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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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We need as many people there as possible to carry our message - no more of our tax dollars for endless wars. Can we count you in? Sign up here:
https://www.codepink.org/novdc26
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 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) The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach
Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department.
By Mark Arsenault, Oct. 9, 2026
Reporting from the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass.
Michel DeGraff, a tenured professor at M.I.T., was pushed out of the university’s linguistics section. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The name of the proposed Massachusetts Institute of Technology course was as provocative as it was long:
“Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond.”
The instructor was Michel DeGraff, a longtime tenured linguistics professor at M.I.T. who came up with the idea in the months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He was a leading faculty voice siding with pro-Palestinian campus protesters, whose frequent rallying cry for Palestinian freedom, “from the river to the sea,” was seen by some Jews as antisemitic.
An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.
To Dr. DeGraff, it was more like the starting gun.
He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course and protested the decision in a flurry of emails decrying it as part of a “new McCarthyism.” He complained to his colleagues, including deans and the university’s president in long email chains — which he then made public.
He objected on social media and in published commentaries. He filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., accusing the school of chilling campus speech on Gaza and violating his academic freedom.
“M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,” Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a “violation of my professional rights.”
The university, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment, though it has denied Dr. DeGraff’s claims in legal filings.
As Dr. DeGraff’s profile has risen, so has the volume of his critics. He was sued for harassment by a Jewish former student. A U.S. House committee staff report last spring accused him of perpetuating “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Now three years into the dispute, his personal relationship with the M.I.T. linguistics section head, a onetime friend, is broken, and colleagues are exhausted by the controversy.
In many other American workplaces, employees who push back so forcefully would most likely risk their employment. But tenured professors are, by design, hard to get rid of.
Administrators have sanctioned Dr. DeGraff, accusing him of being disruptive and violating procedures and directives. He was pushed out of M.I.T.’s linguistics section and given the nebulous title of “faculty at large,” which he includes in his email signature inside satirical quotation marks.
He said in an interview that he had been denied a scheduled raise and access to new mentees, and had even been blocked from the department’s Facebook page. For the third fall semester in a row, he said, he is being paid while not teaching a class.
He is one of a number of professors in disputes with their schools over speech recently.
Carnegie Mellon University announced in September that it was investigating social media posts from a professor who is accused of celebrating the deaths of conservative figures.
A University of Texas professor is contesting his 16-month paid administrative leave, which he believes is related to his criticism of school leadership.
And an arbitrator ordered San Jose State University to reinstate a tenured professor the university had fired over allegations related to her role in pro-Palestinian campus protests.
At a time when campus politics are under a microscope and schools are trying to avoid the attention of the Trump administration, Dr. DeGraff’s fight has become one of the longest and most dramatic.
Chris Sharp, chief of staff at the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin, said some tenured professors were cloaking their personal activism under the guise of “academic freedom.” The term, he said, is often misconstrued as the right to teach or research without limit, when it should be understood as the right to teach and research within one’s specialty.
“Just because I have a Ph.D. in one thing does not make me an expert in everything,” he said.
Friends of Dr. DeGraff say his campaign for his proposed class came from his deep concern for free speech, human rights and his understanding of language as a means to exercise power.
“Michel’s great virtue is his persistence,” said Haynes Miller, an M.I.T. professor emeritus of mathematics who is close to Dr. DeGraff and who says his friend is not an antisemite. “He doesn’t give up. If he sees an injustice he will attack it.”
Dr. DeGraff, 63, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and persuaded his parents to send him to the United States to study computer science. But once there, he became more interested in his homeland’s language, Haitian Creole, which, he said, is often derided as “broken French” and not a real language.
His Ph.D. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was entitled “Creole Grammars and Acquisition of Syntax: The Case of Haitian Creole,” he said. He joined the M.I.T. linguistics faculty in 1996.
Dr. DeGraff sees parallels between the Haitian struggle for independence and that of Palestinian people. “That is what brought me to want to further my research and teaching about these connections,” he said.
The idea for the class came to him on Dec. 5, 2023, after he had watched M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, and leaders of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania get rhetorically beat up by Republicans in a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.
After the course was rejected, he turned the concept into a discussion series with guest speakers in the fall of 2024.
That year, he also frequently joined students who occupied part of campus in a three-week encampment demanding that the school end ties with Israel. He was there nearly every day, he said, before the police shut it down.
Agustín Rayo, dean of the M.I.T. School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, sanctioned Dr. DeGraff in late 2024. In a letter Dr. DeGraff shared, the dean said he was removing Dr. DeGraff temporarily from the linguistics section for being disruptive and creating the expectation that people who displease him “are at risk of being targeted” in public forums.
“Your speech rights do not place you above M.I.T.’s rules,” the dean wrote in the letter.
Dr. DeGraff also came to the attention of congressional Republicans, who in a report pointed to accusations that Dr. DeGraff had targeted a Jewish student for harassment. That former student, William Sussman, joined a lawsuit against Dr. DeGraff and the school in 2025.
Mr. Sussman said Dr. DeGraff targeted him on social media as an example of a Zionist “mind infection” for his pro-Israel views. Mr. Sussman has said antisemitic harassment drove him out of the university.
Dr. DeGraff said the term “mind infection” came from an Israeli scholar who has used it to refer to how Israeli schoolbooks marginalize Palestinians. Dr. DeGraff said he was not an antisemite and that federal courts had said that criticism of Israel by itself is not inherently antisemitic.
Part of the suit, including the claims against Dr. DeGraff, was dismissed, though appeals are possible.
In a statement, Mr. Sussman criticized M.I.T., saying “the professor remains employed at M.I.T., where he continues to smear me.”
His removal from the linguistics department means “his impact at M.I.T. is substantially reduced,” said Dr. Miller, the friend of Dr. DeGraff’s. “It is humiliating for him; it’s a symbolic thing as well as a practical thing.”
Last March, Dr. DeGraff filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., along with the congressional committee that had named him in its report and its chairman. In his suit, he accuses the university of punishing him for his political activism.
“If you ask faculty to keep quiet, then you are basically betraying the job of the university, which is to teach about difficult topics,” he said.
M.I.T. denied his claims and asked the court to dismiss the suit.
“Indeed, the fact that DeGraff has continued to speak publicly and prolifically on the very subjects he claims have been chilled only underscores the speculative nature of his alleged injuries,” the university argued in a court filing.
He is still scheduled to teach the spring classes he has taught for years, “Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities” and “Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies.”
Over this past summer, Dr. DeGraff proposed another new course, based on his book, published last month: “Our Own Language: Harnessing the Power of Kreyol and Other Mother Tongues for Education and Liberation.”
It is common for professors at a research university such as M.I.T. to propose new courses. And in early September, an associate dean told Dr. DeGraff the department would discuss the idea. But first, could he provide a copy of the book?
No, Dr. DeGraff replied, the syllabus he submitted should be enough. Given the history with his last course proposal, he wrote, “requiring an additional departmental review of the book itself therefore strikes me as ongoing discrimination and harassment.” He looped in top administrators, including Dr. Kornbluth, to his email.
His new class, he said, was rejected.
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2) Palestinian Authority Says Elections Are to Be Postponed
The delay, outlined in a letter to France, comes as Fatah, the governing party, is suffering from deep internal rifts.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 9, 2026
Hussein al-Sheikh, deputy to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah, West Bank, in February. He was said to have sent the letters to European officials notifying them of the postponement. Credit...Pool photo by Zain Jaafar
The Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank informed France this week that legislative elections in the territory scheduled for Nov. 28 would be postponed by several months, according to two Palestinian officials briefed on the communications.
The message was conveyed in a letter to the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, from Hussein al-Sheikh, deputy to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, the officials said. Reuters first reported on the letter.
A postponement of the elections would come as Fatah, the governing party in of the PA, suffers from division, especially over Mr. Abbas’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Israel, which controls whether ballot boxes or election observers can enter Gaza, has also shown little readiness to facilitate the voting. That lack of engagement complicates the work of the Palestinian Authority’s election commission, according to three Western diplomats.
The Palestinian officials and Western diplomats spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matters.
A delay in holding elections would not help Mr. Abbas’s efforts to convince European nations and the United States that he can deliver changes to the Palestinian political system. The European Union is one of the Palestinian Authority’s biggest backers and has pressed Palestinian officials to pursue democratic reforms, including holding elections.
In September 2025, President Emmanuel Macron of France recognized a Palestinian state at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, citing a series of commitments that Mr. Abbas had made to him, including “a thorough overhaul of Palestinian governance.”
Some three months earlier, Mr. Abbas had sent a letter to Mr. Macron declaring a commitment to hold elections within a year under international supervision “to rejuvenate the Palestinian governance.”
Last month, Mr. Barrot reinforced Paris’s commitment to Palestinian elections, writing an article in The Wall Street Journal that ended with the words, “Palestinian elections now.”
Pierre-Arnaud Blanchard, a French diplomat in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that there was “profound disappointment and frustration” in France.
“There’s also a sense that there’s a missed opportunity to breathe new life and legitimacy into the Palestinian Authority,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has been dogged for years by accusations of corruption, and U.S. officials have said that the body can play a meaningful role in postwar Gaza only if there is a significant overhaul.
Mr. Abbas, 90, was elected to office in early 2005 after the death of his predecessor, Yasir Arafat. As the leader of Palestinian Authority, Mr. Abbas has consolidated his power by ousting rivals, sidelining the judiciary and cooperating with Israel on security.
Analysts said the decision to postpone elections was partially a result of senior Palestinian Authority officials fearing that a vote could result in further erosion of their already waning legitimacy.
“Elections present a threat to the president and those around him,” said Jehad Harb, a Palestinian political expert.
The last time Palestinians participated in national elections was in 2006, and it led to a brittle governing body, international isolation and, eventually, violence.
In the voting that year, a rival party representing Hamas trounced Fatah, leading to a year and a half of uneasy power-sharing.
The United States and much of the West refused to work with the unity government because Hamas, which many countries designate a terrorist organization, would not accept demands such as renouncing violence.
Fatah and Hamas then fought a brief civil war in the Gaza Strip. That fighting ended in June 2007 with Hamas seizing control there after routing forces loyal to Mr. Abbas and confining his authority to parts of the West Bank.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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3) What We Know About the Man Shot by ICE
Oscar Belgal, 28, was often seen fixing cars and playing music on Marble Hill Avenue, where few residents knew of his criminal record.
By Maria Cramer, Nate Schweber and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
A crowd of protesters began gathering at the scene. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Oscar Belgal often repaired friends’ cars as he listened to reggaeton and hip-hop on Marble Hill Avenue, a bustling street on the border of Manhattan and the Bronx.
He was there early Sunday morning when Carlos Veloz, a taxi driver who lives in the neighborhood, saw him as Mr. Veloz returned home from work.
Mr. Belgal was leaning over the engine of an S.U.V. with its hood open as dawn broke on a cloudy day, and nodded hello at Mr. Veloz.
“He was fine,” Mr. Veloz said, adding that Mr. Belgal never caused problems.
On Thursday afternoon, four days later, Mr. Belgal was on Marble Hill Avenue again, sitting in the middle of the street, his hands handcuffed behind his back and his neck bleeding from a gunshot wound, surrounded by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On Friday, as investigators scoured the neighborhood, Mr. Belgal’s neighbors said they knew little of his criminal history, which Trump administration officials used to paint him as a dangerous undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
But details of what happened on Thursday began to emerge on Friday. Officers had stopped his car as he drove his 5-year-old son. As the boy sat in the backseat, officers in plain clothes surrounded the car, Mr. Belgal accelerated and at least one of the officers fired seven shots, according to Jessica S. Tisch, the commissioner of the New York Police Department. Federal officials said that Mr. Belgal refused their order to get out of his car, then sped into two government vehicles.
The officers shot at Mr. Belgal in self-defense, federal officials said on Friday. The Bronx Defenders, who are representing Mr. Belgal, declined to comment on the specific charges at issue in this case, but said in a statement that they were “not surprised” by the actions of the ICE officers.
“A family just trying to go about their everyday lives faced terror and violence at the hands of ICE in Marble Hill,” they said, adding, “ICE’s brutality is emblematic of what the people we represent endure daily — from violent arrests in our communities to neglect and dehumanization in ICE detention.”
New York City police officers, who are prohibited from participating in federal immigration enforcement, came to the scene on Thursday after hearing a report of shots fired on Marble Hill Avenue. They found Mr. Belgal bleeding, took him into one of their S.U.V.s and drove him directly to the hospital, according to body-camera video the Police Department released on Friday.
Mr. Belgal, who also has a 1-year-old child, was discharged from the hospital on Thursday evening and is now at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
One of his lawyers said a bullet is still lodged in his body and he is in pain.
Arianna Montero, the mother of Mr. Belgal’s 5-year-old son, said the child had been “traumatized” by the shooting and has not spoken since it happened.
“He’s having nightmares,” Ms. Montero said in a brief phone call in Spanish on Friday. “He went through something he shouldn’t have gone through.”
Mr. Belgal’s criminal record showed a string of arrests for drug dealing and larceny.
In February 2025, according to court records, he sold cocaine, fentanyl and crack cocaine to an undercover detective on Wadsworth Avenue in the Fort George neighborhood of Manhattan, where a neighbor said he once lived with his girlfriend and an infant.
He pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of criminal sale of a controlled substance after being accused of engaging in multiple drug sales over at least six months. The case remains open.
In 2023, Mr. Belgal was arrested and charged with robbery. He later pleaded guilty to grand larceny and received five years of probation.
On Friday morning, federal officials described Mr. Belgal as an undocumented “thug” with associations to a gang — known as the Trinitarios — that was connected to the shooting of an off-duty customs officer in Manhattan last year.
Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of Homeland Security, said Mr. Belgal “has either indirect or direct knowledge of the shooting.”
“That’s why he became a target,” Mr. Mullin said.
After he was arrested, Mr. Belgal told ICE officers that he was not affiliated with any gangs, according to internal federal records obtained by The New York Times.
Federal officers had tried to arrest him on Sept. 18, but he ran away and escaped into a building, according to the internal federal records.
On Thursday, Mr. Mullin said, “We had taken all precautions to keep him from fleeing.”
Mr. Mullin said the officers who fired at Mr. Belgal on Thursday did not know a child was in the backseat.
Many elected officials in New York condemned the actions of federal officers, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Mr. Belgal’s criminal record surprised some residents of Marble Hill Avenue, where Mr. Belgal was often seen walking with his son.
“Nice kid,” said Zachary Miller, a resident, of Mr. Belgal. “Very nice-mannered.”
Mr. Belgal was friendly, called Mr. Miller “O.G.” and pet Mr. Miller’s pit bull, Coco.
Crystal Hawkins, president of a tenants association on Marble Hill Avenue, described Mr. Belgal as something of a nuisance.
“Not a menace — annoying,” said Ms. Hawkins, 63, who has lived in the neighborhood for 49 years.
She did not like that he drank and smoked marijuana on the sidewalks with his friends, blasting music late at night.
But he would listen when you asked him to turn it down, Ms. Hawkins said.
“What happened to him was not right,” she said. “He did not deserve that.”
Hurubie Meko, Anusha Bayya and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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4) What to Know About the Delhi Protests
Protesters opposed to sweeping revisions to India’s voter rolls are trying to rally in New Delhi. The police have come out in force.
By Somini Sengupta and Pragati K.B., Reporting from New Delhi, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
The Indian police turned New Delhi into a fortress on Saturday as protesters tried to assemble in the city center to oppose a sweeping revision of the nation’s voter roll. The authorities took extraordinary measures to stop them.
A large number of officers gathered and erected tall yellow barricades around the protest site. Several protesters have already been placed under house arrest. Delhi-bound trains have been canceled. Officials ordered the closure of 45 metro stations.
The protests were called by a Gen Z movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party. The demonstrations follow a week of daily protests by opposition politicians and several activist groups who are expected to defy a police ban and join Saturday’s rally.
The group said in a statement that three of its main leaders, including the founder, Abhijeet Dipke, were detained by the police on Saturday morning when their plane landed in New Delhi. The C.J.P. also shared a video that Mehr Parsicha, a spokeswoman for the youth group, recorded of the police detaining her.
Here’s what to know about the events in New Delhi, the capital of the world’s most populous democracy.
What are the protests about?
The protests stem from growing anger at a sweeping revision of the voter roll. The change, known as the Special Intensive Revision, began last summer as an effort to verify voter eligibility and remove duplicate or ineligible names. The government called it a long overdue push to clean up voter records.
It required Indians to submit multiple documents to prove that they were eligible to vote, and it ended up eliminating 130 million names. Critics said it had removed legitimate voters and forced people identified as dead to come forward to prove that they were indeed alive.
Critics have called the measure a politically motivated purge that could entrench the tenure of Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who has been in power for 12 years.
Leaders of Mr. Modi’s party reject the criticism. The home minister, Amit Shah, accused opposition lawmakers of “lies and disinformation” in a social media post. “Having lost their public support, these parties question institutions after every defeat,” he said.
What do the protesters want?
The protesters say their goal is to ensure free and fair elections.
They have demanded the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar; an immediate halt to the voter roll revision pending an independent inquiry; and the restoration of the previous voter roll in coming elections.
A popular slogan by the Gen Z movement refers to the election chief by a diminutive form of his first name: “Gyanu. It’s done, bro.”
The anger at the election chief has been aggravated by news, reported by The Indian Express newspaper, that other officials within the election commission and the Supreme Court had expressed reservations about the exercise.
Who are the protesters?
The protest was initially organized by the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z movement that emerged this summer to decry a broken college entrance exam system. They won the rare ouster of a government minister.
Several groups said they would join the Saturday rally. They include farmers groups that led protests in 2020 against the government’s proposed agricultural reforms. They too marched toward central Delhi and faced a crackdown, but pushed the government to back down.
The opposition Aam Aadmi party, with which some Cockroach Party leaders had been involved, has also said that it planned to join, along with several leftist youth organizations. Those include the All India Students’ Association, affiliated with one of the country’s communist parties, whose members have led some of the most robust protests this week.
What’s at stake?
First, the irregularities in the voter roll revision has dented the reputation of the election commission, which for years had been seen as a credible institution that ran relatively fair elections.
Second, the protests reflect the force of the Gen Z Cockroach movement, which has been led by a handful of young people with no political experience and all under the age of 32. Their success regarding the college entrance system seems to have emboldened others both in the movement and outside it to speak out against the Modi administration.
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5) Executions Are Again on the Minds of a Divided Public
A botched execution and a planned execution that might be livestreamed have renewed debate and divisions over the most severe form of punishment.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Oct. 10, 2026
People gathered during a March 4 Mercy protest against the death penalty at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville last month, ahead of the scheduled execution of Christa Pike. Credit...George Walker IV/Associated Press
Within the span of eight days, the country has learned of a failed execution and a successful execution, and has been promised a livestreamed execution by military firing squad before year’s end.
The most severe form of criminal punishment — there are roughly 2,000 people on death row nationwide — execution has taken center stage in a nation already split politically and culturally, amplifying divisions just weeks before a pivotal midterm election.
Death penalty opponents have seized upon the blundered attempt to kill Christa Pike in Tennessee last week to push for an end to the death penalty. Conversely, the nation’s top military official said on Thursday that the United States would carry out the government’s first public execution since 1936.
The announcement from the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, and its timing, exemplify the salient place that the death penalty has taken in the nation’s polarized political landscape in President Trump’s second term.
On the day Mr. Trump returned to office, he urged prosecutors across the country to pursue and carry out capital punishment. In 2025, states executed more people than they had since 2009, largely driven by a sharp jump in Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.
The failed execution of Ms. Pike — who survived two doses of pentobarbital that may have been injected improperly — has galvanized death penalty opponents, who have denounced what they see as a grisly example of capital punishment’s faults.
And the two events together have brought the issue of the death penalty — something that has for decades taken place in hidden rooms inside mostly rural prisons — back into the forefront of Americans’ minds.
“What we’re seeing is the brutality of the institution of the death penalty coming back into public focus,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis who has studied the death penalty. “Tennessee didn’t intend to do that; the federal government does.”
“Given that there has been a rise in executions,” he added, “it’s a good time to have that debate.”
Nearly 1,700 people have been executed in the past 50 years, including Jamaal Howard, 46, who was put to death on Wednesday in Texas, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, with a peak of 98 killed in 1999. Mr. Howard had been convicted of murdering Vickie Swartout, 42, during a 2000 robbery. Tennessee had sought to execute Ms. Pike for her 1995 killing of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
While 27 states retain the death penalty, fewer than half of those have carried out an execution in the past five years. Virginia abolished the penalty in 2021, and Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said in June that he wanted his state to do so as well.
In modern times, lethal injection has been used far more than any other method, though states have turned to alternative methods — both new and old — in recent years. Several have authorized the firing squad, and two, Alabama and Louisiana, have used the novel method of asphyxiation via nitrogen.
Public opinion polls have shown support for the death penalty steadily declining in recent decades, though a majority of Americans still support it. One poll from this past summer found that two-thirds were in favor.
Still, the specter of livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of murdering 13 people — mostly soldiers — and wounding dozens more at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, has upset many who might otherwise support his killing.
“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, wrote on social media. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Mr. Hasan, now 56, was motivated by his radical views of Islam to carry out the killings in retaliation for America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was wounded by responding police officers and is now paralyzed from the waist down, raising the possibility that he could be transported in a wheelchair to his execution, which is scheduled for Dec. 3. Mr. Hegseth said Mr. Hasan would be killed at Fort Hood around the same time of day — early afternoon — that he committed the crimes.
The reactions to the announcement fell largely along ideological lines — Republicans are much more likely to support capital punishment — but were far from uniform, underscoring the complexity of the issue.
Some Roman Catholic leaders condemned the execution plans. The Catholic Church has long opposed the death penalty as part of its theological commitment to humans across their life spans, though recently U.S. bishops have prioritized ending abortion and defending immigrants.
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the planned livestream “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” and warned it would harm the country.
“The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, an atheist turned Catholic, said on Friday that he would not watch the execution if it was livestreamed and also cast doubt on that idea, saying, “I don’t know if that’s actually going to happen.”
But in a sign of the continued sharp divide that the Trump movement has carved in American Christianity, an energetic cohort of right-wing Christians defended the livestream on biblical grounds.
Josh Howerton, the pastor of Lakepointe Church, an evangelical congregation with locations in and around Dallas, argued on social media that executions in the Bible were carried out publicly as deterrents.
“I do not think you can say it’s unbiblical or automatically wrong,” he said of public executions, noting passages that described public stonings.
The prospect of a public execution was raised prominently around the turn of the century, when some proposed televising the killing of Timothy McVeigh.
Mr. McVeigh, convicted of carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people, himself had urged as much in a letter to The Oklahoman newspaper in which he argued for “equal access” to his execution: “A reasonable solution seems obvious: hold a true ‘public’ execution — allow a public broadcast.”
In the end, he was executed by lethal injection at an Indiana prison in 2001, with a couple of dozen people watching his death in person and about 232 more — including survivors and their relatives — viewing on closed-circuit television from Oklahoma City.
Notably, Mr. Hasan has said he wants to be killed for his crimes, saying he sees an opportunity for martyrdom, though he does not appear to expect the firing squad or a public death.
“I’m paraplegic and could be in jail for the rest of my life,” he told a military panel in 2010. “However, if I died by lethal injection I would still be a martyr.”
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Nashville, and Elizabeth Dias from Washington.
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6) The Interview
She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Oct. 10, 2026
Mirjana Spoljaric and a delegation at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip on Jan. 14, 2025. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
Are we already in the middle of a new world war without realizing it? That’s the provocative question I wanted to explore when I sat down with someone in the rare position to know: Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The I.C.R.C. is a secretive organization that is not well known outside war zones. Unlike the American Red Cross, which deals with blood drives and American disaster relief, the I.C.R.C. is the independent and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements created in the wake of World War II that laid out the rules of war. In her role, Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. She rarely gives interviews because of the politically fraught and confidential nature of her work, but she sat down with me just after the most recent U.N. General Assembly because she is deeply worried about not only the growing number of conflicts in the world but also how complex they have become.
She is also speaking out because she believes that her entreaties to global leaders when it comes to the rules of war are increasingly falling on deaf ears. (We spoke before Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government would be live-streaming a public execution — another sign that the old rules and norms are eroding.) Many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore,” she told me. “And this lack of empathy, this lack of anger, is what I find most dangerous at the moment.”
I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist, and the world feels more dangerous and volatile than I can ever remember. How do you see things? I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it. We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and noninternational armed conflicts that we classify in our system. That’s the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it’s time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.
In my own newspaper, there was a recent headline asking if World War III had already begun, and I want to speak more deeply about why those fears about a global conflict are taking root. But first, you rarely give interviews. Why are you sitting down with me now? Because I want more people to understand that we live in a decade of war. And because we live in a decade of war, we have to understand the significance and importance of the rules of war and why they need to be respected. These treaties were created precisely for times like the ones we live in. People need to understand the importance of this.
Why do you think they don’t? We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don’t apply anymore, and that there can’t be rules because of the pursuit of total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory; there has only been death and destruction, over and above what was necessary.
Is there such a thing as a necessary war? As far as I’m concerned, no. But philosophers and politicians have argued for thousands of years that war is necessary. The point is that war has always been considered as something in the pursuit of a political objective. It’s a means to an end. Today you get the feeling that war becomes the means to an end itself, and wars continue because people want to stay in power. They have created an environment where war becomes the condition under which they can continue ruling, and that’s very dangerous. You ask me whether we are approaching a third world war. Honestly, history will judge that. History books will tell us whether today we were already in the beginning, or maybe already in the middle of such a situation. The I.C.R.C. didn’t know that we were in the Second World War when it was happening.
You are one of the few people in the world who regularly travels to both sides of armed conflicts. Can you tell me where you’ve been since you took over as the head of the I.C.R.C. in 2022? I’ve been to Gaza more than once during military operations. My organization facilitated the release and return of the hostages from Gaza and the Palestinian detainees back to Gaza. I was in Ukraine. I was in Myanmar. I was recently in Iran, in Iraq. I travel to the Middle East often, but I also travel to Africa. I was in Sudan, I was in Mali. I have to go see for myself what it looks like. I need to understand what civilians endure in conflict because I’m speaking to the holders of power. I wouldn’t be credible if I didn’t know what it means to be subject to this level of violence.
Your organization is one of the few that has been allowed inside and continues to work in Gaza. International journalists, most other international organizations haven’t been given access by the Israeli government. Can you describe what you have seen? I never go to any place of conflict without people telling me that they want to stop, without people telling me that they don’t understand why this is happening. I see children without parents. I see children without arms and legs. How senseless does the world feel to you when you’re confronting these things? When you then go to the power holders and they tell you that there’s nothing that they can do, you just don’t understand. I often don’t understand what I see in connection to what I hear.
Millions of Palestinians in Gaza are now forced to live on only around 30 percent of the territory. Over 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. In a 2025 interview with the BBC, you called Gaza worse than hell on earth, and you described people stripped of their human dignity. Have the rules of war been followed there? What I said about Gaza is still valid today. What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard. There are so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there’s enough food, that’s good enough — for some people it’s good enough to just barely survive in rubble, and for other people it is only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school. It’s applying two standards. And this will backfire. We cannot assume that for certain people certain things are sufficient when that doesn’t apply to everybody else. You can see that by how we measure humanitarian needs in Europe in comparison to South Sudan or Somalia. Intuitively and because we can’t prevent it, we continue applying two standards.
That some human lives are more valuable than others? Yeah. I always fear that if you allow double standards, it can happen to you. You never know when you’ll find yourself all of a sudden on the other side of the line. It happened in the Second World War to the Jewish people, but it’s happened to a lot more people than we nowadays keep in mind.
I want to stay with Gaza for one more moment before we broaden out. Did the I.C.R.C. have access to the Israeli hostages while they were in captivity? Because there were horrific stories of their conditions, and one of your main roles is to make sure that detainees and prisoners are treated well. [Shakes head no] Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back. And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of Day 1. But that’s not the reality in which we operate, and so we have to work with the tools that we have. You know, there’s nothing more complex, and to a certain extent also more brutal, than hostage taking. We know that also because our own colleagues find themselves more often than they should in such situations, and we know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible. So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back. And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes. I personally think that pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations. We could have saved more lives. And this was the subject of our conversations. I traveled twice to Qatar to meet with the leadership of Hamas, to sit with Ismail Haniyeh at the time. I sat with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself. These were tough discussions, and trust me, we are very frank in these meetings. This is why these meetings have to always remain confidential.
Israel has also not allowed you access to detainees inside of Israel. How have they explained that to you, and how do you then respond? Prior to Oct. 7, the I.C.R.C. has had access for decades to detainees held by Israel, and we’ve organized tens of thousands, if not more, family visits, and that’s important. Access to prisons in situations of war is extremely challenging and complicated to achieve. And at a certain point in the conflict, parties decide that for security reasons they don’t want to give us access. That’s the most common argument. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is. According to the Geneva Conventions, which all these states have ratified, they have a legal obligation to give us access, and in my opinion also a moral obligation, because we need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives. You capture a soldier, this person is detained, but a soldier is not, per se, a criminal. And no matter how you classify these situations, torture is never allowed. Never. That is clear, and this is what we discuss with those who don’t give us access.
But there’s a different reason for me to be able to go, irrespective of my legal mandate. Detention is the place where you lose your identity. When there’s no possibility to notify the families and to receive information about them, detention becomes the place of utmost deprivation of yourself. And we’ve seen more often than not that people detained under horrible conditions over extended periods of time forget who they are. When I recently visited a detention facility in Iraq, the detainees told me their biggest challenge is information. What is always most important for everyone is to have information about what month it is, what day it is, where their families are, where their children are, whether the children are safe. You’re talking to human beings.
This is a bit of a basic question, but why does it matter how you treat your enemy? Of course it matters! Because you’re dehumanizing yourself if you torture. If you tell your soldiers, “Go and kill women and children, go rape them, looting is allowed, it’s our strategy,” these people dehumanize themselves. They will never be able to return to a normal life. I listen to so many interviews of former soldiers. All of them say that what haunts them is this child that was left in the street because they weren’t allowed to turn around and collect it. That they saw it bleeding to death. It remains with you. You debase yourself. This is why soldiers have all these problems when they return. I refuse to believe that the core human essence is bad. We are good people, we want to live with people we love, we want to have children that thrive, we want to be able to build a house and know that our grandchildren will be better off than us. This is a very normal human motivation. Our motivation is not to live in rubble. How could it be?
want to learn a little bit more about you. You are Swiss Croatian, you studied philosophy and you worked primarily in international development and peacemaking for most of your career. Why did you want to take on a job about war? Do you have memories of the war in Croatia? My first memory of war was everybody telling me about the Second World War and how they endured it. My father was born in the middle, and when he was 5 years old he had to work in the field for 12 hours in the sun for a glass of milk. He said his whole childhood was marked by the memory of being hungry. And my mother was equally traumatized. She said that every time a child died of a disease in her neighborhood, she thought that the parents were lucky, and probably happy, because there was one less child to feed. Can you imagine thinking as a little girl that somebody’s happy about losing a child because you don’t have enough food for everyone? These are the stories that marked me probably more profoundly than anything else. And then came the Yugoslavia wars and my direct exposure to the impact of conflict. I cannot imagine how anybody could say we need this war. I’m not naïve. I’m surrounded by harsh interlocutors in a harsh environment. But I still think that if you keep the people in mind, if you at all times remember that it could happen to you, it could happen to your children, you will think twice before you start the war.
You are the first woman to be president of the I.C.R.C. Do you think gender matters in how you’re dealing with conflict? When I came into office, everybody was asking, “How is it being the first woman president of the I.C.R.C. after 160 years of male dominance?” And it’s not only at the top; it’s across the institution, because it’s an organization that was created in war, for wars. Then I went to northern Mali, and for the first time an I.C.R.C. president could sit with the women in a tent, because social norms prevented my predecessors from doing the same. I felt so shaken throughout the night when I realized what is happening to women in conflict and how brutal it is, because you have an overlap of many things affecting women and depriving them of even the minimum protection that any human being should have. And that night I realized it is different when it’s a woman. If there would never be a woman at the head of these organizations, we wouldn’t be as conscious of what it means for 50 percent of the world’s population.
You’ve seen many horrible things as part of your job. You deal, as you said, in a very harsh environment. How do you protect yourself from the relentlessness and awfulness? I mean, I’ve seen you get a little emotional thinking about it. In German, we say, “I was built close to water.” I’m very emotional. I try to be hard, but it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s good that I’m emotional, maybe it’s good that I get angry when I see bad things or unjust things, because it keeps me going, it keeps that feeling alive that you have to do something.
I was thinking about the I.C.R.C. and the difficulty of staying neutral in this era — this idea of having to speak to both sides and not taking sides. There have been many accusations that the I.C.R.C. hides behind its neutrality to mask inaction. The Holocaust is a moment where the I.C.R.C. failed catastrophically to prevent or to even acknowledge the extermination of the Jews. I know your background is in philosophy. What does it mean to be neutral in the face of extreme suffering? Is there an inherent tension in that? When I started my studies, I had my thoughts. I could get impatient with the stubborn insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. I very, very quickly changed my mind when I became president myself. Having accepted this unique opportunity, I had to learn quickly and acknowledge that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without this strict insistence on neutrality, not in the context of prisoners of war in Russia and in Ukraine, and definitely we wouldn’t have been able to bring back the hostages from Gaza. You’ve seen the pictures of our colleagues unarmed among thousands, if not tens of thousands, of armed men, surrounded by rubble from which there was no escape. We had to negotiate the terms with everyone. Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this highly complex operation if we hadn’t defended our neutrality over 160 years. You tweak it once, you become political, and that’s it. I know it makes so many people angry, but that’s the essence of our mission.
In that context, I want to ask you about Iran. You’ve spoken with the Iranians about the negotiations [with the United States]. I understand that you cannot divulge the nature of those discussions, but I am wondering how much you can say about how this conflict may or may not be resolved. I followed the nuclear talks between 2013 and 2015 under President Obama. It became clear to me at the time how complex these negotiations were. It’s much more complicated today in comparison. The first challenge is to establish trust. We have created a world where war is not a means of last resort. It happens at any moment in a process, which leads to a situation where parties always keep that possibility in mind and always keep a high readiness and preparedness to return to conflict. That in itself is not helpful, because these negotiations will take a long time and will require a lot of compromise. But on top of this, we have created a situation that is much more complex because of the overlapping of conflicts. Today’s conflicts are not limited to a given situation. They are turning into systems.
Explain what you mean exactly. You have countries aligning over continents. You have shifts in military cooperation. You have shifts in interests and economic goals.
So Iran’s relationship with Russia, Russia’s relationship with China, the conflict spreading to Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the Houthis —— And then you have the nonstate armed groups that are connected with other nonstate armed groups — ideological groups, or radicalized groups, however you want to name them, they share ideologies, they share common objectives, they align, they realign, they trade their arms, they ensure the availability of technology and cheap weapons across many countries and thousands of kilometers. So if the situation escalates in Yemen, you can be sure that it won’t remain contained to that territory for long. You already have two very important sea straits affected. So you have a lack of trust. You have asymmetric warfare that allows these conflicts to continue for an extended period of time. And on top of this, there’s a total absence of economic growth and a fast loss of development gains that have been essential for the welfare of the people in many countries of the world. Take Iraq: Over the last 10 years, the country has been recovering from very large conflicts that have had a heavy impact on society and the economy. These gains are being undone. Countries don’t have the fiscal space anymore to cope with the fallout created by continued warfare. The convergence of these trends is extremely dangerous. And now, what do we need? We need political will. We need negotiations. We need powerful politicians to have the power to negotiate.
In his recent speech at the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump threatened the annihilation of Iran by U.S. forces, speaking of this idea of trust and using war as a method of negotiation. He’s used language like that quite a bit, but it was notable to me because he made that statement at a body explicitly created to stop wars, which is the United Nations. What do you think that kind of language says about America’s understanding and commitment to these very complex, in-depth negotiations that you say are needed? You know, I started my career as a diplomat about 25 years ago in New York. And ever since, I’ve been observing eroding language. Certain things said back then would have triggered points of order. People would have left the room. There would have been outrage. I remember when Hugo Chavez spoke at the General Assembly and what reactions this triggered.
When he talked about President Bush and the smell of sulfur, implying that he was the devil. Exactly. This is a gradual erosion. But there are things being said that in certain situations could even lead to war crimes, because depending on who you are and what the situation looks like, it could entice people to do things that would actually amount to war crimes. This is why hate speech and this brutal language is so dangerous. But I’m not accusing a specific person today, because this erosion has been happening for far too long, and I’ve been alert for many years now. Every politician that uses any term that points at there being no rules and no red lines sends this signal to any person in the world that bears a weapon. You have to be conscious that as a holder of power, you have far bigger reach. Many more people hear: Oh, there are no red lines. I have weapons. I can use them.
One of the things that struck me about why we’re in such a period of global conflict is that it’s relatively easy to get into wars but increasingly hard to get out of them. So they drag on and accumulate. Are we losing our capacity to resolve conflicts? Definitely. If you don’t negotiate over 10 years, you lose the practice. It’s like being a heart surgeon. You don’t stop operating and then come back and they give you the instruments and you resume. I spoke once with a senior representative of the A.N.C. [African National Congress] in South Africa who told me: “Our adversaries never had to negotiate anything. They didn’t know how to do it, so we had to train them first before we could sit at the negotiation table.”
Undergirding this whole discussion and your call for leaders to pick up the phone is the breakdown of many democracies and the institutions that hold them together. The weakness that we’re seeing in upholding liberal democracy means that international organizations are also weak. Are you worried about the complete breakdown of the post-World War II order? Of course I am. Because that order made it possible for Europe to stay out of a third world war, to stay out of the levels of destruction that we have seen. Europe is also the leader of bad wars. I feel very bad saying that, but we have to acknowledge that European or Western history is not one of peace and security. But coming out of that rubble, there were a few people who had the foresight and courage to establish an international system that is in no way perfect but for a long time prevented the worst. I mean, everything that is written in the Geneva Conventions today is still as valid. If you had to rewrite them, you would come back with the same principles because they’re so intuitive and logical. In any society, religion, culture, nobody will tell you it’s correct to torture a child.
To come back to this idea that perhaps we might already be in this third global war without us knowing: What can we do? Let’s go back to that time when we believed in peace. Why is it so wrong to start a global movement around the notion of world peace? It’s possible. When I talk to my children, peace is not something completely away and absent for them. This is how they imagine their future. I think we have to listen to them. We have to start retreating from an overfocus on weapons, weapons systems, defense technologies. But we also have to recreate a positive narrative about humanity, about peace, about coming together and working together and living together. We have to come back to recognizing that humanity is what holds us together and is something we need to protect as a priority today, because we are debasing almost everything.
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7) A Deadly Firefight Exposes Erik Prince’s New Shadow War in Congo
The injury of a former Green Beret and death of an elite soldier from New Zealand have highlighted the Blackwater founder’s growing role in one of Africa’s most intractable conflicts.
By Declan Walsh, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
Declan Walsh reported from Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nairobi, Kenya. He interviewed American, African and European officials, military contractors, U.N. officials and associates of Mr. Prince.
“Mr. Prince’s growing influence in Congo comes as the Trump administration seeks a new toehold for American companies in the country’s lucrative mining industry, where China’s dominance over critical minerals like cobalt is a source of growing concern in Washington. Last December the United States and Congo signed an agreement granting preferential access to American mining interests in Congo, which many Congolese officials privately called a ‘peace for minerals’ deal.”
Erik Prince, the American military contractor, has sought opportunities in resource-rich countries plagued by conflict, mostly in Africa. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The hasty evacuation of a former Green Beret who was badly wounded during a firefight in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month has opened a window into the latest mercenary deployment by Erik Prince, the high-profile American military contractor.
The former Green Beret, Tim Kennedy, who is also known for his career in mixed martial arts and frequent appearances on Fox News, was shot several times during intense fighting in Congo’s eastern highlands, where government forces have been battling a powerful, Rwanda-backed rebel group.
An elite ex-soldier from New Zealand who previously served with his country’s Special Air Service unit was killed. Six people briefed on different aspects of the ambush and subsequent evacuation spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation.
What brought both men to Congo was their employment by Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, a company notorious for a civilian massacre in Iraq in 2007. For years, Mr. Prince has sought opportunities in resource-rich countries plagued by conflict, mostly in Africa. Now his interests are expanding in Congo, where the government has hired foreign help to fend off the rebel advance in the east, while also trying to curry favor with the Trump administration.
To advance its goals, Kinshasa has turned to Mr. Prince, a prominent supporter of President Trump, giving him a central role in one of Africa’s most intractable conflicts.
Details of Mr. Prince’s operations in Congo were provided to The Times by a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Congo, Europe and other African countries, as well as U.N. officials, military contractors and some of Mr. Prince’s own employees. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military casualties or confidential business arrangements.
Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, as did a spokesman for Vectus Global, the company that leads his operations in Congo.
Mr. Prince’s growing influence in Congo comes as the Trump administration seeks a new toehold for American companies in the country’s lucrative mining industry, where China’s dominance over critical minerals like cobalt is a source of growing concern in Washington. Last December the United States and Congo signed an agreement granting preferential access to American mining interests in Congo, which many Congolese officials privately called a “peace for minerals” deal.
In late 2024, Mr. Prince signed a wide-ranging contract to provide security and mining services to President Félix Tshisekedi’s government. The contract was worth hundreds of millions of dollars over five years, although it is unclear how much has been paid out, said a former U.S. official who worked on regional diplomacy.
Since then, Mr. Prince has supplied drones and mercenaries to help Congo fight the M23, the rebel group backed by Rwanda, and has even moved into taxation. His company in Congo employs about 100 people in a drive to recoup some of the estimated $3 billion in taxes that Congo loses every year from fraud in the mining sector.
The tax effort is led by a former French Foreign Legion soldier who works from a gleaming new financial center in the capital, Kinshasa. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an employee of Mr. Prince described plans to digitize mining records, tackle widespread fraud and curb what he called the “blatant looting” of Congolese resources by criminal syndicates that include Chinese mining companies.
Mr. Prince’s employee likened the anticorruption drive to that of Eliot Ness, the Prohibition-era law enforcement officer who aggressively went after the crime boss Al Capone’s bootlegging empire.
The employee said the tax effort is going well. But in the rugged highlands 1,000 miles to the east, where Congo’s war is being fought, Mr. Prince’s other mission has been stymied by setbacks and casualties — not for the first time, say his critics.
“Among mercenaries, especially in Africa, Prince is derided because he has zero successful missions,” said Sean McFate, a former private military contractor who is currently a fellow at The Atlantic Council.
For the past year, mercenaries employed by Mr. Prince have been based at an airfield in Kalemie, a town on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in eastern Congo, several of the current and former officials said. Drone pilots from Colombia and Ukraine, contracted by Mr. Prince, carried out strikes against the M23, the most powerful of more than 100 armed groups operating in Congo. Last January, Mr. Prince’s forces helped the Congolese recapture the key city of Uvira.
But as fighting intensified recently in the nearby Minembwe Highlands, where remote villages nestle amid steep slopes, Mr. Prince’s employees were drawn into a vicious fight. One battle early last month led to the deaths of several Colombian contractors, according to a person briefed on the incident and a report seen by The Times.
Then on Sept. 17, a second group of mercenaries accompanying Congolese soldiers, this time including Mr. Kennedy, was caught in the deadly ambush.
What exactly happened is unclear. One person close to Mr. Prince, briefed on the incident, would only say that it was a “long ordeal,” which was exacerbated by a lack of support from Congolese forces.
When it was over, Mr. Kennedy had been shot multiple times and several others were dead, including Justin Conaglen, a former special operations soldier from New Zealand. Asked about Mr. Conaglen’s death, a spokesman for New Zealand’s foreign ministry said it was “providing support in this case” but declined to provide further information.
After the ambush, Mr. Prince’s officials began to search for air transport options to evacuate the dead and wounded, the people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Kennedy was rushed to Burundi and then South Africa for treatment at the private Milpark hospital in Johannesburg.
Mr. Kennedy has since been flown back to the United States, where he is recovering at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a flagship facility that primarily treats active-duty troops, friends and officials said.
The Pentagon declined to comment, and Mr. Kennedy did not respond to questions.
Known for his dual career in the military and professional sports, Mr. Kennedy served as a Green Beret and competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship until he retired from professional fighting in 2017. He has hosted shows for the History and Discovery channels, published an autobiography, “Scars and Stripes,” and has drawn criticism for making provocative statements about the nature of war on podcasts and TV.
Accusations last year that Mr. Kennedy had exaggerated his military awards prompted the Maryland National Guard to investigate. He publicly apologized for having “unintentionally misstated aspects of my military service.”
Mr. Conaglen took unpaid leave from the New Zealand military in March, before formally leaving the service in August, a spokesman for his country’s military said in an email.
Originally from New Zealand’s North Island, he competed in endurance sports and high-altitude mountaineering, and was part-owner of a holiday rental business in Raglan, a surfing town known for its black-sand beaches.
His remains were returned to New Zealand, where they were cremated on Oct. 1 after a memorial at a rugby club in the small town of Taipa.
Western mercenaries have long been a sensitive subject in Congo, where hundreds of European fighters joined an effort by the Katanga region to secede in the 1960s. Many Congolese also remember the C.I.A.’s role in the overthrow of their country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was later executed by a firing squad led by Belgian contract officers.
But Mr. Tshisekedi put aside those misgivings as the M23 began to resurge across eastern Congo in 2023. As Congo’s notoriously weak national army struggled to respond, he outsourced crucial parts of the fight to foreigners.
Romanians were tasked with defending Goma, the region’s biggest city, until they were routed in January 2025. Algerian drone pilots flew Chinese drones from Kisangani until their base was hit by a suspected Rwandan drone strike in May, current and former officials in the region said.
Those losses have left Mr. Prince as the pre-eminent military contractor in Congo — one who has embraced the language of colonialism.
In a podcast interview in 2024, he called on the United States to “put the imperial hat back on” in African countries that he said were “incapable of governing themselves.”
Asked if he was promoting a new form of colonialism, Mr. Prince replied, “Absolutely, yes.”
In interviews, Mr. Prince often plays up his tough-guy image, presenting himself as a hard-nosed pragmatist who is willing to harness the power of private military action. But in Africa, his ventures have often gone wrong.
In Libya, his mercenaries had to flee on a speedboat in 2019 after a dispute with the warlord who hired them. In Somalia, U.N. investigators accused his forces of violating an international arms embargo on Somalia in 2012.
In Congo, some fear more of the same chaos. Hiring Mr. Prince is a sign of the government’s desperation against the M23, but “it’s creating more problems than solutions,” said Zobel Behalal, author of a recent report on mercenaries in Congo. “It’s a sign that the army is very weak. And while others are making money, in the end it’s the population that suffers.”
Last month, Mr. Prince spent time promoting his new company, Vectus Air Defense Systems, which sells an anti-drone system that he says can protect oil fields, data centers and other sensitive sites. He also began negotiating with Congolese officials over a possible $200 million contract to protect the country’s air force assets, an adviser to the Congolese president said.
American officials say that Mr. Prince’s ventures in countries like Congo are entirely private and that he enjoys no U.S. government support. Still, Mr. Prince, who once donated $250,000 to a Trump campaign, uses his political connections to support his military operations. Mr. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, also served as secretary of education during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Last January Mr. Prince traveled to Belgium for a meeting at the residence of the U.S. ambassador Bill White. In the meeting, Mr. Prince outlined his views on Congo to Belgium’s top Africa diplomat, Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve, according to two European officials.
Then Mr. Prince asked for help.
His drones had been impounded at customs in the Netherlands and he needed to get them out. He also asked if Belgium would authorize the export of guns and ammunition from a Belgian manufacturer to Congo.
The State Department and Belgian foreign ministry declined to comment on the meeting, which State described as a “private diplomatic engagement.” But the answer to both of Mr. Prince’s requests, the officials said, was “No.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt in Washington, Emanuel Stoakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and John Eligon in Johannesburg.
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8) Christa Pike Discharged From Hospital After Surviving Execution Attempt
Ms. Pike, 50 and convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital late last month.
By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Nashville., Oct. 10, 2026
Christa Pike survived an execution attempt and has now been discharged from the hospital. Credit...J. Miles Cary/USA TODAY, via Reuters
Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike had spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
Her survival has gripped the nation and become a flashpoint in the debate over the death penalty at a moment when support for the capital punishment is at its lowest in decades, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Conservative leaders, however, have continued to champion the practice, including in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike’s botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state’s prison system, said he would step down this month.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
May Martinez, the mother of her victim, had traveled from her Florida home to Nashville to witness the execution and has expressed frustration that the promised capital punishment was not carried out. Before the execution, Ms. Martinez told the Times she remained angry not only over the gruesome torture of her daughter — carried out by Ms. Pike and two others — but the toll of lengthy litigation over Ms. Pike’s execution.
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the front-runner to be elected governor in November, has said she believes Ms. Pike should face execution again. The office of the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, has not said whether lawyers will ask the Tennessee Supreme Court to set another date.
Ms. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
A teenager when she was sentenced to death, Ms. Pike had spent decades largely isolated in the Nashville prison as the only woman on death row. During those years, only one other woman, Gaile Owens, was ever held on death row at the same time and the two did not have physical contact.
At the prison, Ms. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers have since said contributed to the violence of her 1995 crime. In response to questions from The New York Times before her execution, Ms. Pike said “the biggest punishment was taking me away from people and human contact.”
A 2024 settlement allowed her to physically interact with other women in the prison. But in the days before her Sept. 30 execution, Ms. Pike was returned to isolation under Tennessee’s new execution protocol.
Her lawyers have fought to shield Ms. Pike’s privacy in the aftermath of the bungled execution. But one, Randy Spivey, has described her expressing an overwhelming confusion over what happened, as well as worry about her loved ones and Ms. Slemmer’s family.
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9) When Black Writers Are Guilty Until Proved Human
By Doyle D. Calhoun, Oct. 11, 2026
Mr. Calhoun is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge.
Ricardo Tomás
The novel “C’était ça ou mourir” (“It Was Either That or Die”), by the Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien, was meant to be a standout of the French literary season. Instead, it became a fiasco that has unleashed some of the worst elements of French political hypocrisy and racism, all over questions that have exercised the publishing world in recent years: What to do about writers who use artificial intelligence? How much is too much? And can we even tell for sure?
But another story is emerging here: The five literary scandals around A.I. that I consider most significant this year have each focused on Black and brown writers.
Mr. Orélien’s novel, which recounts a young history and geography teacher’s flight from gang violence in Haiti, won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac and was longlisted for its most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt. Then an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude (Denounce Your Claude), posted that the A.I.-detection software Pangram showed parts of the novel to be up to “100 percent” A.I.-generated. Accusations of plagiarism in Mr. Orélien’s earlier work followed.
Prominent writers such as Virginie Despentes, Dany Laferrière and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, came to Mr. Orélien’s defense, but the world of French letters closed ranks against him. His Canadian publisher, Éditions du Boréal, suspended promotion for the book. The Académie Goncourt removed the novel from its longlist in the interest, it said, of preserving “the integrity of the Goncourt prize and Academy, whose central role is to promote and award prizes to literature written by women and men.” The judgment was as swift, and as trenchant, as a guillotine.
So why the attention on this novel and this writer? It seems driven less by questions of technical (or technological) literary merit than by the workings of anti-woke vigilante activists claiming to defend the purity of literature.
None of this absolves an author of allegations of plagiarism (and I agree that A.I.-generated writing is a form of plagiarism that undermines the very value of literary creation). The accusations against Mr. Orélien are considerable and alarming. But they have been leveled by groups with clear political agendas.
The X account Balance ton Claude (which echoes France’s #MeToo equivalent, #BalanceTonPorc) had fewer than 100 followers when right-wing accounts began amplifying its accusations. The original post was later revealed to have been made by the Cambridge-educated conservative columnist Samuel Fitoussi, who reposted it to his own 34,500 followers. Asked why he first posted the accusation anonymously, he told Le Monde he wanted to “avoid framing this affair as a right-left divide.” Mr. Fitoussi is the author of “Woke Fiction,” where he decries what he sees as the “ideological transformation” of media, evidenced by, among other things, inclusive casting and prominent Black narratives.
This is a familiar playbook. Reporting in France and Canada has pointed to similarities between the denunciation of Mr. Orélien and other attacks on Black intellectuals, in particular the Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday, who was found dead at his home this past summer shortly after resigning amid reports and mounting evidence that he had plagiarized and fabricated parts of his life story. In Mr. Arday’s case, a “race science network” linked to the right-wing Cambridge professor James Orr and the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel used their connections to fuel the media campaign against him.
An A.I. case also rocked the Commonwealth Prize in May. After Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove” was named a regional winner, Pangram flagged the text as 100 percent A.I.-generated. Social media users ridiculed sentences such as “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” On the left, the debate turned to the standards used to assess so-called postcolonial literatures. “Incoherence that would disqualify a European writer is reframed as authenticity when it is attached to the right cultural geography,” Lina Abushouk wrote in an article that was published on the website “Africa Is a Country.” Yet after an in-depth analysis of the work that relied on interviews and time-stamped documents, the Commonwealth Foundation cleared Mr. Nazir and named his story the overall winner.
In March, Hachette Book Group canceled the U.S. release of “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard and discontinued a British edition already on sale; in July, The Atlantic reported on unverified claims that H.M. Wolfe’s best seller “Daggermouth” was A.I.-generated (her publisher, Simon & Schuster, stood behind the novel); a few days later, Jerry Falade’s $2 million deal with Macmillan collapsed after his agents withdrew his novel amid A.I. concerns. Mr. Nazir is Trinidadian of East Indian descent, and Ms. Ballard, Ms. Wolfe and Mr. Falade are Black.
A.I.-generated fiction is swiftly becoming a widespread problem for literary publishing. But can we trust detection software like Pangram — which studies indicate has even greater limitations when it comes to languages other than English as well as nonstandard or nonnative varieties of English — to have the last word?
Without a forensic account of a book’s journey from manuscript to publication, we are unlikely to know for certain whether A.I. was used in the writing of any of these works. Mr. Orélien has said that a first draft of his novel was written in 2019, before A.I. tools were commercially available.
“C’était ça ou mourir” is not a novel I would have been eager to put on my own syllabus. Critics described it as lyrical, and Mr. Orélien has claimed there is a distinctive Caribbeanness to the text. And yet, I find it fairly linear and uncomplicated as far as Caribbean novels go, hardly innovative in the manner of René Depestre, the Haitian-French writer whose books Mr. Orélien’s narrator carries with him.
As someone who teaches literature for a living, I find the idea that an A.I. novel made it past the Fnac and Goncourt juries, as well as thousands of readers, deeply depressing. I can’t help but also find it depressing that our suspicions have been overwhelmingly focused on Black writers. Our default posture before a text should be that of a willing reader, not of a coroner performing an autopsy.
There is irony in watching the French literary establishment grapple so openly with authorship and authenticity. After all, it was Roland Barthes who declared the author “dead” in 1967 and the text a mere “fabric of quotations.” Oulipo, a group of experimental writers founded in 1960, generated texts using algorithms and other constraints. This kind of thing — write a 300-page novel without the letter “e,” which was the premise of Georges Perec’s “La Disparition” (“A Void”) — Claude could be good at.
When the news about Mr. Orélien broke, I hoped for a more devious (and delightful) scenario: an A.I.-generated novel smuggled into the running for France’s top literary prizes to lampoon a world that has long tokenized Caribbean and African writers or kept them at its periphery. “C’était ça ou mourir” is unfortunately a sadder and an older story.
France has always had a fraught relationship to its nonwhite authors. They are enlisted in progressive-sounding agendas — broadening representation, “decolonizing” curriculums — but rarely fully accepted by the establishment. They are often expected to explain their cultures of origin, to speak authentically and, above all, to conform to aesthetic and critical categories emanating from predominantly white institutions. The surveillance of Black writers is more than backlash against the literary world’s recent efforts to open its doors. It is a way for anti-woke activists to say the quiet part out loud: They would prefer that the literary world remain a fortress.
In French publishing, as elsewhere, Black writers remain strikingly rare. (Because French law restricts the collection of data on race, precise figures are hard to come by.) Those with the most to lose in these very public disgraces are young writers from underrepresented backgrounds whose work meets increased suspicion. They are being asked to choose between success and a target on their backs. Unmasking Black writers will cease to be a blood sport only when it fails to find so many spectators.
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10) Why Your Grocery Bill Will Get Worse
By Kathleen Kingsbury and Peter R. Orszag, Oct. 11, 2026
Ms. Kingsbury leads the Opinion report for The Times. Mr. Orszag is the chief executive and chairman of the global financial firm Lazard.
Kaya & Blank for The New York Times
The Times Opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, spoke with Peter R. Orszag, who leads the global financial firm Lazard, in front of an audience at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday. Their conversation centered on a recent paper Mr. Orszag coauthored, “The New Supply-Side Era: The O-Ring Meets Geopolitics,” which argues that geopolitically driven supply shocks, rather than demand fluctuations, best explain economic volatility.
Mr. Orszag’s background includes serving as a director of the Congressional Budget Office and in the Obama White House as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
During Thursday’s talk, he said the debt-financed artificial intelligence boom brought potentially serious economic risk and predicted that the Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin Warsh, will defy expectations by acting independently of the White House. Mr. Orszag signaled that more rate increases are likely, warned of a sharp jump in food prices next summer and said TSMC’s Arizona chip plant barely dents U.S. exposure to a Taiwan disruption.
What follows is a transcript of their conversation edited for length and clarity.
Kathleen Kingsbury: Peter, you’ve compared today’s global economy to the Challenger disaster. The space shuttle was a brilliantly engineered system undone by one cheap part, the O-ring. Describing the part’s role in the disaster, Richard Feynman’s point wasn’t really about the O-ring — it was that NASA’s managers had talked themselves into a belief that it leaked a little last time and we were fine, so it’s probably fine. Where in the economy — in markets, in companies, in Washington — do you see that same reasoning right now?
Peter Orszag: For decades, we had expanding globalization, and effectively infinitely elastic supply. If you had the equivalent of an O-ring, if you had a component that failed, or you had a problem sourcing it, easy just to substitute it and get another one. Just wait for the next container ship, and you’re all set.
That has started to change because of the fracturing of the global economy. Globalization metrics have not declined, but they’ve kind of gone sideways, and there is this fracturing. We’ve built supply chains that have these multiple single sources of failure; we’re living in a global economy that has a wide series of O-rings, not just one, built into many production processes.
The key point is that we’re living in a new supply-side era, in which if you look empirically at the variation in both economic activity and business activity, it’s disproportionately now coming from the supply side, not the demand side. But this is not your grandfather’s supply side. It’s not about marginal tax rates and savings rates. It’s about often geopolitically motivated things that happen in the global economy that then have really significant consequences for the economy, for business and for inflation.
And you could say, “Well, that’s interesting, but so what?” To ground the discussion in a practical process, this trend is at the heart of what the Fed and other central banks have to account for today, which was not the case 20 or 30 years ago. At the beginning of this year, Adam Posen, who runs the Peterson Institute, and I suggested that inflation in the United States would not come down; it would stay high, stay elevated, and we were almost laughed at because that was not the conventional wisdom. The overwhelming majority of forecasts said that inflation would come down. The point here is not to claim credit for the prediction, but to point out why we said what we said. And we said that if you want to know what’s happening today, you have to look at the supply shocks that were happening a year or two ago, and you could clearly see that the full impact of the tariff shock had not played through, that there was the potential for additional geopolitical risk and so on. Our prediction was more based on a methodological change or a philosophical change than just a one-time thing. Now, we all have to be armchair geopolitical analysts in order to evaluate what’s happening in the business.
Kingsbury: The paper argues that these supply shocks actually behave differently — slow to build, slow to unwind, with long lags through margins and inventories. But you also note the economic damage from any single shock — Hormuz, the chip shortage — has actually been smaller than their 1970s equivalents. Which is it? Are we more fragile, or has the system actually gotten better at absorbing hits, just more often? And why?
Orszag: The impact of any individual shock, I think, is smaller today than in the past. Look at the energy shock coming out of the conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. economy, not only from a net production perspective, but also from the perspective of energy use per unit of G.D.P., is less exposed to energy price shocks today than it was in the 1970s. So when something happens, the impact on the economy is smaller today.
But even though the impact of any given shock is smaller, we are subject to an ongoing series of these shocks. The thought that, oh, we just need to get past this one thing and then we’re good, is very likely to be wrong. The U.S. economy has survived the incoming shocks that have been happening for two reasons: a massive degree of fiscal support and the A.I. buildout. The fiscal deficit is around 6 percent of G.D.P., which is providing a substantial cushion of support to the economy. Artificial intelligence is generating activity in the economy, but that may have its own risks associated with it.
Kingsbury: You’ve called the U.S. economy “a levered bet on A.I.” — infrastructure mostly financed through debt, not equity. If that bet is wrong, however, isn’t that a classic demand-side financial fragility story, cutting against the thesis that demand shocks have been tamed and supply shocks are now the dominant risk?
Orszag: I want to make it clear that we’re saying the supply side is the more important. It doesn’t mean there are no demand-side effects. But let me talk for a second about the levered bet on A.I.
I think it’s really important for us to distinguish the technology from the business model. I am a huge fan of the technology. I am a massive user myself, and we can go through all the different ways in which I think it’s an amazing time to be alive because of this technology.
But separate that from the business model. History is replete with episodes in which debt-financed processes run into trouble. And I think the risk that we face at this moment in time has less to do with the technology, more to do with the fact that the investment levels are massive.
A recent Brookings paper estimated the investment between now and 2032 at roughly 3½ percent of G.D.P. And just to contextualize that, the buildout of highways was more like one. Railways, railroads might have been two. Electricity infrastructure was about a half a percent of G.D.P. So this is a massive, massive bet, and to your point, it is increasingly debt-financed.
And here’s, I think, the business model concern: If it is debt-financed and token spend doesn’t increase as rapidly as the underwriting behind the debt, you can have severe financial distress open up at one of these firms. That is a real significant concern. Token spend is going to come under pressure not just from open-source models, but also from local and edge compute, which doesn’t draw on the cloud architecture and tokens in the same way. If it were equity finance, less-than-expected token spending doesn’t matter. But when it’s debt finance, it really does. And I think this is a pretty significant concern that we should be focused on because I think the odds that the debt financing plays out as expected are certainly far from 100 percent.
Kingsbury: You compare what’s happening in today’s A.I. economy to the fiber-optic cable glut of the 1990s. Can you tell us a little bit about that example?
Orszag: Again, separate technology from the business model, because there are lots of things where there’s a significant amount of investment, and the people who have been making that investment don’t reap the full or even most of the benefits of it. But then there are long-term benefits to the economy as a whole, and I think that’s what happened with the dark fiber period in the telecom buildup, where you had all these fiber-optic cables going unused.
The telecom buildup, at one percent of GDP, was a fraction of the projected A.I. spend, which is estimated to cost more than $10 trillion from 2025 to 2032. It’s a dramatically different situation, but the point is that there can be long-term benefits from the investments that we’re making from a technology perspective, but it doesn’t mean that the firms that are making the investment will benefit or even survive. That distinction is relevant to any new technology financed by debt.
Kingsbury: So I think it’s natural then to turn to the question of Taiwan and TSMC’s $265 billion Arizona buildout. Taiwan now produces over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, and modeling of a blockade scenario puts U.S. G.D.P. down 3 percent in Year 1. Does the Arizona build de-risk anything?
Orszag: Barely.
I think it’s healthy for the U.S. to be building out domestic facilities and capability, but even in the best-case scenario, a very small share of overall chip production — and an even smaller share of the frontier chips — will be produced in the United States. When you’re facing a problem, it’s good to start creating workarounds. But this is not an easy or short-term fix, and it’s not a panacea. So there still will be a significant amount of exposure to the production that happens on Taiwan itself, and from that perspective, Taiwan is effectively the O-ring Island at this point.
Chips are such a key component. In the paper, we go through an example of relatively inexpensive chips during the pandemic; auto manufacturers thought that they wouldn’t need as many of them. The chip production went elsewhere. When the auto manufacturers realized that demand was not declining as much as they thought and wanted to ramp up production, they had a problem because they couldn’t get back to the front of the queue for chips. The inability to access these relatively cheap chips caused auto manufacturing lines to shut down. So the point about the O-ring is not actually a direct comparison to the space shuttle. It’s instead that, looking at something from a share-of-cost perspective is much different than a consequence-of-failure perspective. We have lots of components from that era of ever-expanding supply that are relatively cheap and, from an accounting or cost perspective, look like they can’t be that important, but whose absence or failure causes the whole thing to shut down.
Kingsbury: For those of you who are interested in today’s realities of that, my colleague Farah Stockman wrote an excellent piece about a single screw that has slowed down production of U.S. ammunition in recent years.
We’ve been talking about hardware, but China has bet large on the idea of cheap, open-weight models over frontier ones. If reasoning becomes a near-free commodity, that would be a pretty massive supply shock in the way that you’re defining it. But it also would mean that the U.S. would lose dominance in something it’s currently paying trillions of dollars to build. What outcome do you think is most likely in the next three years?
Orszag: One of the reasons it’s worth focusing on token-spend trajectory is the pressure from open source. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the market share goes to those open-source models. But it could mean that the pricing of frontier or U.S. closed models comes down to maintain some market share, with the origin of that competitive pressure being, at least in part, the open-source models.
The Chinese are playing for foundational control of key parts of the global economy. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. benefited dramatically from controlling technological infrastructure, controlling the financial stack, controlling the tech stack. It gave us an ability to exert a lot of influence on what happened in the rest of the world. And I think if you look at what’s happening in the digital financial stack, if you look at what’s happening in A.I., if you look at what’s happening in lots of parts of the physical world, including in renewables and so on, the Chinese are manufacturing at scale, whether it’s pure manufacturing or virtual, the infrastructure for the next several decades. Near-term profitability is not necessarily the only objective, especially from the Chinese side.
Kingsbury: And that doesn’t even include the rogue, unexpected choke points in the geopolitical system that have become normal at this point. In writing about your London School of Economics speech in Bloomberg, John Authers raised Goodhart’s Law, the idea that a choke point stops working the moment it’s weaponized because everyone exposed to it then has a reason to route around it. You address Goodhart’s Law in your paper. Let’s dig into that. Rare-earth elements feel like the obvious example with the one-year truce that was just extended, the initial Nexperia standoff was resolved in just a few weeks. If blocked choke points keep resolving that fast, is that a new permanent era, or is it just a bad couple of years?
Orszag: First, just to clarify, Goodhart’s Law is from monetary policy, and it basically says as soon as you start targeting some metric from a policy perspective, it immediately distorts that metric and its useful life diminishes. The analogy here is: As soon as you start or even threaten to exert pressure on one of these single sources of failure, you’re creating an incentive for people to have a workaround. We’re seeing this play out on the Strait, where there’s lots of discussion of not only the East-West pipeline, but building new pipelines, finding new ways of working around the Strait itself, et cetera.
So the question then becomes: How easy is that to do? How cautious should you be in exerting any pressure on the choke point? Rare earths, the chips, and what have you, a temporary peace is not the same thing as the vulnerability having been addressed. We are still extremely vulnerable to a cutoff of rare-earth supply from the Chinese, despite the fact that there’s a bit of a détente. And I think the way to actually interpret the stability in the U.S.-Chinese relationship right now, which is something that we should welcome, is that both sides are playing for time. The U.S. is playing for time to build out more rare-earth capability, especially on the processing side. The rare-earth materials themselves are more easily obtainable than the building of the facilities to process them. And the Chinese are playing for time to build more parts of the chip production ecosystem. Both sides have an incentive to play nice for a while, while there’s this, effectively, mutual assured destruction.
Kingsbury: Your paper is pretty candid that the reorganizing of supply chains around the geopolitical blocks as you’re describing will cost trillions of dollars. Who pays that bill? Is it the consumers, the shareholders, the taxpayers, and has anyone really been honest with the public about that?
Orszag: This is the inevitable consequence of the ever-expanding globalization period ending. Globalization worked really well from a cost perspective. Didn’t work so well from a resilience perspective. It will be more expensive to create more resilience amid this fracturing of the global economy. How much more expensive depends on the sector. And we don’t necessarily need that resilience in every area. And so the extra cost may not be that substantial depending on the sector, but it will be more expensive. And that’s inevitable. It’s very rare to be able to have a more resilient structure that doesn’t also have some additional expense associated with it. There will be a cost to moving away from that ever-expanding globalization era.
Kingsbury: What you’re actually talking about in the paper is a shift from a rules-based economic system to discretionary state capitalism. You raise the question of golden shares, and government equity stakes in companies like Intel — firm-specific deals replacing the predictable regulation that we’re used to. Can you talk a little bit about whether you think that’s good for American capitalism ultimately?
Orszag: First, a little backdrop, and then I’ll answer the question directly. Over the past 20 years, the spread in corporate performance has exploded. I think a lot of people are used to the inequality chart. If you rank companies by one common metric of performance, which is return on invested capital, it’s the same chart. The median’s basically flat, and the 10th percentile is actually down a little bit, so the spread has widened dramatically, and so I think the question is: As we enter this new supply-side era, is that likely to continue?
And we think the answer is yes. If you’re at the frontier, if you’re the top firm, you want to make sure that your entire supply chain is very high quality because the cost to you from an O-ring moment, from having one component that’s not quite as good, is actually larger than it is for the laggard firm, because you’re otherwise at the frontier and one thing messing up really collapses. Your excellence depends on every part being excellent.
A second thing that’s happening, at the same time, is: Because these choke points or single sources of failure are more geopolitical in nature, it’s changing the interaction between business and government, and this is where you get to the discretionary state capitalism point. That can happen in different ways. It can happen in the sense of: Here are the rules of the road. We’re going to define them, and there is a different relationship between business and government. Or it can be: We’re trying new things. Come see me if you want to. We’ll reach some special deals.
We are doing a lot of that, and I think what I would say is the evidence suggests that over time, that practice tends not to produce economic outcomes or business outcomes that are as beneficial as a rules-based system, because it creates a lot of unwarranted variation across firms that doesn’t have to do with their underlying performance. That creates an inefficiency, and then it does also tend to almost inevitably lead to either the appearance or reality of corruption because the payoff to being one of those favored firms is so high.
Two years ago the Nobel Prize in economics was actually awarded to a set of three economists who basically made the argument that a rules-based system and that kind of governance lead to better outcomes. The thing is, it’s not immediate. It takes time for those effects to play through.
Kingsbury: Lazard advises government and companies on exactly these kinds of choke points and geopolitical risks, what you call “contextual alpha.” Does your own business benefit from the changes in the world that you’re describing?
Orszag: It’s not that one environment is better for us than another environment. Our business is dependent on helping our clients understand the environment they’re operating in. And so Lazard — to the contextual alpha point — has always had a comparative advantage going beyond the narrow business question to a broader frame of, “Here are all the things that could affect whether this is a good decision or not,” that goes back to Felix Rohatyn and throughout Lazard’s history. I would say in today’s world that’s more important than ever because whatever the operating environment is, this operating environment has a larger impact on narrow business questions than the one from 20 or 30 years ago.
Kingsbury: You’ve talked about monetary policy a couple of times here, and you’ve written elsewhere that the A.I. capital expenditure is funded through cash flow and private credit rather than bank lending. But if monetary policy has weaker traction now, as you’re arguing, what actually stops an inflation surprise once it starts, if not the Federal Reserve?
Orszag: I think it does have to be the Fed. It’s a new paradigm in that historically, if you go back to Econ 101, the argument was that if a supply shock like the 1970 oil shock comes along, the central bank shouldn’t respond to it. You often hear some administration officials still making this kind of argument: It’s a one-time price level change. It doesn’t affect ongoing inflation. It just raises the price level, and therefore, since the Fed is focused on ongoing inflation and not one-time changes in the price level, they should just not do anything about it and let it play through.
But if you’re seeing a series of these things and they’re hitting one after another after another, then that sure looks a lot like ongoing inflation. It’s not just one thing.
We’ve had six of these shocks in six years. I think the argument that the Fed or the E.C.B. or any other central bank should just passively say, “Oh, that supply shock. Don’t worry about it,” is much weaker today, given this new environment that we’re in, than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
I think the Fed needs to get pretty good at looking at inflation today, looking at the supply shocks that we were hitting a year or two ago, and making sure you’re playing through the consequences.
Let me give you one specific example. The Fed focuses on core inflation, which excludes energy and food. But those things do seep into underlying inflation. I think it’s very likely that we’re going to see significantly higher food prices next summer in an almost predictable way because of the constraints on fertilizer and other inputs into the agricultural cycle that we already know are happening, and you can almost inevitably see that impact.
And that’s the point: If you want to be evaluating monetary policy and inflation, you have to get really granular at a sectoral level on all these shocks hitting the economy, because they have lags in terms of when they show up in prices, and you’ve got to be playing that game even as a central bank.
Kingsbury: Do you think that the current Fed is acting aggressively enough right now?
Orszag: Inflation has remained elevated in the way that we expected, and I think it was appropriate for the Fed to respond to that by raising rates at the last meeting.
Kingsbury: Do you think they should raise rates again?
Orszag: I think from here, a lot will depend on the degree to which these ongoing supply shocks hit, but that the weight of the evidence or the risk balance tilts toward probably needing higher rates in the future.
Kingsbury: I’m asking these questions because we are also experiencing a Fed that has had more pressure from the White House and legislators than perhaps ever before, so what I’m asking is more of a step-back question. Your prescription for all of these questions is a kind of superabundance, as you describe it — more capacity spread across more suppliers and geographies rather than self-reliance. But you also talk about how difficult it was for Germany to adapt after Russian gas was cut off, and permitting reform is stuck in the U.S. Senate right now until a vote after the midterms. So is superabundance actually achievable? Or is it something that today’s politics simply can’t act on?
Orszag: I may be an outlier here. I think Kevin Warsh is going to surprise us in terms of the degree of independence that he exerts on behalf of the Fed.
When I became head of the Congressional Budget Office, Bob Reischauer, who was one of the icons of former C.B.O. directors, pulled me to the side and said, “Peter, just remember, don’t leave the dance with the people who brought you.” In other words, you’re in the job now. You have a series of responsibilities to fulfill that job, and whoever appointed you is no longer really that relevant because you’re in the job.
And once you’re in the seat of being the Federal Reserve chair, you have these two icons in internal mythology: Paul Volcker and Arthur Burns. Paul Volcker, who withstood political pressure, brought inflation down, and Arthur Burns, who caved to political pressure and is seen as not the best Fed chair in history. So internally, it’s very clear which model you want to be reaching for, and we’ll see how this plays out. On the German experience, I think the lesson actually is, don’t prematurely cut off sources of resilience that could benefit you. Moving away from nuclear under the German government over the last few decades is exactly what you don’t want to do. And if I were then to bring that to the United States, I would say if I had a concern about our energy policy, it’s actually not that we’ve moved more toward, at least relative to the prior administration, fossil fuels. It’s instead being anti- renewables, because I think the right approach is actually the one the Chinese have, which is you need a kind of all-sources approach, and the mix can vary over time. But to be adamantly for or against different sources of energy, almost to the point of exclusion, is a problem, and what’s interesting about that, in turn, is despite policy shifting away from renewables, capacity buildout remains very heavily tilted toward renewables, including in states that people may find surprising, like in Texas and elsewhere. Fundamentally, from a cost and business perspective, it’s still attractive.
Kingsbury: What you’re describing is a long-term vision, but I am wondering, having served in the Obama White House in 2009, what you see as the best supply-side crisis playbook, and who in the government today do you think you would trust to run that playbook?
Orszag: The thing about crises is they’re very hard to know how they play out until you’re in them, and so it depends what we’re talking about. But let’s hypothetically say that we do face some financial distress around the A.I. buildout business model. I think the interesting question is what happens then. There’s a lot of opacity in where the ultimate liabilities rest. Does someone in the federal government decide that the A.I. labs are too big to fail? The politics of that, I think, are really challenging. Do one of the major players try to play J.P. Morgan from the early 20th century and step in with a private-sector solution? I mean, there are lots of different ways you can see that play through, but it also depends on where the shock initially hits and lots of contours of it that are really hard to game out ahead of time.
Kingsbury: That’s fair. If you’re right, and we are now “geopolitical supply-siders,” what is the one assumption that investors are still making that is wrong?
Orszag: That these are one-off events. In fact, I read an analyst report from yesterday afternoon from one of the well-known financial firms in New York that basically made the argument: Don’t worry, these are all one-time effects on inflation, and so it’ll fade. And that may be right with regard to the shocks that were happening a year ago, but our point is there are new shocks. There will be new things that come up because there are so many O-rings or single sources of failure that governments or businesses or others are going to try to exploit. That you shouldn’t be shocked that this keeps happening, and therefore you need to have a worldview in which you can continue to operate despite the fact that these things happen.
The second thing is to not become overly negative, because it’s easy to look at all these risks and go to the Eeyore side of the spectrum and think that everything is dismal. And I’m always reminded, when people get too apocalyptic, of the saying that anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist, because it’s not just the right kind of operating model, but also empirically, the fact of the matter is, things have worked out despite the fact that at any point in time in the past, you can look at all these risks and do the hair-on-fire thing. So I think we just need to also be cognizant of those risks, operate within them, but have some underlying sense of optimism, because it’s easy to get stultified otherwise.
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11) Over 100 Migrants Are Dead After Boat Capsizes Near Djibouti
The shipwreck is among the deadliest ever recorded on the route to Yemen, the International Organization for Migration said. Dozens remain missing, and the bodies of 15 children were recovered.
By Leo Sands and Saeed Al-Batati, Oct. 11, 2026
Saeed Al-Batati reported from al-Mukalla, Yemen.
A photo released on Sunday showing the shipwreck of a boat that sank off the shores of Djibouti between Thursday night and Friday morning. Credit...International Organization for Migration Djibouti, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 139 people have died, including 15 children, after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized while traveling from the Horn of Africa to Yemen, the International Organization for Migration said on Sunday. An additional 84 are still missing, the United Nations body said in a statement, stoking fears that the death toll could climb.
The shipwreck is among the deadliest ever recorded on the route, one of the most dangerous crossings in the world. More than 80 people survived, all of them Ethiopian nationals.
The boat was carrying 305 people when it overturned between Thursday night and Friday morning, near Guhere, north of Obock, a small Djiboutian port town, the migration agency said. The migrants were traveling from Djibouti to Yemen across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the agency said. Last year, more than 900 people died or went missing while making the journey, according to an agency tally.
The bodies of nine girls and six boys were among the 139 recovered as of Sunday, the U.N. migration agency said. The cause of the disaster was not immediately clear.
Tens of thousands of men and women from Ethiopia and other East African countries make the desperate sea crossing from the Horn of Africa to Yemen every year, seeking jobs and security in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. The boat trip is only the first part of a route fraught with danger. In Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war since 2014, migrants risk violence, thirst and hunger as they traverse the country toward the Saudi border, frequently on foot.
The additional risks posed by the heated conflict in Yemen, between the Houthi militia and government forces backed by Saudi Arabia, do not appear to have deterred migrants from embarking on the journey. Last week, the Yemeni government, backed by Saudi warplanes, launched a military offensive to retake territory along the Bab al-Mandab Strait from the Houthis, who are backed by Iran. Much of the fighting has taken place in and around Ras al-Ara, a key entry point for African migrants arriving in Yemen.
The humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply in the country in recent weeks, as the pace of the fighting escalates and front lines move quickly. More than 200,000 people have been displaced by the war, the migration agency said on Wednesday, a sharp increase compared with the 76,000 displaced people it counted in mid-September.
The death toll as of Sunday makes the shipwreck one of the deadliest in the Red Sea in recent years. In August last year, more than 60 migrants were killed after their boat capsized in the Gulf of Aden. The previous March, over 180 went missing after two boats capsized off the coast of Yemen.
“We cannot keep treating these deaths as normal,” said Amy Pope, the director general of the International Organization for Migration. “No one gets into a boat like that unless they believe there is no other safe way,” she said in a statement on Sunday. “I am asking governments and donors to act before the next boat goes down.”
Alexandre Coissac, the agency’s chief of mission in Djibouti, described the death toll as devastating. “This tragedy is a stark reminder of the dangers faced by migrants along this migration corridor as they seek economic opportunities,” he said in a statement.
Djiboutian authorities continued search and rescue operations on Sunday, even as hopes of finding survivors began to fade. In Obock, the migration agency said it was working with the local authorities to provide health care and shelter for the survivors. The Djiboutian health ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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12) ‘What You See in America Is Exactly What You Saw in Poland and Hungary’
By David Broder, Caroline de Gruyter, Mattia Ferraresi and Tim Schneider, Oct. 12, 2026
Mr. Broder is the author of “Mussolini’s Grandchildren.” Ms. de Gruyter is a columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC. Mr. Ferraresi is a writer for the Italian newspaper QN. Mr. Schneider is an editor in Times Opinion.
“Caroline de Gruyter: The world is changing fast. Governments can’t keep pace, are incompetent or, for various reasons, don’t meet voters’ demands. Far-right parties jump into the void. But they do not win elections by just criticizing governments and uttering extremist views: They need the media to pay attention and, crucially, they need parties from the political center to start copying them. It is only when other political parties start shifting to the right that the far right can attract a sufficient amount of voters.”
Bina Thorsen
The far right has been rising in Europe for a long time — Edward Luttwak called fascism “the wave of the future” back in 1994 — but last month’s electoral breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt by the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, felt seismic. For the first time in Germany’s postwar history, a far-right party stands on the brink of power. The AfD joins a legion of others, not least Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, either in office or perilously close to it.
In a written online conversation, Tim Schneider, an editor in Times Opinion, hosted David Broder, author of “Mussolini’s Grandchildren”; Caroline de Gruyter, a columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC; and Mattia Ferraresi, a writer for the Italian newspaper QN, to discuss Europe’s thriving far right, the roots of its success, its plans for power and, of course, what President Trump has to do with it all.
Tim Schneider: An easy one to start: How did we get here?
David Broder: The post-2008 period is often described as a temporary “populist moment.” But nativist parties obsessed with civilizational decline have since established themselves as major forces, even where electoral systems or national histories offered apparent defenses against them. The reasons are many: a drop-off in mainstream parties’ ability to guarantee social progress; the specter of immigrants undermining national identity; and fewer people voting. The financial crisis helped undo the old mainstream. Now, some of these parties are becoming the right-wing establishment and building effective coalitions.
Caroline de Gruyter: The world is changing fast. Governments can’t keep pace, are incompetent or, for various reasons, don’t meet voters’ demands. Far-right parties jump into the void. But they do not win elections by just criticizing governments and uttering extremist views: They need the media to pay attention and, crucially, they need parties from the political center to start copying them. It is only when other political parties start shifting to the right that the far right can attract a sufficient amount of voters.
Mattia Ferraresi: I guess the short answer, for me, is the crisis of liberalism in the post-Cold War era. Mainstream liberal politics, in both its left- and right-wing versions, failed to deliver on its promises, not only in terms of welfare and economic growth but also in the more complex realm of identity and meaning. The apparent triumph of that worldview paved the way for its own demise. What we’re seeing today, all over the world, are different — sometimes very different — expressions of the same disillusionment with liberalism and its policies.
Schneider: A common perception is that these parties appeal to a particular type of voter, often older workers in left-behind, deindustrializing areas. Is that true? Is there a core far-right constituency in Europe?
Ferraresi: There’s some truth to the far right’s appeal to the post-working class, I guess, but I would tie it to a lack of political and cultural identity. The AfD’s strength in eastern Germany is only partly linked to the region’s dire economy; at a deeper level, the party offers a framework for identity. Voters across Europe who are drawn to the far right are often united by a sense of meaninglessness that was once filled by other structures and parties (mainly Christian Democracy and Communism). James Carville’s line about the economy was an effective campaign message for Bill Clinton, but it was ultimately shallow and wrong. It’s the identity, stupid!
Broder: These parties draw moral force from claiming to represent people the left forgot. Even their more middle-class voters like to think they’re on the side of the underdog. The real picture is more mixed: The National Rally, for instance, grew earlier in the areas you mention, but now its support is rising faster among white-collar groups. Though lower-educated voters in deindustrialized rural eastern Germany were early backers of the AfD, the party has since captured much broader attention and support. In many countries, these parties harvested former social-democratic voters after 2008. Today, they are cannibalizing the mainstream center right.
De Gruyter: Most voters will go for centrist parties — we are middle-class countries, after all. The problem is that if mainstream parties leave the center and all that is on offer is the far right, part of the electorate will go for that, and some will simply stop voting. People vote for far-right extremist parties because that is what is on offer. I think it is a myth that voters are shifting to the right. Parties are shifting to the right!
Schneider: It’s interesting that we’ve not really mentioned immigration, which most people regard as these parties’ signature issue. What about the rest of their platform — what is their offer economically or culturally?
De Gruyter: What they usually offer is the opposite of what mainstream parties offer. And they flip-flop in order to catch votes. For example, Ms. Le Pen used to protect the working class, with a plan to bring down the retirement age and so on. But now, with France drifting toward huge deficits and financial markets taking note, she suddenly switches tactics and proposes big cuts to welfare. N’importe quoi, really.
Broder: Often these parties are called “welfare-chauvinist,” in that they seek to protect social services by barring new arrivals. I think this is simplistic. Most offer some renewed idea of meritocracy and even retool the Third Way promise to reward “hard-working families,” while also prioritizing the nuclear-family model. They may even speak of integrating some deserving immigrants. But broadly the story is that migrants are unfairly cutting in line or being pushed ahead by elites, at the expense of hard-working nationals.
Ferraresi: Anti-immigration policies are essentially about providing an identity, whether rooted in whiteness, language, Christianity or something else. That, I think, is why they are so effective at energizing voters — far more so than other culturally conservative causes, such as traditional family values or opposition to abortion. In a culturally conservative country like Italy, Ms. Meloni did not win the election, and go on to lead the longest-serving government in the history of the republic, by rallying against abortion or same-sex marriage.
Schneider: What does Ms. Meloni’s tenure tell us about the far right in office?
Ferraresi: I think it tells us that going mainstream is the only way to govern. Ms. Meloni’s story is that of a shrewd politician who understood right away that her only chance of political survival lay in being legitimized by the European elite. Her success was forged in Brussels, so much so that when she was forced to choose between Mr. Trump and the European Union, she picked the latter. I’m not sure there’s a broader lesson here for other far-right parties, but the strategy has certainly worked for her.
Broder: Ms. Meloni has inspired imitators to become pro-NATO, pro-business parties who aim to change the European Union from within. Yet it’s also no surprise that a new further-right party, National Future, is quickly rising in Italy and ideas like so-called remigration are spreading. This is in part a critique of Meloni-style mainstreaming — she hasn’t delivered on more fiery promises — but also shows how such governments open space for more radical proposals.
De Gruyter: Ms. Meloni’s tenure tells us that part of the far right mellows when in power — though not all! The AfD is different, as is the Freedom Party of Austria. Once in power, Ms. Meloni suddenly became pro-NATO, pro-E.U. and pro-Ukraine. The far right in many other countries, including France, has also made huge U-turns. They do not want to exit the European Union anymore but to change Europe from the inside. This is a completely different strategy than before.
Schneider: The general shift of these parties toward accommodation with the bloc makes me wonder: Is a far-right European Union a contradiction in terms?
Broder: Though Ms. Meloni’s party still sometimes paints Brussels as a liberal blob, once-radical ideas like outsourcing border control to non-European states are now the norm — and conservative and far-right forces have repeatedly formed majorities, including in dismantling the bloc’s earlier green push. Most of the parties we’re talking about trade in vague ideas like a “Europe of nations,” emphasizing both civilizational solidarity and the defense of national sovereignty. They have no shared federalist project, obviously, but faced with issues like high energy prices or rearmament, they can agree to some cross-border collaboration. And no one really wants to dynamite the euro.
Ferraresi: The reality is that on some issues, most notably immigration, the Overton window in the European Union has shifted significantly over the past decade. On other subjects, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: Positions on abortion or same-sex marriage that are now considered fringe were common among conservatives until relatively recently. We could find plenty of shifts in other areas. Remember when the Union was remarkably soft on Vladimir Putin’s Russia and eager to do business with it? That was not so long ago.
De Gruyter: Short answer: yes. Europe is about living together on a crowded continent. The only way far-right parties can succeed in European politics is by making compromises and seeking alliances. This is exactly what they are doing now in the European Parliament. Have you noticed that these parties all support protecting the single market against China and the United States? And condemn Mr. Trump for intending to snatch Greenland?
Schneider: We clearly need to talk about Mr. Trump. Let’s start with his administration’s support for these far-right parties, especially the AfD: How significant is that?
Ferraresi: It’s hard to prove or measure, but I think the AfD benefited very much from the Trumpian endorsement. Overall, it’s still a small party, but the Trump administration, and especially Marco Rubio’s State Department, was instrumental in creating a platform where parties like it could thrive. A pretty huge boost, all things considered.
Broder: The Trump administration and figures like Elon Musk undermine any attempt to wall off more radical parties like the AfD or Restore in Britain. So, they definitely give a platform to minoritarian forces. Yet it’s also true that the practical consequences of Mr. Trump’s conduct can be bad for these parties if they are in or near power. Mr. Trump’s Middle East policy, for example, has had direct effects on voters’ pockets.
De Gruyter: Well, it doesn’t always work: When the United States went all in for Viktor Orban in Hungary, he lost! Mr. Trump is incredibly unpopular in Europe, including with far-right voters. So, far-right parties are keeping their distance. Remember also when Ms. Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and Mr. Trump supported her? She hated it and refused to talk about it.
Schneider: If not always a successful booster, is the Trump administration — militantly anti-migrant, economically protectionist, culturally aggressive — a useful template for what far-right governments in Europe could look like?
Broder: Many battle lines are comparable to the United States, on identity and immigration, though some countries (like France) have a far more racialized political conflict than others (like Poland). Still, most European societies are less violent than the United States and I think ICE-style units aren’t quite on the agenda, even if Europe’s own border agency, Frontex, has also been implicated in the illegal pushback of migrants. Fundamentally, the European Union is not the same kind of power as the United States.
De Gruyter: What you see in America is exactly what you saw in Poland and Hungary during the reign of the far right. Most people did not vote for Law and Justice or Fidesz because they wanted to abolish democracy. They voted for them because of gasoline prices or other dissatisfactions with the performance of the previous government. When the parties started to attack democracy, voters turned away from them. That’s why, in the end, they lost.
Ferraresi: I don’t think a successful far-right governing party in Europe could realistically look like the Trump administration. One reason is the dense web of E.U. ties; another is that parliamentary systems are mostly designed to balance political forces, at the expense of executive power (and sometimes governability). Ms. Meloni, I think, is once again a case in point. I suspect any far-right party that wants to govern would have to follow a similar path.
Schneider: There are elections in Spain next month, in France and Italy next year, and in Britain and Germany before too long. By the end of these contests, far-right parties could be in power, jointly or alone, in all of them. So the last question is simple: How can they be stopped?
De Gruyter: By other parties. The far right needs other parties to get into government. So if center-right parties stay the course and make clear they will not work with the far right, many unhappy voters will not go for the far right — because that would make their vote pointless. It is only when center-right parties express willingness to cooperate with the far right that those parties can attract great numbers of votes. It’s quite simple, really.
Broder: Not just by warning against them but by mobilizing more people for something better. That may sound trite. But Pedro Sánchez did that last time in Spain: Back then, he ran on a record of cost-of-living measures, as well as criticizing the conservative and far-right alliance. Ultimately, angry nativist parties’ message takes root when mainstream parties fail to uphold a broadly accepted model of social progress and reward for hard work. Attending to that is the key antidote.
Ferraresi: In a democracy, far-right parties can only be stopped by other parties offering something more appealing to voters who are confused, scared and feel voiceless. Whether we like it or not, unregulated immigration is a source of concern for many in Europe, and mainstream parties need to face that and come up with competitive platforms. The far right thrives on the questions everyone else refuses to answer.
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13)How American Retirees on Different Incomes Rely on Social Security
Social Security funds are on track to run short by 2032, which would mean a reduction in benefits. Here’s how four hypothetical households rely on the program in retirement.
By Tara Siegel Bernard, Oct. 12, 2026
If Congress doesn’t act, more than 60 million Americans could see their Social Security income drop by nearly a quarter in six years.
That’s when Social Security’s retirement trust fund is expected to run dry, and incoming revenue would be enough to pay only 78 percent benefits, reducing every retiree’s paycheck by 22 percent.
The program, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law in 1935 during the Great Depression, is not in danger of completely running out of money. While lawmakers have long known they would need to move to close that gap — through tax increases, benefit cuts or some combination — they have been slow to act on this politically charged topic.
But the window is closing.
Many of the lawmakers being elected in the coming midterms will probably be entrusted with drafting reform packages, and they will need to contemplate crucial questions: Who will absorb the costs of any changes to shore up the program, and what will the consequences be? Will people be less prepared for retirement as a result?
Procrastination has been costly, making these decisions now more difficult. Even some Republicans, who often resist any tax increases, have recently proposed raising the income ceiling on payroll taxes, the dedicated tax that finances the program, so that wealthier households contribute more.
“Any serious Social Security reform package should be scored on what it does to household retirement outcomes, not only on what it does to trust-fund balances,” said Jack VanDerhei, director of retirement research at Morningstar’s Center for Retirement & Policy Studies.
The details of any fix-it plan are crucial given the program’s extraordinary reach, potentially affecting tens of millions of working Americans, as well as future retirees and current ones — many of whom lean heavily on the program.
Just how heavily do they lean on it?
To address that question, we looked at four hypothetical households — two singles, two married couples — with different income levels and resources to illustrate the role that Social Security plays in their financial lives, a topic we’ll continue to closely track in the year ahead.
In each illustration, individuals are 64 years old and plan to retire and file for Social Security at 67, the age at which they qualify for a full retirement benefit. All analyses were run by Mr. VanDerhei of Morningstar.
Monthly Social Security benefit at age 67: $1,543
Social Security benefit if Congress doesn’t act: $1,204 (around age 70)
Social Security is often a primary source of income for the lowest-income Americans, according to other analyses.
In this case, a single man who earned $34,000 a year, on average, over his working life is one of the roughly half of households across the country that have no money in retirement accounts to draw on.
The Middle-Income Retiree
Monthly Social Security benefit at age 67: $2,548
Social Security benefit if Congress doesn’t act: $1,987 (around age 70)
Total monthly income from Social Security + savings: About $2,620
In this case, a single worker earned about $75,000, on average, over her career. That puts her monthly Social Security benefit at $2,548, which accounts for the vast majority of her monthly income because she has just $20,000 in retirement savings (generating about $70 a month), like households with similar earnings.
About three-quarters of similarly situated households also own their own homes; the median household holds $137,000 in home equity.
With pensions fading and ever-rising costs — health care, housing, college — continuously pushed onto families, Social Security has served as a stabilizer during retirees’ most vulnerable years. Should the stock market plunge on the eve of your retirement, damaging savings at the most inopportune time, Social Security remains unaffected.
Even households with solid income and savings need to stow away and accumulate substantial sums to draw even a modest income — one that must last for potentially several decades.
That $1 million savings milestone? It will typically generate $40,000 a year (adjusted upward for inflation in future years).
The Middle-Income Couple
Monthly Social Security benefits at age 67: $5,096
Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t act: $3,975 (around age 70)
Total monthly income from Social Security + savings: $5,668
Each worker here earned $75,000, on average, over the course of their careers, for a combined total of $150,000. Retirement savings of $171,700 provide $572 in monthly income. Most households like theirs also own homes, with the median household holding $251,800 in home equity. A little more than a quarter also hold stocks, bonds or mutual funds outside retirement accounts.
The Higher-Earning Couple
Monthly Social Security benefits at age 67: $6,681
Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t act: $5,211 (around age 70)
Total monthly income from Social Security + savings: $8,131
This couple collectively earned about $261,000 a year — one spouse earned at least the maximum amount subject to Social Security payroll taxes each year, which works out to an average of about $186,000 over this spouse’s career; the other worker earned $75,000 on average.
Their retirement savings of $435,000 could generate monthly income of $1,450. Most similar households own their homes; the median household holds $400,600 in home equity. About half hold stocks, bonds or mutual funds outside retirement accounts.
Many retirees report feeling reliant on Social Security.
But it’s more than just a feeling: Among beneficiaries 60 and older in the middle of a five-rung income ladder, where median household income was projected at about $90,900 in 2024, Social Security made up 38 percent of household income on average, according to the Social Security Administration’s MINT model, which uses administrative earnings and benefits records to make projections.
Those in the next-highest rung, with median household income of $152,300, leaned on Social Security for a quarter of their income, on average, while the group just below the middle relied on it for 56 percent.
Other studies have shown that roughly 42 percent of households rely on Social Security for at least half of their retirement income.
The program is more than just an inflation-adjusted insurance policy against running out of money in retirement — it also provides disability, survivor and family benefits. When so much of our financial lives rides on luck, timing and our collective human vulnerability, this social contract has persevered.
Assumptions and sources for illustrations
— Each example pairs a Social Security benefit calculated for a hypothetical worker born in 1962 who claims at 67 in 2029, with the retirement savings of real households near retirement with similar wages. The low and middle earners’ pay follows a career pattern based on actual workers’ earnings, rising with national wages; the higher earner earns at least the maximum amount subject to Social Security tax each year. Career-average earnings are stated in 2026 wage levels. Benefits are in 2026 dollars adjusted for inflation.
— The reduced check assumes the retirement trust fund is depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, as projected in the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, after which about 78 percent of scheduled benefits would initially be payable. It is an illustrative proportional reduction, not a benefit estimate provided by the Social Security Administration.
— Retirement savings figures are medians from the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, adjusted for inflation, for comparable households headed by someone age 55 to 64 in 2022. They are not projections; balances could rise or fall with contributions, withdrawals and investment returns.
— Retirement savings include individual retirement accounts, like Roth I.R.A.s, and employer plans such as 401(k)s and 403(b)s. Income from savings assumes a 4 percent annual withdrawal. It excludes pensions, earnings, home equity and other assets like stocks, bonds, mutual funds and annuities held outside retirement accounts. All income figures are before taxes.
— All data and analysis are from Jack VanDerhei, director of retirement research at Morningstar’s Center for Retirement & Policy Studies.
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