr. Betancourt.
That meant Mr. Betancourt would need to be able to travel freely. Officials from the State Department and the Justice Department intervened in the Swiss investigation by reaching out to Swiss counterparts to persuade them not to go forward with the extradition, according to people familiar with the matter.
They also asked Britain’s government to ease travel restrictions on Mr. Betancourt, the people said, allowing him to travel to Venezuela and to the United States to meet with Trump administration officials. The British government was reluctant but eventually agreed to the request.
Under the deal with the Trump administration, a financing office within the Pentagon plans to partner with Mr. Betancourt’s oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, which is being granted 100-year concessions to operate 17 oil fields in Venezuela.
Mr. Betancourt does not own the fields, but the concessions give him the exclusive rights to exploit them — and they are potentially enormous. In all, these oil fields have estimated reserves of 65 billion barrels, nearly as much as all the proven reserves in the United States.
“The United States has wreaked havoc on us” with this deal, said Rafael Ramírez, a former Venezuelan energy minister. He called the unusual arrangement with Mr. Betancourt “grotesque” and “unsustainable in the long run” because it was done in secret with an authoritarian government many Venezuelans view as illegitimate, echoing criticism across Venezuela’s normally polarized political spectrum.
Sara Chouraqui, a spokeswoman for Mr. Betancourt and the general counsel for his oil company, rejected the criticism.
“To Alejandro, this isn’t political,” Ms. Chouraqui said. “The fact that he is now in a position to revitalize the country’s long-dormant economic potential is in itself a win, not for any one political party, but for all of Venezuela.”
This article is based on interviews with oil executives, current and former U.S. officials, and former Venezuelan officials, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
In settling on Mr. Betancourt, the Trump administration opted against partnering directly with a U.S. oil giant like Chevron, which has had extensive operations in Venezuela for decades, or Petroleos de Venezuela, the country’s state-owned oil company.
The deal with Mr. Betancourt holds some parallels with the transition from state socialism to market capitalism in post-Soviet Russia, when the West worked with newly anointed oligarchs to gain access to Russian oil reserves.
“It’s actually eerily similar,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist. In both cases, Mr. Rodríguez said, weak governments handed over key parts of their oil industries to well-connected figures. In Russia, he noted, these oligarchs grew immensely rich while often supporting authoritarian rule.
In response to a request for comment on U.S. efforts to press Switzerland and Britain to lower the legal pressure on Mr. Betancourt, the State Department cited a briefing on Tuesday in which a top U.S. official told reporters that the administration had found “no pending legal problems in the United States.” The ongoing legal cases had largely originated from U.S. prosecutors’ efforts to look into Mr. Betancourt’s dealings about a decade ago, the official said.
The White House had no comment, while the Justice Department and the British Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. The Washington Post reported earlier on some details of U.S. efforts to help Mr. Betancourt with his legal challenges.
Explaining the deal, Mr. Rubio told a Venezuelan journalist this week that the partnership with Mr. Betancourt was “going to be professionalized” and will “operate under laws that will apply to it so that the money is never used improperly.”
President Trump has promoted the deal as a way to lower gasoline prices and replenish U.S. strategic oil reserves, though the effort could take years, at best, and there are questions about whether the Pentagon has the legal authority to pursue the deal.
Mr. Betancourt has a long history operating in the shadowy world of secretive oil deals, regime power struggles and multiple financial crime investigations.
But until news of the deal emerged in recent days, Mr. Betancourt, 46, born into an upper-crust family that traces its lineage to a 19th-century Venezuelan president, was largely known for mastering the art of landing deals with Venezuela’s authoritarian leaders while still in his 20s.
Reaping a bonanza from no-bid contracts with Venezuela’s government, he plowed that money into trophy real estate around the world, including a penthouse in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower and a castle in Spain with extensive hunting grounds, as he shifted into new ventures, from African banks to pumping Venezuelan oil.
While the deal with the Trump administration is unorthodox, there is strong reasoning for this new approach, according to Venezuelan oil experts.
Franco Sampieri, the director of the Petroleum Chamber of Zulia, the oil-producing state in western Venezuela, said he believed the deal would bring many direct and indirect jobs to the region.
“We are 30 years behind,” Mr. Sampieri said, emphasizing that Zulia desperately needed such an initiative to help resuscitate the industry.
Petróleos de Venezuela is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was, hobbled by mismanagement and corruption, dimming its allure as a potential partner. Mr. Betancourt also has a reputation, however marred by allegations of impropriety it may be, of getting business done and raising oil production in Venezuela.
The Trump administration may also have a kind of leverage over Mr. Betancourt that it couldn’t exert over a major U.S. oil company, especially after his arrest in Britain last November in connection to international money laundering inquiries.
If Mr. Betancourt doesn’t toe the line, the Trump administration could reverse course and press foreign legal authorities to revisit allegations, or push the Justice Department to reactivate its investigation into a U.S. money laundering case in Miami. In that case, Mr. Betancourt was identified, albeit not by name, as an unindicted co-conspirator, according to a person familiar with the case.
The help Mr. Betancourt has gotten from the U.S. government to evade further scrutiny — instead of it treating him as a potential witness in other corruption inquiries, or even as an unindicted co-conspirator — has shocked former Justice Department officials, the person familiar with the Miami investigation said.
Mr. Betancourt has recently become close to Mauricio Claver-Carone, a powerful political operator close to Mr. Rubio, according to two people with knowledge of their relationship. Mr. Claver-Carone has been instrumental in shaping Venezuela policy despite holding no formal role in the Trump administration.
Mr. Betancourt comes from a privileged background. His father was a cardiologist and pianist, and his mother a jewelry designer. He attended an elite private high school in Caracas before studying business at Boston’s Suffolk University.
When he returned to Venezuela, high oil prices were setting off an economic boom. Hugo Chávez’s revolution was in full swing as the Venezuelan leader sought to use oil revenues to consolidate power, fund antipoverty projects and lift Venezuela’s profile on the world stage.
But amid Mr. Chávez’s expropriations and anti-American rhetoric, there were also opportunities to make a great deal of money in a short amount of time. Mr. Betancourt cut his teeth selling turbines, which allowed him to develop ties with government officials.
Leveraging those contacts, Mr. Betancourt got into the business of building power plants at a time when Venezuela was experiencing electricity shortages. Despite having little experience in the power generation sector, Mr. Chávez’s government awarded him an array of no-bid contracts.
José Aguilar, an independent Venezuelan energy auditor who often coordinated his work with Venezuelan civic transparency organizations, found that Mr. Betancourt’s company overbilled state entities by more than $800 million for the power plants, often by tacking on massive markup fees.
Separately, prosecutors in Europe and the United States investigated claims that executives at Mr. Betancourt’s company paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to secure the contracts.
Mr. Betancourt was not charged as a result of the multiple investigations into these activities, and Ms. Chouraqui, his spokeswoman, said he had never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction.
Even so, Mr. Aguilar called the U.S. government’s decision to partner with Mr. Betancourt “shameful.”
All of Mr. Betancourt’s early deals laid the foundation for a rapid accumulation of wealth. But they also exposed him to scorn from many Venezuelans who viewed him as a traitor for dealing with a government that was jailing dissidents, purging the civil service of critics and nationalizing parts of the economy.
Mr. Betancourt made his foray into Venezuela’s oil industry in 2011 by acquiring a minority stake in Petrozamora, a state-controlled producer operating oil fields in Lake Maracaibo.
Coordinating with other minority owners from Russia, Mr. Betancourt held on to his stake in Petrozamora until 2022, when one of the Venezuelan government’s periodic purges pushed him out of the company at the behest of Tareck El Aissami, the oil minister at the time and a rival of Delcy Rodríguez, then the vice president.
But Mr. Al Aissami’s purge was short lived, and served as the catalyst for his own arrest in 2024 on corruption charges.
After his stake in Petrozamora was expropriated, Mr. Betancourt navigated the fallout by aligning with the regime faction led by Ms. Rodríguez, who is now Venezuela’s president, and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly.
He regained his stake in Petrozamora in 2024 through NABEP, a newly created company registered in Barbados. The company helped execute a rapid operational turnaround, lifting production from 20,000 barrels a day to about 200,000.
In doing so, NABEP emerged as the second-largest private oil company in Venezuela, coming within reach of Chevron’s production of about 280,000 barrels a day.
As the Trump administration tries to ramp up Venezuela’s overall oil output, that positioned Mr. Betancourt not only as a key interlocutor between Washington and Caracas, but someone poised to amass even greater wealth and power as a partner of the U.S. government.
Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.
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11) Israel Says It Is Cementing Its Foothold in Southern Lebanon
The recent capture of a strategic ridge has further entrenched the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, as efforts to broker lasting peace have floundered.
By Euan Ward and David M. Halbfinger, Sept. 4, 2026
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon and David M. Halbfinger from Jerusalem.
In a screen grab obtained from a social media video released on Aug. 22, smoke rose following strikes on Ali al-Taher ridge in Nabatieh, Lebanon. Credit...Social Media, via Reuters
The Israeli defense minister said Friday that the military’s capture of a strategic ridge in Lebanon a day earlier had consolidated its foothold in the south of the country, adding to concerns that Israel intends to prolong its monthslong occupation there.
The Ali al-Taher ridge, about six miles from Lebanon’s border with Israel, sits above a sprawling underground base for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that Israel has long fought.
The ridge had increasingly become a focal point of the conflict, which reignited in March after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Hezbollah’s chief backer.
The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a video statement that the capture of Ali al-Taher marked “the completion of the process of consolidating our hold on the security zone in southern Lebanon,” referring to an Israeli-occupied strip of Lebanese territory along the border.
Hezbollah’s media office did not respond to a request for comment on Israel’s claim that it had captured the ridgeline. The office of the Lebanese presidency declined to comment.
In June, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a U.S.-brokered framework intended to end the fighting and eventually restore Lebanese control over the country’s south.
Under the plan, the Lebanese military would disarm Hezbollah and deploy in designated “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops progressively withdrew. That process has largely stalled, however, with Israel and Hezbollah at odds over which side must act first. Hezbollah has consistently rejected demands to put down its weapons.
Israel has said for months that its forces would remain in Lebanon until Hezbollah has been disarmed. Mr. Katz reiterated that in his statement on Friday, as the capture of the ridge underscored how entrenched the Israeli military has become in Lebanon, with little sign of an end to the occupation.
It remained unclear what Israel’s capture of the Ali al-Taher ridge would mean for the broader U.S. conflict with Iran. Tehran has insisted that any agreement to end that conflict must stop fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon.
Iran warned the United States on Thursday that Israel’s capture of the ridge would cross a red line and that Tehran would retaliate forcefully if the offensive continued, according to an Iranian official and a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said the message was sent via Oman.
The Revolutionary Guards official said that roughly 70 to 100 Hezbollah members, along with Iranian military advisers, had been trapped inside the complex beneath the ridge as Israeli forces encircled it.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had established “operational control” over the ridge after an operation that began in June, when thousands of Israeli troops surrounded the underground facility, one of Hezbollah’s largest in Lebanon, and trapped dozens of militants inside.
The Israeli military said its soldiers had cleared Hezbollah militants from two underground routes beneath the ridge, killing some while others fled. Mr. Katz said on Friday that the military would now work to neutralize the tunnels and deploy around the ridge to maintain its hold and prevent Hezbollah from re-establishing itself there.
Sarit Zehavi, the president of the Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli group focused on security along the northern border, said the capture of the ridgeline was significant but would not fundamentally alter the state of the conflict.
The central question was whether Hezbollah would return to the border region if Israeli forces withdrew, Ms. Zehavi said, arguing that the Lebanese government had not done enough to prevent Hezbollah reconstituting in those areas.
“I don’t feel that it’s a different day,” she added. “There is still a lot of work to do.”
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12) IN AN AGE OF PERPETUAL CLIMATE DISASTER, REBUILDING IS THE WRONG GOAL
By David Wallace-Wells, Sept. 4, 2026
“Disaster is a trial through which communities must pass, ideally transformed positively by the experience. Recovery could be much more ambitious than stanching the blood loss from an immediate wound. It could mean designing and building a whole new world, one that makes the protection of people and promotion of human flourishing a higher-order goal than restoring the value of real estate.”
Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, 2024. Credit...Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
This spring, the Southeast was on fire. Ninety-five percent of the region was in severe drought, and in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas what was burning was what’s called the “blowdown” from Hurricane Helene — the fires tearing through landscapes heavy with trees felled a year and a half ago and left to bake into ready fuel, waiting for a spark.
This is not a climate fable; it is a pattern. Disaster intervals are collapsing, with one catastrophe following another in such quick succession that one bleeds into the next and the old metabolism of disaster recovery fails to keep pace. Climate scientists sometimes talk about whiplash: conditions of extreme drought followed by conditions of historic rainfall, for instance, with flooding made worse because the dirt and soil has been baked into a surface as unwelcoming to water as concrete.
Wildfires often denude hillsides, leading to lethal mudslides when storms come; fires can even be fed by heavy rains, as happened in Europe this summer, when spring precipitation nurtured new vegetation which baked under the continent’s historic heat waves and then burned. When rains hit desert, you can get achingly beautiful floral superblooms in Death Valley or lethal flash flooding in the Grand Canyon. This summer we got both. When decades of glacier loss is followed by an unusually hot summer in the Himalayas, you can get landslides that feel like a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
Cosmic anomalies now arrive serially, disrupting paradigms as reliably as they do landscapes. When a thousand-year storm hits the Texas hill country and the floodwaters drown 139 people and the entire grounds of Camp Mystic, it might look like an act of God, even when the waters overwhelm something long known to locals as Flash Flood Alley. When another flood hits 12 months later, it suggests a very different calendar of grief — and recovery.
Disasters of this scale used to scar communities for generations, if not centuries. Rebuilding could unfold over decades, too: new infrastructure, new patterns of development, perhaps new evacuation routes and emergency-response units. When truly scarring cataclysms struck, survivors built whole new worlds in their wake. This work was difficult even in stable circumstances. But increasingly, weather extremes are arriving not only as crises but premonitions, with future disasters following now within a generation, often within years, and sometimes, unnervingly, within months.
“Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama and now a disaster-management scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But the whole apparatus was built on the assumption that disasters were random and rare and that recovery was one and done.”
This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.
For years, one promise of rapid decarbonization was that it might allow us to secure a stable climate, familiar and comfortable by the standards of the past, into which we might innovate and adapt to build a more hospitable world. Today the green transition is proceeding at inspiring speed and we have flattened the curve of global carbon emissions. But warming isn’t slowing, at least not yet. Instead it’s accelerating, drawing the world quickly past temperature thresholds we once called the dividing line between livable futures and a much darker world.
Perhaps that bright line was a projection of hyperbole and panic, since ecosystems are not ruled by neat binaries and humans will find ways to adapt to the jaggedness of warming, often by normalizing its recurring brutality. But it is no longer possible to dream of a world unperturbed by what was once called catastrophic global temperature rise. And it is no longer sufficient to see disasters only as tragedies, or policy failures, or even a shameful form of carbon comeuppance. They are opportunities, too: not simply to defiantly restore what was damaged or destroyed but to better prepare for, and protect against, a world we once hoped to avoid even imagining.
Just think of a recent disaster — the Palisades fire; Hurricane Helene. The immediate playbook of recovery is familiar, even for those watching from afar: search-and-rescue, clearing debris, restoring some basic public services and temporarily standing up others. “But when Anderson Cooper leaves town, it’s not as sexy,” Kayyem says. “It’s not all the madness, with the cops and the firefighters, and it’s not the child reunited with the mother or the dog reunited with the senior citizen. It’s just the really difficult stuff, which we didn’t take seriously before, because we all figured disasters were random and rare. We figure we’ll just throw a lot of money at the problem, get the community back on its feet and move on.”
Perhaps some local group will rally for new flood barriers, or a county official will press a weather-hardening initiative for local homes. But once you’re out of immediate danger, the recovery often grows rudderless against an ocean of contrary currents. Insurance payments frequently reward rebuilding in precisely the same spot, and for homeowners the highest priority is typically to return as quickly as possible — even if that means not waiting for new codes and building guidelines, let alone paying more to implement them. The tax base has a status quo bias, too, since localities expect certain revenue to stream from certain places, which happens only if the community returns to form. Local transportation and social services, too, were designed to serve the needs of the old community.
And then there are the more human factors, also understandable: coping and nostalgia, bureaucratic sclerosis and the effective veto power of victims over the terms of their own rebuild, the basic desire among individuals and communities to be made whole again. The layouts of streets and parks, the operation of public services, the locations of homes and what they looked like — ideally it would all be as it had been, with the disaster itself lingering more like a bad dream than a crucible in which a new community could be forged.
In an age of serial disaster, that’s no longer enough, even when it can be achieved. One problem is that there is rarely someone truly in charge — no “recovery czar,” Kayyem says. “But you need someone to own this, because the communities don’t really have the capacity. They don’t have the access to federal authorities. They don’t have the right training and perspective.” Emergency response was professionalized decades ago, she says. Recovery, though, is a different story. “Nobody owns it, nobody really wants to own it, and nobody seems to have all that clear an idea of what it needs.”
Sometimes local leaders will invoke a “new normal” when describing the scale of the challenge ahead. Never mind that it was precisely “normal” that has been revealed as vulnerable, the intuitive measure of success is how quickly visitors can return without noting signs of calamity at all. “The idea that you would be required only to recover from the disaster already behind you but not adapt to the next one — it’s insane,” Kayyem says. “Just insane.”
But for decades, this approach to recovery was required by a federal law called the Stafford Act, with FEMA disbursing most of its funds for projects that altered nothing about the structures that had been destroyed. Buildings were supposed to look the same, built with the same materials in the same place and put to the same purpose. The law has been reformed several times over the last couple of decades, with some recovery money set aside for new resilience and guidelines softened to allow communities to rebuild in different ways, and different places, rather than being bound by what had stood before. But the impulse to restore persists.
When New Orleans rebuilt its levees after Hurricane Katrina, they were not sufficient to prevent flooding in the case of a Category 5 storm. Nearly eight years since the Camp fire tore through Paradise, Calif., only 40 percent of the destroyed homes have been rebuilt, and many of the surviving structures still bear some of the same hazards — wood-shingle roofs, overgrown brush and piles of dead leaves, slack power lines — that doomed their neighbors. The homes being rebuilt now in the Palisades and Altadena have been exempted from a number of local codes and regulations in order to speed recovery on what’s been called a “like-for-like” approach to rebuilding. Their neighbors in equally vulnerable neighborhoods like Brentwood and Beverly Hills have spent much of the past 20 months fighting new responsive requirements tooth and nail — though the updated guidelines, called Zone Zero, were finally adopted in August.
These are only one kind of recovery story. There are encouraging ones, too, both big and small. In 2013, Kayyem tells me, a tornado powered by 200-mile-per-hour winds tore through Moore, Okla., the third in less than 15 years, flattening more than a thousand homes and killing several dozen people. In rebuilding, the town added not a binder full of new requirements but just two pages’ worth — then stood proud as the new buildings survived a tornado two years later. The Houston area has emerged from at least three 500-year storms in five years with better flood maps and perhaps more honest insurance policies, more defensive infrastructure and much greater willingness among voters to actually spend on that stuff. In New York, nearly 15 years after Hurricane Sandy, flood barriers are going up around Lower Manhattan — and though the system isn’t perfect, it was built much more quickly than the Second Avenue subway.
The big question is how to ensure devastated communities get on one of these paths rather than the other. In 2024, Kayyem convened a task force at the Kennedy School to ask exactly this question, examining almost 3,000 recoveries from billion-dollar disasters between 2000 and 2017, identifying 625 of what they called “leading” recoveries — in which local economic activity exceeded pre-disaster levels for a period of at least five years — and 1,259 of what they called “lagging recoveries,” where battered communities never got back to base line.
The most important measure of success, they found, is not speed — how quickly you can distribute disaster relief, bring people back and conjure at least the illusion that everything is back to normal. It’s resilience — how effectively you’ve managed to protect the community against future risk. In successful recoveries, they found, more money had been invested in resilience ahead of time by local officials who seemed to understand the risk. After impact, money was distributed more quickly and more flexibly, often thanks to ready-to-use blueprints and sometimes because leaders had stocked money away in anticipation of a coming disaster.
These are local lessons, which is part of the point. Federal response predominates in the national imagination — think of George W. Bush and Katrina, Barack Obama and Sandy, FEMA and Helene — but the actual work is increasingly falling to local communities. Partly that’s because real recovery lasts longer than the federal attention span. Partly it’s because it depends on local knowledge as much as domain expertise. And partly it’s because disasters are now frequent enough that they have begun to overwhelm the federal government’s ability to respond — America’s 20th-century institutions running up against 21st-century weather.
In the five years before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracked an average of 5.4 “billion-dollar disasters” each year, inflicting an average of $39 billion in damages. In the last five years, the country has averaged 23.2 such disasters each year, totaling $140 billion in damages each year. Even before President Trump returned to office, promising to radically overhaul and possibly eliminate FEMA, liberals would tell you that the federal government was simply not capable of handling so much catastrophe and that the old system of centralized response was no longer fit for purpose. It’s not yet clear what FEMA will look like come January 2029. But almost invariably, it seems, local communities will have to learn to do more.
Disasters are always opportunities of a kind. In 2007, Naomi Klein described what she called the “shock doctrine” — the pattern by which, in the age of globalization and neoliberal financial capitalism, crises were exploited to push through predictably right-wing policy responses, ranging from austerity to privatization. Her focus wasn’t climate disaster, but it was easy enough to connect the dots: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the New Orleans public school system was liquidated, with education turned over to charter schools. Emergency response was largely handed off to for-profit contractors, earning the derisive description “Disaster Inc.”
In 2024, Sarah Labowitz and Katie Mears, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, proposed an optimistic inversion: “Adaptation through shock,” they called it. “We know the world will look dramatically different 100 years from now,” they wrote. “It’ll be hotter, the oceans will be higher and the most productive farmlands will be further north. Many of the places where we live won’t be recognizable or even exist, and hundreds of millions of people will have moved.” But we also know, they wrote, that “disasters are moments when change happens in communities: Resources flow, and decisions, big and small, are made to rebuild, to elevate, to harden or to say goodbye.” Everyone allows themselves to contemplate new futures, if only briefly — to ask what of the old order should be preserved. And what should not.
What Labowitz and Mears imagine is a recovery framework that begins from that premise: Disaster is a trial through which communities must pass, ideally transformed positively by the experience. Recovery could be much more ambitious than stanching the blood loss from an immediate wound.
It could mean designing and building a whole new world, one that makes the protection of people and promotion of human flourishing a higher-order goal than restoring the value of real estate. This could mean more focus on food-aid programs or providing generous direct-cash transfers to those whose livelihoods have been directly affected. It might also mean much more consideration to move people out of harm’s way rather than straining to return them into communities marked once already by climate disaster, perhaps by subtly redesigning neighborhoods, or in some cases through what’s been called, almost always in scare quotes, “managed retreat” from whole regions.
In the case of the Palisades or Altadena, for instance, it could mean a new street map that does not follow the wind paths flowing down from nearby mountains, or purchasing a few strategically located lots to be rebuilt instead as firebreaks. It could mean buying out homeowners at pre-fire prices to enable relocation, or forward-looking revisions to insurance policies so that rebuilding in the same place is not rewarded. For now, recovery tends to anchor you in the zone of exposure, and migration tends to be in the opposite direction. That is, toward risk — invariably underpriced, as we learn again with each disaster. And then forget.
Look at the burn scars in Lahaina or Spokane, or the path of destruction Helene cut through seven states, or the fact that unspectacular thunderstorms now routinely deliver more than a billion dollars in local damage, and you might assume that money would be the chief challenge in recovery — and that ambitious recovery might fail because of pinched budgets.
In fact, the money isn’t such an obvious problem, Labowitz says, since, in general, federal disaster funding flows quite freely and abundantly. In Trump’s second term, FEMA has been far more partisan in its distribution of funds, with nearly 40 times as much money sent to red and purple states wrecked by Hurricane Helene than to California in the aftermath of its fires. But over the last decade, the federal government has distributed $558 billion in disaster relief. . If we’re going to be spending all that money, she says, we should try getting a bit better at it.
“Why are we spending so much money?” Labowitz asks. “It’s because it’s the right thing to do. There’s something kind of beautiful and moral about it that we collectivize risk in a big and rich country,” she goes on. “It’s beautiful — the government helps you after a disaster. But we should be thinking about the money that we spend on disaster recovery in terms of what we could get for it. Not just in rebuilding what was there before, but preparing for the next disaster, too.”
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13) Colombia’s New President Poses With Dead Bodies in Show of Force
In Colombia, as in the United States and El Salvador, leaders are increasingly using images of captured or killed enemies to project power.
By Genevieve Glatsky, Genevieve Glatsky reported from Bogotá, Colombia, Sept. 4, 2026
"The video was an especially stark expression of a political tactic increasingly visible across the Americas: leaders who campaign on law and order using images of alleged criminals as a spectacle of state power. Experts say the imagery reflects a regional trend of treating people labeled terrorists as enemies who do not merit the protections of due process. They pointed to the Trump administration’s designation of drug traffickers as terrorists and its military strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 223 people, as part of that shift. … The identities of the dead have not been disclosed, and the operation has not yet undergone the investigations required after a military action resulting in deaths. By displaying the bodies as defeated ‘terrorists,’ the government collapsed distinctions between combatants and civilians, adults and children, and legal and illegal uses of force, Mr. Restrepo said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/world/americas/colombia-de-la-espriella-bodies.html
Colombia’s leader sits at a desk surrounded by military and police officials, presenting what he describes as evidence of a successful military operation. But the rows in front of him are not boxes of seized cocaine or weapons. They are dead bodies.
Wearing the same dark green as the military officials with him, President Abelardo De La Espriella can be seen in a video posted Wednesday morning on his X account walking beside white body bags said to hold the remains of rebels.
The video was an especially stark expression of a political tactic increasingly visible across the Americas: leaders who campaign on law and order using images of alleged criminals as a spectacle of state power.
Experts say the imagery reflects a regional trend of treating people labeled terrorists as enemies who do not merit the protections of due process. They pointed to the Trump administration’s designation of drug traffickers as terrorists and its military strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 223 people, as part of that shift.
President Trump has publicized videos of immigration raids, sometimes accompanied by popular music. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has made images of prisoners part of his security strategy, releasing videos of inmates being shaved and marched into prison.
“When the U.S. is behaving like this, it makes it easier for everyone else to fall into that behavioral trap,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, the deputy director for Latin America for the International Crisis Group. “It’s not just: He did something bad, but he is a bad person and therefore deserves whatever punishment we assign.”
Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institute, said, “It’s trying to get people excited about not just statistics about the homicide rate, but actually about these visuals in almost a cartoonish or pro-wrestling kind of way to appeal to people’s basest instincts.”
But that imagery carries particular weight in Colombia.
During decades of armed conflict, the military’s practice of measuring success by enemy casualties produced one of the country’s darkest human rights scandals: Soldiers killed nearly 8,000 civilians, then cast them as guerrillas killed in combat to inflate their body count.
The legacy of that scandal in the early 2000s, known as the “false positives,” remains deeply embedded in Colombians’ memory.
“Colombia has a long history of almost glorifying violence and the violent deaths of criminal leaders,” Ms. Dickinson said. “There’s a performative aspect of what’s happening here. And it really does mark a shift and a return to times past.”
For communities that have lived through decades of violence from both armed groups and the state, the images send two messages at once: that the government is capable of defeating criminals, but also that a new era of mass violence could be emerging.
Mr. De La Espriella, a right-winger backed by Mr. Trump, called the operation a “lethal blow” to the group’s territorial control and the most successful military operation in Colombia in the past 12 years.
“The time when you could move through Colombia with safe passage from a government that played freeze tag with you is over,” he said. “The determination to eradicate you — because you are a cancer — is absolute.”
Mr. De La Espriella said that 23 people had been killed and six captured, including aleader of a dissident rebel group who was known by the alias “Tigre.” He described him as the group’s third in command.
The president said the group had recruited children and attacked members of the army and navy during this year’s presidential elections. He also said that one child recruit had been rescued and placed in the care of the country’s child welfare agency.
The photographs, Colombian security experts said, are intended to demonstrate the government’s zero-tolerance approach.
“It is not just a punishment in terms of law and order, it is a moral punishment,” Ms. Dickinson said. “The celebratory aspects of their deaths plays into that narrative about this being an existential good versus evil conflict. It’s hard to overstate how powerful these images are.”
In 2016, Colombia forged a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel group, ending a 50-year conflict with the Marxist guerrilla group. But dissident factions that rejected or later abandoned the agreement, among other groups, continue to operate in parts of the country.
During the height of the conflict, the government sometimes released photographs of the bodies of major guerrilla leaders, including images in which the dead were presented alongside senior government officials.
But an image of the president himself alongside bodies represents something different, said Jorge Restrepo, director of the Conflict Analysis Resource Center, a Colombian research group.
“It feels novel in this post-conflict period,” he said.
The identities of the dead have not been disclosed, and the operation has not yet undergone the investigations required after a military action resulting in deaths. By displaying the bodies as defeated “terrorists,” the government collapsed distinctions between combatants and civilians, adults and children, and legal and illegal uses of force, Mr. Restrepo said.
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