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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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 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 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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) A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I.
An attack by what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian drone with an Nvidia chip presages a dystopian future of weaponry untethered to humans.
By Andrew E. Kramer, Visuals by Nicole Tung, Aug. 24, 2026
Reporting from Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine
“A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others. … The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts… The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said. … While traditional software follows step-by-step rules written by a person, an A.I. system derives its own rules by finding patterns across enormous amounts of data, a process called machine learning. That allows it to manage unanticipated situations. It also means no one can fully predict what it might do. … Ukraine, too, has tested self-targeting A.I. systems.”
The young woman ran for her life, but it was too late.
A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others.
They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have died in Russian airstrikes, but the circumstances of their deaths came with an ominous twist. The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and the forensic team that examined wreckage from the deadly strike and others in the city.
The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said.
It is a development long watched for in the war in Ukraine, presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.
“This is a risk for the whole world,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of air defenses in Zaporizhzhia. “In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”
Analysis of debris from this attack and others in Zaporizhzhia found that the drones had onboard minicomputers, sold commercially by Nvidia, that made their targeting decisions, the experts and military officials said. Nvidia produces a majority of the chips powering the world’s most advanced A.I. systems.
The presence of Nvidia modules and a lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to surmise that the weapons were guided by an autonomous A.I. system, which was confirmed on further investigation.
Autonomous A.I. systems can be trained on thousands of images to recognize categories like “river,” “military truck” or “person.” Self-targeting drones use their cameras to hunt for these things with greater precision than a human pilot can provide. But opponents of such weapons argue that, without human intervention, drones may be more prone to mistakes or violations of the laws of war, such as by failing to distinguish innocent civilians from combatants.
The use of self-targeting A.I. in the gas station attack, on July 6, would be the first documented case in which civilian deaths were caused by a Russian drone outfitted with such a system, said Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She added that the Nvidia module “is the best proof” that Russia was experimenting with autonomous A.I.
While an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has written on social media that Russia was testing self-targeting A.I. systems, the fatalities have not been previously reported, nor have the details of the Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module that was used.
Both Russia and Ukraine were already using A.I. in multiple drone models before the fully autonomous drones emerged. In those earlier models, A.I. is used only for what is known as the “last mile” — the final stage of the attack, after a remote human pilot has selected the target. Fully autonomous A.I. removes humans from the final target selection.
The Nvidia chip in the Zaporizhzhia attack was not encrypted, Ukrainian officials said, so they could see the terrain images that had been uploaded to the module, enabling the drone to track visual landmarks and stay on course. They were also able to examine coding, they said, that revealed what types of targets the drone had been trained to recognize and attack, like propane tanks.
Earlier drone models are generally either piloted by human operators, through radio transmissions or fiber-optic cables, or they are preprogrammed with coordinates. As drones have taken over the battlefield in Ukraine, their pilots have become prime targets.
An autonomous A.I.-guided drone, by contrast, requires no human pilots and can be more accurate than a munition programmed to hit coordinates.
Local air defense officials say that Russia has been aiming for civilian objects like pumps or propane tanks at gas stations in trying out autonomous drones in Zaporizhzhia, along with military recruitment centers. It is not clear why these targets were chosen for the tests.
Vadym Kushnikov, a drone expert at the Kharkiv Aviation Institute in Ukraine, said the drone that killed the three civilians was “a preprogrammed tool trained in virtual reality to track specific objects.”
While traditional software follows step-by-step rules written by a person, an A.I. system derives its own rules by finding patterns across enormous amounts of data, a process called machine learning. That allows it to manage unanticipated situations. It also means no one can fully predict what it might do.
Rights groups and the International Red Cross vehemently oppose the use of A.I. weapons without humans in the loop. Such groups say that autonomous systems essentially leave robots to interpret international law in determining legitimate targets in war.
But some experts argue that, in the future, weapons should in fact be required to have A.I. systems. These weapons are safer, the argument goes, because they are able to make decisions before striking, even if not always perfectly, unlike unguided aerial bombs or ordinary artillery shells that just fall without seeing what they will hit.
The weapon in the fatal strike was flying in a group of about half a dozen drones, according to the regional military governor, the city’s air defense commander and an air defense team on duty that day. None were emitting radio signals, and they had other characteristics associated with Russia’s autonomous A.I. tests, including being launched in a wave, the officials said.
While some of the A.I.-guided drones tested by Russia have detonated on impact, others have not and remained intact, Ukrainian officials said. They showed debris from two such drones to reporters for The New York Times. The Times photographed the Nvidia computer module inside the drones and sent the images to the company.
Nvidia confirmed that the photos showed a Jetson Orin minicomputer. Such modules, which cost only a few hundred dollars, have been found on several types of Russian weapons.
In a statement, the company said that the minicomputer was a consumer-grade product “sold to students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” Nvidia sells the computer in many countries but not in Russia. It is, though, widely available through resellers, the statement said.
Ukraine, too, has tested self-targeting A.I. systems. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister who was recently ousted, said in an interview with The Times late last month that Ukraine tested an entirely autonomous A.I. system in Russian-occupied Crimea over the past several months. Mr. Fedorov said that the devices targeted fuel storage sites and military equipment and that no civilians had been killed.
While the drones in the Zaporizhzhia attack had no antennas to send back data on the tests, Russian forces often fly reconnaissance drones that can record strikes. The city is also believed to harbor Russian spies who report battlefield damage assessments.
The absence of an antenna would not by itself prove that a drone was self-targeting. It could be preprogrammed to fly a route, with computer algorithms like those used for decades in auto-piloting systems for aircraft. But that drone would not need an Nvidia chip.
Russia began test flights of A.I.-guided Molniya drones — a mass-produced fixed-wing model — in May, and started testing self-targeting systems in the V2U, another fixed-wing drone, several months before that, Ukrainian air defense experts said. Some of the V2U tests were only for “last mile” targeting.
In interviews, some residents of Zaporizhzhia, which lies just nine miles from the front, said that the thought of devices buzzing over the city, making their own decisions to kill, brought chills. But Ukrainian cities have been so heavily bombarded for years that life had already been reshaped by less sophisticated drones.
Interceptor drones, piloted (for now) by men and women who are local heroes, are one answer to the drone threat. Anti-drone nets are another, covering about 240 miles of roads in and around Zaporizhzhia.
Another defensive measure is camouflage. Plastic sheeting, for example, is propped at odd angles around propane tanks at gas stations, in an effort to fool A.I. image recognition systems.
Moments before the exploding drone barreled toward the gas station on July 6, a group of people huddled by the wall of a nearby apartment building for safety, having already heard blasts as the drones came in waves.
Oksana Ishenko, a station attendant, stood beside Ms. Bubynets. “She was crying from fear,” Ms. Ishenko recalled.
Then some in the group started to shout, “A plane! A plane!” Ms. Ishenko said. A drone was heading their way. Ms. Bubynets and several others bolted, fanning out in a parking lot. After the drone failed to make its way around the apartment building, it detonated before reaching its target.
Ms. Bubynets, who had been studying accounting at Zaporizhzhia National University, lay on the pavement, unmoving, with blood flowing from her nose. She was declared dead at a hospital, said Tetiana Melikhova, one of her professors. The two others killed, Oleksiy Svirin, 41, and Roman Karpiy, 48, died later of their wounds.
“They are training the technology,” Colonel Minaiev, the city’s air defense commander, said of the Russians. A.I. is good but not yet perfect, he added. “They are looking for mistakes and will fix them.”
Evelina Riabenko, Stanislav Kozliuk and Paul Mozur contributed reporting.
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2) U.S. Military Kills 2 People in Attack on Boat in Pacific
The United States has killed at least 223 people since its campaign of boat strikes began nearly a year ago.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 24, 2026
A screen grab from a video posted by U.S. Southern Command on Monday showed what it said was a vessel operating along a drug-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. U.S. Southern Command
The U.S. military killed two men in a strike against a boat in the eastern Pacific that it said was transporting narcotics, U.S. Southern Command announced early Monday. It was the first such strike by the military since June 21.
The United States began a campaign of boat strikes last year in the run-up to the military operation that seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. The military has continued the operations in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing at least 223 people in 67 strikes that it said were involved in the narcotics trade.
But narcotics experts say the boat strikes have failed to slow the smuggling of cocaine from South America to the United States. According to Brown University, the costs of the operation were at $4.7 billion as of March 31.
Legal specialists also have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
Southern Command provided little detail about the strike that took place on Sunday but noted that intelligence reports said the vessel was trafficking narcotics and traveling on a route used by drug smugglers.
“Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” Southern Command said in a statement, referring to a new military unit set up to expand the Pentagon’s war against drugs in cooperation with regional allies.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, said in the statement on social media announcing the strike, “When I ordered the establishment of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, it was precisely for this purpose: to accelerate, synchronize, and execute lethal actions against these destabilizing narco-terrorist networks.”
Southern Command did not explain the two-month lull in strikes since an attack on a boat in the Caribbean killed eight people on June 21. Military officials have attributed the pause at least in part to planes and other equipment being diverted to help victims of the recent earthquake in Venezuela.
The Trump administration has in recent months stepped up its cooperation with allies across Latin America to combat the drug trade. It created the coalition, part of the regional Shield of the Americas alliance, and convened its first meeting in March.
That month, Ecuador and the United States launched joint military operations against designated terrorist groups. In May, the Pentagon pressed Guatemala to agree to joint U.S. airstrikes and other military action inside its borders to target suspected drug groups.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said earlier this month that Honduras and Colombia had also agreed to allow joint operations.
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3) Is This a New Era of Class Warfare?
By Kim Phillips-Fein, Aug. 24, 2026
Dr. Phillips-Fein is a professor of history at Columbia University.
Erin Jia
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”
The young man’s voice in the video is earnest and clear, forceful but controlled. His face is not visible, but his hand is shaking a little as he holds a lighter. “There goes your inventory.” More than $600 million worth of damages later, a Kimberly-Clark warehouse lay in a smoking mess, and the young man alleged to be in the video — Chamel Abdulkarim, who worked for a distribution company servicing the warehouse — was charged with arson.
Mr. Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty; his possible motivations will soon be litigated in court. But even as they are, the early April torching of the warehouse in Ontario, Calif., seems to capture a political mood. That same week, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the mansion of the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. In June, prosecutors revealed that their case against the man charged with setting the blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades fire in California hinged on the argument that he was motivated by class rage. (The jury, which could not reach a verdict, was less convinced.)
Hanging over all these attacks was the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in broad daylight on a Manhattan street in December 2024, a crime that Luigi Mangione admitted to earlier this month. The manhunt for Mr. Mangione, and the ensuing coverage of his arrest and trial, helped cement an image of him as an avenger of all those wronged by private health insurance. But Mr. Mangione’s celebrity has spurred fear: Companies are spending more on security for their top executives. This year, a law enforcement intelligence hub put out a bulletin, as reported by The Intercept, stating that the rich are facing a “heightened threat environment” as more people blame them for economic duress: “Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives.”
Class inequality has surged into the view of American politics in recent years, but this isn’t the first bout of class violence this country has seen. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 12-hour working days were common and child labor legal and federal minimum wages nonexistent, neither political party offered meaningful relief, pressing the working class to the wall. Violence — sabotage, dynamite, assassinations — ensued.
But there’s a key difference. In that earlier era, the anarchists and trade unionists who committed acts of violence did so, however rashly, in the hopes of affecting change. What is more, there were labor organizations and political movements committed to bringing about better conditions for working-class people. In time, they achieved at least some of these goals.
Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.
While the extreme concentration of wealth today may echo the dawn of industrial capitalism, the conditions of class confrontation then were profoundly different. Then, the workplace itself was extremely dangerous: Thousands of workers died in industrial accidents annually in the early decades of the 20th century. The police and National Guardsmen came in to break strikes, while companies hired private militias to prevent workers from organizing.
Radical workers responded with violence of their own, instilling great fear among the elites of the day. In the coal fields of Western Pennsylvania, Irish miners killed at least 14 mine officials over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. When the Western Federation of Miners sought to organize in 1899, union supporters used dynamite to destroy company property. The governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, imprisoned about a thousand workers in response. In 1905, after leaving office, a bomb killed him at his home. Union leader William Haywood was among those charged (a member of the miners’ union had confessed to the crime and implicated union leadership; a jury found Haywood not guilty). President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist who had lost his job during an economic crash. Two union members dynamited the offices of The Los Angeles Times, widely seen as hostile to organized labor, in 1910.
There’s one attack among this history of violence that feels eerily familiar to what we see today: an assassination attempt against Henry Clay Frick, the general manager of the Homestead, Pa., steel mill of Carnegie Steel, during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When it looked as if Mr. Frick, who was acting for Andrew Carnegie, was seeking to replace the factory workers with hired strikebreakers, the entire town of Homestead rose up in revolt.
The Homestead workers were winning in the court of public opinion until Alexander Berkman, a young anarchist, broke into Mr. Frick’s office, shot him with a revolver, then stabbed him twice. Mr. Frick survived; Mr. Berkman was arrested. The union leadership passed a resolution condemning the assassination attempt, but the press, the politicians and many in the public blamed the union for the act of violence, even though Mr. Berkman had acted by himself. The strike fell apart not long after.
On the surface, Mr. Berkman’s act might resemble that of Mr. Mangione. He was a young man seeking to carry out an assassination to protest the extreme economic inequality and injustice of the time. His attack was a frightening demonstration that all people are frail when confronted by lethal force, no matter how much wealth they might control or how many private guards they might amass.
But the differences are far more profound. Mr. Berkman attempted to assassinate Mr. Frick after an entire community had mobilized to defend ideals of economic security, equality, democracy and freedom. He was not part of the union, but his act of violence was to him apparently part of a larger call to arms. Mr. Berkman was convicted and served 14 years in prison.
Mr. Mangione, by comparison, is believed to have acted alone, writing his “manifesto” without talking to comrades or friends. He had not previously been involved in political efforts to change the American insurance system. He has entered a guilty plea to federal stalking charges resulting in death, without offering an extensive political defense (he still faces murder charges in a New York State case); at one point, his lawyers had considered arguing that he suffered an “extreme emotional disturbance.” While he seems disconnected from any political mobilization, his act of violence has prompted a political response: the interpretation, which seems to be shared by many in the economic elite, that he was driven not by mental distress, but by the class divide.
Mr. Berkman’s assassination attempt very likely awakened fear and guilt in Andrew Carnegie. He had been in Europe during the Homestead Strike, and he found it deeply upsetting: “Never employ one of these rioters,” he wrote Mr. Frick. But even before Homestead, Carnegie had become persuaded that the extreme concentration of wealth would inevitably breed “social distrust.” As he put it in an 1889 essay: “Each Caste is without sympathy with the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it.”
Carnegie believed that the answer to class rage was for the rich to invest their money in philanthropic projects so that the poor would become convinced that they were benevolent at heart, able to steward the resources of society. As he put it, “Even the poorest can be made to see … that great sums gathered by some of their fellow citizens and spent for public purposes … are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.” In other words, libraries, concert halls and universities over higher wages.
Whether Carnegie’s efforts were successful at ameliorating the anger of working-class people is doubtful. What is striking in Carnegie is not so much the sense of social obligation as his recognition that the perceptions of poor people might matter for his own comfort and the stability of his society. That acknowledgment seems lacking today.
Instead, fear is causing the wealthy to invest in literal fortifications. Luxury home builders are incorporating a vast array of new security features into the mansions they construct, from safe rooms to retina scanners to guard towers and moats. Island communities like Indian Creek Island in Miami, also known as “Billionaire Bunker,” reportedly draw ultrawealthy residents like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos with the benefit of being effectively closed to the public. With one guarded bridge as the only way in or out, the island takes the idea of a gated community to a new level. There are Land Rovers remodeled for the frightened rich, augmented with pepper-spray guns, and dog breeders who specialize in canines designed to attack intruders.
But it is hard to imagine these measures doing anything other than making the paranoia of the wealthy worse. If anything, they create visual reminders of a deeply fragmented and divided society, physical testimony to the barriers that separate the haves and have-nots. Like the infamous “Wall of Shame” built in 1980s Lima, Peru, which separated a privileged gated community from an impoverished neighborhood, they are efforts to create security that wind up making fear manifest.
American class relations continued to be fiercely violent after World War I, as companies and the government worked together to break the labor movement. Hundreds of immigrant radicals faced deportation following a series of bombings, as the historian Beverly Gage has written, including one at the home of the United States attorney, general, A. Mitchell Palmer.
The class violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries continued during the 1920s, in the mine wars of West Virginia, and the 1930s, when many corporations stockpiled gas equipment and guns to resist rebellion. Company security forces fired on unemployed workers at the Ford Motor Company in 1932 who were participating in a “hunger march.” Police officers killed strikers on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934, sparking a general strike. In Chicago three years later, police officers shot and killed 10 pro-labor marchers in what came to be called the Memorial Day Massacre. Only days before, Ford security guards savagely beat up United Automobile Workers union leaders, including the union president, Walter Reuther, on camera — images that were carried in newspapers throughout the country.
But the growth of the labor movement over these years opened up new possibilities. The creation of independent institutions, like unions and consumer cooperatives, gave workers a say over their basic conditions on the job, to grant them more autonomy and more freedom. Such “countervailing powers,” to quote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, also mitigated the total power of employers and the wealthy. Henry Ford fought unions at his company bitterly, but when workers finally were able to vote on the question in a federally supervised election in 1941, 97 percent voted to unionize.
After World War II, regular increases in the minimum wage, the expansion of health insurance and pensions, tax policies that reduced extreme inequality and public investment in higher education all added up to an economy more responsive to the needs of working-class people. The political circumstances of these measures are distinct, but they generally grew out of the political organizing that had helped support the New Deal of the 1930s. They came to be with the help of New Deal Democrats who were responsive to the labor movement, which not only represented workers on the job, but brought their interests into political life.
In short, the distance between the wealthy and the underclass became smaller, and the virulence between the classes did, too.
In the past 50 years, however, political leaders have vilified government programs, tried to break public sector strikes, starved the welfare state of funds and transformed the tax system so that it has tilted to favor the wealthy. Organizing a labor union has become far more difficult and a first contract much harder to win. We’ve seen precisely the hardening of the “castes” that Carnegie warned of long ago.
Societies in which there is an extreme division between the wealthiest and the rest tend to be politically unstable ones as well. They provide fertile ground for conspiracy theories to flourish, as people grapple with why they are struggling and why the mechanisms of democracy do not seem to respond to their needs. Inequality makes it virtually impossible to sustain the feeling that we’re all part of the same political project, and so it makes it hard for people to believe that democratic government is possible — that we all have a common stake in society. Small numbers of people with great fortunes come to exercise disproportionate political power.
But highly unequal societies also become ones in which the very rich fear the rest of the world they live in. They cannot help but view the Uber drivers, the subcontracted warehouse employees and the people whose livelihoods are displaced by their technologies with suspicion.
They are not wrong to fear the anger of those dispossessed groups, and the dispossessed are not wrong to be angry. But what matters is how this class anger is expressed, whether it leads to nihilism or solidarity, to isolated rage or collective action. By so profoundly weakening many of the institutions that once nurtured collective action — labor unions, political organizations, protest groups — our society has made itself one in which people torch warehouses. What we need is a more viable path to a better world, or at least a more equal one.
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4) It’s One of Our Greatest and Most Controversial Novels. How Should It Be Taught?
I traveled around the country to find out if “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” still has a place in the classroom.
By Ruth Franklin, Aug. 24, 2026
Ruth Franklin traveled around the country and interviewed more than three dozen teachers and students.
Photo illustration by Alex Merto
A few years ago, I created a seminar for my students at Columbia University, where I teach writing, about the challenges of separating a novel’s literary value from its politics. There were 10 books on the syllabus, including “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Even though I hadn’t read the novel since I was a child, I knew it had to be part of this course. For more than a century, Mark Twain’s saga of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man traveling on a raft down the Mississippi River has been a fixture of the American canon. Narrated in Huck’s cheeky, irrepressible voice, it pioneered the writing of literary fiction in the vernacular while mercilessly skewering the racism and hypocrisy of white Southerners in the pre-Civil War era. Influential critics from T.S. Eliot to Ralph Ellison enshrined it as essential — not just a great book but, in the words of Lionel Trilling, “one of the central documents of American culture.” By the end of the 1940s, it had become a mainstay of anthologies and survey classes.
But over the past few decades, this once-standard text has come to occupy a slippery position in the classroom. Some perceive it as an essential commentary on slavery’s depredations, while others feel it endangers Black students — mainly because the racist slur known euphemistically as the N-word appears more than 200 times. A son of slave owners who married into a prominent abolitionist family, Twain almost certainly intended the novel as an indictment of racial prejudice and used the word to illustrate the racism of his characters, not to endorse it. Though Huck, indoctrinated in the conventional morality of his time, initially believes it’s wrong to help an enslaved person escape, he comes to feel loyalty and love for Jim, his companion. The tension animating the story is not just whether the two of them can outwit the villains who want to capture Jim, but also whether Huck will reject his prior conception of right and wrong.
Still, many readers understandably feel that the novel’s constant, even obsessive repetition of the slur reinforces the system of white supremacy that it purports to critique. In the classroom, where teachers often read aloud or call on their students to do so, the problem is obvious. Even when the word isn’t spoken, its silently menacing presence on the page is impossible to ignore.
I could see this as soon as I opened the book. I was reading a used copy whose previous owner must have been a student. This person started out diligently highlighting and taking notes. But they clearly found the slur upsetting. “OMG stop using it,” they wrote in the margin at one point. Eventually, the highlights and notes petered out.
I gulped down the novel in two sittings, disoriented and amazed. It felt genuinely shocking to be confronted by the slur so brazenly. But I was beguiled by Huck’s plain-spoken voice and by the way Twain uses it to point to the gap between the character’s limited understanding of the world and what is really taking place in the novel, which we must work out on our own. “It shows how a body can see and don’t see, at the same time,” Huck says at one point when he’s failed to notice something — a line that could be the novel’s motto. I was startled, too, to find that Twain relies on Jim as the novel’s moral fulcrum, often leaving space in the narrative for a richer and more multilayered reading of the character than is commonly thought. Despite all its problems, the book felt fresh and relevant. Reading it, I wished Twain were alive and writing today, if only to know what he would make of our current president.
Since 2000, “Huck Finn” has been challenged or banned by school districts in at least 12 states, usually because it is perceived as racist. At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn., the book sits front and center on a shelf of banned books displayed in a literal cage. But educators tell me the book is less likely to be formally removed from curriculums than simply put aside by overworked teachers who have neither the classroom time nor the intellectual energy to handle a text widely seen as radioactive — and who fear that a misstep could cost them their jobs. “They haven’t banned it,” says John Conway, a retired public school teacher in Alabama. “They just don’t want to have the discussions about it.”
A majority of book challenges today come from right-wing activists, organizations and government officials who object to what they see as progressive political content, particularly regarding race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Precisely because it deals with the history of enslavement, “Huck Finn,” too, is now vulnerable to such challenges. Early in his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which directs schools to promote “patriotic education,” defined as “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” This executive order explicitly prohibits what it calls “discriminatory equity ideology,” a term that seems to cover just about any discussion of systemic racism — the novel’s central engine.
In this climate, it’s easy to see why “Huck Finn” is “dying a quiet death,” as one teacher tells me. Owing to a combination of factors — the early introduction of technology in the classroom, pandemic learning losses and now the growing use of A.I. — students are reading more reluctantly than ever before. Where teachers once assigned multiple novels per year, they are now likely to cover only one or two. At the same time, novels by Black writers that deal with racism, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” have become staples of the curriculum.
The Twain scholar and Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin compares “Huck Finn” to fugu, a Japanese delicacy so poisonous that a chef must be specially licensed to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” she says. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.” What might it mean for the book to be “prepared right”?
Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the classroom, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome. The book provides its own master class in critical thinking; as Toni Morrison wrote in an admiring introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition, “The brilliance of ‘Huck Finn’ is that it is the argument it raises.” Watching teachers and their students grapple with it, and grappling with it myself, I came to feel that the book remains vital. Huck’s journey to political and ethical independence serves as a powerful testament to the importance of questioning authority and trusting oneself, a primary American principle that remains at least as urgent now as it was in Twain’s time. As one teacher told me, “It’s about the country’s search for a soul.”
Anyone who wants to teach “Huck Finn” must figure out how to handle the slur, which first appears in Chapter 1. Huck, whose father is the town drunk, has grown up enviably free from parental interference, sleeping outdoors and rarely going to school. When the story begins, he has been quasi-adopted by the Widow Douglas, who is trying to “sivilize” him (Huck’s term). After she delivers a lecture about how to get into heaven, Huck describes their nighttime routine: “By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.”
The word was still part of common colloquial language at the time of the story — the novel, published in 1884, is set “forty to fifty years ago” — but it was understood to be offensive. Twain grew up hearing it all around him but is said to have no longer used it when writing in his own voice by the time he was writing the novel. His use of it in characters’ speech is at once a realistic portrayal of how some Southerners would have talked and a literary device highlighting the degradation of a society that believed itself to be “sivilized” while persisting in stunningly barbaric behavior. It’s no accident that he often puts it in the mouth of a character espousing religion, one of the main targets of the book’s satire. “Twain did not set out in that book to write a story about an epithet,” says Joseph Csicsila, a white professor in Michigan. “The epithet figures in that book as a function of character revelation.”
This intellectual explanation doesn’t mitigate students’ distress when encountering the word. “Reading ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was like seeing a Confederate statue,” Randall Dottin, a documentary filmmaker who is Black, tells me of his experience with the book in high school several decades ago. “No student wants to hear it,” says Ryan Heryford, a college professor in California, who still remembers his own discomfort as a white student asked to read aloud from the book. “It’s a form of violence.” Rohan Pai, an Indian American student who read the book in high school, concurs: “It was obviously a little tense when someone would get to that word.”
In the early 2000s, Alan Gribben, a white professor of English who died in May, noticed that his Black students tended to be absent when he taught the novel. Hoping to “retain a great work and take some of the pain out of it,” he decided to create a new edition that replaced the slur with “slave.” He brought his manuscript to NewSouth Books, then an independent publisher in Montgomery, Ala. (It is now part of the University of Georgia Press.)
When the NewSouth edition of “Huck Finn” was first announced in 2011, it was pilloried. Twain scholars accused Gribben of censoring the work of an American icon, while editorialists attacked his work as political correctness gone wild. In an op-ed, the Twain biographer Ron Powers charged him with the “evisceration” of a classic. Fishkin, the Stanford scholar, was more measured but equally disapproving, arguing that Gribben’s edits neutered the book: “To expose a racist society for what it is, you have to show racists as they are, speaking as they would speak,” she wrote.
Fifteen years later, the tide has shifted. No teacher I’ve met speaks the slur aloud in the classroom or allows students to do so. Instead, they substitute “N-word” or a nonverbal sound like “mm.”
“Knowing that such a thing existed, it felt derelict to me to choose any other version” than the NewSouth edition, says Peter Mergenthaler, an English teacher in Washington, D.C., who is white. To have the word on the page “for kids to see, to read independently and either to misunderstand contextually or be grievously hurt by it — I don’t know that even with dozens of years of experience I would choose the uncensored version,” he adds. Maya Dunkley, one of his students, agrees with this approach. “You don’t have to read racism to learn about racism and learn that it’s wrong,” Maya, who identifies as biracial, tells me.
But most of the teachers I spoke to felt that Gribben’s effort, while well-intentioned, was misguided. The educator and scholar Jocelyn A. Chadwick, who is Black and has written extensively about pedagogy as well as about Twain and race, argues that it’s better for an inexperienced teacher not to teach the novel at all than to use the NewSouth edition. The slur, she says, is essential to the book. “It’s not a hip-hop word, it’s not a slang word, it’s a word that’s so filled with blood and agony and hatred,” she says, adding: “It’s supposed to hurt.” Eyob Sisay, a Black student from Washington, D.C., agrees. “Just knowing how jarring it is, and how casually and frequently it’s used in the story, I think it’s important for us to have that perspective,” he says.
Samantha Goodwin, who taught Eyob at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, spends several class periods contextualizing the slur, using the work of the linguist Geneva Smitherman and the historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. I sat in on one of her classes as she walked her students through the difference between milder Horatian satire, which is meant to be funny, and Juvenalian satire, the harshest form of the device, which Twain uses for his sharpest critiques. “It’s not meant to make you feel good,” she told me. It’s meant to make the reader uncomfortable — and angry.
Twain’s use of the word is part of his assault on the hypocritical mores of supposedly genteel Southern society. People Huck and Jim encounter over the course of the novel — many of whom Huck believes he should respect as “quality” — participate in a blood feud that results in the deaths of multiple people, including children; try to swindle three grieving sisters out of their inheritance; and speak of Black people as less than human. “If you read it without understanding that it’s satire, your anger will be directed at the author,” Goodwin cautioned. This is exactly what often happens when students first encounter “Huck Finn.”
As the students debated where various scenes in the novel fall on the satirical spectrum, Goodwin, who is white, brought up Huck’s demeaning language about Black people. There was a pause in which I could see the discomfort on some students’ faces. Finally, a white student responded. “It’s supposed to anger you,” he said. “You feel like Huck has been taught that Black people aren’t human.”
“You’re speaking nicely to the power of Huck as narrator,” Goodwin responded. “He doesn’t have the ability to take the next step and say: ‘Wait a second. Why did I believe that?’ But we get angry.”
In a pedagogical culture that tends to shy away from unpleasantness, Goodwin’s approach felt like an honest — and valuable — way of dealing with one of the ugliest aspects of American literary history. Reading “Huck Finn” isn’t just an intellectual experience; it’s also an emotional journey. If the book produces strong feelings in its readers, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.
Still, I left Goodwin’s classroom wondering whether her strategy was replicable on a larger scale. She teaches in an elite private school where around 40 percent of students are white, and she is able to design her own curriculum. It’s easy to see how the social dynamics could spin out of control in a classroom led by a teacher with less experience or skill or fewer resources. She thinks her own children, who are biracial, should wait until at least the age of 14 to read the novel.
And even Goodwin can’t persuade all her students of the book’s value. At the end of every school year, when she asks them — anonymously — whether it should still be taught, some say no: “It’s just racist.”
In addition to the slur, Twain’s characterization of Jim is another reason some readers perceive “Huck Finn” as racist. The character speaks in heavy dialect that sounds similar to portrayals of Black people in minstrel shows. Sometimes he seems to function as a foil to Huck, expressing confusion over simple facts or misunderstanding well-known stories, such as the parable of King Solomon and the baby. In one classroom I visited, students debated whether he was intended to serve as comic relief.
It sometimes seems that way. In Chapter 2, Huck and Tom Sawyer are trying to sneak out of the widow’s house. Huck stumbles and attracts the attention of Jim, who goes outside and stops just at the spot where the boys are hiding. “Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n … I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin,” he says, apparently to himself. Positioning himself nearly on top of the boys, he falls asleep, allowing them to escape.
Percival Everett’s 2024 novel “James,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, loosely retells the story of “Huck Finn” from Jim’s perspective. Everett’s version of the character sometimes seems tailor-made to compensate for the apparent flaws in Twain’s depiction. Not only has he secretly taught himself to read and write, but he holds erudite fantasy conversations with Enlightenment philosophers. When he uses dialect, it’s a canny survival strategy, giving white people a version of Black people they can feel superior to. “More than a correction, it’s a rescue mission,” Sam Sacks wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
But in the gap between Huck’s narration and what is actually going on, Twain allows the reader to enter into Jim’s perspective — and to notice how other characters do not. Robert Paul Lamb, author of the forthcoming “Huck and Jim’s America: Slavery, Race and Realism in Mark Twain’s World,” speculates that Jim’s performative language in the first scene suggests he’s only pretending to be asleep in order to amuse the boys — which is also the way Everett rewrites the episode. In “Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade,” published last year, Fishkin argues that Jim’s actions demonstrate he is more intelligent and resourceful than Huck appreciates. “Start with the assumption that Jim is smart,” she tells her students. “Once that seed is planted, they begin to recognize Huck’s blind spots.” A body can see and don’t see, at the same time.
A first-person narrative, by definition, is limited to the point of view of the person who is telling the story. The fact that the novel is narrated in Huck’s exceedingly unreliable voice means Twain can’t give us Jim’s point of view on anything. But when things happen that Huck has no words to express — because they are beyond his comprehension or involve a leap of empathy that he can’t yet make — Twain indicates that by leaving him silent. Toni Morrison described these moments as “when scenes and incidents swell the heart unbearably precisely because unarticulated, and force an act of imagination almost against the will.”
Morrison may have been thinking of the end of Chapter 23, one of the book’s most poignant episodes. One morning Huck finds Jim weeping with longing for his wife and children. At the time, defenders of slavery often justified separating families by saying that Black people’s family ties were not as strong as white people’s. It suddenly strikes Huck that this is a lie. “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for theirn,” he muses. It’s a shocking line — and a moment when we might need to remind ourselves that Twain is representing such ideas rather than endorsing them. Much of the novel’s extraordinary energy comes from the tension between Huck’s dawning sense of morality and the inadequacy of his language to convey it.
Then Jim tells a wrenching story. One day, shortly after his daughter recovered from scarlet fever, she ignored an order that he gave her, and he struck her hard across the face in rage. A few minutes later, when she failed to react to a loud noise, he realized the disease had left her deaf. He castigated himself for treating his child — a child he may never see again — so harshly and unfairly. “O de po’ little thing! de Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!” Jim recalls saying. “O, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb — en I’d ben a treat’n her so!”
The chapter ends there, without comment from Huck. Just Jim’s words, with all their pain, for the reader to endure.
“If you were to say to Mark Twain today, ‘You were a racist,’ he probably would agree with you,” John Pascal told a class of 11th graders at Seton Hall Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic high school in New Jersey. Before Pascal’s students even opened “Huck Finn,” he walked them through Twain’s life story, focusing on the writer’s about-face with regard to slavery and the close relations he had with Black people, including Frederick Douglass. Pascal, who is white, especially likes to tell the story of Warner T. McGuinn, a Black student at Yale Law School whose tuition Twain paid — a gesture many see as an attempt at reparations for slavery. “People who say ‘Huck Finn’ is racist, and Mark Twain is racist, don’t know this fact,” Pascal told his students.
On this spring morning, they were working through Chapter 15, one of the thorniest passages. Huck and Jim have been looking for the point where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers converge. They plan to stop there and find a steamboat to take them up into the free states. The river is enveloped in fog and full of debris, and when Huck paddles ahead in a canoe to look for a place to anchor the raft, he can’t find his way back. When he finally returns the next morning, Jim is overjoyed to see him. But Huck, who can rarely resist playing a mean trick, tries to convince Jim that he dreamed the entire episode.
The students were at first too focused on decoding Jim’s speech to appreciate the emotional dynamics. “Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead — you ain’ drownded — you’s back agin?” one of the boys read haltingly as others snickered.
Jim finally concedes and even offers an interpretation of the supposed dream, but Huck can’t stop there. “What does these things stand for?” he asks, pointing to the leaves and branches that accumulated on the raft during the stormy night.
Now Jim understands that Huck was fooling him. “When I got all wore out, wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’,” he tells Huck. “En all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout, wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.”
This speech constitutes the most important education Huck receives from anyone in the entire novel. At a time when in some states Black people could be whipped simply for speaking rudely to white people, this was revolutionary. “There’s no other instance I can think of of a Black person correcting a white person in 19th-century American literature,” Fishkin says.
Jim leaves Huck alone to think about what he’s done. Soon Huck does a remarkable thing for a white person of his era: He apologizes to Jim. “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger — but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither,” he says. “I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.”
Once again, Twain’s irony sits in the space between Huck’s primitive language and his dawning racial consciousness. The phrase he uses, “humble myself to a nigger,” is grotesque. But he’s moving toward the understanding that Black people are equal to white people in every way, including in their emotional lives — a point that was not at all taken for granted at the time of the novel.
“Now, why did it take him 15 minutes?” Pascal asked his class.
“Because that’s just not something he would normally have to do, to apologize to — to — a slave,” said a student in the front row, highlighting the passage.
“The institution of slavery is so strong it takes him 15 minutes to walk through it and do the right thing and just apologize.” He paused. “Is he ashamed for apologizing?”
“No,” the boys chorused.
“‘I wasn’t sorry.’ How come we don’t get the actual words of apology?”
“It’s not needed,” another student said.
Pascal, who had been pacing among the boys, paused again. “Twain’s emphasis is on showing that Jim has a voice and that that voice is as human as a white person’s,” he bellowed. “For Huck to say anything, if Huck gives the words and we read it, it takes away from the power of what Jim said.”
Allowing Jim’s speech to stand without comment also lets Twain avoid sentimentalizing him, as a writer more given to using characters as mouthpieces for his own opinions might run the risk of doing. Rohan Pai, one of Pascal’s students, later told me that his class was amazed to realize that the book’s “one good character” is Jim. If Twain has hidden Jim’s agency and humanity beneath the stereotypes of his time, he’s challenging the reader to unearth the character’s true depth rather than succumb to the racism the novel condemns.
In the book’s emotional climax, Huck discovers that two con men with whom he and Jim have become embroiled sold Jim to a farmer for $40. Over two pages, Twain walks us through Huck’s dilemma. According to what he’s always been told, the “right thing” is to write to Miss Watson, Jim’s enslaver, and tell her where he is. But he can’t make himself do it. He thinks about how Jim “said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.” Though Huck believes that he’s acting against God’s wishes, he takes a stand for what he feels is right. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he announces, tearing up the letter he’s been trying to write.
We might say that Huck shouldn’t be congratulated for doing the only compassionate thing. “It may have functioned as a book against racism in its own time, but it doesn’t have the same effect now,” says Maya Dunkley, the student who read the NewSouth edition. Others argue that Huck’s journey as a white character is relevant only to white people. “I don’t think ‘Huck Finn’ is a novel for young Black kids,” says Randall Dottin, the Black filmmaker. “It’s really for white folks to enter into these stories and hash it out.”
Some students of color I spoke to, though, find that Huck’s dilemma speaks to their experience. Geethika Pochana, an Indian American student who read the novel in Conway’s class, compared the racial dynamics of the book to anti-Muslim prejudice among Hindus. Conway, who is white, said a Korean student in his class drew an analogy with Japanese oppression of Koreans. “That’s exactly what you need to take away,” he said. “You need to make it real.”
The more I think about “Huck Finn,” though, the more I wonder whether treating it as “a book against racism” is unnecessarily limiting. Its larger theme transcends race: the need for each person, thinking and acting as an individual, to determine their own moral code.
If the novel remains inspiring, it’s not because Huck comes to understand that Black people are equal to white people. It’s because he offers a step-by-step guide to challenging the status quo, demonstrating how someone steeped in the prejudice of his time learns to assert his own understanding of right and wrong.
Huck will soon be faced with a new dilemma — one with which teenagers especially can empathize. When Huck finally finds the farm to which Jim was sold, the owners turn out to be Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas — and then Tom himself shows up to visit. He tells Huck that Miss Watson died and set Jim free in her will. But before telling Jim — or his aunt and uncle — Tom subjects Jim to a cruelly drawn-out charade of imprisonment, with little opposition from Huck. As Erin Bartram, the associate director for education at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, notes, it’s one thing “to have discovered that everything you believed was wrong and that the world you live in wants you to keep holding on to that fiction in order to fit in,” and another to stick to your new principles “when your cool friend comes around.”
Critics have always hated this ending. Hemingway, who wrote that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn,’” encouraged readers to quit before the final chapters, because “the rest is just cheating.” In an influential essay published in 1953, the critic Leo Marx argued that the ending is an artistic and ethical failure that substitutes cheap entertainment for the novel’s moral heart. Maya puts it more succinctly: The episode “has a lot of white savior vibes.”
Reading politically, some see the ending as a metaphor for the failures of the post-Reconstruction era, which were at the forefront of Twain’s mind in the early 1880s, after his first visit back to the South since the Civil War. “It’s written out of anger,” says Stephen Harris, a teacher in Brooklyn. “He was mad at what he saw in the South. Mad at what he saw his people having done to Black people.”
Even so, it’s excruciating to watch Huck go along with Tom’s heartless plan, knowing how Jim must be suffering. Huck tells us that “Jim he couldn’t see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him.” Of course, there is a stinging irony in this: Jim has no choice but to agree. The reader really does know better, though, and feels sorrow and rage on Jim’s behalf. Perhaps this is Twain’s intention. Remember Chadwick’s words: “It’s supposed to hurt.”
Twain saves some of his subtlest — and thus most devastating — satire for Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas, whom Huck sees as kindly white folks but who are capable of thoughtless brutality toward their slaves. One small example: the presence on the farm of a “yaller girl.” The word “yaller,” or “yellow,” referred to biracial people. Is this the novel’s way of telling us that Uncle Silas, so kind and affectionate to Tom and Huck, rapes his slaves? It’s another example of Morrison’s idea that Twain forces us to experience “an act of imagination almost against the will.”
At the end of the book, Tom suggests that all three of them go off and have new adventures. Huck agrees, but once again, the text is silent where Jim might respond. We know that he wants only to find his wife and children. Perhaps Twain means for us to feel the absence of resolution. The failure to bring this paradigmatic story of race relations to a satisfying conclusion may be the only ending possible. “America has never been able to write a better ending,” the writer David Bradley, who is Black, has said. “America has never been able to write any ending at all.”
In 1989, “Huck Finn” ranked No. 3 in a national study of the most frequently taught works in American high schools. The current data isn’t as comprehensive, but in a study conducted recently by the National Council of Teachers of English, only 77 of around 4,000 teachers listed it as a book they often used. The teachers I spoke to are certain the trend is moving downward. Many of them are the last of their colleagues still teaching the book.
Twain understood as well as anyone that literary trends change. If “Huck Finn” was once perceived as the quintessential work of American literature, we now have a greater appreciation of the importance of multiple stories and perspectives. Many of the teachers I encountered pair the novel with slave narratives or other texts by Black writers. Chadwick argues that without Twain as their predecessor, contemporary Black writers could not write about slavery the way they do. “It all starts with Twain,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean we are finished learning from him. “Huck Finn” draws one of the most memorable and sympathetic Black characters in 19th-century American fiction and makes its readers feel that character’s pain. It brings us inside the confusion of a boy who discovers not only that he’s been lied to all his life, but also how hard it is to stand up for his new beliefs under social pressure. And it forces readers to work hard to understand that we’re getting a limited picture — and sometimes an entirely misleading one — of what’s actually taking place.
The disappearance of “Huck Finn” is a worrisome sign that wrestling with a difficult book and emerging with one’s thoughts invigorated is no longer a given in the high school classroom. If students are no longer learning to value the skills of literary interpretation and critical thinking, Twain’s most important novel may eventually fulfill his own ironic definition of a classic: “a book which people praise but don’t read.” As a nation, we will be poorer for its absence. “It’s a tough book,” Chadwick says. “But it’s a book about us.”
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5) He Was Wrongly Convicted of Attempted Rape. He’s Suing the DNA Analysts.
Alexis Rodriguez claims technicians at the New York City medical examiner’s office fabricated DNA evidence, leading to his wrongful conviction in 2014 for attempted rape.
By Santul Nerkar, Published Aug. 23, 2026, Updated Aug. 24, 2026
The lawsuit comes more than a decade after the New York City medical examiner’s office launched an internal investigation into whether it had mishandled DNA evidence in hundreds of rape cases. Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
On a cold January morning in 2010, a 22-year-old woman was walking to work on Staten Island when a man grabbed her from behind, pulled her scarf across her face and yanked her to the ground by the roadside.
The attacker started rubbing her thighs and tried to force her jacket open, but she managed to escape his grasp. Later that day, she provided the police with her scarf and gloves, hoping evidence could be extracted from them to help identify the assailant.
Scientists at the New York City medical examiner’s office — a leader in developing forensic methods to crack America’s most difficult cases — pored over the evidence in the case and were able to pull small amounts of DNA from her clothing.
After more than a year, the office reported a breakthrough: Alexis Rodriguez, a 26-year-old man who had been arrested in connection with an unrelated burglary, was a match for the attacker.
Mr. Rodriguez was found guilty of attempted rape in 2014 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But in 2021, a judge overturned the conviction, finding that Mr. Rodriguez had received inadequate counsel. Specifically, his lawyer had failed to properly challenge the DNA evidence, a move that could have exonerated his client.
Now, Mr. Rodriguez, 42, is suing the city and the lab analysts who worked on his case, accusing the analysts of fabricating evidence. His current lawyer, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said it was the first time that anyone from the medical examiner’s office had been sued for DNA analysis leading to a wrongful conviction.
Mr. Rodriguez’s suit claims that the evidence was fabricated as part of an established practice at the medical examiner’s office in which analysts often used DNA samples that were too small and complex to be reliable, and conflicting interpretations of the data were pushed aside. Flawed results were then presented to law enforcement agencies — and then juries — as evidence of guilt, according to the lawsuit.
The suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Wednesday, comes more than a decade after the medical examiner’s office launched an internal investigation into whether it had mishandled DNA evidence in hundreds of rape cases.
A subsequent report from the state inspector general found a troubling pattern of errors at the office. Disputes among lab analysts were papered over, and technicians often presented subjective, flawed interpretations as scientific findings to prosecutors or defense lawyers.
Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, said that it “operates in accordance with best practices and stands by the science produced by the experts who staff it.”
At the time of the attack of the 22-year-old woman in 2010, Mr. Rodriguez was working as a maintenance worker at a Y.M.C.A. on Staten Island, he said in an interview. In May of the following year, he was arrested in connection with a burglary, and his DNA was entered into a state database.
The medical examiner’s office, according to the lawsuit, then significantly altered the DNA profile of the attacker “to match a known profile that had been entered into the national, state or local databases.”
According to the lawsuit, Theresa Caragine, a senior scientist at the lab, and Craig O’Connor, an analyst, changed results from DNA testing so that they would more closely match Mr. Rodriguez’s profile.
Dr. Caragine and Dr. O’Connor are both named as defendants in the lawsuit. Dr. Caragine did not respond to a request for comment. The medical examiner’s office declined to make Dr. O’Connor, now its director of forensic biology, available for an interview.
In August 2012, Mr. Rodriguez was arrested and charged with attempted rape, and the DNA was the only evidence that linked him to the attack. The victim did not identify Mr. Rodriguez as her attacker during a lineup. In an interview the day after the attack, according to the lawsuit, the woman identified her attacker as a Hispanic man who was about 5-foot-5; Mr. Rodriguez is more than 6 feet tall.
A jury on Staten Island convicted Mr. Rodriguez of all charges, which also included attempted kidnapping and criminal possession of a weapon, in May 2014.
Around the time that Dr. Caragine was handling Mr. Rodriguez’s case, her work came under scrutiny. She resigned in April 2013 from the medical examiner’s office after the state inspector general’s investigation found that she had ignored lab protocol, including by rewriting reports whose findings she disagreed with.
The circumstances of Dr. Caragine’s resignation, according to the lawsuit, were never disclosed to Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers.
Mr. Rodriguez wound up serving seven and a half years in prison, including stints at the Attica and Otisville Correctional Facilities in New York. He now lives near Orlando, Fla., where he provides transportation for older people. (He referred to his work as driving “an Uber for senior citizens.”)
In an interview, Mr. Rodriguez said he hoped to bring attention to more instances of people being convicted on the basis of mishandled evidence.
“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” he said.
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