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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 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) Inside Afghanistan’s Secret Schools for Girls
The Taliban have banned education for millions of Afghan girls. Times journalists examined classrooms where students, teachers and parents continue to resist by defying the rules.
By Elian Peltier, Photographs by Kiana Hayeri, Aug. 28, 2026
Elian Peltier interviewed more than 50 students, educators, therapists and parents involved with clandestine schools in Afghanistan.
Kowsar, who was in sixth grade, and her mother Tasnim, a primary schoolteacher.
Ayesha goes to a secret school six days a week, mainly to keep seeing people outside her home. It’s the only way to avoid total isolation under Taliban rule, she says. It’s the only way to feel alive.
“Without that connection,” she said, “I don’t know what would happen to me.”
Now 18, Ayesha once dreamed of studying psychology at university. The Taliban ended that dream when they banned formal education for girls beyond sixth grade in 2022.
But Ayesha has been defying the Taliban’s rules for years, sitting in a classroom hidden behind the corridors of a primary school. Thousands of such programs operate across the country under the Taliban’s radar.
Clandestine schools were once seen as a stopgap, a way for girls to keep up with their education until the Taliban were gone. But five years after the Taliban’s return to power, nearly 2.5 million Afghan girls have been locked out of secondary school.
They can go to religious schools or study at home with private instruction. But across the country, girls are risking arrest by going to school in secret. Others fail sixth grade on purpose, to remain in their classrooms for as long as possible.
Principals, teachers and parents operate the schools through a clandestine effort, fighting for what they fear may be a lost cause: to save a generation of girls from ignorance. The Taliban’s leaders do not appear willing to rescind the ban, even while some local officials tolerate the secret schools, worried about denying their own daughters an education.
In interviews with more than 50 students, educators, therapists and parents, many said they feared the ban would do permanent damage — to girls and to Afghanistan’s social fabric. All asked to be identified only by their first names, for fear of retaliation.
Even girls who finish their education have few prospects; the Taliban have banned women from most jobs, and opportunities to go abroad are scarce. Reports of suicidal thoughts, self-harm and rates of underage marriage are on the rise, according to teachers and humanitarian organizations.
Nevertheless, some girls refuse to give up their fight for an education.
“We are also part of this society,” Ayesha said. “Just let us be who we want to be.”
The Hidden Passageway
Late one night recently, Ayesha received a text from her friend Zuhal, 17, who said she would not be coming to class the next day. Zuhal’s father had beaten her, saying that there was no point in attending an underground school.
Ayesha recalls crying as she read Zuhal’s message. She has become known among her friends as the one they can confide in, the apprentice therapist. She said she prayed in her bedroom and urged Zuhal to come back. “If you sit at home, it’s finished for you,” Ayesha told her. “Nobody else is going to do anything for you.”
Zuhal returned to school a few days later but said she would be able to come only when her father is away.
Ayesha’s secret classroom is concealed inside an official primary school. The playground is filled with the shouts of younger students, and hundreds of tiny, colorful shoes are lined up at the entrance to the building. But beyond their classrooms, a door leads to a hidden passageway tucked behind a corner, which leads to the secret classroom for older girls.
To avoid detection, the students vary their routes to the school and avoid walking in groups. Still, now and then, the Taliban burst into the school unannounced, as they did one morning in July during Ayesha’s midyear physics exams. The principal locked the students inside, and 14 young women kept scribbling in silence.
The classroom remains undiscovered. On one occasion, when the girls were not at school, the Taliban tore down the artwork on the walls in a common room near the classroom, Ayesha recalled.
There used to be a time, students and a teacher explained, when a Taliban inspection would send them fleeing through the back door, or rushing to the basement where they would lock themselves in the dark and shush those who cried.
As the students moved up to Grade 12, Taliban visits don’t frighten them as much anymore. Many said they feel contempt for the group.
“Are they expecting the country to develop by depriving half of the population of education?” said Palwasha, one of Ayesha’s classmates. “We don’t want anything other than the basic rights Islam gave us.”
Only a tiny fraction of girls in Afghanistan can receive a secondary education through secret schools; even fewer, like Ayesha and Palwasha, study an international curriculum and speak English fluently. Palwasha wants to launch her own clothing brand. Ayesha knows she won’t be able to study psychology at a university in Afghanistan when she graduates, so she counsels her classmates.
This is the extent of Ayesha’s social life, and it will vanish in a few months. There is no secret school after Grade 12.
“Girls, you are here now,” Ayesha recalled their teacher saying as they sat down for their midyear exam. “But at this time next year, you will be at home.”
Computer Science and Duolingo
The Taliban have taken credit for one measure of success in education: Primary school enrollment for girls rose from 78 percent in 2021 to 87 percent in 2024, according to UNESCO and UNICEF. That’s mainly because day-to-day security has improved across Afghanistan since the war ended with the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. Schools that had been closed reopened, and crossing a street to reach a classroom no longer presents a daily danger.
But the overall picture is alarming. Nine out of 10 Afghan children age 10 cannot read an age-appropriate piece of writing, according to UNESCO. Only one in four Afghan women is literate. Girls who want to continue their education sometimes face additional obstacles from their families.
Laila, 21, joined a secret school to study computer science and languages two years ago, more than 500 miles from her home in one of Afghanistan’s most conservative provinces. She said she threatened to kill herself if her family did not let her attend.
On a recent morning, she worked on computer science and Duolingo lessons in a clandestine Grade 11 classroom. In the school’s darkened corridors, students walked silently past colorful presentations on the human body and the solar system. Dozens more studied in the basement library.
Laila and hundreds of other girls take in-person classes by day and online by night with volunteer tutors around the world, from the United States to the Netherlands to Hong Kong, most of them high school students in a global network of peer-to-peer support.
Even two years after enrolling, Laila faces surprise visits from her younger brother, who tells her she has dishonored the family by being “so free.” Her father is more open-minded but fears gossip if a relative or neighbor finds out, Laila said.
Laila now speaks four languages fluently, including English, and is learning Korean. If she can leave the country after graduation, she said she will study graphic design in Canada or South Korea.
“I want to share these opportunities with other girls from my province, but I can’t,” Laila said.
During their first rule, between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban banned both primary and secondary education for girls, arguing that secular schools were contrary to their hard-line vision of Islam. They said it was a temporary measure, until they could establish a more compatible education system, but they never did.
After coming back to power in 2021, they made similar claims about the public school system that expanded during the 20-year U.S. occupation, and still maintain that the ban is temporary.
“We hope that one day girls’ schools will reopen,” the Taliban’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in an interview earlier this year. “This situation also deeply affects many officials of the Islamic Emirate who have daughters,” he added, referring to the name the Taliban have given to Afghanistan.
But five years into their second rule, the temporary ban once again appears permanent.
The ban comes directly from Kandahar, the group’s seat of power in the south and home to its secretive leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. Many Taliban officials privately say it should be lifted, but no one challenges their leader’s order.
12th graders with their backpacks.
In practice, many Taliban turn a blind eye to schools operating in secret. The principal at one secret school, where some girls pay fees if their families are able, said he had enrolled the sons of Taliban intelligence officers for free to maintain a cordial relationship.
They know Laila’s school well: Taliban police and intelligence officers visit weekly to ensure that female students wear their hijabs correctly and don’t mix with boys, who attend the same school legally.
But they can order the school shut at any time. All schools in Afghanistan, even religious schools, which are permitted for older girls, face an array of rules and frequent, sometimes surprise, inspections.
When they see the Taliban approach, the guards at Laila’s school warn the teachers and the principal by walkie-talkies and then sound a distinctive bell to alert the students.
Najib, the school principal, said that when he asked some unfamiliar Taliban officers to show him their ID on a recent visit, one shouted, “My ID is my gun.”
“And my gun is my pen,” Najib said he replied. He cited Quranic verses about the imperative to educate all children, and that seemed to satisfy them.
The Taliban left.
Failing in Order to Succeed
Many younger Afghan girls try to delay as long as possible what Ayesha and Laila are going through.
In December, Somaya, 12, took her sixth-grade final exams but skipped the tests in Dari language, social studies and Quran studies, hoping to fail and repeat her final year.
“I love going to school,” she said. “I simply wanted to stay.”
Weeks later, Somaya’s teacher told her she could come back. There was only room for her in Grade 4, so she sometimes helps teach since she already knows the curriculum.
Fatima, 12, a student at another school, tore up her final sixth-grade tests last year, hoping that her teachers would fail her and let her repeat the grade. But they passed Fatima anyway, she said.
As Fatima spoke softly in her family’s living room in Kabul, her father, Azizullah, wept and left the room.
“I cry when I think about how often she says she wants to be a doctor, and how now it’s all over,” Azizullah said.
But Fatima bounced back. Weeks later, she passed an entrance exam for an underground school.
Sixth graders with their backpacks.
Tasnim, a primary schoolteacher, said she leaves the farewell parties for her Grade 6 students because she can’t bear seeing them cry. She no longer has an answer when they ask her, “What was this all for?”
When her own daughter, Kowsar, completed sixth grade, Tasnim convinced a colleague to take her into her class so she could repeat by taking the spot of an absent student.
Her daughter’s graduation certificate reads “Successfully promoted to Grade 7.”
“We try to make them happy,” Tasnim said. “But there’s no Grade 7.”
Dreaming of the Taliban
The restrictions on women and girls are the primary reason the world has shunned the Taliban, but they have promoted religious schools, or madrassas, as an alternative. The girls in those schools must wear black coverings from head to toe, and they are allowed to study science and English as well as religious subjects.
Zala, a sixth-grade student, plans to enroll in a religious school after leaving primary school. “At least we still have an opportunity to keep studying,” she said.
Other students say the madrassas are a poor substitute. Classes deemed less important than religious ones — physics, chemistry and mathematics — are merged into one. And girls are not permitted to use the more advanced curriculum for boys.
“These subjects are pushing us ideologically toward the Taliban,” said Zahida, 17, about Islamic studies, religious history and discussions about politics and jihad led by teachers who embrace the Taliban’s hard-line views.
Ezat, Ayesha’s principal, recently turned the school where her classroom is hidden into a madrassa to ease pressure from the Taliban. He said he hopes teachers can keep providing what he described as a “modern education.”
To what extent and for how long, he does not know.
After the Taliban formalized their ban on education in 2022, many teachers were left without jobs. They kept teaching for free, or for smaller salaries at schools that remained open, or in underground classes across the country.
Many say they feel disillusioned.
At a recent staff meeting, employees in a secret school in Kabul talked about how to keep motivating students. “But who is motivating us?” Kamela, one of the teachers, remembered thinking.
“I see the Taliban in my dreams,” she said. “They’re running after us, beating us and closing the school.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.
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2) How a Private Equity Group Drove an Apartment Complex Into the Ground
After decades as a coveted address in Syracuse, N.Y., the sprawling Nob Hill complex descended into neglect, squalor and death. One family paid a terrible price.
By Christopher Maag, Aug. 28, 2026
Six months after the fire, Nob Hill’s Building 3 remains empty. Liam Kennedy for The New York Times
Augustus Grissett spent three decades running the drug-abuse clinic at a hospital in Queens. His wife, Beverly, toured the world as a folk singer for 20 years. After raising a son and two children from Beverly’s first marriage, they moved in 2005 from New York City to Syracuse.
They were thrilled to move into Nob Hill, a sprawling rental complex along the southern edge of the city. With 761 apartments in four buildings spread across 28 acres, the property featured a swimming pool, a gym and well-kept lawns.
Their neighbors were politicians, lawyers, university professors and factory managers.
And around Syracuse, Nob Hill even had a nickname: Snob Hill.
“It was a fantastic spot,” said their son Gus Grissett Jr., who helped his parents move into a ground floor apartment in Building 3. “It was where the elite seemed to live.”
But after 15 years, things at Nob Hill started going downhill.
This January, Ms. Grissett entered the hospital. Her husband, at age 78, was still working full time for a nonprofit and spending the rest of his time at his wife’s bedside. They needed their son’s help, so Gus Jr. flew up from Queens.
He was shocked by what he found. The campus was choked with weeds. Reeking garbage overflowed from dumpsters outside, and trash bags and pizza boxes sat in piles down the hall from his parents’ door. Nearby units were supposed to be vacant, but Gus Jr. heard people inside them, bumping around. He assumed they were squatters, taking advantage of broken doors to seek refuge from Syracuse’s bitter winters.
In his parents’ apartment, the faucets emitted black and green ooze, and the radiators were cold. Building managers offered a space heater, but the elder Mr. Grissett refused, worried about the risk of fire. The apartment was so frigid that he slept in his clothes, including a winter hat.
“It was beyond disgraceful,” Gus Jr. said. “We might as well have been sleeping outside.”
Ms. Grissett died this Valentine’s Day. Her son stayed for another two weeks and then flew home to New York to prepare for her memorial service in Queens. His father would take the train to New York three days later, on Feb. 28.
Early that morning, after years of complaints from tenants about growing fire risks, a fire broke out inside Nob Hill’s Building 3. In the apartment where the fire started, firefighters found a body.
How did one of the largest and most desirable apartment complexes in New York State deteriorate so precipitously?
To nearly everyone who witnessed its decline, there was a clear answer: A private equity company bought it in 2018 and ran it into the ground.
Everything started to change, tenants and city officials said, when Nob Hill was purchased by an investment group based in Santa Monica, Calif.
At first, tenants said, it was small things: The grass went uncut, and the pool was often closed. Then in 2022, conditions declined significantly. Uncollected garbage overflowed from dumpsters and trash chutes, and the elevators failed. Broken locks were never fixed, inviting squatters to occupy vacant apartments and do drugs in the lobbies.
Nob Hill acquired a new nickname: Slob Hill.
Meanwhile, maintenance was performed by five different management companies over four years. Every time a new manager took over, tenants said, their long-neglected maintenance requests seemed to disappear.
“Things there fell apart,” said Syracuse’s mayor, Sharon F. Owens, who visited relatives who lived at Nob Hill in the 1990s.
The situation became untenable in 2025. Tenants sued Nob Hill’s owners for uninhabitable conditions, and the city of Syracuse sued for code violations. This July, Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, weighed in with another lawsuit, citing “rampant negligence and violations of tenants’ rights.”
The owners responded with a countersuit, accusing one of the property managers of allowing Nob Hill to spiral out of control, and accusing the city of hampering efforts to fix it up.
“My son and I are serious, thoughtful real estate owners, investors and operators,” Patrick Nesbitt, Nob Hill’s largest shareholder and leader of the private equity company that purchased the complex in 2018, said in an email. In court filings, he stressed that the ownership group was kept in the dark about the state of the property. “Unfortunately, Nob Hill has been an unmitigated disaster from almost the beginning of our ownership.”
In court, tenants expressed fear that the combination of squatters, faulty electrical wiring and failed fire safety systems could lead to disaster.
At one hearing, Sean Stanyon, a tenant who lived in the same building as the Grissetts, testified that the fire alarms and smoke detectors were regularly out of order.
“I’m afraid to sleep at night in case there’s a fire,” he told the judge.
Weeks later, a fire broke out in Mr. Stanyon’s building as he slept.
Skin in the Game
Nob Hill was completed in the early 1970s. By 2018, the longtime owners were looking to sell. Nicholas Sinatra, a real estate developer based in Buffalo, learned of the opportunity through a local real estate company, he said. An investment broker introduced him to Mr. Nesbitt, a hard-charging real estate developer whose company, Windsor Capital Group, owned shopping centers, hotels, apartments and office buildings around the country. He lived on a 43,000-square-foot estate in Montecito, Calif., with stables for 17 horses and a regulation polo field.
After hearing Mr. Sinatra’s pitch about Nob Hill, Mr. Nesbitt recruited two of his friends to invest. Teodoro Calle, whose family owns an Ecuadorean construction company, came to own 13 percent. Fred Fellows, an investor in West Palm Beach, Fla., bought 8 percent. Mr. Sinatra also became a minority investor, taking a 4 percent stake. His firm, Sinatra & Co., assumed the role of overseeing the property.
The purchase of Nob Hill was part of a flood of similar deals in 2018 in which private equity firms bought apartment complexes across the country, said Jim Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit that tracks private equity apartment deals.
Nob Hill’s sale price of $58.5 million made it one of the most expensive sales in Syracuse history. But because 90 percent of the money came from a $51 million loan backed by Fannie Mae, the government-controlled mortgage finance company, Mr. Nesbitt and his fellow investors faced little financial risk if the investment failed.
“Why this is emblematic of private equity ownership of housing is that, from the beginning, the ownership group had limited skin in the game,” Mr. Baker said. “They never had much to lose. Most of the risk falls on residents and the broader public.”
The business plan was common among private equity firms: make some improvements, then sell at a profit in five to seven years, according to one of the investors. “The goal was not to cut costs,” Mr. Calle said in a recent phone interview. “It was to invest a substantial amount to make it better, and try to improve the occupancy and the tenants.”
Soon, however, Nob Hill fell apart.
“This is not good.”
Bruce Hare always had fond memories of Nob Hill. He moved there in 2001, into a one-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms and a terrace, for $1,200. The place was well kept and close to Syracuse University, where he was a sociology professor.
“The pool was beautiful,” Mr. Hare recalled recently.
He left Nob Hill when he married in 2020, then moved back in 2022, after his divorce. Soon after he returned, he realized things had changed. One of the two elevators in his building wasn’t working. The lawns were overgrown, and the pool was rarely open.
“I thought, ‘This is not good,’” he said.
Also in 2022, the Nesbitts removed Mr. Sinatra as the property’s manager, though he remained a minority investor. Nob Hill’s owners would cycle through four more management companies in less than four years.
“I was no longer in charge of operations,” Mr. Sinatra said, “and that’s when the property went south.”
In interviews and in court, tenants agreed that conditions worsened after Mr. Sinatra was no longer involved. As garbage went uncollected for months, pests invaded. Common areas were rarely cleaned, and elevators reeked of cat urine.
More seriously, fire safety systems failed. Some fire doors were nearly impossible to open, tenants said, while others rarely stayed closed. Smoke detectors, fire alarms and emergency lights broke across the campus. The Fire Department grew accustomed to frequent false alarms at Nob Hill. Michael Monds, the Syracuse fire chief, ordered special emergency response plans drawn up for each of Nob Hill’s four buildings.
“We knew it was going to be challenging if there ever was a fire,” Mr. Monds said.
The first lawsuit against Nob Hill’s owners was filed by the City of Syracuse in April 2025, followed the next month by a raft of suits brought by tenants.
Nob Hill’s owners stopped making mortgage payments in June 2025, and Fannie Mae sought to foreclose. In February 2026, Judge Shadia Tadros of Syracuse City Court ordered the owners to make repairs, and ruled that tenants could withhold rent until the problems were solved.
“For many of the tenants, Nob Hill was more of a nightmare than a home,” Judge Tadros wrote. “Some of the conditions noted are the worst this court has seen. The complete disregard of tenants’ living conditions would be deemed criminal if not for corporate protections.”
Judge Tadros signed her order on Feb. 27. Before the sun rose the next morning, Nob Hill’s Building 3 would erupt in flames.
Scared, cold, vindicated
The smoke detectors in Sean Stanyon’s apartment were broken. So when the fire started, he slept right through it.
He realized there was a problem only a half-hour later when Jack, his Pomeranian, wouldn’t stop barking. When Mr. Stanyon got out of bed, his apartment was thick with smoke.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he said to his roommate before placing Jack in a bag and heading for the exit. The hallway was dark and silent. No fire alarms, no emergency lights. He slowly felt his way down three flights of darkened stairs and escaped to the parking lot.
He felt scared, cold and vindicated — his warning in court about the risk of fire now seemed unnervingly accurate.
When firefighters arrived, at around 4 a.m. on Feb. 28, they searched the perimeter of Building 3 and found flames leaping from the windows of a first-floor apartment. Nob Hill’s managers had provided a list of tenants, but fire officials quickly realized the list was wrong — many of the residents who had fled the building and were huddled in the parking lot did not appear on it.
The night before his mother’s memorial service, Gus Jr. called his father and reviewed the plan for his trip to New York. His father’s dark suit was laid out; he would pack his laptop and charger in the morning. He would drive to the train station, where a friend from work would see him off. He was still in mourning, his son knew, but he was looking forward to seeing relatives and old friends in New York.
“Everything seemed to be fine,” he said.
Gus Jr. called his father at 7 a.m. to make sure he was awake and ready. Mr. Grissett did not answer. A couple of hours later, Gus Jr. received a call from Syracuse. It was his father’s co-worker, calling from Nob Hill. There had been a fire. She stood in the parking lot surrounded by fire trucks.
Inside Apartment 128, where the fire started, firefighters had found a body. Nob Hill’s manifest described the apartment as unoccupied, so fire officials presumed the body was that of a squatter.
Gus Jr. knew: It was his father.
Mr. Grissett died in his apartment of smoke inhalation and thermal injuries, according to Fire Department investigators. Gus and Beverly were buried together on March 31, their 57th wedding anniversary.
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3) Trump Says U.S. Has Deal for Control of Large Share of Venezuela’s Oil
The president said an agreement between the countries covered more than 65 billion barrels of reserves. A U.S. official said it would involve a partnership with a private company.
By Rebecca F. Elliott, Simon Romero and Edward Wong, Published Aug. 28, 2026, Updated Aug. 29, 2026
An oil refinery in Punto Fijo, Venezuela, in 2021. Venezuela’s president, Delcy Rodríguez, said a U.S. oil deal would have a “significant impact on our nation’s revival.” Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
President Trump said late Friday that the United States had struck a deal to take majority control of a huge portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, pointing to a sweeping effort to assert U.S. dominance over energy in the Western Hemisphere.
The agreement amounts to a highly unusual foray into another country’s oil fields through a partnership with a private company, the State Department said through a U.S. official.
That firm is affiliated with a Venezuelan businessman, Alejandro Betancourt López, according to two people familiar with the partnership.
The deal would give the United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Mr. Trump said in a social media post. That is almost as much as all of the proven reserves in the United States, which is the world’s biggest oil producer.
Venezuela’s president, Delcy Rodríguez, said the “historic” agreement would involve developing 17 oil fields and have a “significant impact on our nation’s revival.”
The aim of the deal, Ms. Rodríguez said, is “putting our immense reserves at the service of national development.” It would draw more than $100 billion of investment, she said, and generate an estimated $209 billion for Venezuela’s strapped government, which has been struggling to improve living conditions after earthquakes in June left more than 6,500 people dead.
Details were sparse, however, and the text of the agreement was not immediately available. Mr. Betancourt did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the State Department did not respond to questions about Mr. Betancourt’s potential role in the arrangement.
Inside Venezuela, Mr. Betancourt is often called a “bolichico” or “Bolivarian boy” — a term used to refer to Venezuelan businessman who are favored by the government, and who have profited immensely during the country’s socialist revolution. (The government named the revolution for the country’s independence hero Simón Bolivar.)
The Trump administration deposed and captured Ms. Rodríguez’s predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, in January, transforming a country that had been an adversary into something resembling a client state. As part of the process, the administration made Venezuela’s oil central to its campaign to expand U.S. influence over energy in the Americas, where rising production has helped blunt the loss of oil coming out of the Middle East over the past six months because of the Iran war.
Previous U.S. leaders often shied away from any suggestion that gaining sway over another country’s natural resources was a primary objective of U.S. military and foreign policy, wary of the international backlash, doubts over the legality of doing so and the potential for such moves to generate security threats against the United States.
But Mr. Trump and some of his top advisers have made it clear that oil is an important part of their foray into Venezuela.
Even before the removal of Mr. Maduro, American officials bluntly claimed that the United States had created Venezuela’s oil industry and that the country’s government had effectively stolen U.S. oil fields through nationalizations.
Unlike most other big oil powers, however, the United States does not have a national oil company through which it can make investments. Asked for comment, the State Department said through the U.S. official that the deal would in effect give the United States 55 percent of the output of a joint venture with an unidentified “experienced private operator in Venezuela”
Oil exploration in Venezuela is generally conducted by the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or through partnerships between it and private companies.
Mr. Trump made his announcement on Friday as Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, was in advanced talks to significantly expand its operations in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the negotiations between the oil company and Venezuelan officials. That deal could be announced as early as next week.
Any new investment by Chevron, the only American company with a major presence in Venezuela, would bolster the country’s efforts to revitalize its ailing oil industry and its struggling economy.
Chevron’s negotiations over new investments in Venezuela were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
Several other U.S. oil companies have also been pursuing opportunities in the South American country, though much of what has come to fruition so far this year has been preliminary or relatively small.
The Trump administration’s deal showcases the major shift underway in the energy landscape of Venezuela, which is thought to have the world’s largest oil reserves. Maintaining government control over oil has shaped the country’s politics for decades, and many Venezuelans view oil as a birthright and a cornerstone of national identity.
Under U.S. pressure just weeks after the capture of Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s National Assembly approved an overhaul of legislation governing its oil industry, granting foreign oil companies greater control over their operations in the country. This move reversed much of Venezuela’s nationalization of oil projects in 2007 and opened the way for Chevron to expand its foothold.
The nationalization had been a pillar of Chavismo, the political movement created by Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, which wielded control over Venezuela until this year.
Ms. Rodríguez, a Maduro ally who replaced him as president, has faced U.S. threats that she could meet a similar fate. She has been much more open to working with the U.S. government and frequently talks to and meets with top Trump administration officials.
Anatoly Kurmanaev, Julie Turkewitz and Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
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4) Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Foreign Students Who Criticized Israel
The ruling was a win for Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, and it followed another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, Published Aug. 28, 2026, Updated Aug. 29, 2026
A lawsuit argued that student journalists had been forced to self-censor out of fear of government retaliation. Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.
“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.
“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”
Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.
Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.
“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.
The ruling follows another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year. A federal judge in Massachusetts appointed by President Ronald Reagan ruled in September that Trump officials had violated the First Amendment as part of a broader strategy to stamp out campus activism. Judge Wise relied heavily on the reasoning of that court, which found that the Trump administration singled out “pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech for a campaign of speech-chilling retribution.”
In California, lawyers from the free speech group brought their lawsuit on behalf of The Stanford Daily, a student newspaper at Stanford University. They argued that several of its staff members had been forced to self-censor or quit the paper out of fear that the government could retaliate for what it published.
In court filings, the newspaper, which is open to all students and has more than 150 members, said it had weathered resignations and withdrawn stories by noncitizens who were concerned that publishing content about Israel or the conditions in Gaza could leave them vulnerable to deportation.
The climate of fear at Stanford that the lawsuit described followed a series of arrests last year, when the Trump administration began targeting prominent student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, over their speaking out against the Israeli government and the mounting death toll in Gaza.
In those and other cases, immigration agents arrested the students after Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, invoked the challenged provision, deeming the students a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. In each case, Mr. Rubio personally signed off on the decision to revoke a student visa or render a lawful permanent resident deportable after determining that those interests were at stake.
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5) Dolly Parton Was So Fake She Was Real
By Rhonda Garelick, Aug. 29, 2026
Ms. Garelick is the author of “Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History” and the forthcoming “Why Fashion Matters.”
“It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it/And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.”
Ron Galella, via Getty Images
From the beginning, Dolly Parton was utterly real about her unrealness. She played with the over-the-top details she shared with a long line of platinum femmes fatales — Mae West, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe with even a dash of Daisy Mae, the country bombshell from “Li’l Abner,” Al Capp’s satirical comic strip about “hillbillies.”
In a way, Ms. Parton was a drag artist. We all know the ingredients: big uberblonde hair, big lashes, big smile, big bosom, vertiginous heels and an hourglass figure poured into the tightest, sparkliest dresses. They’re exaggerated versions of the standard feminine proportions and embellishments that women are encouraged to strive for. These are the building blocks of beauty culture, which I’ve loved and hated all my life.
Like many women, I learned about beauty from my mother. My sister and I adored watching her prepare for a night out. She’d open her cosmetics drawer, revealing its colorful tubes and pots — magical items that would transform her into a glamorous second self. (“Glamour” originally meant “magic spell,” as in “to cast a glamour.”) My mother enjoyed this process, but it was also clear that beauty was often a chore, an exacting discipline, a burdensome disguise. Though never overweight, Mom would periodically diet to “improve” her figure. And she increasingly despaired over the physical effects of aging, and mused about rejuvenating surgical procedures, though she never had any.
I learned early that a woman’s face and body were composed of separable units, ones I had to maintain, enhance, hide or control. It could be a pleasurable, even powerful process, but it was also fraught with self-doubt and alienation.
As a young woman, I struggled to strike a balance between glamming it up and wanting to be taken seriously. Once, many years ago, I dressed for a dance party in a gold lamé mini dress, fishnets and heels. It felt fun and festive, until a friend announced, “You look like a drag queen.” I was deflated. I knew they meant that I had gone too far, and fallen off the continuum of acceptable female appearance. Femininity may be a kind of “masquerade” as the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote, but it works only if you occult most of the effort involved. Looking “like a drag queen” meant I had failed at feigning feminine naturalness. I’d desexed myself with the accouterments of my sex. This is how precarious the whole beautification enterprise can be for women.
Drag beautification is another matter. Drag performers show all work. They celebrate it. Their goal is a deliberately artificial-looking persona. For years, I hated drag. I thought the performers were mocking women for conforming to social conventions we did not choose, taunting us with their liberty to play with, then set aside those same conventions. I felt like they were showing me up, beating me at my own game.
I’ve learned better. I now love drag. I can appreciate it as a commentary on the theatricality of female gender expression. And Ms. Parton knew that power and freedom. She showed us how a woman could appropriate the costume of femininity for her own purposes.
Ms. Parton seemed to gaze upon her stage persona from an amused distance. In a vexed 1977 interview, a disapproving Barbara Walters pressed her to justify her flamboyant style, saying: “You don’t have to look like this. You’re very beautiful,” adding, “You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes.” Ms. Parton, wearing a giant blue fabric flower in her giant blond wig, replied with disarming sincerity. She explained that her look was designed not to compensate for any lack of natural beauty, but simply to capture audience attention. “I’m very real where it counts, and that’s inside,” she said. “Show business is a moneymaking joke.” The distinction was clear — there was glitzy, outside Dolly and real, inner Dolly.
Eventually, the outer Dolly multiplied into thousands. That is, the Dolly Parton look was so beloved and so easy to copy that it became a popular drag persona. Ms. Parton, a great supporter of the L.G.B.T.Q.A. community, joked fondly about her imitators. In a 1978 Playboy interview, she wondered if she might lose if she entered one of the many “Dolly look-alike” contests. “Wouldn’t that be hysterical?” she said. “But I doubt if I would. I mean, I look too much like her.” That third-person “her” was the perfect reminder of Ms. Parton’s pragmatic understanding of her showbiz self. Years later, she claimed that she had in fact entered such a contest — and lost.
With her good-humored, practical view of bombshell style, Ms. Parton drained it of its potentially oppressive quality. She was not trying to be “natural” — to convince us she really had that hair, those lashes or that extremely ample bosom (whose origins she left mysterious). The costume was a tool to get her true gift — her music — noticed. And as she grew older, she held fast to that costume, admitting freely that she needed outside help to maintain it. “If something is bagging, sagging or dragging,” she explained, “I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it.” That funny little rhyme bore no trace of vanity or ageism. This was not trying to look young; this was brisk practicality, just Dolly taking care of business. To me, this feels feminist, but when asked in 2019 if she considered herself a feminist, Dolly rejected the notion. “No I do not,” she said. “I think of myself as a woman in business.” (I think she was both, though. Avoiding the feminist label was itself likely something of a business decision.)
Ms. Parton’s “9 to 5” (the title song for the 1980 film she also starred in), is an upbeat anthem to women’s (and workers’) solidarity. The comic movie took on a serious issue of its era: women’s challenges entering male-dominated workplaces. Ms. Parton played Doralee, a secretary whose sexist boss demeans and harasses her. Ms. Parton infuses her character with a humanity that transcends Doralee’s provocative wardrobe of clingy dresses and low-cut blouses. And Dolly’s memorable song for the film echoed her character’s plight, decrying the dehumanizing grind of corporate life: “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it/And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.”
Dolly Parton showed us how what can feel like a constraint — the conventions of beauty, sexiness, body type, even age — can all be repurposed as a costume to wear with wit and self-awareness. Her supremely artificial persona made her seem only more human and approachable. She made the trappings of femininity seem joyful, and liberatory.
Although married for nearly 60 years to Carl Dean, who passed away in 2025, Ms. Parton was almost never seen with him. Few people even knew what he looked like. He was “very independent,” she said, and “liked being alone.” As a result, Ms. Parton too seemed independent and unattached. She existed outside of the traditional setting of a couple. She was a wife, but only privately; and she was not a mother. This permitted her to retain her artful, self-enclosed stage persona untethered from the domestic labels and tabloid exposés (about marriages, divorces, pregnancies, etc.) that tend to define — and limit — high-profile women. Her intimate, offstage life was kept permanently under wraps, much like her natural hair. We didn’t know much about her personal life, but we didn’t need to. We could see, enjoy and learn from the wonderful, brilliantly talented creation that was public Dolly Parton — bedecked in all her ultrafeminine, ultra-artificial drag that she wore so knowingly, yet so lightly.
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6) Mountains Are Coming Undone
By Jonathan Mingle, Aug. 29, 2026
Mr. Mingle is the author of “Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World.”
Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On the morning of Aug. 26, an entire glacier-covered mountainside in northern Nepal collapsed. Within minutes, a towering, churning wall of mud, rock and water engulfed villages in the valley of the Bhotekoshi River along the border between Nepal and Tibet. For many of those in its path, there was little time to escape. At least 580 people are dead; more than 1,900 people remain missing. The toll is expected to rise in the coming days.
The several-story-high mass coming out of nowhere to explode buildings and snap bridges was not like the floods or avalanches well known in this region. It was more like a bomb, some said.
This is a sign of a new, disorienting danger in cold mountain zones: the rapid destabilization of glaciers and permafrost that can remake entire landscapes in the blink of an eye. The processes leading to these cascading failures are complex, but the hidden hand behind them is human-caused climate change. Our fossil fuel burning is pulling down the world’s highest peaks.
Initially, Nepalese authorities speculated that an earthquake may have triggered the disaster. Satellite images indicate instead that an immense mass of ice and rock on the northern side of a mountain called Langtang Lirung likely gave way and plummeted 4,000 feet until it slammed into the valley floor. The resulting surge ricocheted down the river with a force so great it mimicked a 5.2-magnitude seismic event — big enough to be detected by seismometers around the world.
In 2011, I spent a week visiting this part of Nepal while researching a book about the causes and consequences of glacier loss in the Himalaya. I started the journey in the riverside settlement of Syapru Besi, a town that was mostly erased this week.
Worldwide, climate change is causing glaciers to disappear at an accelerating rate. Few places are as vulnerable as the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau, where the rate of glacier ice loss has doubled since 2000. As those frozen water towers dwindle, the two billion people downstream who depend on the Brahmaputra, Indus and other great rivers of Asia will have less water for drinking, farming and hydroelectricity in decades to come. More people will also be exposed to glacial lake outburst floods, a dangerous phenomenon triggered when glacial melt fills basins and overwhelms dams.
Fifteen years ago, my reporting focused on those daunting but largely anticipated twin impacts of vanishing ice. I saw villages in north India abandoned as receding glaciers led to extreme drought. I heard farmers on the Tibetan Plateau describe their shock at seeing once reliable springs dry up. People in Nepal and Bhutan described their fear of losing their homes and their lives in glacial floods.
Now something else is coming into view: Like termites gnawing on a house’s framing, rising air temperatures seem to be chewing away at the ice and permafrost holding slopes together at high elevations.
In April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck northern Nepal, shaking loose a nearly seven-foot-thick mass of snow, ice and rock from the southern face of Langtang Lirung that killed more than 300 people including more than 100 whose bodies were never recovered. In 2024, researchers concluded that climate change had likely made the tremor-induced avalanche more deadly.
A slope on the north face of that very same mountain has just collapsed, a very likely sign it is further buckling under the weight of climate change. It’s far from the only one.
In 2016, two glaciers in the Aru mountains of western Tibet spontaneously crumbled into fast-moving ice avalanches — highly unusual events that came in quick succession, just two months apart. The first one killed nine shepherds and coated three square miles with debris. The north face of Ronti Peak in Uttarakhand, India, broke off in 2021, sending a surge of pulverized ice and rocky debris downriver through the district of Chamoli. More than 200 people were killed or missing and two large hydropower plants were damaged.
The risks extend beyond the Himalaya. In 2022, following a period of anomalously warm weather, a permafrost-buttressed glacier in Italy’s Dolomites collapsed and killed 11 mountaineers. In May 2025, a rock-ice collapse buried the village of Blatten in Switzerland after its 300 residents had been safely evacuated. Geologists are now closely watching a similarly unstable rock face that threatens another Swiss village.
Conventional flood warning and disaster response systems may be no match for these events. Days after the cataclysm in Nepal and Tibet, there is an ongoing risk of further flooding to both survivors and rescuers, from new lakes that have rapidly formed upstream by debris blocking the river’s flow.
As rescue and recovery efforts unfold in the days ahead, one question we should consider is how many other mountains might be quietly coming undone. In a recent post analyzing the disaster, Bethan Davies, a glacial geologist at Newcastle University, warned that in the years ahead “we should expect to continue to experience such catastrophic events.” A study she co-authored documents how glacier ice loss in Nepal’s Langtang region has been speeding up in recent decades. Many glaciers are shrinking and fragmenting at a geologically breakneck pace, leaving exposed dark rock that has been insulated for millenniums.
We are accustomed to thinking of mountains — especially the Himalaya, which means “abode of snows” in Sanskrit — as fixed, timeless, immovable, permanent. The disaster in Nepal is the latest disturbing sign that mountains are fragile. The speed with which humans are warming the world is pulling them apart at the seams. Even mountain dwellers who have learned, across generations, to adapt to the vagaries of monsoon rains, periodic landslides, spring and summer floods and winter avalanches have now been dragged into alien terrain, without ever having moved.
In the minutes before this week’s deluge struck and tore away the life he and others had known, a survivor downstream of the border said he heard what sounded like a “thunderclap” — the sound of one of the planet’s tallest mountains falling. This new warning alarm of climate breakdown is loud and terrible enough to echo around the world — if we choose to hear it.
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7) Trump Is in Open Revolt Against the Constitution
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 29, 2026
So far, the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.
Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.
This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.
It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.
To wit, earlier this week the Supreme Court paused a lower court injunction on the proposed ballot rule, writing that it had not been formally issued yet by the U.S.P.S., so the states that sued could not demonstrate harm. Since then, the Postal Service has issued its rule and a Federal District Court has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking implementation. The administration has appealed this decision, and the Supreme Court is set to hear the case on the merits in a number of weeks, if not days.
From there, the court will have to decide whether it will follow the Constitution — which clearly leaves election administration to the states, unless Congress intervenes — or contrive again to contort the law and give the president a win, allowing him to pursue his irrational crusade against mail-in voting and giving him the tools — if not to sabotage the midterms outright — then to create chaos and disruption.
I would not put much faith in the Supreme Court, but we’ll see what happens.
The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.
It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.
Life under Trump during his second term is defined by the aggressive use of unaccountable executive power, from illegal taxes — in the form of tariffs — and wars to the military occupation of American cities and a roaming deportation force used to terrorize entire communities. Thousands of people have been kidnapped in the street and whisked away to squalid detention centers, where dozens have died. Many thousands more, including some American citizens, have been deported, sometimes to countries they’ve never seen or visited in their lives.
The president has wielded his power against colleges and universities in a concerted effort to destroy the nation’s capacity for scientific research and weaken any institution capable of generating independent knowledge.
The administration continues to assault the First Amendment: both the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press. Not a single member of this White House appears to believe in the public’s First Amendment rights or in its right to choose its own political leadership.
The attitude of the president and his advisers is that the 2024 election was an enabling act for a constitutional revolution, in which rule by the people was replaced by the Führerprinzip.
That the intent is clear does not mean it is the reality on the ground. I believe Trump has failed to accomplish authoritarian consolidation. But he has ripped an enormously damaging Trump-size hole in the constitutional order, and a future president with autocratic designs will have every tool he needs to push the envelope even further.
That’s why, should Democrats capture a majority, they must make the reconstruction of the American political order their first priority. That includes an impeachment trial against President Trump, if only to emphasize the gravity of his conspiracy against the Constitution.
Americans hate the idea of looking back. But we have to if we want any hope of moving forward.
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8) Tupac Shakur Murder Trial: Takeaways From Week 2
The jury heard recordings of Duane Keith Davis discussing the shooting; the defense said there was no physical evidence tying him to Las Vegas the night of the crime.
By Anusha Bayya, Aug. 29, 2026
Duane Keith Davis, in court on Wednesday, in Las Vegas. Closing arguments are coming next week. Caroline Brehman/Reuters
The murder case against Duane Keith Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the shooting of the rapper Tupac Shakur, will be in the hands of the jury in Las Vegas next week.
The prosecutors say that on Sept. 7, 1996, Mr. Davis was one of four people in a white Cadillac that pulled up at a red light alongside a BMW carrying Mr. Shakur and his record label boss Marion Knight, known as Suge.
Mr. Davis is charged with acquiring the gun that was used to shoot Mr. Shakur. While he is not accused of pulling the trigger, prosecutors claim he was instrumental in the murder. His 2019 self-published memoir about his time as a gang member in Compton, Calif., which said he was in the Cadillac, helped propel the case to trial.
Mr. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday. Both sides finished presenting their cases to a jury this week, wrapping up earlier than anticipated after certain witnesses, including Mr. Knight, were not called to testify by either side.
Here are five takeaways from the second week of the trial.
The jurors heard Mr. Davis’s voice over and over.
In opening statements last week, Binu Palal, a prosecutor, told jurors that on the night of a Mike Tyson prizefight, a feud between record companies on the East and West coasts and their affiliated Compton-based gangs had come to a head. Mr. Shakur’s shooting, Mr. Palal said, was a vengeful act. He added, “Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.” Jurors have heard recordings of Mr. Davis recounting his role that night to the authorities, documentary filmmakers and YouTube interviewers.
In a 2008 interview and under a proffer agreement, Mr. Davis first gave the authorities an account that most closely resembles what he is being prosecuted for. He recalled being provided a gun by an associate of Sean Combs, the owner of the rival record company that had been at war with Mr. Knight’s label, Death Row Records. (Mr. Combs has long denied any connection to Mr. Shakur’s death.) Mr. Davis decided to pursue Mr. Knight and Mr. Shakur after an attack on his nephew, Orlando Anderson, he said. After failing to find them at a club, Mr. Davis, his nephew and two other men were heading to a hotel when they spotted the BMW, he said, and Mr. Davis passed the gun to the back of the car; Mr. Anderson shot at the vehicle after another man refused.
Jurors heard Mr. Davis repeat parts of this account in a 2009 interview with law enforcement officials, and again years later as he spoke to the showrunner of a documentary related to the shooting. The details varied; sometimes, he denied knowing who fired the gun. In audio clips played at trial, Mr. Davis’s lawyer at the time, Wayne Higgins, can be heard acknowledging that Mr. Davis is prone to boasting, something his current lawyer, Michael Sanft, has echoed in his efforts to paint Mr. Davis’s statements as self-aggrandizing exaggerations in the name of making money.
The defense said there was a lack of physical evidence.
Mr. Davis’s voice formed the crux of the prosecution’s evidence, but Mr. Sanft homed in on the lack of physical evidence tying his client to the crime or to Las Vegas the night of the shooting.
Dan Long, a former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detective who testified as a defense witness, described his fruitless efforts to locate the murder weapon and the Cadillac that Mr. Davis and his associates purportedly rode in. Another former member of the department recalled running bullet casings recovered at the scene of the shooting through a system known as the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, first in 2003 and again in 2023, to see if they matched a weapon on file. Again, one failed to materialize.
Robert Ladd, a retired Compton Police Department detective who once worked in its gang unit, testified this week that residences in Compton affiliated with Mr. Davis were searched in the late 1990s amid escalating tensions between the South Side Compton Crips and the rival Mob Piru Bloods gang, associated with Death Row Records. A hotel receipt, a bill from the Monte Carlo casino and a letter from the Excalibur Hotel addressed to Mr. Anderson were recovered that potentially tied Mr. Davis to Las Vegas, but Mr. Ladd did not know where those items were now.
Former officer describes Mr. Davis as a ‘shot caller.’
Mr. Ladd offered jurors a crash course on the mechanics of the 55 or so gangs in Compton at the time, which largely fell into one of two camps: the Crips and the Bloods.
Mr. Davis, a Crip, was at the top of the food chain. “He was a shot caller,” Mr. Ladd testified. “He could tell the younger gangsters what to do.”
Mr. Ladd was one of dozens of officers who encountered the aftermath of Mr. Shakur’s death and the gang war that ensued in Compton. He recalled a spate of what he called retaliatory shootings, and said he assumed that the Crips had been responsible for Mr. Shakur’s death.
On cross-examination, Mr. Sanft emphasized that none of the four people said to have been in the Cadillac were killed during the ensuing violence, and that Mr. Ladd had no proof that Mr. Davis had ordered any of the shootings.
But Mr. Ladd testified that if, as the prosecutors say, Mr. Davis and his three associates were in the Cadillac that night, Mr. Davis would have been the one to give the order to shoot. “If he tells them not to do it, say, ‘Let’s handle it back in Compton,’ they wouldn’t had a shooting,” Mr. Ladd said.
A Las Vegas detective was ready to arrest Mr. Davis in 2009.
In 2009, a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who had been present for an interview of Mr. Davis in California was prepared to arrest him afterward, that detective testified.
After hearing Mr. Davis admit to acquiring the murder weapon and sitting in the same car as the shooter, the detective said that he felt there was probable cause for an arrest.
The detective’s intent, he said, was to “have Mr. Davis arrested for murder.” .
But the Clark County District Attorney’s office paused after hearing audio captured during that interview of a conversation between Mr. Davis, Mr. Davis’s lawyer Mr. Higgins and a member of law enforcement, after Mr. Long was asked to leave the room. In the recording, Mr. Davis can be heard asking Mr. Higgins and Daryn Dupree, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective investigating a 1997 murder of another rapper, whether he should tell Mr. Long that he had the gun. “Stay consistent,” Mr. Dupree responds. “’Cause the story’s already been told.”
Mr. Long eventually caught wind of a proffer agreement, which would have protected Mr. Davis from being prosecuted based on that conversation. Mr. Long made attempts to contact Mr. Higgins and the U.S. attorney’s office in California, where the interview occurred. Nobody replied, he said.
A scaled back witness list.
A handful of missing voices, some of whom the defense has claimed offer critical answers to unanswered questions, have loomed over these proceedings.
Those figures include Greg Kading, a former Los Angeles detective who interviewed Mr. Davis in 2008 and later wrote a book about the saga, and Clifford Mogg, a retired homicide detective who helped shepherd the case to trial.
Another potential witness, Corey Edwards, who prosecutors claim was with Mr. Davis in Las Vegas the day of the shooting, was not at his residence when the authorities attempted to arrest him last week, nor was he at another location in Compton when authorities tried again on Monday.
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