We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) How to Fight Capitalism and Win
By Bonnie Weinstein, Sept/Oct 2026
The power of the capitalist class is based upon one thing—it’s ownership, by law, of the means of production and the profits created by the labor of the working class.
But workers have no say in the creation of these laws that guarantee wealth only for the capitalist class. All these laws relegate workers to wage-slavery—earning a tiny fraction of the wealth we create from our labor—getting paid only as much as we fight for.
Ending capitalist dictatorship over us seems insurmountable, but it’s not.
The foundation of capitalism
Our very survival depends upon selling our labor power to the wealthy for as much as we can possibly fight them for, and not a penny more. Workers must pay for everything that we need to survive—food, housing, healthcare, education, the clothes we wear, the tools we need for work, the transportation we need to get to work—we must pay out of pocket for everything while the wealthy flourish.
Capitalist democracy is democracy for the rich and totalitarianism for the poor
If you are a millionaire, billionaire or trillionaire you can afford anything, including winning elections. How can an independent candidate of the working class compete in the electoral process against the ruling elite?
It costs millions of dollars to win an election. To make matters worse, our labor organizations are working in partnership with the bosses by donating millions of dollars of funds collected from union members to capitalist politicians—mostly Democratic Party politicians who pretend to be on the side of the working class in order to tie us to their undemocratic electoral process that overwhelmingly favors those with the most money.
The wealthy spend millions of dollars on publicity for their campaigns that promise everything and deliver nothing—and often force give-backs that workers have fought for and lost. The capitalist elections are a lopsided battle that favors the wealthy over the poor.
Workers can’t compete fairly in capitalism’s electoral process where money rules and the poor are rendered voiceless. There can be no partnership between the exploiter and the exploited. The exploited must stand independently and in solidarity with each other if we are to survive.
Our only hope is to break from this rigged system and organize ourselves independently of the capitalist class.
We must fight our own battles based upon the power and strength of our unity and solidarity with one another and for the rightful full share of the wealth we produce through our labor. We are the overwhelming majority. All we need do is organize for our own benefit.
Capitalism’s predation
The depths and expanse to which capitalism’s profit motive is destroying us and our environment is staggering. In July three stories in the New York Times illustrated this destruction.
The first article, by Murray Carpenter, published July 6th, titled “Tobacco Companies Are Cashing In on Zyn’s Unstoppable Popularity,” is about how the tobacco industry is devising ways to get more people—especially youth—addicted to nicotine, which is proven harmful to the body:
“Along with vaping products, the Big Tobacco corporations have seized on the nicotine pouch market as a way to offset the steep decline in domestic sales of cigarettes. Pouch sales are projected to increase to more than $40 billion worldwide by 2033 from $6.9 billion in 2025, according to an analysis by Grand View Research, a market research firm. Companies are racing to meet the demand, so far investing more than $1 billion in plant production to accommodate the growth. Several states have welcomed the industry’s forays into the latest twists on nicotine products, handing out millions of dollars in tax credits and grants. But the marketing of nicotine-laden items like pouches, gums and lozenges as another safe alternative to traditional cigarettes has heightened public health concerns. Experts are accusing the tobacco industry of once again deliberately ignoring decades of science that proved the addictive nature of nicotine, and of stoking demand by producing more and more potent varieties. Reminiscent of Juul and other flavored vaping products that caused a public uproar over teenage consumption, the pouches — tobacco-free ‘lip pillows’ placed between the cheek and gum — have revived warnings that nicotine is highly addictive and can cause a host of conditions, like anxiety and heart arrhythmia. It also threatens a teenager’s still-developing brain, with the potential for affecting behavior and cognitive function, experts say.”
The second article dated July 9th, by Catrin Einhorn, titled, “Sea Mining Could Devastate an Enigmatic Group of Creatures, Researchers Warn” explains how deep-sea mining threatens the health of the oceans, but will take precedence over the welfare of life on earth in order to increase the profits of mining companies:
“Deep-sea mining threatens to drive to extinction more than half of the snails and other mollusks that rely on hydrothermal vents, according to the latest update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the global scientific authority on the status of species. The finding comes as nations are expanding plans for deep-sea mining, eager to access valuable minerals needed for electronics and other uses. Some of these minerals are found in and near chimney-like structures around hydrothermal vents, areas where cold seawater seeps through fissures in the earth’s crust and hits magma. As the water heats, it picks up elements like copper, zinc, gold and silver before shooting back into the ocean at temperatures that can reach over 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The rapid cooling causes the metals to precipitate out. Companies are interested in harvesting these and other deep-sea metals, arguing that growing demand combined with the serious environmental impact of mining on land make oceans an attractive source. … The Trump administration has moved to push ahead with deep-sea mining in international waters without global approval.”
The third article, again, points out the insidious nature of capitalism’s quest for profits at the expense of our health—especially the health of our children.
In a July 27th article by Julia Belluz titled, “This Is the Way Out of Our Ultraprocessed Dystopia” she explains how capitalism deliberately produces unhealthy and addictive foods for the poor as a cheap substitute to the healthy diet we can’t afford:
“Researchers have uncovered how processed foods override the body’s built-in signals for satiety and nutrition and increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes and obesity, among other chronic diseases. … Philip Morris purchased Kraft in 1988, and a little earlier, R.J. Reynolds acquired major food brands and merged with Nabisco. The tobacco documents show that cigarette companies applied their knowledge about flavor optimization, youth marketing and brain chemistry to ultraprocessed foods in order to increase profits. … To play on a question that the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler asked during the tobacco trials: Whose choice is driving the demand for ultraprocessed foods in America? Is it a choice by consumers to continue eating them? Or by food companies to maintain the public’s dependency on them?”
We have become immune to all the ways capitalism is destroying our lives and the planet in pursuit of profits—including their continued wars of aggression against working people around the world.
It is the ordinary people who fight and get killed in wars. The elite sit on their thrones and direct the hits that will benefit them the most financially because that’s all they are concerned about.
Our unity is free and our votes can be free, too
An independent organization of unity and solidarity among all of us who must work for a living can surmount the power of wealth because we are the overwhelming majority.
If we stood united in our demand for control over the wealth we produce by our work, we could turn the tables on the wealthy and end the balance of power of the rich over the poor forever.
And we could conceivably achieve this peacefully and without violence if we stop work on capitalism’s production for profit en masse—before they do destroy the world—and take control of the means of production out of their hands and into our own, for the benefit of all of us.
We could elect who we want to represent us. We could disarm capitalism, and free the world from their constant wars of power, destruction, threats and the illegal acquisition of the wealth we alone produce.
We can remove the borders that separate us and plan democratically to build a fair and equitable world internationally.
Production for the needs of all on a foundation of economic and social equality and justice is in our power to achieve—if we stand united.
All we need do is organize democratically in our own defense, and in defense of all life on earth.
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2) A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator.
Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.
By Sarah Kliff, Sept. 8, 2026
Sarah Kliff reviewed thousands of pages of court records and interviewed eight people whom Roger Marshall sued over medical debt.
It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas.
A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant.
The police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.
“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said.
The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.
Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the record show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred.
They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate.
The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. About half the lawsuits were filed under Mr. Marshall’s name and the rest by Heartland Regional OBGYN, the medical practice he solely owned from 1998 to 2012 and then co-owned with another doctor from 2013 to 2019.
Some facing lawsuits were new mothers with outstanding bills from their deliveries. Most lived in Barton County, a rural area with above-average uninsured and poverty rates. Some patients the Times spoke with lacked insurance; others had health coverage but were responsible for part of their bill.
“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.
Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.
“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” said Ms. Clutts, 45. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once.”
In response to detailed questions from the Times, a spokeswoman for Mr. Marshall said that he spent decades caring for patients regardless of their ability to pay.
“Judges issue warrants when people repeatedly miss court dates, not doctors,” the spokeswoman, Payton Fuller, wrote in a statement.
Court records show that Mr. Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested arrest warrants, including in Mr. Vasquez’s case. They filed dozens of briefs arguing that warrants were needed because the of the defendant’s “refusal to obey Court orders.”
Steven Johnson, a lawyer who often represented Mr. Marshall in debt cases, defended the warrants and ensuing arrests as necessary to ensure that debtors attended court dates.
“If defendants were allowed to appear only when they wanted to without any consequences the court would get no business done,” he wrote in a text message.
He said that Mr. Marshall was “no different” than his other clients in allowing his law firm to take the steps they felt were necessary to pursue an outstanding bill. As a client, Mr. Marshall was not involved in decisions about when to seek warrants, arrests, or garnishments, Mr. Johnson said, but did set the 18 percent interest rate in a contract he had patients sign. Mr. Marshall’s office did not respond to a question from The Times about who set the interest rate.
Doctors have wide discretion in how to handle unpaid bills. They can decide when to involve a debt collector, file lawsuits or drop the debt entirely if a patient seems unable to pay.
“There is a lot of variation,” said Barak Richman, the co-director of the health law program at George Washington University who has studied medical debt litigation in three states. “There are a lot that do bring lawsuits but also a whole lot that don’t. It’s not because they’re in a different position, they’ve just decided they’re not going to do it.”
Some hospitals and doctors have increasingly relied on litigation as insurance deductibles have risen, leaving patients responsible for a great share of their bills.
Even so, wage garnishments and arrests of patients are “definitely on the extreme side,” Mr. Richman said.
Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford University, has conducted research in one state finding that lawsuits against patients are relatively rare, with about 1.7 percent of hospital stays resulting in litigation.
“It’s not surprising there are outliers but this does seem to be an extreme case,” in terms of how far a doctor went to pursue debt, Mr. Mahoney said.
Federal law made debtors prisons illegal centuries ago but many states’ laws allow for arrests when the defendant in a debt lawsuit misses a court date.
The Times interviewed eight people Mr. Marshall sued between 2003 and 2015. Most described themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, often deciding between paying medical bills or buying groceries. Two said that the bills Mr. Marshall pursued in court stemmed from late miscarriages that required surgery.
Mr. Marshall stopped practicing medicine after winning election to Congress in 2016. But some of his collection work continued during his time serving in the House of Representatives, from 2017 to 2021, The Times found.
‘Doc Marshall’
Mr. Marshall spent more than 25 years practicing obstetrics before running for Congress in 2016. In campaign materials, he frequently trumpeted his work delivering babies and the financial success of his medical practice. Both his Senate and his campaign websites refer to him as “Doc Marshall.”
“For 5,000 Kansans, life began here, in the trusted hands of Dr. Marshall,” an ad during his 2020 campaign for Senate said, showing the senator holding two newborns.
His current campaign website says that he was often “the only OB-GYN in the area” in his largely rural region of the state. He has also highlighted his care of low-income patients. Sometimes, he said in 2017, women drove “over a hundred miles” to see him because he accepted Medicaid, the public health benefits program for the poor.
In 1998, he and eight other doctors opened a four-bed surgical center in Great Bend. It steadily grew into a full-service hospital generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He served as the hospital’s board chairman, and his family remained co-owners of the hospital until March 2017, two months after he was sworn into office.
Mr. Marshall earned salaries both from his obstetrics practice and the hospital. In 2015, his combined earnings from the two was about $780,000, his 2016 financial disclosure report shows. His current worth is between $3 million and 9.8 million, according to his most recent financial disclosure report.
Great Bend Regional Medical Center also filed hundreds of lawsuits against patients during the years Mr. Marshall was either an investor or board chair.
More than a dozen of those lawsuits occurred while Mr. Marshall served in Congress and before he sold his ownership stake in the hospital, according to Kansas court records and Mr. Marshall’s financial disclosures.
Ms. Fuller, Mr. Marshall’s spokeswoman, said that the hospital “provided millions in uncompensated care” and “used the exact same billing and outside collection procedures as every other business or hospital in Kansas.”
She added, “Sixty days before an election, The New York Times has decided that a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on is some kind of scandal. Kansans know better.”
When Mr. Marshall was elected to Congress, he quickly parlayed his experience as a doctor and health care investor into a central role in Republicans’ 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the sweeping health care law enacted under President Barack Obama. “I may be the only physician in Congress to help run a hospital,” he said.
In July 2025, he introduced legislation that would prohibit hospitals from suing patients if they did not publicly post their medical prices.
One Patient, Three Arrests
The first time Meischa Zimmerman was arrested for missing a court date related to a C-section bill from Mr. Marshall was in 2011. She was home with her 2-year-old, and eight months pregnant.
“I asked them quietly: Can you not handcuff me in front of my daughter?” said Ms. Zimmerman, 44. “I explained to my daughter I was going for a ride.”
Ms. Zimmerman was arrested twice more, in 2013 and 2016, each time posting $200 bonds that would go toward paying down her debt, according to receipts The Times reviewed. Court records indicate that she was hand-delivered notices of the hearings she needed to attend, but Ms. Zimmerman said she did not receive such documents.
Her last arrest occurred the week after Mr. Marshall won his first congressional election.
Ms. Zimmerman was uninsured during the earlier pregnancy, in 2009, but had explored enrolling in Medicaid. All states offer Medicaid coverage to low-income women during pregnancy and for a short period after. But states set their own income caps, and Kansas has long had one of the lowest in the country, limiting the benefit to women who earn less than 150 percent of the poverty line.
Ms. Zimmerman was not working at the time and thought she might qualify. She made an interview appointment at her local Medicaid office but went into labor the night before, so didn’t show up and never completed the paperwork. Five months later, with her $3,596 bill for the delivery still unpaid, Mr. Marshall sued her.
“I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it,” she said.
Ms. Zimmerman said she set up a $50 monthly payment plan in 2010 but sometimes could not keep up. Mr. Marshall’s law firm was charging 18 percent interest on her bill, and she recalls being told that it had ballooned to over $7,000 with interest.
Ms. Zimmerman is among 81 patients whose court records indicate that an arrest occurred. Their debts ranged from $114 to $4,683. In some cases, efforts to collect a debt would continue for over a decade and lasted into Mr. Marshall’s congressional career.
Most patients did not attend their original court date, which led to a default judgment. Four of the eight patients The Times interviewed said they never received their summons, which court records indicate were typically delivered by mail. Some sent in handwritten letters asking for leniency.
One, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2004 for $1,200, asked that she not be held liable for care she received “for me and my twins (who I lost).” She was still found responsible for the bill.
Another hired a lawyer, who wrote a brief protesting a $520 bill for a surgery to remove placenta that remained in a patient’s uterus after childbirth.
“The service that the plaintiff seeks payment for should have been part of the original birthing services for which the plaintiff has already been paid,” the lawyer argued. That case was dismissed.
Mr. Vasquez said he did not recall receiving a summons for his lawsuit or a notice of his court date in 2007. Court records indicate both documents were delivered.
The couple had health insurance, he said, but believe something went wrong with the billing. Mr. Vasquez recalls Mr. Marshall’s office offering a $250 monthly payment plan that he could not afford.
“Every little bit of money we were getting went for rent and bills,” he said.
Mr. Vasquez was recovering from surgery, with fresh stitches in his arm, when the police arrived at his house. Because of that, he was not handcuffed and was kept in a solitary cell.
“It was just me in that itty-bitty room,” he said.
After the arrest, the Vasquezes worked with a law firm to roll this and other debts into a payment plan. Eight years later — 11 years after the emergency surgery — in November 2015, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers filed a letter with the court releasing the judgment against them.
Susan C. Beachy and Stella Raine Chu contributed research.
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3) Britain Accuses Israeli Settlers of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Parts of West Bank
The U.K. said Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians by extremist settlers, as it and other countries announced a ban on trade with illegal settlements.
By Stephen Castle, Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 8, 2026
Stephen Castle reported from London, and Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
Palestinian villagers harvesting olives in the village of Turmus Aya, with Israeli settlements in the background, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank in 2025. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Britain announced significant trade restrictions on settlements in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday and accused extremist settlers of perpetrating “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” as it acted with Canada and France to toughen policies toward the Israeli government.
Britain’s package of measures, including a trade ban on goods produced in the settlements, was announced on Tuesday in Parliament by Ed Miliband, who became foreign secretary in July.
The decision is the clearest shift in British foreign policy since Andy Burnham became prime minister in the same month, succeeding Keir Starmer who was elected in 2024.
It was coordinated with Canada and France, whose foreign ministers issued a joint statement with Britain promising “national measures” to ban trade in settlement goods, and supporting other nations that have done so.
“Today marks the beginning of a new approach,” Mr. Miliband told lawmakers, adding that the British government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank — perpetrated by settler terrorists.” All too often, he added, “The Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse.”
In a speech with an often deeply personal tone, Mr. Miliband said that he made his announcement as a “proud British Jew” who was “unwavering” in his support for the state of Israel. He added, however, that Britain had concluded that the occupation was unlawful in line with a ruling of the International Court of Justice.
“So I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” he said, adding that the measures would also cover those who provide services to settlements including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”
Mr. Miliband also announced that Britain would refuse applications for the sale of arms that would “materially contribute to the occupation.”
Speaking before the statement in Parliament, Pat McFadden, a senior British cabinet minister, said that the overriding drive behind the plan was to keep alive the possibility of a two-state solution, a proposed framework to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“What we’re really concerned about is that there is an attempt, openly, by some Israeli ministers, to erase that possibility through the expansion of these settlements in the West Bank,” he told the broadcaster Sky News.
He added that the trade restrictions would be limited to those settlements. “I think it’s also important to say that Israel is an important trading partner for the U.K. This isn’t intended to be a boycott of all Israeli goods,” Mr. McFadden said.
Britain, a longtime ally of Israel, has repeatedly condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law. Within Israel, a number of former generals, intelligence officials and prime ministers recently accused armed settlers in the West Bank of ethnic cleansing after they raided Palestinian homes, mosques and villages.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shrugged off international and domestic criticism and promoted building more settlements at a breakneck pace.
Even before the British announcement was made, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, warned that the plans could stoke tensions with Washington and that countermeasures could have a “huge economic impact on British businesses.”
Mr. Huckabee told the BBC that Britain’s firms might face restrictions on business in some U.S. states, citing Florida as an example. “It’s like throwing a stone and not having an idea where it’s going to land,” he said.
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, welcomed Mr. Miliband’s announcement, describing it as a “turning point in every sense.”
“The U.K. has finally matched its values with its actions,” he said in a phone interview. “What happened today is the beginning, not the end. But it is a very, very powerful beginning.”
The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, said early Tuesday that other nations might join Britain and said in a speech that he believed the sanctions would “prove to be a grave miscalculation, a decision that will fall on the wrong side of history.”
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s hard-line national security minister, said it was time for Israel to recognize that the Falkland Islands, a British territory in the south Atlantic, belonged to Argentina and were under “occupation.”
Other critics have warned that action against Israel could be used by Mr. Netanyahu to galvanize his supporters ahead of elections scheduled there for next month.
Israel has become increasingly isolated on the world stage in the aftermath of the devastating war in Gaza, and international attention has increasingly focused on Israel’s tightening grip over the West Bank. The sanctions are set to be imposed at a time when Israeli extremists have repeatedly attacked Palestinians, on occasion assailing homes with little intervention by Israeli forces.
Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, became increasingly contentious in Britain, particularly after a United Nations commission said that Israel was committing genocide in the enclave. Israel has rejected allegations of genocide from scholars and human rights groups, saying the target of its campaign is the militant group Hamas.
When he took over as prime minister, Mr. Burnham apologized for the British government’s initial reaction to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, saying that his Labour Party “didn’t get it right” and adding: “There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.” He did not say genocide had been committed, saying that only the international courts could determine accountability.
The debate over Gaza has had domestic political consequences in Britain with an insurgent Green Party capitalizing on misgivings over Labour’s earlier caution among left-leaning voters.
Last month, Britain condemned the Israeli government decision to move ahead with plans for new homes for settlers in E1, part of the West Bank near Jerusalem, in a joint statement with countries including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway and Australia.
The statement urged Israel “to retract these plans immediately and end its expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Not only will they take us further from peace, but they further undermine Israel’s international standing.”
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4) 9/11’s Dust and Ash Coated Their Childhood. Is It Still Making Them Ill?
Much of the research on exposure to the World Trade Center residue has focused on emergency workers, but people there when they were young say their health is at risk, too.
By Joseph Goldstein, Sept. 8, 2026
Jacob Fortinsky and his twin sister, Sarah, were a month away from turning 4 when the first jetliner slammed into the World Trade Center 25 years ago. They had been watching Franklin the Turtle cartoons in their apartment one block west, on the 21st floor of Gateway Plaza. As fire trucks and ambulances gathered below, the twins began to count them.
When the south tower collapsed that morning, Sept. 11, 2001, the windows of their apartment blew in. Dust and debris filled their home, bringing darkness. Sarah thought a monster had come for them.
Their mother and nanny carried them and their 2-year-old sister into a stairwell frantic with fleeing neighbors, then down to a basement boiler room. Someone distributed strips of wet fabric, with instructions to breathe through it as a filter.
These are Mr. Fortinsky’s very first memories: the fire engines in the street, the dust cloud, the panic in the stairwell, showing his sisters how to use the wet cloth. When they eventually emerged from the building, they were barefoot. The ground felt soft, covered in powdery ash. They boarded a boat to New Jersey. At a cousin’s home, the children took bath after bath until the water was no longer murky with the gray dust that had clung to them.
“I don’t remember anything before,” Mr. Fortinsky, now 28, said.
It has been impossible to forget. In the months after the attack, he was anxious that other tall buildings would collapse. And there was a fear of fire. He would shrink from even the Shabbat candles his family lit on Friday nights.
In the years that followed, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and he developed asthma, ailments that they believe are linked to the World Trade Center dust, which was full of toxins. Once, after playing soccer in the cold, he had such difficulty catching his breath that his friends worried he was dying. “It’s hard to know with 100 percent certainty if it’s from 9/11, but it obviously took a toll on my body,” Mr. Fortinsky said.
Growing up, he worried he might someday get lung cancer. “I’d wonder what the equivalent number of cigarettes is — you know, in terms of what I inhaled that day,” he said.
Those fears subsided long ago, and he hasn’t had an asthma attack in years. But many researchers share his questions about how that day so early in his life could affect his long-term health.
Research into the toxic exposures from the attack initially focused on firefighters, police officers and other emergency responders who toiled at ground zero, searching for survivors and human remains, and sifting through rubble. An alarming number have fallen ill with respiratory ailments and cancer.
Researchers expanded their focus to the health effects on nearby residents and workers — including the survivors from buildings that were destroyed or damaged. But children who were nearby have received less attention and have proved harder to study. Researchers estimate that about 25,000 children lived or attended school near the World Trade Center.
Mr. Fortinsky and his sisters are among the youngest of the generation of children who witnessed Sept. 11 or were exposed to the dust cloud. Others are entering middle age.
The toxic exposures did not end that day: The pile where the towers once stood smoldered for months. The dust and smoke deposited toxins into homes and schools. The dust lingered on carpets where toddlers crawled and in the ducts of air-conditioning systems.
Now, 25 years later, the federally funded World Trade Center Health Program is endeavoring to track down exposed children and enroll them in a large research cohort. Congress ordered the project in 2022, and it is inching forward: The federal government recently began searching for research partners.
Scientists who have been studying the health effects of the dust exposure welcome the federal effort but say it is overdue.
“I would say it’s a tad late,” said Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a medical researcher at NYU Langone Health. “That might be a nice way to put it.”
Studies of various sizes over the years have found that children who witnessed the attack or were exposed to the toxic dust have, by some measures, poorer health than their peers. They have been diagnosed with depression and asthma over the subsequent decades at higher rates.
Dr. Trasande’s studies found that children exposed to the dust had far higher levels of certain toxins in their blood more than a decade later, including dioxins, which are linked to cancer, and PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals.”
Other questions remain unanswered, including whether young people exposed to the dust get cancer at higher rates than others.
After Dana Nelson felt a lump in her breast in 2020, the cancer diagnosis at age 33 did not feel like random bad luck. “I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop,” she said.
On the morning of the attack, Ms. Nelson, then 14, and her father had taken the ferry from their home in Staten Island to Lower Manhattan together, their usual morning routine. She went to Stuyvesant High School and her father worked in an office building, each a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
The first plane struck while Ms. Nelson sat in English class. Another student, looking out the classroom’s windows, said she could see birds near the towers. They weren’t birds, but people jumping, Ms. Nelson realized.
The students left school and walked north. By then, one tower had fallen.
Stuyvesant reopened the next month. The pages of textbooks had an acrid smell, Ms. Nelson recalled. And dust was everywhere: in the upholstery of the auditorium seats, in the gray sludge that covered the streets.
Ms. Nelson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic sinus problems. Reports of other Stuyvesant students becoming sick with cancer have been in the news over the years.
In 2018, Ms. Nelson’s father was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Then came her breast cancer diagnosis. Ms. Nelson, a teacher in Brooklyn, believes both stem from Sept. 11.
The largest studies involving children have emerged from a long-running research effort by the New York City Health Department, which has been tracking the health of thousands of people near the towers who enrolled in a registry in 2003 and 2004. Of the original 71,000 enrollees, more than 3,000 were children.
Not all of them still answer the surveys. But Health Department researchers periodically check cancer registries and hospitalization records to see how the group is faring.
The Health Department has found that about 25 percent of children exposed to World Trade Center dust have been diagnosed with asthma, compared with 16 percent in the general population of the same age.
The Health Department’s research has found that people who experienced Sept. 11 as children were 50 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with depression than other New Yorkers of similar sociodemographic characteristics.
Witnessing such a traumatic event so young can shape people’s outlook. They may go through life with a sense of dread or view the world as a bleak place, said Dr. Rebecca Rosen, the mental health director of the World Trade Center health program at the city’s public hospital system.
Mr. Fortinsky, who founded a sports prediction market, said he grew up with a view that “the world is chaotic and is not necessarily predetermined.” He said his experience that day — watching his mother and babysitter protect him and his siblings and steer them to safety — probably nurtured in him a hopeful and optimistic streak. But that day also stoked fears.
When he began asking his parents whether the tall buildings on the street would fall over, they decided it was time for the family to move to Westchester County, north of New York City.
His sister Sarah was plagued by nightmares for years. “I would see that same monster” — the dust cloud — “tackling me to the ground as a kid,” recalled Sarah, a 28-year-old journalist. She dreaded bedtime and would insist her parents reassure her there would be no nightmares that night — a ritual that continued for years.
“I do think it shapes you into who you are to have that sort of experience so young,” she said.
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5) Iran Signals Readiness to Escalate Fight in Face of Rising U.S. Pressure
The Iranian government is taking an increasingly aggressive approach as it confronts a growing economic threat and worries that its grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping, analysts say.
By Erika Solomon, Erika Solomon is the Iran bureau chief, Sept. 9, 2026
Iranians are feeling the strain of the war, which has made a longstanding economic crisis worse. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Iran has signaled that it is willing to escalate its fight with the United States, with senior leaders issuing increasingly sharp warnings in recent days after attacking American warships for the first time.
The country’s leaders are taking a more aggressive approach as Iran faces mounting economic pressure and they worry that their grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping. The American blockade is making it nearly impossible for Iran to ship oil, its main money source. And in effect, Iran sees escalation as the primary leverage it has against the United States, analysts said, warning that the recent clashes could reignite a full-blown war.
The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for attempted strikes on a U.S. Navy warship, while Iran said it launched strikes at a base used by American forces in Jordan in response. The attacks occurred three days after Iran made its first known attempt at striking an American military vessel.
On Sunday, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s lead negotiator and the speaker of Parliament, told lawmakers that the era of “proportionate responses” to American attacks was over. Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, also announced plans to impose a “restricted zone” for shipping in the Persian Gulf that would go beyond the country’s efforts to control the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has largely withstood the heavy military campaign launched by the United States and Israel in February. But the war of attrition in recent months has created an economic threat that is now pushing the government to intensify its rhetoric and attacks.
An American naval blockade has prevented Tehran from exporting much of its oil, the country’s main source of revenue, making a longstanding economic crisis even worse. On Tuesday, the government raised some gasoline prices because of fuel shortages, a move that is expected to further roil a country already struggling with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a rapidly depreciating currency.
At the same time, U.S. naval escorts have enabled a trickle of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, undercutting Iran’s closure of the waterway, which has caused global oil prices to rise sharply. The number of ships getting through is small, and the effort is extremely costly for the United States, but it has prevented oil prices from rising further and blunted Iran’s ability to impose economic pain on Washington.
“How do you regain the momentum? You escalate,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute, a research group. Iran will likely attempt to intensify the military confrontation, he said, while seeking to avoid a return to full-out war. “It’s highly damaging, but at the same time, they hope it raises global oil prices or fully re-closes the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
‘Make or break moment’
Senior Iranian officials have said they are open to negotiating a return to the fragile Memorandum of Understanding that halted the war in April and was meant to lead to talks on an Iranian nuclear deal.
But President Trump has said he has no interest in negotiations, preferring to maintain his strategy of attrition and suffocating Iran economically.
Iran’s leadership believes that now may be the best moment to raise the stakes, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November when an unpopular war could hurt Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
“All signs point to a make or break moment,” said Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst and editor of the regional news website Amwaj.media. “I’m not sure the Iranians are going to wait until after the elections to be attacked if diplomacy fails.”
Iran’s move to strike two U.S. warships with ballistic missiles was a significant escalation, said Hamidreza Azizi, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Iranian forces had previously made no serious effort to target U.S. naval ships and seemed reluctant to conduct attacks that could cause heavy American casualties. “These calculations have obviously changed,” he said.
The U.S. decision to retaliate by striking three Iranian oil tankers — and sinking one of them — was an indication of how seriously Washington took the Iranian attack.
“Both sides are trying to dictate their red lines and trying to push the red lines of the other side as far back as they can,” Mr. Azizi said.
It was also a recognition that Iran’s military capabilities have evolved. Before the war started, the United States did not think Iran could target American military bases in the region with precision, he said. But in recent months, Iran has shown it can do so, including with a strike on a U.S. base in Jordan in July that killed two American soldiers.
Iran could become similarly adept at targeting naval fleets, Mr. Azizi said.
Iran has also been very public about its efforts to capture and learn from its enemy’s weapons. On Tuesday, Iran’s state news agency IRNA announced that naval forces of the powerful Revolutionary Guards had seized a U.S. submarine drone known as the Dive-LD. Iran has previously managed to reverse-engineer weapons offered to it by its allies or captured from its enemies.
U.S. Central Command said the drone was an older model that had malfunctioned and “neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment.”
Mr. Rezaei’s announcement of a new “prohibited zone” in the Persian Gulf was another attempt to ratchet up the confrontation.
The security chief offered few details about the plan, but Mohamed Ghaderi, a Tehran-based foreign affairs expert, said it was designed to increase the cost for vessels passing through the strait with a U.S. naval escort and warn them they may not be safe even once they do.
“Compliance with Iran’s new rules can be a condition for safe and consequence-free passage,” he said.
These escalatory moves come amid fresh regional turmoil, with Iran’s Houthi militia allies in Yemen launching attacks that wounded dozens in the south of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, and the kingdom vowing to retaliate. Whether coordinated with Tehran or not, renewed conflict in Yemen would help Iran in its goal of putting more pressure on global energy prices.
Economic crisis
For Iran’s leaders, what they have called a U.S. “economic war” has become a domestic security risk that has prompted them to take a more aggressive stance.
A rising sense of economic despair among Iranians could spark a new wave of anti-government protests. Last December, a currency crisis triggered nationwide demonstrations, which security forces crushed with deadly force.
Iranian officials are anxious that Israel may exploit any discontent to support dissidents or an insurgency, said Hadi Borhani, a professor of Israeli and Middle East studies at the University of Tehran.
He pointed to recent statements by Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said this week that “there is still more to complete. I mean, first and foremost, the toppling of the regime. This regime in Iran — its end is near.”
The Iranian government does not want to wait for Israel to act.
“They believe Iran should change the situation, possibly through a more damaging or aggressive move that can raise regional tension,” Mr. Borhani said.
Some Iranian leaders also believe now is a good moment to act because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway. The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.
Mr. Sabet, however, expects that worsening global economic conditions will eventually push the Trump administration to ease tensions.
Even though the U.S. naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz have allowed some oil to move, he said, global crude stockpiles are not being replenished fast enough, and natural gas and other critical oil derivatives are not getting through. Those shortages are likely to inflict more pain on the global economy.
“That is when I see them muddling their way toward some kind of limited or de facto deal,” he said. “Don’t think of it as an M.O.U. plus — think M.O.U. minus.”
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
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6) Europe Unites to Pressure Israel, Breaking With U.S.
Britain once followed in France’s slipstream when it came to pressuring Israel. Under new leadership, it is spearheading opposition to Israeli settlements, risking American anger.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from Paris, Sept. 9, 2026
Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain, right, meeting last week with President Emmanuel Macron of France. They have united to pile pressure on Israel. Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Britain confirmed last September that it would recognize a Palestinian state, it was pulled in the wake of France, which had signaled a few months earlier that it planned to take the symbolically freighted step.
On Tuesday, almost a year later, Britain was the one to seize the initiative. The British government announced, followed by France and Canada, that it would stop trading with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It went so far as to accuse some settlers of engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.
This diplomatic sequencing speaks partly to domestic politics in each country. Last year, President Emmanuel Macron of France, entering the twilight of his term, was eager to cement his legacy. Now, a new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, wants to mollify Labour Party members appalled by the suffering in Gaza and angry that Britain hasn’t done more about it.
Yet the cumulative impact is strikingly united European pressure on Israel. It has left the Israeli government bitterly estranged from Europe, at odds with its two largest military powers — once stalwart allies — and facing economic punishment that analysts said could prove to be more than symbolic.
“The idea of boycotting goods from settlements or even treating them differently in terms of customs and duties has always been talked about, but almost nothing has been done to date,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former United States ambassador to Israel, said. “Even the idea of clearly labeling goods from settlements, so as to distinguish them from ‘Made in Israel’ has not taken off.”
“Bottom line,” said Mr. Kurtzer, who now teaches at Princeton, “this could be a very significant economic blow to the settlements movement and any Israeli government that backs settlements.”
Exports from settlements account for only a small fraction of the annual trade, worth $8 billion, between Britain and Israel, though its exact value is difficult to measure, according to a recent assessment by British Parliament researchers. But income from goods like dates, wine and plastics — coupled with subsidies from the Israeli government — plays a vital role in the economies of individual settlements.
The ban has underscored Europe’s widening divergence from the United States on Middle East policy. An unhappy Trump administration “obviously” won’t follow Britain, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday. Such divergence is hardly surprising from independent-minded France, but it is notable from Britain, which has usually been more closely aligned with Washington.
Israel’s thunderous reaction suggested that it viewed Britain’s shift as more than just symbolic. It ordered the closing of the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem, which represents Britain’s interests in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Founded in 1839, it is one of the oldest diplomatic outposts in the region.
Israel also banned several mostly left-wing members of the British Parliament from the country, canceled Britain’s training of Palestinian security forces and excluded Britain from the Gaza coordination mission, a U.S.-led international body that coordinates relief efforts in Gaza and is based in Israel.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, accused a “hostile Labour government” of “systematically acting against the state of Israel.” He also said that Israel had no choice but to retaliate for a move he called “morally distorted.”
Israel did not announce comparable measures against France, though it lashed out at Mr. Macron last year for leading the push to recognize Palestine. Mr. Macron’s campaign also involved organizing a conference with Saudi Arabia in July 2025 on the two-state solution.
Part of the challenge for Israel in retaliating across the board this time is that the ban on trading with Jewish settlements was endorsed by nine other countries in addition to Britain, France and Canada: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
In a joint statement, foreign ministers of those countries said they had been pushed to act by “unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion.” They pointed to Israeli plans to build a new settlement in E1, a strategic corridor in the West Bank that is considered essential to the viability of a Palestinian state.
The countries said they would enact national laws, and support European laws, to restrict trade in goods with the settlements, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. Britain, France and Canada went further. In addition to halting goods trade, they said they would target services, going after “individuals and companies that support, facilitate or profit from illegal settlement activity.”
Analysts said that could prove challenging, citing the theoretical example of an Israeli bank that provides loans for West Bank settlement construction but conducts other banking activities in Israel or abroad.
“No one has gone there yet,” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a think tank in London and New York that works for Middle East peace. “This is taking it into new terrain, certainly on the U.K. side.”
Mr. Levy, who criticized the previous Labour government for taking what he called half measures against Israel, said Mr. Burnham recognized that he needed to do more. Soon after taking office in July, he apologized for how Labour initially handled the Gaza war, which was spurred by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, saying the government “didn’t get it right.”
The policy shift has been fronted by his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, who has staked out a markedly tougher line on Israel than his predecessors. In Parliament on Tuesday, Mr. Miliband described himself as a “proud British Jew” who supported Israel. But he lashed out at the situation in the West Bank, where settler attacks on Palestinians reached record levels in recent years, leading to Palestinian displacement across strategic tracts of the territory.
“The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists,” Mr. Miliband said. “All too often the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this.”
Speaking to broadcasters on Wednesday, he added that Britain had assessed whether the cost of taking action outweighed the benefit, but concluded that Britain could not “simply stand by because we feared Israeli reaction.”
Britain, Mr. Levy noted, had rejected the argument that it should hold off until after Israel’s election next month, lest its measures helped to rally Israeli voters to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and empower his hard-line government. The hard-liners, he said, were already plenty empowered.
Not everybody praised Britain’s new stance. “British policy toward Israel and the wider Middle East has increasingly substituted declaratory positioning for strategy,” wrote Jon Mendelsohn, a Labour member of the House of Lords.
“The result has been a marked erosion of British leverage with Israel,” making a two-state solution less, not more, likely, Lord Mendelsohn continued, in an essay in The Spectator, a conservative magazine.
Britain’s government clearly hopes for the opposite result and has persuaded allies to follow its path. Devising the trade sanctions will take months, Mr. Levy noted, and enforcing them will be tricky. But it is the kind of diplomatic heavy lifting at which Britain has often excelled, he said.
“It is testing a theory that the U.K. still has some heft,” Mr. Levy said. “This is Britain taking a leadership ownership role, and it does give other countries room for maneuver.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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7) Israel’s Election Campaign Is Heating Up. Here’s Who’s Running.
The contest is shaping up to be a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is considered the most consequential in Israel’s history.
By Johnatan Reiss, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Sept. 9, 2026
A campaign event in Jerusalem last month for the Likud party, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Israel’s political parties have finalized their candidate slates ahead of a general election on Oct. 27, which many Israelis and outside observers consider to be the most consequential vote in the country’s history.
The campaign so far has been dominated by a battle between Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s polarizing prime minister, and Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff who leads the largest opposition party. Polls show that neither man’s bloc has yet gained the support of a decisive majority of voters, and there is no guarantee that either of them will be the next prime minister.
The result is an unpredictable race, with profound implications for Israelis and the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, as well as for the country’s regional conflicts, its international relations and the Jewish diaspora.
About a dozen parties are expected to clear the electoral threshold to make it into Israel’s 120-seat Parliament, the Knesset. The real political wrangling begins after the election, when party leaders will try to forge a governing coalition of at least 61 lawmakers.
The leading contenders
Likud (Consolidation)
Historically the largest conservative party; increasingly populist.
Leader: Benjamin Netanyahu, 76.
Many consider this election a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu, who as prime minister has not delivered on his promise to achieve “total victory” in Israel’s wars and has not accepted responsibility for security failures preceding the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day in the country’s history.
He has also faced blowback over a deeply unpopular military draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews and a divisive push for judicial reforms, which would in part reduce the Supreme Court’s powers.
A right-wing party with strong support in working-class and traditional Jewish communities, Likud has governed Israel for more than 34 out of the past 49 years, including 19 under Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Netanyahu, who faces corruption charges and an international arrest warrant in connection with the conduct of the Gaza war, has vowed to “complete the job” in waging Israel’s various conflicts and block the formation of a Palestinian state.
Yashar! (Honest, or Straight)
New party aimed at centrists and center-right voters worried about where the Netanyahu coalition is leading Israel.
Leader: Gadi Eisenkot, 66.
A former military chief of staff, Mr. Eisenkot served in Mr. Netanyahu’s war cabinet for part of the Gaza war, in which one of Mr. Eisenkot’s sons and two nephews were killed. He formed his party a year ago and has emerged as Mr. Netanyahu’s top challenger. His platform strikes at Mr. Netanyahu’s vulnerabilities, including by endorsing calls to investigate the failures preceding the Oct. 7 attack.
Mr. Eisenkot has rejected the prospect of Palestinian statehood in the near term. He has also voiced support for a more restrained expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank while promising to curb settler violence.
Other major opposition parties
B’Yachad (Together)
A partnership between the centrist, secular and liberal Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) party and Naftali Bennett, a right-wing nationalist.
Leader: Naftali Bennett, 54.
In 2021, Mr. Bennett and Yair Lapid, 62, the leader of Yesh Atid, allied to oust Mr. Netanyahu in a short-lived government. This year, they have sought to lead an anti-Netanyahu front again, emphasizing unity amid Israel’s bitter divisions. They have called for an expanded draft of the ultra-Orthodox and an inquiry into the Oct. 7 attack.
Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home)
A secular Jewish party that is right-wing on security matters but broke with Mr. Netanyahu years ago.
Leader: Avigdor Liberman, 68.
Founded in 1999 as a political home for immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the party has since expanded its appeal by promising to defend Israel’s secular Jewish character against the rising influence of ultra-Orthodox rabbis.
The Democrats
Heir to two parties from Israel’s dwindling political left, which once dominated the country.
Leader: Yair Golan, 64.
Mr. Golan, an outspoken former two-star general, formed the Democrats in 2024 out of the remnants of the storied Israeli Labor party and the more left-wing Meretz party. It favors a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while seeking to forge Israel’s identity as a liberal, secular Jewish state.
Other major pro-Netanyahu parties
Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power)
A far-right, ultranationalist, anti-Arab party.
Leader: Itamar Ben-Gvir, 50.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, a right-wing provocateur, made his name as a lawyer defending Israeli settlers arrested for attacking Palestinians. His support appears to have grown amid a shift to the right among Jewish Israelis since the Oct. 7 attack. He has called for the removal from Gaza of Palestinians through “voluntary emigration.” Mr. Ben-Gvir has drawn international condemnation and sanctions for his anti-Arab rhetoric and conduct as national security minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
Religious Zionism
A far-right, ultranationalist party with a focus on expanding Israeli settlement of the West Bank.
Leader: Bezalel Smotrich, 46.
As finance minister and a minister in charge of the administration of the West Bank, Mr. Smotrich has masterminded the steady advancement of Israel’s de facto annexation of the territory by expanding settlements, building roads for Israelis and crippling the Palestinian Authority, which administers part of the West Bank. He has repeatedly said that Israel should permanently occupy and resettle the Gaza Strip with Jews.
Amcha Yisrael (People of Israel)
A right-wing party that supports Mr. Netanyahu but opposes a draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox.
Leader: Ofer Winter, 55.
Mr. Winter, a former brigadier general who formed the party in August, gained prominence for his hawkish national security views. He has spoken of encouraging the voluntary emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.
Shas
Traditional political home for ultra-Orthodox Jews whose families came to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa.
Leader: Aryeh Deri, 67.
Mr. Deri, a veteran political operator, spent time in prison for bribery and fraud, and was later convicted of tax fraud and barred from serving as a government minister. Shas’s following extends beyond ultra-Orthodox Jews to others who are less religious, but whose roots are likewise in the Middle East and North Africa.
United Torah Judaism
An alliance of two parties representing different streams of ultra-Orthodox Judaism with roots in Eastern Europe.
Leader: Yaakov Asher, 61.
U.T.J.’s politics center on protecting the ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, community’s strict religious way of life. It has long been allied with Mr. Netanyahu, whose governments have supported U.T.J.’s voters with subsidies. But the partnership has grown increasingly shaky.
The Arab parties
Raam (United Arab List)
An Islamist party that increasingly advocates coexistence between Arabs and Jews.
Leader: Mansour Abbas, 52.
Mr. Abbas has taken a pragmatic approach to Arabs’ participation in Israeli politics, and in 2021, he made history by joining an Israeli governing coalition. In August, he recruited a Zionist former senior police commander as Raam’s No. 2 candidate. If Jewish opposition parties drop their resistance to joining a coalition with an Arab party, Mr. Abbas could be crucial to ousting Mr. Netanyahu.
The Joint List
An alliance of three parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Leader: Yousef Jabareen, 54.
The Joint List’s component parties represent a range of ideologies, including a Jewish-Arab communist alliance and a Palestinian nationalist party. Their goal in uniting is to bring more Arab voters to the ballot box, expanding their representation in Parliament.
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8) JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers.
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, Sept. 9, 2026
Eleanor Davis
universal child care and made snide comments about working families with little ones at home. On Twitter in 2021, he claimed that “normal” non-affluent Americans prefer “a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
Of course, no parents want their kids in “crap daycare.” But what American mothers prefer is far more complicated than Vance’s caricature of the desires of frivolous and wealthy parents who don’t want to care for their own children. According to a November 2025 analysis from the conservative policy and research organization the Institute for Family Studies, a majority of all moms with children under 5, regardless of education level or marital status, prefer to work rather than stay home full time. Unmarried mothers without a college education constitute the group least likely to say their “ideal status” does not involve a job, which makes sense, since single mothers tend to be the most financially vulnerable.
But instead of crafting policy that might help hard-working single mothers — like his own mother — Vance is reportedly championing a federal policy that would take funds earmarked for child care for low-income parents and change the eligibility requirement to include married families with a parent who does not work.
The money, about $9,000 per child, comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund was created in the 1990s to support low- to moderate-income parents so they could work or get an education. “About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data,” reported my newsroom colleague Coral Davenport. About 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried parents.
The money is currently distributed to states via a block grant, and it typically goes directly to child care providers. The proposal viewed by The Times would not increase the amount of funding, but it would create “the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.” If this draft rule goes into effect, it will almost certainly hurt child care providers who rely on this funding to stay afloat. And because stay-at-home, married parents will likely be battling for the same pot of funds, it could also prevent single parents from earning money for their families.
In the past Vance has said he approves of unpaid caregivers like grandparents and other relatives in lieu of center-based child care, but the funding under discussion is for stay-at-home spouses. Extended kin would likely not be eligible for the benefit, either, to offset the cost of work they may be foregoing.
This proposal is especially cruel in light of recent cuts to programs that support low-income working families. The Trump administration is already hard at work trying to gut Head Start, a program that provides child care and other services to poor children from up to age 5. First, the administration tried to zero out funding for Head Start in a budget proposal. Then, it illegally withheld funding from the program, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Now, it seems to be trying to destroy Head Start by deregulating it, eliminating the program’s requirements to provide disability services, home visits, health screenings and other benefits.
That’s not the only part of the safety net for children that has been shredded. Even as grocery prices continue to rise, the administration’s policies have cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the bone. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggests that more than one million children have lost food assistance since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025 and made it harder to qualify for the program.
Cuts to federal health care also seem to be harming children. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has declined by 2.4 million since January 2025. This suggests that the number of uninsured children is on the rise, Joan Alker, the executive director of the center, noted on X.
While Vance policy’s orientation is pronatalist, the evidence from international experiments of the effects from giving people money to marry or have children is not conclusive. In China, for example, the government has tried to carry out a range of policies, from cash vouchers for newlyweds to baby bonuses, and yet marriage and fertility rates continue to decline. “Marriage registrations in China fell 6.2 percent year on year in the first quarter and are about half 2017 levels,” Reuters reported in May, and the Chinese birthrate is at a record low.
Hungary, where Vance campaigned on behalf of the former prime minister Viktor Orban, adopted some of the most generous family policies in the world, spending over 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to boost fertility rates mostly among married, heterosexual parents. The policies did not work in the long run, and Hungary’s fertility rates are about where they started before the pronatalist push.
The state of American family policy is so poor that our federal government could do about a million and one things to help parents that would be more effective and more desired. According to the survey I cited earlier from the Institute for Family Studies, 85 percent of mothers ages 25 to 55 with children under 18 said that paid parental leave would be “extremely” or “very” helpful to them and 80 percent said that child tax credits would be extremely or very helpful to them. Lower-income moms support the tax credit at a higher rate than wealthier moms, while higher-income moms prefer parental leave, but a vast majority of both groups want both of those things.
Few are asking for what Vance and the administration are proposing. While this rule, if it ever goes into effect, might help a small number of one-income, married families in the short term, it could actively harm single and married parents who rely on day care if their centers go into a death spiral from losing a big chunk of federal funding.
I can only conclude that the administration’s plans are either meant to pit stay-at-home parents against working ones, or to punish single parents — and their children — who need support the most.
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9) U.S. Takes Aim at New Target in Deadly Boat Strike Campaign
U.S. military officials in the past two weeks have sunk six large fishing vessels accused of providing fuel to fast boats carrying drugs from South America.
By Annie Correal and Eric Schmitt, Sept. 9, 2026
Annie Correal covers Latin America, and Eric Schmitt covers the U.S. military and national security.
An image released by the U.S. military shows what it says is a floating refueling station being boarded last week. The Trump administration has said that refueling vessels support drug trafficking operations. U.S. Southern Command, via Reuters
A year into its military boat strike campaign, the United States appears to be targeting a new type of vessel — large fishing boats off the coast of Ecuador that the Trump administration says provide fuel to smaller vessels carrying drugs.
On Tuesday night, the U.S. military announced the sixth such operation in two weeks, posting a video that showed a helicopter hovering over the ocean and military troops boarding a large fishing boat to remove the crew, followed by the boat exploding.
U.S. Southern Command said the boat, like five other large vessels it destroyed off Ecuador’s coast since Aug. 28, functioned as a “floating refueling station,” restocking the kind of fast boats that the U.S. military has attacked in lethal boat strikes that have killed more than 220 people since they began a year ago.
The Trump administration has claimed, without providing evidence, that the boats are carrying drugs. Experts in laws governing the lethal use of force say the strikes are illegal because the U.S. military is not permitted to target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence, even if they are committing a crime.
The string of strikes on larger vessels comes alongside a resumption of strikes on smaller boats allegedly carrying drugs after a two-month lull. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is traveling to Ecuador on Wednesday as part of a three-country trip to South America, with security and military cooperation against drug-trafficking groups at the top of his agenda.
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, who is expected to meet with Mr. Rubio, was the first leader in the region to enter into an agreement with the United States to allow joint military operations.
Officials have said that the larger fishing vessels targeted in the last two weeks — some in coordination with Ecuadorean forces — were linked to the Los Choneros gang, which the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Current and former U.S. military officials say that sinking the larger refueling boats is a more effective way of targeting the drug-smuggling infrastructure of criminal groups than blowing up smaller vessels.
One former senior U.S. official said refueling vessels were harder to replace than the smaller boats and have a bigger impact on the drug-smuggling network.
Taking aim at the larger boats has the added advantage of not killing crew members. Lethal boat strikes have faced fierce criticism from Congress, international leaders and rights groups.
In each case, U.S. troops have boarded the boats and removed the crew members, whom the American authorities have said are turned over to the Ecuadorean authorities. Then, U.S. troops attach explosives to the vessels and blow them up.
U.S. Southern Command said in a statement that “these interdictions cut off critical nodes in the narcotics logistics network” and advanced the administration’s goals of applying “total systemic friction against narcoterrorists.” The military’s other boat strike campaign, the statement said, “continued unchanged.”
Ecuador’s government did not respond to a request for comment on the recent strikes.
The Trump administration’s explanation for its military boat strikes has shifted over time.
U.S. officials originally said the strikes were intended to target a Venezuelan gang in the months before the United States captured Venezuela’s former president, Nicolás Maduro.
The administration later broadened its justification, explaining to Congress that President Trump had determined the United States was under attack by trafficking groups and that all traffickers were therefore enemy combatants.
In recent months, the Trump administration has moved to further militarize the fight against traffickers both at sea and on land in Latin America, urging ideologically aligned leaders to allow joint operations with the United States and to aggressively deploy their own security forces against criminal groups.
Administration officials have compared the new “anti-cartel” push in Latin America to the military campaign against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Since last year, they have added about 20 groups in Latin America to the U.S. list of terrorist groups, laying the groundwork for military strikes.
In August, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, activated the permanent military task force involved in the recent boat strikes, the Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, to counter drug-trafficking threats across the hemisphere.
In August, the U.S. Treasury also placed sanctions on a network of Ecuadoreans it said had assisted Los Choneros and another gang, Los Lobos, by using fishing vessels to provide fuel, food, medical supplies and, in at least one case, drugs to fast boats shuttling narcotics to Mexican cartels. It said the larger boats also helped scan for law enforcement.
Despite widespread questions about the legality of military boat strikes, U.S. officials appear unbowed. On Sept. 2, U.S. Southern Command posted a message on social media commemorating one year since the boat strike operation began and declaring, “The Western Hemisphere is no longer a safe haven for narcoterrorism.”
José María León Cabrera contributed reporting from Quito, and John Ismay from Washington.
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10) As He Backs ICE Crackdown, Nebraska Governor Employs Undocumented Workers
Gov. Jim Pillen’s family business is one of the nation’s largest pork producers. As he seeks re-election, he has aligned himself with President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda even though his farms have taken on undocumented laborers.
By Yanqi Xu, Sept. 9, 2026
Yanqi Xu is a reporter for Flatwater Free Press. She examined the agricultural industry in Nebraska as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Before becoming Nebraska’s governor three years ago, Jim Pillen built a multimillion-dollar hog enterprise. Casting himself as a conservative businessman who would grow the state’s economy, he defeated a Trump-backed candidate in the Republican primary.
This time around, Mr. Pillen, who is seeking re-election this fall, won President Trump’s endorsement. The governor — who had rarely spoken out about immigration issues until last year — had embraced Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.
Days after Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the governor directed the Nebraska State Patrol to partner with ICE on immigration enforcement. He allowed the federal agency to use a former state prison, now referred to as Cornhusker Clink, to hold hundreds of detainees caught up in the administration’s mass deportation sweep. He has echoed Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about “criminal illegal aliens” who have “invaded our country” and decried “the worst of the worst” immigrants he has claimed are hiding out in Nebraska.
But for more than a decade, Mr. Pillen’s hog business has employed migrant workers, those who are in the country legally — and those who are not, The New York Times and The Flatwater Free Press found.
His company, Pillen Family Farms, has taken on undocumented workers as it has grown into one of the nation’s largest hog producers, according to a review of state and federal court records and interviews with more than 40 current and former employees, prosecutors, immigration lawyers and community organizers.
Many farms in Nebraska and other states rely on immigrants because of labor shortages. While the scale of undocumented workers in the Pillen farm labor force — which has about 1,200 employees in four states and Canada — is not clear, the fact that the company has used them is an open secret at some of its Nebraska farms.
Mr. Pillen has faced little public scrutiny about his workers. His spokeswoman, Laura Strimple, said in a statement that “Jim Pillen never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees.”
At least 20 Pillen hog farms employed undocumented immigrants, according to court documents and interviews with more than two dozen current and former workers, including several managers. Six former workers acknowledged in interviews that they themselves had no legal status.
Court records show that at least a dozen Pillen workers were charged with using fake or stolen IDs for employment between 2015 and 2024. Many Pillen workers interviewed said the practice was common. At least 10 who assumed false identities, according to them or their relatives, never faced criminal charges for that.
David Armendariz, a Mexican who overstayed his tourist visa in 2008, said he worked at two Pillen farms until 2023. When he was hired, he recalled in an interview, a farm manager accepted the fake driver’s license he had purchased. The same ID was rejected years later, he said, when he applied for a construction job elsewhere.
Over the years, Mr. Armendariz said, more Hispanic workers arrived at the farms, many of them undocumented. One co-worker changed his name multiple times, he said, and another went by a different name from the one on his sign-in sheets. Mr. Armendariz said he was open about his own status. “Everyone knows that it’s not your name,” he said, “but they don’t ask you what your name is.”
Quinten Rowley, who managed two boar farms for Mr. Pillen’s business until 2022, said the company ramped up background checks for applicants about the time Mr. Pillen decided to run for governor. After that, Mr. Rowley said, he had to turn away more applicants.
Samuel Bethune, Platte County’s public defender until 2009, said he had represented hundreds of undocumented immigrants every year, most of them employed in meatpacking plants. He recalled that a few clients charged with traffic offenses identified themselves as Pillen workers but lacked valid employment documents.
ICE identified no records of audits or inspections at Pillen farms in the past 15 years after a request from The Times and Flatwater. The federal agency has raided relatively few workplaces in Nebraska. The largest and highest-profile one was an Omaha meatpacking plant where more than 70 workers were arrested in June 2025 over alleged identity theft.
After the raid, Mr. Pillen suggested in interviews that ICE would not target established immigrants. “Anybody that is here working hard and being a good neighbor, they’re A-OK, they’re fine,” the governor told The Nebraska Examiner. But he also said that stealing identities was a “grave offense.”
The governor did not respond to interview requests and declined to answer written questions for this article. Mr. Pillen’s spokeswoman said in her statement that he “has the strongest immigration record in Nebraska history. Under the governor’s leadership, Nebraska has assisted the federal government in the deportation of nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants through its variety of partnerships with federal entities.”
ICE has arrested more than 3,000 people in Nebraska since Mr. Trump’s second term, more than doubling the rate under the Biden administration. By comparison, in Minnesota, the epicenter of some of the nation’s most aggressive urban immigration enforcement operations, such arrests have more than quadrupled, according to an analysis of ICE data released by the Deportation Data Project.
Federal officials have largely avoided clashes with agricultural employers in states that helped re-elect Mr. Trump, according to agricultural producers and labor economists.
“If you’re going to come and pound on farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, whatever, and daily raid their farms or their processing plants, you’re going to have some problems politically,” said Al Juhnke, former executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association. “The farms are right smack dab in the middle of red areas.”
Hogs, Farmhands and Fake Names
The first farmer to lead Nebraska in more than a century, Mr. Pillen often talks about his agricultural roots. He grew up with livestock on his small family farm in Platte County in northeast Nebraska.
A Cornhusker football standout at the University of Nebraska, he studied animal science and then worked as a veterinarian before launching his own business more than three decades ago. What is known as Pillen Family Farms, based in Columbus, started with 60 sows, or female pigs, on a dirt lot.
Now, after expanding and buying out competitors, the company owns about 100 farms in Nebraska alone, with workforces ranging from a handful to dozens of people. Since Mr. Pillen became governor, his children Sarah and Brock have run the company, which ranks No. 14 nationally on the Pork Powerhouses list, with 78,000 sows.
The family also owns a hog-breeding business and has a minor stake in Wholestone Prestage, which operates a pork-processing co-op in Fremont owned by some 200 producers. Since 2019, at least 56 Wholestone workers have been charged with using fraudulent IDs to work, according to state court records. More than half pleaded guilty or were convicted, several cases are going through court, and the other defendants fled or failed to appear. Wholestone did not respond to requests for comment.
At Pillen farms and elsewhere, workers labor long hours for relatively little pay to keep the hog barns running. They vaccinate pigs, feed them, move and ship them. The job is one that most Nebraskans do not want, hog farmers said in interviews.
Facing labor shortages, large corporate hog producers in recent decades have turned to a workforce of immigrants, whether legal or not, according to John K. Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union.
Gary Stover, a consultant who helped a local producer manage a hog farm in Shelby, said in an interview that he replaced the crew there with Hispanic laborers in 2010 because their work ethic impressed him. He said that one employee there used a fake name, and that his other consulting clients also had undocumented workers with falsified documents.
Nathan Dallon, an immigration lawyer in Omaha who has defended hundreds of undocumented workers against criminal charges like identity theft and driving without a license, said Nebraska’s agriculture industry operated on the premise that there would be unauthorized migrant labor.
“H.R. for a lot of these companies are incentivized to take on workers that they know are using fake papers,” he said in an interview. “Sometimes they even help them get the fake papers, and then they know full well that they are making the crime worse for the person working.” (Mr. Dallon, citing client confidentiality, declined to say whether he had ever represented Pillen workers.)
The use of fictitious documents by immigrants for employment is hardly new in Nebraska. In Schuyler, fake IDs used at the Cargill meatpacking plant created a controversy more than two decades ago.
Dave Reinecke, then Schuyler’s mayor, told “60 Minutes,” “Would you rather have growth, or would you want to pick and choose where they came from?”
Now, three-quarters of Schuyler’s residents are Hispanic, the highest share of any municipality in the state. Court records show some undocumented workers for Pillen farms have lived there. Other Hispanic immigrants, including Pillen employees, have settled in small towns near their workplaces.
Carl K. Hart Jr. prosecuted a steady stream of identity fraud cases involving undocumented workers, including five employed by Mr. Pillen’s business, as Platte County attorney until 2022.
“There are folks who are facilitating all of this,” he said in an interview. “They’re in the community, and they’re filling a need for the agricultural industry to obtain workers.”
Nine of the 12 Pillen workers who were charged with identity theft or impersonation were convicted, and three failed to appear in court. Pillen Family Farms was not accused of any wrongdoing in those cases. Employers are rarely the target of such investigations, making it hard to determine whether they had any knowledge or involvement, prosecutors and defense lawyers said.
One former manager at a Pillen farm said in an interview that he told an immigrant to obtain a different ID a few years ago after an initial fake document was flagged by the company. Before working for Pillen, he had advised workers on how they could make their fake IDs appear more genuine, said the manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still has relatives in the industry.
When Mr. Armendariz worked at Inland Foods, a Pillen farm outside Hastings, only a handful of workers had legitimate documentation, he recalled. About 20 immigrants did not, including him, he said. Roughly half had been hired by a co-owner that Mr. Pillen’s business eventually bought out. (Mr. Armendariz, who asked not to use his full surname because he feared retaliation, said he was let go after disputes with his boss.)
Some Inland workers are still undocumented after more than 20 years there, said a current employee, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the company. Two people said their undocumented relatives currently work at a Pillen farm near St. Edward.
Ashly Cortez-Garcia worked at a Pillen-owned hog unit near Albion five years ago. In an interview, she said her manager learned from the head office that an employee was working under one name and had applied for state assistance under another. Ms. Cortez-Garcia recalled that the manager told her to ask the worker in Spanish, “Which one do you want me to use?”
The manager, now retired, declined to respond to requests for comment.
Pillen Family Farms was sued in 2021 by a former human resources specialist, Luis Lucar, who alleged that it knowingly hired undocumented workers.
Between 2015 and 2019, he said, he repeatedly complained that the business changed workers’ names in company and government documents, misclassified workers as contract labor and falsified employment verification forms.
Mr. Lucar was fired in 2019 and now works as an organizer in Schuyler for the Heartland Workers Center, a nonprofit advocating immigrant labor rights.
The company denied the allegations in a legal filing. Mr. Pillen’s campaign spokesman at the time, Matthew Trail, said Mr. Lucar was lying and described him to a reporter as a “disgruntled former employee” and “pro-illegal-immigration activist.”
In 2022, both sides agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. Mr. Lucar and his lawyer declined to comment for this article.
As Pillen Family Farms grew, it stepped up compliance with employment laws, said Mr. Rowley, the former manager. The business brought in more immigrants from Mexico on a specialized visa for skilled workers in the past decade. The day Mr. Pillen launched his campaign for governor, records show, the business opted into E-Verify, a government system to bolster employment verification.
In a statement echoing the governor’s, Sarah Pillen, the farms’ co-chief executive, told The Times and Flatwater: “Our team takes a great deal of pride and responsibility in following all employment laws. We have never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant.” She said that the company followed all employment verification rules and ensured that “all required forms of ID are reviewed and approved. We also voluntarily participate in the E-Verify program to go above and beyond in our commitment.”
A Pivot on Immigration
Since Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Pillen has worked to build good will in Washington. He has visited the White House 11 times since last year and Mar-a-Lago twice, including a one-on-one meeting with the president in July 2025, according to the governor’s official calendar. That is far more than his recent predecessors.
Despite the president’s endorsement, Mr. Pillen is in a competitive re-election race. Neither he nor his opponents have highlighted his immigration stance in the campaign.
But immigration remains a polarizing issue, even in a conservative state. Less than a third of Nebraskans support the federal crackdown, one national poll shows.
Before his first run for governor, Mr. Pillen’s business donated to Centro Hispano, a Columbus-based nonprofit supporting both legal and undocumented workers, and he accepted an award from the group in 2018. As governor-elect, he spoke about the need for the federal government to expand the number of legal immigrants who could do vital work in Nebraska and other farm states.
Backing Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, Mr. Pillen has emphasized the risk of violent criminals coming into the country and the need to target them for deportation.
On a radio program in July 2025, he recalled learning on a trip to the southern border that intruders had butchered a steer on a Texas family’s ranch. “There have been so many terrorists and criminals swimming across the border,” he said.
“The criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed,” Mr. Pillen said in a social media post in December. “I will do everything in my power to stand strong with President Trump to get the job done.”
At times, the governor has appeared to soften his tone. After unveiling the new ICE site last summer, Mr. Pillen said that the detention center was intended for criminals, not hard-working families. He also emphasized the need to address labor shortages in industries beyond agriculture, including construction and hotels.
“President Trump knows, right? He knows that there are people in his industry that have worked forever and done good work but are not documented,” he said. Mr. Pillen added that he was “100 percent opposed” to mass deportation.
Mr. Pillen’s language distinguishing hard-working people from criminals ignores legal reality, some local officials and immigration lawyers say.
Undocumented workers in Nebraska, though sometimes committing a crime to obtain employment, rarely break other laws and are largely “law-abiding residents trying to live their American dream and support themselves and their families,” said Mr. Hart, the former Platte County prosecutor, a Democrat.
After the January killing of two people in Minneapolis by ICE agents and the resulting outrage, the governor largely refrained from commenting publicly about immigration.
More recently, under pressure to meet White House quotas, ICE agents have made arrests in record numbers nationwide, often deporting undocumented people with no history of criminal charges.
The Nebraska State Patrol has assigned more troopers to immigration enforcement roles. And the ICE detention center, in McCook, is expanding to house more people.
Ms. Cortez-Garcia, the former Pillen farm employee, said she was dismayed as a Republican voter that Mr. Pillen seemed to contradict himself on the immigration issue. “You can’t hire illegals and then stand against illegals,” she said.
Samantha Aguilar and Roselyn Gonzalez contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Emma Croteau, Georgia Gee, Bob Glissmann, Kirsten Noyes, Jane Bello Rivas, Asia Rollins and Jeremy Turley. Sarah Cohen contributed data analysis.
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11) Salvadorans to Keep Deportation Protections for Now, Trump Officials Say
Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador was set to expire on Wednesday. The Trump administration said it would make an announcement about the program’s future at the “appropriate time.”
By Jazmine Ulloa and Madeleine Ngo, Sept. 9, 2026
Members of the National TPS Alliance hold a rally in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals courthouse in Pasadena, Calif., in June. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The Trump administration said Wednesday morning that it would not move to cancel temporary humanitarian protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, for now, preserving their ability to live legally in the United States and shielding them from deportation.
Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., allows foreign nationals from troubled nations to live and work legally in the United States and was set to expire for El Salvador on Wednesday. But the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that an announcement regarding the Salvadorans’ status would come “at the appropriate time” and that until then, “Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under T.P.S. retain protection.”
The department did not provide more information on the timing of the announcement. The administration has at times waited several days after the program’s expiration to publicize its decision.
The move stands in stark contrast to how the Trump administration has treated the roughly 350,000 Haitians whose protections expired in July. Hundreds have been deported in recent weeks, and federal officials have targeted Haitian communities in the United States with an aggressive electronic ankle monitoring campaign. Administration officials and Homeland Security’s social media accounts have churned out celebratory videos of Haitians being put on deportation flights.
The administration’s push to remove those Haitians comes even as the State Department warns travelers not to visit Haiti for any reason because of crime and other threats. The department’s travel advisory for El Salvador, meanwhile, suggests exercising normal precautions.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has positioned himself as a willing White House ally central to the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate deportations. In the spring of 2025, he helped detain more than 200 migrants deported from the United States to his country in a maximum-security prison. Experts have told The New York Times that Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans earns Mr. Bukele political points at home, where remittances from U.S.-based family members are critical to the economy.
Still, many Salvadorans say they no longer feel safe staying with expired documentation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps across the country continue to entangle immigrants with and without legal residency.
In recent days, dozens of Latino evangelical leaders, T.P.S. holders and immigrant rights supporters have petitioned lawmakers in Washington calling for long-term protections. Some Salvadorans have begun packing, buying flights and preparing to self-deport.
“For families from El Salvador, it is a very difficult moment,” said José Palma, a Salvadoran T.P.S. holder and spokesman for the National TPS Alliance, an organization focused on defending the program. Many have lived in the United States for the past 25 years, he added, and many have established deep roots. They own cars, homes and mortgages. They have U.S.-born children in high school or heading off to college.
“We are seeing families struggling to stay stable,” he said, citing his own uncertain fate.
Agustín Quiles, who heads Mission Talk, an advocacy organization for Latino evangelicals that gathered this week in Washington, said the pastors in his network report that their members are afraid to go to school, work and church.
“There is a lot of pain, a lot of suffering,” Mr. Quiles said.
The Trump administration has already paused or terminated T.P.S. for 13 of the 17 countries once covered. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration could end the program for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.
With less than two months before the midterm elections, aggressive immigration tactics have emerged as a thorny issue for Republicans. Images of people being rounded up at airports and from their cars have prompted pushback, even as members of President Trump’s base have called for more heavy-handed tactics.
El Salvador was the first country designated under the T.P.S. program after Congress created it with bipartisan support and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990. The status provides safe haven for people from foreign nations engulfed in armed conflict, natural disasters and crises, and the government can renew it up to 18 months at a time.
Critics, including Mr. Trump, say the program was intended to provide only short-term relief. Immigrant rights and refugee aid organizations counter that the status has become one of the few paths to safety within an outdated and overburdened U.S. immigration system that Congress has failed to overhaul.
Daysi González, 31, a Democratic political operative and partner with Solidarity Strategies, a progressive consulting firm, has lived in the United States since she arrived in California from her native El Salvador for Christmas in 2000. She and her family entered the country on tourist visas but applied for T.P.S. after their home country was hit by powerful earthquakes that winter. She ended up staying for decades.
Ms. González said she would have applied for longer-term residency if she had been able to, but the program does not provide a legal pathway to lawful permanent resident status.
Now, she has been posting videos on social media chronicling what could be her final days in the United States. On Tuesday, she was searching for flights and waiting to hear back from her employer on whether she could keep her job.
“Without confirmation that I can legally work, that I can renew my license — living here will just be too dangerous,” she said.
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12) Netanyahu’s Rivals Call Him ‘Unfit’ After Report He Was Warned Before Oct. 7 Attack
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would sue the newspaper Haaretz after it reported that the Emirati president had warned him Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel.
By Ephrat Livni and Isabel Kershner, Published Sept. 8, 2026, Updated Sept. 9, 2026
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a news conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.
The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.
Mr. Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report.
On Wednesday, he vowed to sue Haaretz for libel, calling the report “a wicked fabrication with clear political timing,” in a post on social media. He said security officials had found no record that he had spoken with Sheikh Mohamed between September 2023 and the Oct. 7 attack.
A day earlier, Mr. Netanyahu’s office similarly said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”
The Emirati foreign ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.
The report that Mr. Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Mr. Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured.
The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarized country.
Mr. Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. And he has seemed to shift blame onto others for the Oct. 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to Gaza.
Recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza, because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas.
“If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different,” he said in a campaign video clip last month.
But when Mr. Netanyahu’s office released a schedule of his actions immediately after he was awakened at 6:29 a.m. that day, when the Hamas assault began, it appeared that he had not ordered an immediate counterattack and that hours had passed before he spoke to the military chief of staff.
Ultimately, the Israeli military response in Gaza destroyed much of the enclave, led to widespread privation and displacement of Palestinians and killed more than 70,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians, Gazan officials said.
Mr. Netanyahu’s political challengers have characterized his far-right government and its policies as risks to Israel’s future, pointing to the country’s international isolation since the war in Gaza and the increased chaos in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where violence by extremist settlers has become rampant.
These challengers cited the report on Tuesday as evidence that Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had become a liability.
The leaders of four Israeli opposition political parties called in a joint statement on Tuesday for an independent commission to investigate the 2023 attack after the elections. “The public in Israel deserves to know what happened before, during and after the Oct. 7 massacre,” they wrote.
Many Israelis had long called for an independent commission to investigate official failures that might have led to the attack, but Mr. Netanyahu had resisted. When he finally agreed early this year to an investigating commission, he proposed a process that deviated from Israeli law for independent inquiries.
The opposition politicians cited a “series” of revelations about Mr. Netanyahu’s actions and what they described as failures to act leading up to the attacks that have undermined faith in his leadership and government, and his claims that he is the key to Israel’s security.
“Netanyahu and his partners in the Oct. 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” the opposition leaders wrote. “We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster.”
Mr. Netanyahu is trailing in the polls, and his primary rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, leads him in polling when respondents are asked how much they trust each candidate on security matters. Mr. Eisenkot, who heads a relatively new party, has accused Mr. Netanyahu of prioritizing his political survival over the interests of Israel.
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