We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) At Least 21 Dead in Gaza After Building Collapse, Officials Say
The building was previously damaged by an Israeli strike, the local rescue service said. Its fall underscored the precarious conditions for people living among Gaza’s ruins.
By Natan Odenheimer, Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir, Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv, Sept. 16, 2026
Excavating rubble from a collapsed building to recover bodies in Gaza City on Wednesday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A war-damaged building in Gaza collapsed on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people, including children, and trapping many more beneath the wreckage, according to local officials.
The incident shines a light on the perilous conditions in Gaza after the devastating war that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Officials have warned that many more damaged buildings are at risk of collapse. The lack of progress on reconstruction has forced residents to choose between living in seriously compromised buildings or in tents.
Dozens of people were living in the Saada residential building in Gaza City when it caved in at around 2 a.m. local time, according to the Civil Defense rescue service, which is part of the Hamas-run interior ministry in Gaza.
The officials added that the building had previously been hit by an Israeli strike, though it was unclear when. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
Search-and-rescue teams pulled survivors from the wreckage on Wednesday morning as they searched for missing residents.
“We can see people still trapped under the rubble,” said Raed al-Dahshan, director of Civil Defense in the Gaza City area. “We’re doing everything we can to extract them.”
Mr. al-Dahshan said the authorities in Gaza had warned residents that the building was unstable, but that many did not leave because they did not want to be displaced and potentially end up in worse conditions. He added that there were roughly 70 buildings in the Gaza City area at risk of collapse.
Humanitarian groups warned that there could be more such deaths in the coming months.
“With the heavy rains and winds of winter approaching, the risk of damaged buildings collapsing will only increase, putting more lives in danger,” Pat Griffiths, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said by telephone from Gaza.
“Choosing between life in a tent — with little privacy or space and exposed to harsh weather — or a building that is damaged and at risk of collapse, just to have a roof over one’s head, is not a choice any family should have to make.”
The deadly collapse underscores the devastation across Gaza after years of war, which has left entire neighborhoods in ruins. Much of Gaza’s population was displaced by the conflict, and many are now living in damaged buildings.
After a U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement was reached in October 2025, Palestinians had hoped that Israel would allow a significant amount of heavy machinery and construction materials into Gaza to begin the long process of removing rubble and rebuilding the territory. Thousands of bodies from the war are still beneath the rubble across Gaza, according to local officials. On Tuesday, the United Nations human rights chief called for international investigators to be allowed into the enclave to recover the remains of Palestinians from beneath damaged buildings.
Efforts by President Trump’s Board of Peace and regional mediators to advance the cease-fire and pave the way for reconstruction have stalled. Israel has continued to target the territory, despite international pressure to halt its attacks there.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed a Civil Defense worker and a teenager, according to an official in the rescue service. The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hamas militants, and that the attack was under review.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and Egyptian-backed rescue teams assisted local emergency crews on Wednesday in their search for survivors of the building collapse.
In a statement, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, urged international authorities to allow heavy equipment into Gaza to assist in search-and-rescue operations, along with humanitarian aid.
“Every possible effort must be made to save lives, protect people from further harm and provide families with safer places to live,” he said. “Every minute counts.”
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2) Trump’s Minnesota Surge Threatened Democracy, Judge Warns
In a rare interview, Patrick Schiltz, who served as the federal court’s chief judge last winter, called the administration’s actions “a grave threat to the rule of law.”
By Mattathias Schwartz, Sept. 17, 2026
Mattathias Schwartz visited the Twin Cities and spoke with Judge Schiltz and six other judges who serve on Minnesota’s Federal District Court.
The legality of the administration’s tactics during its immigration enforcement operation, known as Metro Surge, in Minneapolis early this year was challenged by a series of federal lawsuits. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz’s warning was stark.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated nearly 100 orders issued by Minnesota’s Federal District Court during the month of January, including some mandating the release of undocumented immigrants from detention.
The violations needed to stop immediately. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Judge Schiltz wrote in his Jan. 28 order.
Judges around the country took notice, not only of the scale of the allegation but because such a harsh reproach was coming from the pen of Judge Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee with almost 20 years of experience on the bench. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s and has enjoyed close ties to the conservative legal establishment for decades. This was not the profile of a judge likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the White House.
In a rare 90-minute interview seven months later, Judge Schiltz said his order had been prompted by concern that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.
What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”
He said he thought the violations were largely the result of incompetence and staffing shortages, but also worried that the Justice Department had not taken their corrosive effect seriously enough.
“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he added, referring to the violated orders and other unusual behavior by the Justice Department. He was in his chambers, which has signed photos of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the wall. Earlier in his career, he helped found a law school at a Catholic university in Minneapolis, and wrote a renowned law review article about the moral perils of the legal profession.
Judge Schiltz, who served as the district’s chief judge from mid-2022 through June 2026, declined to discuss ongoing cases. But he and six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench agreed to speak to The New York Times about last winter’s tumult, to describe how an intense national spotlight, a deteriorating relationship with the Justice Department and a flood of lawsuits had combined to put their court under tremendous pressure.
In the view of the Department of Homeland Security, it operates “in line with the U.S. Constitution and all applicable federal laws,” said Chandler Rebel, a D.H.S. spokesman.
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the administration “will continue to fully comply with court orders.” She asserted that in most instances where there was an issue, “the underlying substance of the order was satisfied even where a secondary deadline was missed.”
Ms. Pels added that it she found it “remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews” criticizing the administration, and suggested that they consider recusing themselves if they “have made public comments on pending or related matters.”
It is indeed unusual for federal judges to give extensive interviews that reflect on periods when their rulings have made headlines.
The seven judges who spoke to The Times were appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. They included six of the seven judges who held active status in Minnesota last winter.
“We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence,” said Judge Nancy E. Brasel, whom Mr. Trump appointed in 2018. “And so we should, in order to keep it.”
The tensions in Minnesota eased after the administration announced an end to its surge in mid-February, following the killings of two civilians by federal agents.
Judge Schiltz said he hoped the portrait of how the bench had handled the crisis would help Americans better understand how the United States’ system of government depends on the rule of law.
“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body,” he said. “It is something that you absolutely need to survive, and yet it’s something that people just take for granted.”
Stirring the Pot
On Jan. 23, Judge Schiltz was at home cooking lunch when he received an email informing him the Trump administration had gone over his head to an appeals court.
Out in Minneapolis, ICE officers were arresting undocumented immigrants and putting them on planes bound for detention centers in Texas. It was the second month of Operation Metro Surge — the administration’s latest push to flood a Democratic-led city with armed personnel tasked with delivering on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations.
Tear gas filled the streets as protesters skirmished with uniformed D.H.S. personnel. Federal officers had already shot and killed one Minnesotan in her car; they would shoot and kill another during the coming weekend.
When a group of protesters disrupted a church service in St. Paul, the Trump administration sought warrants for their arrest, including Don Lemon, the former cable news host who has said he was reporting on the group as a journalist. One of Judge Schiltz’s colleagues, Magistrate Judge Douglas L. Micko, had granted three of the eight warrants, but not the one for Mr. Lemon. (Judge Micko, who was not among the judges interviewed by The Times, declined to comment.)
Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, then took the unusual step of requesting that another judge review Judge Micko’s decision. Judge Schiltz had told Mr. Rosen that he would decide on that after the bench met in person the following week.
That timeline wasn’t fast enough for the Justice Department. The Jan. 23 email informed Judge Schiltz that the administration had gone around him. It had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to force him to issue the other warrants. He had less than three hours to make his case to the appeals court for why it shouldn’t intervene.
Outside, it was 20 degrees below zero. The cold had closed the daytime center that looks after Judge Schiltz’s adult son, Peter, who has Down syndrome.
Judge Schiltz turned off the stove and settled Peter in his room with a movie. Then he went to his office.
“I had to sit down and represent myself,” he recalled.
When Judge Schiltz found himself in the spotlight, he said he drew on his experience clerking for Justice Scalia, who he recalled was “utterly unmoved by criticism,” and taught him that “you have to have a thick skin and, you know, uphold your oath.”
That afternoon, Judge Schiltz fired off two letters to the appeals court. He disputed the government’s claim that a warrant for Mr. Lemon’s arrest was, in his words, a “national security emergency.”
Justice Department officials were blasting Judge Micko, noting that his wife works in the office of Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat.
“I don’t even want to say ‘judge,’” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a senior department official, said in an interview that day with the journalist Megyn Kelly. Judge Micko, she said, “exhibited bias.”
The condemnation of Judge Micko by Trump-aligned media outlets was followed by a series of violent threats, which have not been previously reported. In the interview, Judge Schiltz revealed that Judge Micko and his family had to be moved to a secure location, where they remained for several days. Judge Schiltz said that the administration’s statements were part of what had put Judge Micko in danger.
The Eighth Circuit sided with Judge Schiltz, rejecting the government’s request. But the administration eventually got the additional warrants through a different route, by convening a grand jury. Months later, another judge is reviewing that process to see if prosecutors may have misinstructed the grand jury.
The cases cited in Judge Schiltz’s January list of violations have largely concluded, and in many cases, the administration eventually fixed the issues he had flagged.
The ‘Worst of the Worst’
For the clerk of court, Kate M. Fogarty, Operation Metro Surge brought echoes of the fraught atmosphere that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Even as public pressure on the court increased, she still had to monitor protests and handle shutdowns of the district’s courthouses, sometimes with a few minutes’ notice.
“You’ve got thousands of people demonstrating outside your window, whistles blowing nonstop,” Ms. Fogarty said. “And an inbox full of critical cases that need to be assigned.”
By late January, the immigration sweeps had led to hundreds of habeas corpus petitions — lawsuits from detainees demanding to be set free. Previously, undocumented immigrants could generally go on living in their communities for years while challenging deportation in immigration court. Then the Trump administration decided they could be detained as if they were still seeking admission to the United States.
During the first three months of 2025, Minnesota’s Federal District Court fielded two habeas corpus petitions. Over the same period in 2026, it received 1,116 of them. The clerk’s office stayed open 16 hours a day, seven days a week to process incoming petitions. None of the district court’s employees receive overtime, so the court’s staff were essentially working as volunteers.
Homeland Security officials claimed that the agency was targeting immigrants who were “the worst of the worst.” But the district’s judges said most of the detainees who appeared on their dockets seemed to be ordinary people with homes and jobs.
“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” said Judge John R. Tunheim, who was appointed by Bill Clinton.
District court judges work alone, but as the number of cases ramped up, the judges recalled seeking one another’s counsel, meeting regularly and consulting in running email threads. Eventually, some of their clerks made an informal spreadsheet showing whom to consult on particular legal questions. Some judges built templates of legal orders so they could respond quickly to some of the detention issues that were arising again and again.
The judges said they stayed glued to their devices, fearful of missing a petition. Judge Katherine M. Menendez said she responded to one request on her iPad from the coat room of a restaurant. At dinners with friends, Judge Schiltz said he would apologetically explain why he needed to check his phones constantly. “The cost of me enjoying a movie could be somebody waking up in New Mexico the next day when they shouldn’t have,” he recalled.
A Game of Keep-Away
As tensions in the Twin Cities rose, the district’s judges were also facing many other kinds of lawsuits — over the government’s conduct toward protesters, the rights of legally admitted refugees, criminal charges against the protesters themselves, attempts by the Trump administration to subpoena state and local officials and some suits questioning whether the whole operation was legal in the first place. Any decision they made was potentially subject to appeal to the Eighth Circuit, where four of the 11 active-status judges were Mr. Trump’s appointees.
But some of the district court’s most significant curbs on Operation Metro Surge came from its own Trump appointees.
“Due process is not a game of keep-away,” Judge Brasel wrote in a ruling requiring that detainees be given access to counsel.
Judge Eric C. Tostrud, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2018, issued a temporary order for the government to preserve evidence gathered at the scene where federal agents had shot and killed Alex Pretti, a protester.
Judge Tostrud, as the longest-tenured active judge, took over as chief this summer when Judge Schiltz decided to take senior status, a form of semiretirement. In an interview, he said that Judge Schiltz had been “the perfect person to lead us” during Operation Metro Surge. “Independent, brilliant, courageous. And not faint of heart.”
Behind the scenes, the district’s judges were dealing with a deluge of violent threats. After major rulings, the phones in judges’ chambers would sometimes ring nonstop, with clerks logging hundreds of incoming communications each day. Judge Jerry W. Blackwell shared one anonymous email vowing to “kill u soon.” The volume of hostile communications led the bench to create its own internal system for tracking people responsible for multiple threats, supplementing the U.S. Marshals Service, which normally handles judicial security.
The U.S. attorney’s office, headed by Mr. Rosen, was losing career attorneys, some of whom quit in response to how the Justice Department was handling the civilian killings. The administration tried to shore up head count by borrowing lawyers from the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. In a hearing before Judge Blackwell, one melted down, saying that the system was “broken.”
In the interview, Judge Schiltz said that normally government agencies act as “partners” to judges in tackling challenges to the system.
“But they weren’t this time,” he said. “We were really on our own.”
Anarchy or Authoritarianism
After Judge Schiltz’s January warning, judges in other districts around the country began using their rulings to sound the same alarm — the administration’s approach to detaining immigrants was jeopardizing the rule of law.
In West Virginia, a judge threatened to hold administration officials in contempt. In New Jersey, a judge ordered the Justice Department to make its own list of cases where it had failed to comply. In Texas, a judge decried the administration’s actions, and what he called “the perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
“If there is one single issue that would unite judges of all persuasions, it is the sanctity of court orders,” said Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, by email. Judge Wilkinson, appointed by President Reagan, is one of several Republican-appointed judges who have criticized the Trump administration in their rulings. “There is a brotherhood of judges on this question, of which Judge Schiltz is an esteemed and valued part.”
In the interview, Judge Schiltz said that many of the government’s violations of his court orders appeared to be inadvertent, the result of sloppiness and a lack of legal staffing to accompany the immigration surge.
“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” he said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.”
At the same time, he said, the violations needed to be taken seriously. The lack of resources led to a result, he said, that should have been anticipated, and that threatened the foundations of the legal system.
Obedience to court orders, Judge Schiltz said, is why people feel secure owning a home, saving money, getting married and having children.
“You walk down the street, and you assume you’re generally safe because of the law,” he said. “It’s the rule of law. If you don’t have it, you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.”
Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting.
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3) Locals Call It the World’s Largest Cesspool, and Blame It for Surging Cancer
For decades, the Mexican authorities have sacrificed a rural valley to flush away the capital’s waste and power the economy. Now, local communities are paying for that decision — often with peoples’ lives.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Visuals by Alejandro Cegarra, Sept. 17, 2026
The reporters visited several communities surrounding the Endhó Dam, in central Mexico, which locals call the world’s largest cesspool.
The old church of San Francisco Bojay in Hidalgo state, in Mexico, was partially submerged after the area was flooded in the 1950s for a reservoir called the Endhó Dam.
Yury Uribe traced an invisible map of death in her neighborhood, pointing to house after house, nearly all of them touched by cancer, she said.
On that corner lived Doña Agustina, claimed by cancer in her stomach just like Coco, her neighbor across the street. Farther down was Eva, whose death from a ruptured throat tumor left her autistic son on his own. Colon cancer took Doña Juanita, who went to the hospital on a Friday and died the following Monday. And Estela lived over there until about two years ago, when lung cancer spread through her body.
By the end of the tour of her hometown, General Pedro María Anaya, Ms. Uribe had tallied an incomplete yet grim ledger: at least 42 cancer-related deaths, 15 survivors and six active cases, all clustered within a few blocks.
“It’s a lot of pain,” said Ms. Uribe, 45, a former seamstress who turned to activism after seeing her town besieged by unexplained illness. “It’s not normal to have this many sick people in a community”
For many residents of more than 20 communities surrounding a reservoir known as the Endhó Dam in Mexico’s Hidalgo State, cancer is just another symptom of a crisis decades in the making.
In the 1970s, the federal authorities quietly diverted Mexico City’s storm runoff and wastewater into the region, effectively transforming it into the dumping ground for more than 20 million people. Effluent from a heavy industry corridor — including more than 100 factories and an oil refinery fueling Mexico City and other states — has compounded the crisis, with the vast majority of those plants dumping their untreated waste into the Tula River, which empties into the Endhó.
The resulting stew has turned the reservoir into what residents call the world’s largest cesspool.
The United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights has classified the Endhó basin as one of Mexico’s longest-running “sacrifice zones,” an area where local health and ecosystems are intentionally compromised to benefit the capital and its surrounding industries.
Sacrifice zones are a trade-off of modern urban planning. Areas where some people lose so the majority can thrive. The pattern spans the globe, from Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and Italy’s steel plants, to Canada’s oil sands and Mexico’s Endhó Dam.
Around the reservoir, the air is thick with sulfur and rot. White clouds of chemical foam float by homes and roads, while heavy organic waste in the water feeds an unstoppable carpet of aquatic weed.
“What we live through day after day is hell,” said Magnolia Sánchez, 51, a resident of San Mateo La Curva, another riparian community, whose cousin Maira died of breast cancer.
Older residents still remember when the polluted water arrived unannounced. Feliza Camacho was a newlywed in 1972 when she noticed the reservoir turning murky and smelly.
Then came the first victims.
“The lake was white with dead fish,” said Ms. Camacho, 73.
The decision to route Mexico City’s sewage lines and industrial runoff to the Endhó was initially seen as a win-win. As the capital grew, engineers desperate to shield the city from catastrophic flooding also realized the reservoir’s waters, loaded with organic nutrients from the sewage, could double as irrigation and a free fertilizer for the naturally arid valley.
Decades later, the massive influx of nutrients has sustained the region’s agricultural boom while also transforming the Endhó into an environmental dead zone.
Microbes have depleted the dam’s oxygen reserves. Aquatic life has vanished. In 2024, a thick carpet of invasive water hyacinth choked out the surface, growing over 27 times its initial size in just a few months, according to government estimates.
The labyrinth of crannies, nooks and holes within the tangled vegetation has turned the Endhó into a prolific mosquito factory.
When evening falls, people lock themselves inside. Cookouts and quinceañeras have been canceled because of the swarms. Families burn cardboard indoors, hoping the smoke scares off the insects, and purchase up to three cans of bug spray per week — a severe drain on their finances. Bedroom walls are speckled with people’s own dried blood, marks of their nightly battle with the creatures.
“We are living on edge. Being shut inside like this, we’re becoming aggressive. I see it in my own children, I see it in myself,” said Pablo Tinajero, 59, the community leader in Santa María Daxthó, a town by the dam.
At a nearby primary school, Daniela Álvarez, a teacher and principal, struggles to keep her students focused. Children constantly shift in their seats to shake off the mosquitoes, she said, and going to the bathroom, where the bugs congregate, has become a source of dread. Even Ms. Álvarez, 41, avoids pulling books from shelves for fear of releasing hidden insects.
“We’ve normalized the pollution, the bad air and the bad water,” she said. “But normalizing a plague is going too far. We shouldn’t have to teach our kids that this is normal.”
When Leticia Sánchez González’s right breast swelled last year, the pain was so intense that she said she had to quit her two jobs. Doctors told her not to worry, she said. It was likely an infection.
In June, new tests confirmed her suspicions: cancer. Her oncologist prescribed six rounds of chemotherapy to be followed by a mastectomy.
“So many people are getting sick now,” said Ms. Sánchez, 48, who lives near the dam in Santa Ana Ahuehuepan. “You have it, but so does the neighbor.”
The true extent of the illness is unclear.
According to raw data from Mexico’s statistics agency, cancer death rates in Tula de Allende — one of the two municipalities where the dam sits — have surpassed the national average every single year since 2016, at times spiking more than 50 percent higher than the rest of the country. In the neighboring municipality of Tepetitlán, mortality rates for kidney failure and urinary tract diseases have routinely dwarfed the national average, sometimes doubling it.
No public health data exist for the towns in the immediate vicinity of the dam, however.
The results of a census conducted by state and federal health brigades in 2024 were never disclosed. And the government has refused to fund epidemiological studies in the region, according to two researchers who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing public funding. Without that evidence, it remains close to impossible to know whether the surge in cancer cases is indeed caused by the pollutants in the Endhó, something else entirely or the result of random chance.
But to others, there is a clear connection between the Endhó’s polluted waters and the public health disaster. “The pattern is unequivocal,” said Juan Francisco Martínez, Hidalgo’s former director of epidemiological surveillance. “There is a correlation that is obvious, strong and coherent, even if there are no epidemiological studies to prove causality.”
Mexico’s Ministry of Health and the country’s health regulatory agency did not respond to a list of detailed questions.
As for residents, they say the proof they need is in their own backyards.
After Mexico City’s waste arrived, communities dug seven wells seeking clean water as the reservoir fouled. Yet for nearly 20 years, government studies have repeatedly confirmed that the wells — the main source of drinking water — are contaminated.
Arsenic, mercury and lead have all been found in the wells, violating maximum limits set by Mexican safety standards, according to reports by the country’s federal water authority seen by The Times. So have toxic levels of nitrates and fecal bacteria, as well as industrial solvents and byproducts of the petrochemical industry.
In 2024, an official report detected an identical chemical and molecular fingerprint shared between the reservoir and the local drinking supply, concluding that the Endhó’s toxic brew has seeped into the towns’ wells.
But Mayela Godínez, an official with Mexico’s water authority, dismissed that research as flawed, insisting that the agency’s technicians had assured her the well water “is not contaminated, that the quality is good.”
However, change may be slow.
Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree in 2024 legally binding the government to remediate decades of environmental neglect at the dam, eliminate the weeds and the mosquitoes. So far, the government has fumigated 27 communities and extracted the equivalent of 42 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water hyacinth.
But the plan, which the authorities called “the most important act of environmental justice in the history of the country,” feels hollow, critics say. The decree prohibited allocating new funding to clean up the dam, relying instead on exhausted public budgets. Efforts to treat the wastewater face fierce resistance from farmers who depend on the nutrient-rich runoff as crop fertilizer. And crucially, the program excludes public health initiatives.
“Once the environment is restored, our health will improve, they tell us,” said Ms. Uribe, the activist. “It’s an insult to our pain. Cancer doesn’t wait. Illnesses don’t wait.”
Chantal Flores and Alejandro Cegarra contributed reporting.
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4) Trump’s Economic Vise Leaves Cubans Desperate for Food and Medicine
The U.S. says its sanctions are not aimed at depriving Cuba of essential goods. Thousands of stranded shipping containers tell a different story.
By Ed Augustin and Frances Robles, Ed Augustin reported from Havana, Sept. 17, 2026
Ships unloading humanitarian aid at the Port of Havana this year. The challenges in shipping to the island nation are intensifying a humanitarian crisis. Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu, via Getty Images
Thousands of containers filled with food, medicine and other goods bound for Cuba have been stranded throughout the Caribbean since two shipping giants stopped deliveries to avoid tough U.S. sanctions, according to diplomats, Cuban officials, merchants and others involved in the imports.
The containers stranded in various ports include humanitarian aid, from solar panels to medication to colostomy bags. Dozens of containers of aid purchased by different United Nations agencies are among them.
U.S. sanctions have also hobbled shipments by air, and forced the World Health Organization to scrap planned deliveries of cancer drugs.
The challenges of delivering vital materials have sharply aggravated longstanding shortages, added to an enormous backlog of patients awaiting surgery and sent grocery prices soaring as Cubans live through the island’s worst humanitarian crisis since the 1959 revolution. With food becoming prohibitively expensive, hunger is rising and soup kitchens are struggling to fill the gap.
The Trump administration has imposed an economic vise on Cuba and its ruling communist party to try to force political and economic change.
In January, the administration imposed an oil blockade on the island. Then in May, it cranked up the pressure by announcing that foreign companies working with certain Cuban state entities risked having their assets frozen and being locked out of doing business with U.S. companies and banks.
Shortly after, Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping company, and CMA CGM, a French one — which experts say together delivered at least half of Cuba’s imports, including most of its food — quit delivering to the island.
The development adds another layer of misery for Cubans already struggling under daily blackouts, fuel and food shortages and a collapsing health system. It also puts more pressure on the Cuban government as it tries to survive the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.
Dr. Valia Rodríguez, a Cuban doctor in Britain who runs a charity called Aid for the Caribbean, said a Hapag-Lloyd container her organization filled with more than $500,000 worth of resuscitation kits, colostomy bags and intravenous tubes left Northern Ireland in April. It arrived at the Port of Mariel in Cuba on June 4, a day before the new sanctions aimed at foreign companies went into full effect.
“They decided to stop unloading the containers,” said Dr. Rodríguez, referring to Hapag-Lloyd.
The containers were instead sent to Panama, where the charity says it has had to pay more than $6,000 in storage fees, as patients who have had colon surgery turn to desperate measures. “Right now, people in Cuba are using shopping bags, because there are no colostomy bags,” Dr. Rodríguez said.
Spare parts from a dismantled power plant in Uruguay, donated to Cuba by the South American nation’s state-owned power company, have been unable to leave because no shipping line will take them to the island, according to diplomats. Cuba has suffered at least five nationwide blackouts this year as its aging power grid repeatedly collapses.
Though the U.S. government has explicitly stated that its sanctions are not intended to prohibit the delivery of food and medical supplies, Francisco Pichón, the U.N. coordinator in Cuba who runs its humanitarian response, said sanctions were jamming up the organization’s relief effort because shippers were wary of taking any chances.
“We are facing something very real, which is a phenomenon called ‘overcompliance,’” Mr. Pichón said. “Overcompliance is a really excessive precaution from companies to not expose themselves to sanctions.”
As of last week, the U.N. humanitarian relief effort was still awaiting delivery of 30 containers holding water treatment kits, antibiotics, contraceptives and pregnancy tests.
A lack of jet fuel has also decimated air traffic to Cuba, shutting off another cargo delivery route.
Despite months of attempts, thousands of donated vials of a cancer drug called doxorubicin failed to reach the island after several airlines stopped flying to Cuba, according to the Pan American Health Organization.
The World Health Organization said tuberculosis medication it purchased from an Indian pharmaceutical firm meant to leave by air via D.H.L. was returned to the manufacturer in May without explanation. Other humanitarian aid shipments had to be airlifted on special charter flights, U.N. agencies said.
Businesses have considered routing their cargo through the United States because shipments are still coming from there. But the cost of the extra shipping more than doubled the price of cheaper products like rice, making much of it too expensive to sell in Cuba, a person involved in Cuba business trade said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect business operations.
Business owners have been debating whether to abandon their cargo in foreign ports, the person said.
The State Department, has said that sanctions hold the “corrupt” Cuban regime and its financial backers to account, including GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls large parts of the island’s economy.
In a statement to The New York Times, the State Department said the government’s “blatant kleptocracy” and its economic mismanagement directed scarce resources for the benefit of officials, the military and the intelligence apparatus rather than the Cuban people.
“Our tough Cuba policy restricts financial transactions with entities owned or controlled by Cuban security services in order to cut the regime off from resources used to line its pockets and violently oppress the Cuban people,” the statement said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in September that “if Cuba is a humanitarian disaster, it is because their regime is a disaster, because the economic model they follow doesn’t work.”
Rodolfo Benítez Verson, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told the U.N. Human Rights Council last week that more than 7,000 containers bound for Cuba were stranded.
“The cruelty knows no bounds,” Mr. Benítez said. “They will have to answer to the Cuban people, and they will not be forgiven.”
Hapag-Lloyd, the German shipping line, said in a statement that it had made a “business decision” not to continue the Cuba maritime route and that it was working toward a “swift and practical solution” for the cargo.
CMA CGM, the French company, said in a statement that it had resumed limited services of “compliant cargo” to the island, such as agricultural products, medicines and medical devices.
Given the scale of the backlog it would take months for all the containers to reach the island, businesspeople, diplomats and humanitarian workers said.
The People’s Forum, a left-wing organization based in New York, said it had three containers stranded with roughly 1,000 solar panels costing over $750,000 meant to power hospital intensive care units. Purchased in Mexico, they are now stuck there, said Manolo De Los Santos, an organizer with the group.
“The bigger thing for us is the anguish of knowing there are literally surgical rooms without electricity and 100,000 patients waiting for surgeries,” he said.
The Cuban government, in a new report detailing the effects of the U.S. oil blockade, said 100,000 patients were awaiting operations, including 12,000 children.
With few viable commercial shipping routes available, exports to Cuba have plummeted.
Brazilian and Mexican exports to Cuba were both down over 90 percent in July compared with the same month last year, according to Brazilian and Mexican government official statistics.
“Up to two-thirds of the overall container shipping capacity has disappeared,” said Gordon Wilmsmeier, a professor of shipping and global logistics at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
It has become so difficult to ship supplies to Cuba that some sympathetic nations have turned to their militaries. Mexico, which stopped shipping oil to Cuba in January after President Trump threatened tariffs, used Navy ships to deliver items like thousands of tons of rice and beans, as well as bags of powdered milk. The Brazilian Air Force flew in shipments of powdered milk.
Celso Amorim, a top foreign policy adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, said in an interview that Brazil would like to provide Cuba with fuel and more aid, but is wary of Washington’s reaction.
“This is part of the reality of the present world,” he said. “It’s complicated. Every company here — even state companies or quasi-state companies — have interests in the United States, and they are afraid of being affected.”
At markets in Havana, the price of frozen chicken has doubled in recent months, while the price of a carton of 30 eggs has tripled to $11 — higher than the average monthly salary.
Food prices increased 60 percent from January to August, according to Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, a Cuban economist.
Soup kitchens have proliferated in Havana, the capital, but are running short of goods.
Quisicuaba, a state-linked religious nonprofit that, said it was waiting for five food containers. The quantity of chicken and eggs has dwindled, said Luis Enrique Alemán, who is in charge of Quisicuaba’s kitchen supplies.
“Such a drastic reduction in supplies forces us to work miracles and rethink our recipes,” he said.
Amid hundreds of people waiting to fill plastic tubs with food, Carmen Carballo García, 66, sat on a bench while her 5-year-old granddaughter, Yaquelin, sucked her thumb.
“The doctors tell me she is underweight,” Ms. Carballo said. “She needs milk, but she doesn’t have any.”
Jack Nicas contributed reporting from Brasília.
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5) To a Binational Tribe, Trump’s Border Wall Feels Like Betrayal
An escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson threatens to upend decades of uneasy cooperation between the Tohono O’odham Nation and the United States.
By Reis Thebault, Visuals by Anna Watts, Sept. 17, 2026
Reis Thebault and Anna Watts reported from the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They traveled nearly the entire length of the tribal reservation’s 62-mile border with Mexico.
“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Reis Thebault and Anna Watts reported from the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They traveled nearly the entire length of the tribal reservation’s 62-mile border with Mexico.
The first fence to slice through the Tohono O’odham Nation was simple barbed wire meant to keep cows from roaming south into Mexico. The second, which rose nearly a century later, was a sturdier steel barricade that stopped smuggler trucks from barreling north into the United States.
The binational tribe, whose land stretches from modern-day Arizona into the Mexican state of Sonora, has long been caught in the middle of disputes over a border between two countries that did not exist when the O’odham’s ancestors first settled here thousands of years ago.
The tribe’s leaders have adapted, working with the American government as it ratcheted up immigration security on their territory. But now they are facing the biggest wall yet, and they are drawing a line.
The Trump administration wants to build a towering 62-mile barrier that would bisect the Tohono O’odham homeland along the international boundary with Mexico, and construction could begin as soon as October. Leaders of the Native American nation say it will restrict member movement, endanger wildlife, destroy sacred burial sites and undermine tribal sovereignty while doing little to tamp down illegal activity.
“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation. “We don’t matter to the U.S. government. They want to erase us. They want to take our land, they want to desecrate it, they want to hit us where it hurts.”
The tribe has sued to prevent construction, but the federal government is pushing ahead as it seeks to wall off most of the southern frontier. Last month, masked and armed Border Patrol agents escorted a group of contractors through the reservation to do survey work at the planned wall site. O’odham leaders accused the workers of trespassing.
It is one of many battles simmering along the southern border, where President Trump’s wall has drawn bipartisan outrage in national parks, on private ranches and among environmentalists and Catholic priests. But this escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson stands out because it upends decades of uneasy cooperation between the tribe and the United States.
The Tohono O’odham Nation, which occupies a reservation roughly the size of Connecticut, has for years allowed federal immigration authorities to operate bases and surveillance towers on its land. The tribe spends $3 million a year on border security, and its police force works closely with Border Patrol agents.
“We’ve bent over backwards to work with the federal government,” Mr. Jose said. “But we will never agree to a wall.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the tribe successfully lobbied against a wall. But since Mr. Trump’s re-election, O’odham leaders say they have found federal officials unwilling to compromise.
The administration, which has waived environmental reviews to speed wall construction, has argued that the tribe’s vast and varied territory is a hot spot for cartel-sponsored crime.
“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border,” Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in a statement.
The Tohono O’odham, whose enrolled members number near 40,000, have long moved freely among the Sonoran Desert’s sky-scraping saguaros, Seussian ocotillos, herds of javelina and packs of coyotes.
In the 1850s, the Gadsden Purchase divided O’odham land nearly in half as a new boundary was drawn between the United States and Mexico. Today, Mexico is home to some 2,000 tribal members, as well as ancestral cemeteries and ceremony sites. But to cross, the O’odham must call a Border Patrol agent, who then checks documentation and unlocks one of three gates along the existing barrier.
Illegal immigration and drug smuggling through the reservation surged in the 1990s, raising fears among tribal members and prompting O’odham leaders to increase collaboration with Border Patrol.
“We’ve been homeland security,” Mr. Jose said. “We care about who’s coming through our borders.”
The tribe now says the federal government has betrayed that partnership. If the C.B.P. proceeds, Mr. Jose said the O’odham could seek to cancel leases allowing the agency’s offices and towers on the reservation.
The tribe sued in June, claiming the wall would illegally reduce the size of its reservation without congressional approval. Its lawyers asked for an emergency court order to stop construction. Last month, a federal judge denied the request, writing that the government’s security needs outweighed the O’odham’s concerns. The tribe is appealing.
Critical to the court challenge is a 60-foot-wide ribbon of federal land that runs along the border from California to New Mexico, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, where the Trump administration has claimed broad authority to build walls.
The tribe argues both that its borderland is exempt from the Roosevelt Reservation and that wall construction would inevitably spill beyond the strip.
A few feet from the border fence, a group of O’odham members has been tending a fire of creosote branches for weeks while praying for a halt to the wall construction. Tribal members at the prayer camp said the idea that C.B.P. would listen to them was far-fetched.
“We don’t trust the government,” said Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, a Marine Corps veteran who lives a few miles from the border.
Some see the dispute as a continuation of abuse and exploitation that dates back to Spanish colonization of the area.
“It’s just opening old wounds again,” said Samuel Fayuant, a cultural affairs specialist with the tribe. “They have never healed. It just continues and continues, and I don’t know if it’s ever going to stop.”
If the tribe loses in court, many members have said they would put their bodies on the line to stop a wall, citing the massive protests in support of the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight against an oil pipeline in 2016.
The tribe also has concerns about construction outside the reservation. In nearby Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where C.B.P. built a wall during the last Trump administration, it is now building a second barrier that will run parallel to the first.
Bulldozers have already begun clearing miles of desert to make way for construction, and the tribe is worried the work will wreak havoc on a sacred site known as Quitobaquito Springs.
The spring, a rare desert oasis, hosts three endangered species — a fish, a turtle and a snail — and was long the site of religious rites for the Hia-C’ed O’odham, a band of Tohono O’odham.
“Quitobaquito is the aquatic, biological gem of that broader desert landscape,” said Russ McSpadden, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. Because the Trump administration waived environmental laws, “contractors are pretty much working blind,” he said.
C.B.P. conducts cultural and environmental reviews before construction and hires monitors to oversee the contractors, said Hilton Beckham, an assistant commissioner at the agency.
Illegal immigration also threatens the environment, she said, when border crossers leave “trash, pollution and damage to natural resources.” Ms. Beckham said construction would “avoid Quitobaquito Springs and minimize impacts to sensitive resources.”
But activists and tribe members say the government has a poor track record. Six years ago, border wall construction in the area unearthed human remains and destroyed protected saguaros. In April, contractors plowed through a 1,000-year-old O’odham archaeological site.
Lorraine Marquez Eiler, whose great-grandparents lived near Quitobaquito Springs, fears the cherished place will not survive a second wall. “How much more damage can it take?” she said.
The atmosphere around the reservation is tense these days. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Jose was driving along the planned wall site to monitor construction preparation when a Border Patrol agent flashed his lights and swerved his truck in front of the chairman’s S.U.V.
“Why are you stopping me?” Mr. Jose demanded.
“I’m trying to get your attention,” the agent replied. He asked Mr. Jose to roll down his windows and identify the passengers in his car, saying he was checking for smugglers. “We don’t normally have a lot of vehicles coming down this way.”
Mr. Jose refused, saying: “This is my territory.”
The chairman fumed as he drove on, angry that a federal agent would accuse an O’odham leader of wrongdoing on his own land. Mr. Jose continued his survey until he reached a hill on the reservation’s eastern boundary.
Leaning on a dried saguaro rib for support, Mr. Jose walked to an overlook and gazed out. Far below, the old steel border fence faded into desert scrub, almost out of sight.
Bora Erden contributed reporting.
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6) What Is E1, Where Israel Is Pushing a Disputed Settlement Plan?
Israel’s right-wing government is opening bidding for thousands of housing units in a patch of the West Bank, a move that would thwart efforts at Palestinian statehood.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 17, 2026
An area this month in the E1 zone, near Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
Israel’s hard-line government is pushing forward contentious plans for construction in a strategically significant area of the occupied West Bank. Critics say the effort, which defies international censure, aims to lock in the plans on the ground before elections next month.
Previous American administrations vehemently opposed Israeli housing construction in the area, a patch of land east of Jerusalem that is about 4.5 square miles and is known as E1.
But Israel’s current right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has made moves suggesting construction there may begin soon, bucking the internationally accepted parameters for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here’s what to know about E1.
Where does the project stand?
The settlement project, which plans for about 3,400 housing units, stalled for years under international pressure. But the Israeli government granted final approval for it about a year ago.
This month, weeks after publishing an initial tender for the construction of more than 1,234 settler housing units in the area, the government said that it would open bidding on Oct. 25 for another 2,167 units.
Ir Amim, an Israeli group that advocates a Jerusalem shared by Israelis and Palestinians and that opposes settlement in the West Bank, publicized the new tender this week, after it was issued by a government office. The move underscores “the limits of domestic avenues in preventing the advancement of E1 and reinforces the urgency of international intervention and accountability,” the group said in a statement.
Why is it so opposed?
Most of the world considers settlement in the occupied territories to be a violation of international law and sees the West Bank as a core part of any future Palestinian state. Plans for Israeli settlement construction in E1 were first laid decades ago, but Israeli governments held off building there because of sensitivities about the location.
E1 is small but strategic. Building there would largely sever the northern half of the West Bank from the southern half, complicating the prospect of a viable, contiguous Palestinian heartland. The project would link Jerusalem with Maale Adumim, a large, urban Israeli settlement east of the city.
The name E1 refers to a bureaucratic designation for planning and zoning purposes, with the “E” standing for “east of Jerusalem.”
Location of the Proposed Israeli Settlement in the West Bank
Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister and the government’s chief promoter of settlements, has prioritized the development of E1, saying it “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office and several other government agencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the latest developments regarding E1.
The Trump administration has so far avoided openly condemning the E1 project, though it has opposed Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
Why advance building now?
The bidding for the first 1,234 housing units opened in mid-August and is due to close on Oct. 19, just a week before national elections scheduled for Oct. 27. The latest tender is expected to open for bids two days before the election and to close on Dec. 21, by which time a new government might be in place.
Opponents of the settlement say the current government is trying to curry favor with right-wing voters and to lock in as many bureaucratic moves as possible regarding E1 while it still can.
The Israel Land Authority, a government agency, posted an online announcement about the upcoming tender on Sept. 7, a day before Britain, Canada and France — once staunch allies of Israel — announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
That step illustrated Israel’s deepening isolation after the devastating war in Gaza, set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, and during intensifying settlement building and settler violence in the West Bank.
In a speech announcing the sanctions, Ed Miliband, the British foreign secretary, described the issuing of the E1 tender in August as “the crossing of a longstanding red line.”
“Let us be absolutely clear what this means: the creation of a set of facts on the ground to make the two-state solution unviable,” he added.
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who opposes settlement and who founded Ir Amim, said that announcing the tenders reflected “a clear decision to move ahead” and would not have been done without Mr. Netanyahu’s knowledge and consent. Mr. Netanyahu, he said, was in “defiant mode,” flouting international criticism, and is “going places he didn’t dare go in the past.”
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7) How Sexism Helps Put Women on Death Row
By Rachel Louise Snyder, Sept. 17, 2026
Ms. Snyder is a contributing Opinion writer.
Jude Weir
In 2004, during the trial for the murder of an Oklahoma man named Rob Andrew, the prosecutor dangled a pair of red thong underwear belonging to his wife, Brenda Andrew, in front of the jury. Ms. Andrew was accused of orchestrating the shooting that killed her husband. As a piece of evidence, the underwear was irrelevant to the case, but as an image it was potent. It said to the jury that this woman, with her provocative undergarments, will trespass the boundaries of marital vow and bed, so then every boundary, including taking a life, must be breachable to her.
The jury convicted Ms. Andrew and sentenced her to death. But in January 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence such as the underwear and Ms. Andrew’s dating history could render a trial “fundamentally unfair” and sent the matter back to the 10th Circuit. Last month, the 10th Circuit declined to reconsider the case, holding that any gender-based evidence used to convict her did not affect her sentence or taint the jury.
Ms. Andrew is just one of dozens of women awaiting execution across the United States who were subjected to prosecutorial tactics so deeply mired in sexism that they should be manifestly unconstitutional. This term, the Supreme Court will have an opportunity to consider Ms. Andrew’s case again when her lawyers file an appeal — with the hope of obtaining a new trial and enforcing a standard long missing from criminal law: a standard that would prohibit sexism and gender bias in criminal trials.
The Supreme Court and lower courts have repeatedly affirmed that racial bias can undermine the fairness of a criminal trial. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that relying on race “to impose a criminal sanction ‘poisons public confidence’ in the judicial process.” In that case, an expert witness deemed the defendant, Duane Buck, potentially dangerous in the future because he was Black. The justices determined that such blatant racism, relying as it did on the stereotype of the violent Black man, rendered his trial unfair. But there is a striking lack of firm precedent around gender discrimination.
In Ms. Andrew’s case, the prosecutor pushed the Oklahoma jury to see her through the lens of a former Sunday school teacher turned Jezebel, able to control her partners through seduction and manipulation — a not uncommon framing for women facing the death penalty. Throughout the trial, prosecutors questioned witnesses about Ms. Andrew’s skimpy outfits, her sexual partners going back decades and the frequency of her having sex in a car. None of these salacious details were connected with the alleged plot to murder Mr. Andrew, but they would collectively paint a portrait of a woman so morally compromised as to render her every word unreliable and ultimately help send her to death row.
The legal system is rife with misogyny and racism, both of which can work against defendants in courtrooms across this country. But with women at the center of so few cases involving capital punishment — they make up just 2 percent of the country’s death-row population — criminology research has tended to focus on larger demographic populations. Recently, in a paper titled “Sex on Trial,” the researchers Nathalie Greenfield and Sandra Babcock examined the trial transcripts of all 48 women who were sentenced to death between 1990 and 2022 to determine whether and how they were sexualized by prosecutors and defense lawyers. Ms. Greenfield is also representing Ms. Andrew in her appeal to the Supreme Court, and Ms. Babcock is representing her in a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
They found a full 34 out of the 48 cases, or 71 percent, featured prosecutors using sexualizing language or arguments in their attempts to secure convictions. “In most of these cases prosecutors made no attempt to link the descriptions of women’s bodies and undergarments to the elements of the crime or aggravating factors relevant to punishment,” wrote Ms. Greenfield and Ms. Babcock. Over and over, women’s clothing, hair, body parts, extramarital affairs, relationships, sexual proclivities and accusations around bad mothering appeared in their trials, even when these details were irrelevant to the crimes.
Wendi Andriano, now on death row in Arizona for murdering her husband, used lube to have sex with her husband and was questioned about whether or not she also needed lube with her lover, the insinuation being that the lube itself was evidence of her wifely failings. Darlie Routier, sentenced to death after being accused of killing two of her sons in Texas, had the misfortune of leaving the house braless on several occasions after she had breast augmentation surgery, a detail the prosecutor asked at least two witnesses about on the stand. Unless needing lube or having breast implants directly implicates a defendant — and in neither of these cases was that true — such items should be barred from evidence since they serve no other purpose than to humiliate, objectify and dehumanize the woman on trial.
Nearly all the women in the report were subject to physical or sexual violence. During trial, that violence was often ignored, minimized or reframed as the women’s choice — another way in which sexism infiltrates a courtroom. Take the case of Brittany Holberg, a sex worker who claimed she’d killed a former client in self-defense after he pulled out clumps of her hair, refusing to let her go. The prosecutors said Ms. Holberg’s claim of self-defense was a fabrication. They argued that the fact that she pretended to enjoy sex for a living made her inherently deceitful. “Instead of viewing the woman who’s on trial as a victim-survivor,” Ms. Babcock told me, “they’re viewing her as somebody who has agency and who exercises her sexual power to seduce and manipulate.” These sordid details can have an accumulated effect of poisoning a jury’s mind against a defendant. This kind of poisoning is what denying due process looks like.
“A jury can only make proper decisions about somebody’s credibility,” Ms. Greenfield told me, “about their testimony, about who they are and what they might have done in their story and their defense if they’re devoid of those moral judgments and those stereotype-based judgments.”
The fact that more than 20 years later the news pieces written about Ms. Andrew or her case (including this one) still refer to her thong underwear reflects how powerfully the prosecutor’s narrative has taken hold. A not insignificant point in “Sex on Trial” is that 88 percent of the judges were men and 96 percent of the death-penalty cases were tried under an elected male district attorney.
In an effort to see if male defendants are subject to this same treatment, a team of researchers led by Ms. Babcock has begun research on men’s death-row cases in the same geographical areas and jurisdictions where the women were convicted. Of the 52 cases they’ve analyzed so far, they have yet to find a single one in which a man’s appearance is sexualized or his consensual sexual relationships are examined in detail. In their research, men were not asked about the number of sexual partners they’ve had or the type of undergarments they wear. The report has not yet been released, but so far evidence of sex acts typically appears in two ways, Ms. Babcock told me: either the defendant was charged with a sex crime or the defendant was a childhood victim of sexual abuse.
It seems that two different practices exist in our legal system: one that prejudices juries and judges by relying on gendered stereotypes and biases, and another that doesn’t. To condemn someone to death, evidence of guilt ought to be strong enough in its own right without prosecutors’ having to rely on shady tactics of sex discrimination. Women, Ms. Babcock told me, “are being condemned not just because of what they were convicted of doing, but because of their sex lives. Because of their appearance. Because they didn’t wear a bra.”
If the Supreme Court grants Ms. Andrew the opportunity to readjudicate her case, it will have taken an important step toward correcting this judicial blind spot and firmly establishing a much-needed new precedent for courts — and for women — across the country.
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8) Side hustles aren’t just for ‘Ted Lasso’s’ plot, they’re many professional footballers’ reality
By Asli Pelit, Sept. 17, 2026
When Lewes FC was in England’s second tier of women’s football, the league had yet to become fully professional. Jasper Wax/The FA via Getty Images
This week’s episode of Apple TV’s ‘Ted Lasso’ opens with a scene familiar to many working mothers: a professional woman juggling childcare and her job. In this case, that job is playing professional soccer for a second-division women’s team in England.
AFC Richmond Women’s team knows that being a professional soccer player does not necessarily mean soccer gets to be your only profession. The fictional team’s portrayal mirrors the reality of many real athletes facing the same challenges.
When Lizzie (Faye Marsay) loses her childcare support at the last minute, she decides that her only option is to bring her son to training. Meanwhile, Gemma (Abbie Hern) learns that a coveted law-firm internship interview conflicts with practice. The dean of the law school calls it “your football thing”, as though playing professionally is little more than a hobby. When Shannon (Shannon Hayes) makes a food delivery for her other job, a customer recognizes her: “You play for Richmond, right?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“And you deliver food?”
“Welcome to second-division football,” Shannon says.
These are not just obstacles thrown in the way of a fictional team’s progress, as they struggle to make an impact on the pitch in the second division of English football. This Hollywood drama is very much real life.
“We would be in with the club Monday for about a half-day, Wednesday for most of the working day, Friday for most of the working day and then Saturday morning for matchday minus-one and then matchday on Sunday,” Lauren Heria, who played for Lewes FC Women during the 2022-23 season when the club was in England’s second division, recalled.
“The majority of the girls worked alongside that schedule. And they had jobs that were sympathetic to the fact that they were footballers.”
Heria’s teammates worked in restaurants or bars, while others were attending university.
“You’ll probably see more of that in tier 3 to 4,” she said. When Heria was playing for the London Bees, a semi-professional team, in 2021-2022, all of her teammates had full-time jobs to balance with two evening training sessions a week. “Football was kind of what they did on the side.”
After decades of being categorized as a part-time gig for players, last September, the WSL2 became fully professional, meaning players became eligible for membership in the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), with access to the union’s support and services. The move also introduced mandatory salary floors for both the WSL and WSL2. In the second division, clubs must pay players at least £17,500 ($23,400) for players aged 18-20, £22,200 ($29,440) for players aged 21-22 and £26,900 ($36,000) for players aged 23 and older.
“This initial floor establishes a baseline and it’s a foundation we are fully committed to building upon,” a WSL spokesperson said at the time. “There was no salary floor for players up until this season, and minimum salaries have been implemented as the result of an 18-month consultative process involving key stakeholders. The floor is higher than the minimum wage for an equivalent age, based on 20 hours per week.”
Before the new standards were introduced, WSL 2 players were mostly earning significantly below those rates.
Take Blackburn Rovers, one of the second-division clubs from Lancashire, for example. According to The Athletic’s Megan Feringa, who broke the news that the club decided to self-relegate from the second division in May 2025, the players were reportedly earning about £9,000 ($12,000) a year, with the highest salary of £15,000.
While the new rules satisfy the regulatory definition of professional soccer, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate the economic pressures that lead someone to consider a second job.
The £22,200 ($29,440) minimum required salary is below what someone working a conventional 37.5-hour week would earn annually in the United Kingdom.
For a worker aged 21 and over working full time, the minimum wage yearly salary is approximately £24,785 ($33,167) for a 37.5-hour week or £26,437 ($35,375) for a 40-hour week before tax. Despite the benchmark, WSL’s governing body says its salary floor exceeds the applicable minimum wage when calculated against the league’s required 20 hours of weekly contact time.
Unfortunately, efforts to create better financial conditions for players have also produced unintentional consequences.
In 2024, faced with the new requirements, then-club owner Dai Yongge voluntarily withdrew Reading F.C. Women’s team from the WSL 2 before having to meet the requirements to compete in the league. Rovers followed a year later, choosing to withdraw its women’s team from the second tier rather than meeting the increased financial obligations, including the required salaries.
The fight for decent wages and better working conditions hasn’t been limited to second-division women’s soccer in the UK.
In the United States, a country whose women’s national team has won the World Cup four times, you don’t have to look back even a decade to find professional players struggling to make ends meet.
In 2021, players in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the top-flight soccer league in the United States, launched an unambiguously named campaign to fix a similar problem: #NoMoreSideHustles.
“Professional athletes, regardless of gender, shouldn’t have to work two, three, and four jobs to support themselves,” the campaign said. At the time, roughly one-third of NWSL Players Association members earned the minimum $22,000 salary per year. About 75 percent earned $31,000 or less. For a league in its ninth season, in full expansion mode with 12 teams in 2022, the NWSLPA said it was not going to wait “another decade to achieve fair contracts, equal pay and professional playing conditions.” At the time, the minimum salary for an MLS player was $84,000.
“I was cleaning toilets, mopping floors, cleaning up after customers, etc. After that, I’d train myself, train with a boys team at night when I could find one, and referee in between so I could afford the gas money for all of the above,” Darian Jenkins, the now-retired pro player and a pundit of CBS Sports, who was working at a cycling studio, said at the time of the campaign.
Former players Jessica McDonald, Kristen Hamilton, DiDi Haračić, Emily Menges, Tori Huster and Kat Williamson all talked about having second jobs to continue their professional careers in soccer, from packing boxes for Amazon to driving for DoorDash and cleaning floors.
For the NWSL players, the turning point came through collective bargaining. In 2022, the NWSLPA ratified its first collective bargaining agreement. Among other things, it established a $35,000 minimum salary and protections including pregnancy and parental leave.
The parties renegotiated in 2024, and the league minimum rose to $48,500 in 2025 and $50,500 this season. By 2030, it is scheduled to reach $82,500. The base salary cap, encompassing every player’s salary on a team, was $3.3 million in 2025 and will rise to $5.1 million in 2030.
The current CBA, which will be renegotiated before the 2030 season, guarantees player contracts, provides unrestricted free agency, eliminates the draft and prevents players from being traded without their consent. It also expanded parental leave, childcare and caregiving assistance, family-building benefits and housing support.
These are all particularly relevant to the latest Ted Lasso episode.
If they were playing in the NWSL, Lizzie could receive a dependent-care stipend of up to $10,000 per season to help with childcare. The twins could take advantage of the league’s housing support. Gemma might not feel the same urgency to pursue a law degree alongside soccer or could feel the freedom to choose to pursue both. Boots would likely be able to afford a better car and only perform her own maintenance if it was her choice.
If this episode gets one thing right, it’s that putting “professional” in a league’s name does not necessarily make the lives of its players better.
True professionalization means building a proper employment structure with wages, benefits and protections that allows athletes to actually make soccer their job.
And no more side hustles.
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9) Abortion Rights Activists in Idaho Find Their Pitch: Bring Back the Doctors
Organizers of a referendum to repeal an abortion ban in deep-red Idaho are far more focused on how the ban has broadly affected health care in the state.
By Anna Griffin, Reporting from Boise, Idaho, Sept. 18, 2026
The Idaho Legislature enacted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, criminalizing abortion for doctors. Since then, the number of ob-gyns has plunged. Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Supporters of the campaign to overturn one of the nation’s toughest abortion bans would rather not talk to Idaho voters about abortion. Instead, they want voters in their redder-than-red state to think about doctors.
Proposition 1, on the ballot in November, would establish a right to abortion until fetal viability and afterward in medical emergencies. But that’s not how the unlikely Idaho ballot measure is being sold in the conservative state.
Instead, as opponents of abortion focus on the ban’s success in ending the procedure, abortion rights proponents are talking about health care broadly, as Idaho weathers a steep decline in the number of doctors providing obstetrics care amid a population boom.
In the four years since Idaho criminalized doctors who perform the procedure, the number of obstetricians and gynecologists practicing in the state has fallen sharply. A study published last year found that Idaho had lost 94 of the 268 physicians who were practicing obstetrics when the ban took effect, a 35 percent decline in the first two years, even after accounting for doctors who arrived in the state. About half of Idaho’s 44 counties lack a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist.
The result, according to health care professionals: longer waits, higher costs and less access to preventive care for all Idahoans, not just pregnant people.
“Most of what obstetricians do is not obstetrics,” said Dr. Edward McEachern, who led the study. “It’s just taking care of women.”
Conservative lawmakers and activists who pushed the state’s anti-abortion laws focus on the intended result: The number of in-person abortions in Idaho fell to almost none, from around 80 a month before the laws.
“Idaho is a pro-life state, and our laws reflect that,” said Blaine Conzatti, president of the Idaho Family Policy Center.
Idaho is a conservative state and growing more so. Over the past two decades, Republican supermajorities in the State Legislature, fortified by an influx of conservative voters from across the West, have enacted spending cuts and some of the country’s toughest restrictions on transgender health care, public restroom access and scholastic sports.
“We’ve been a lighthouse for the rest of the country,” said Mr. Conzatti, whose organization helped craft much of that legislation. He said he’s not at all worried about Proposition 1 passing.
But organizers believe they stand a chance. Other conservative states, including Kansas and Missouri, have overturned recent abortion bans or upheld abortion rights. More than 57 percent of Floridians voted in 2024 to legalize abortion over the will of the Legislature, but 60 percent was needed under that state’s referendum rules.
A Boise State University survey in January found that 60 percent of Idaho residents supported establishing a right to make private reproductive health care decisions, including abortion until fetal viability and in medical emergencies. More than 110,000 people signed petitions to put Proposition 1 on the ballot.
Beyond abortion, Proposition 1 would enshrine rights to contraception and fertility treatment. Organizers view it as a chance to rebuild Idaho’s health care system, and, more expansively, as a referendum on the state’s hard-right swing of the past decade.
“This is the one way we have to say ‘enough,’” said Melanie Folwell, the proposition’s campaign manager.
Idaho’s abortion restrictions date to before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state’s 2020 law, designed to take effect after Roe’s repeal, criminalizes nearly all abortions. A separate law prohibits abortion after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected and allows certain family members to sue providers who perform prohibited abortions. Exceptions for rape and incest are limited to the first trimester and require that the crime be reported.
The legal burden falls on providers, not women seeking care.
“It makes the performance of an abortion a crime, a felony,” State Senator Todd Lakey, the sponsor of the ban, said when it came to a final vote in March 2020.
During legislative debates, Democratic lawmakers and health care groups warned that criminalizing abortion could cause doctors to flee. Republicans dismissed the concern; Lori Den Hartog, a legislator from Ada County, challenged “the notion that the taking of a human life is health care.” Idaho’s attorney general briefly threatened to prosecute doctors who referred patients to states where abortion remained legal.
Health care professionals say legislators misunderstood how pregnancy care works. Medical records, for example, can use terms such as “spontaneous abortion” to describe a miscarriage, even though Idaho law does not prohibit care during and after a miscarriage. That reality has created confusion and fear among doctors.
Amy Klinger, a physician assistant in rural Stanley, Idaho, described providers second-guessing their treatment plans for pregnant women in life-threatening situations — or pausing to call their hospital legal team. “If you can go somewhere else and just focus on caring for your patients, why wouldn’t you?” she asked.
Supporters of the ban are eager to focus the proposition fight on abortion, arguing that the referendum could allow them much later in pregnancy than Idaho did before Roe v. Wade was overturned. The proposition’s definition of viability as a “significant likelihood” of sustained survival outside the uterus “without extraordinary medical measures” could permit elective abortions into the seventh or eighth month, they say. Repeal organizers dispute that interpretation, noting that medical authorities generally place viability around 24 weeks.
During a legal fight over ballot language, Idaho’s attorney general and secretary of state, both Republicans, pushed to include references to the lives of “unborn” and “preborn” children. The final ballot features both.
Referendum opponents also argue the statistics on Idaho’s health care system do not stand out nationally. They cite a national study published last year that tracked more than 60,000 obstetricians and gynecologists and found no statistically significant difference in OB-GYN work force trends in the two years after the overturning of abortion rights between states with total abortion bans and states with abortion access protections.
“We have a rural health care problem all across the nation, not just in Idaho,” Mr. Conzatti said. “It’s not abortion laws that are driving physicians away. It’s the hard economics of aging populations in rural areas and consolidation in the health care industry.”
Active OB-GYN licenses in Idaho increased by more than 20 percent between 2022 and 2025, but doctors do not need to live or practice full time in the state to maintain one, and not all OB-GYN practices offer a full-range of women’s health care.
“The bottom line is that licenses do not equal access,” said Susie Keller, chief executive of the Idaho Medical Association, which represents 4,000 people in the field and has not taken a position on the repeal. “The lack of clarity has absolutely convinced some people to leave and reduced health care options in Idaho.”
If voters throw out the state ban, Republican state legislators could restore some version in 2027. Health care professionals say that even if state laws are loosened, it could be years before the state’s medical field returns to the levels it saw when abortion was legal.
“It’s a generational thing,” said Dr. McEachern, the chief medical officer at St. Luke’s Health Plan, an Idaho-based insurer.
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10) Why Israel Fears This Searing New Documentary
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist, Sept. 18, 2026
Photo Illustration by The New York Times
Israel is treating the new documentary “NAZA,” by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, less like bad publicity than a national security crisis.
Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, pledged to use “every tool at our disposal” against the documentary, which features anonymous interviews with 24 intelligence officers and soldiers, most involved in remote strikes in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for legislation that would let the state strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship. Israel’s culture minister has asked the Interior Ministry to investigate them for treason. Activists and staff members from the far-right party of Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside Szor’s parents’ house, where a speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed and their families’ homes demolished, as often happens to the homes of Palestinians.
The official calls for persecution of Abraham and Szor, who previously made the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” with two Palestinian filmmakers, seem strategically unwise, since they’re spurring heightened interest in “NAZA.” A press screening I went to on Wednesday, at New York’s 268-seat Walter Reade Theater, was at capacity, and I was told to arrive a half-hour early to get a seat. This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like “NAZA,” win a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening. Its subjects described factory-scale targeting, enabled by artificial intelligence, in which little effort was made to avoid enormous numbers of civilian casualties. “The goal was quantity, not quality,” said one of the speakers. According to the sources in the film, the military chose to target members of Hamas, some low-level, at home at night rather than when they were out during the day because it was easier, even though it meant killing their families and neighbors. One man told of hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl to learn when her father arrived home, and then ordering a bombing in which she was killed.
“NAZA” is Hebrew military shorthand for nezek agavi, or collateral damage. One of the speakers described a computer interface showing how many people would be killed if a particular site were bombed. Typically, said one, “20 NAZA” was a benchmark — meaning it was OK to kill 20 civilians for one Hamas target. (That figure was previously reported by The New York Times.) An interviewee said that for one bombing, a NAZA figure of 500 was approved, which the I.D.F. has denied.
Part of what makes “NAZA” so devastating is the way it shows that mere indifference to civilian deaths can shade into deliberate mass killing. To Israel’s defenders, after all, the fact that the military puts limits on acceptable collateral damage shows that it’s not trying to kill as many people as possible and thus can’t be genocidal. The Israeli journalist Ariel Oseran argued, for example, that the very word NAZA is exculpatory, writing, “If Israel’s specific objective were to destroy the Palestinian population, Palestinian deaths would not be categorized as collateral damage; they would be the intended goal.”
But “NAZA” suggests that the system Israel created had mass death built into it. In the frantic days following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, Israel was full of calls to annihilate Gaza, and the murderous rhetoric has persisted. After 50,000 Gazans had already been killed, the former head of Israeli military intelligence said, in leaked audio, “For every one person on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.” In this atmosphere of rage, grief and total self-justification, the Israeli military made a series of choices that ensured Gaza would become a killing field, whatever the specific motives of everyone involved. “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza’, what do you mean if not executing people?” asked one of the subjects in “NAZA.”
At one point in the film, as one of the interviewees explained the rules of engagement, Abraham said, “But if you can kill 20 people per junior member, and there are tens of thousands of members …” To which the man responded, “You end up with all of Gaza, yes.”
Of course, we don’t know who these sources are. They were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, their faces shadowed, their profiles and voices digitally altered. Journalistically, the use of anonymous sources for explosive allegations isn’t unusual, but it makes some of the documentary’s claims impossible to check. The I.D.F. has emphasized the whistle-blowers’ anonymity in disparaging the film. At the same time, it’s opened a leak investigation to find out whether classified material was used in the production, a strange thing to do if its revelations are false.
Ultimately, Israel’s fury at “NAZA” — which has its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26 — is almost certainly not about journalistic ethics. Part of the uproar is simply Netanyahu and his allies demagoguing ahead of next month’s parliamentary election, trying to cast the Israeli left as traitorous enemies of the military. (One Haaretz writer called the controversy a gift to Israel’s “fascist-nationalist bloc.”) But there’s also a broader sense of a taboo being smashed, of Israel being confronted with something it desperately doesn’t want to see.
“Israel has been in a state of denial now for close to three years,” said the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov, author of the recent book “Israel: What Went Wrong.” Until “NAZA,” he said, there’d been little debate in the country about the leveling of Gaza. Now, he said, people are “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”
But it’s a conversation many cannot face. “In Israel you may be on the left, but your children go to serve in the army, and often you are proud of them being soldiers,” said Bartov. “And then you’re told they maybe were involved in a criminal war. That’s very difficult for people to accept, and they will find all kinds of ways to resist it.”
It’s hard to tell whether Israelis are enraged by “NAZA” because they think it’s full of lies, or because they know or fear it’s true.
Ms. Goldberg writes, "It's hard to tell whether Israelis are enraged by 'NAZA' because they think it's full of lies, or because they know or fear it's true." Israel has been the target of numerous lies over its existence, but the scorched-earth reaction is so different in degree it may have become different in kind. If the documentary were simply false, why not expose its falsehoods and move on? The Israeli government seems to be calling for the total destruction of the mirror because they can't live with the reflection.
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11) Civil Rights Groups Sue to Keep Armed Agents Away From Voting Sites
The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and suggestions that it could send agents to polling stations violate the Voting Rights Act.
By Amy Qin, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 18, 2026
The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of labor unions and Black, Asian and Latino civil rights groups. Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times
Civil rights groups and labor unions sued the Trump administration on Friday, asserting that its aggressive immigration enforcement and suggestions that it could send armed agents to polling sites amounted to voter intimidation and violated the Voting Rights Act.
Brought by a coalition of Black, Asian and Latino civil rights groups and unions, including the N.A.A.C.P. and the Service Employees International Union, the lawsuit seeks to block any effort by the Trump administration to deploy federal agents at voting locations, which the groups contend can deter citizens trying to legally vote.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that President Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and other members of the administration had created a climate in which “voters, especially voters of color, are intimidated and fearful of engaging in the democratic process.”
They had done so, the suit says, by simultaneously pushing false narratives of rampant voting by noncitizens, conducting sweeping immigration enforcement in communities of color and repeatedly suggesting that they could send armed agents to polls.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent on Friday morning. But in the past, Mr. Mullin has said that opponents were fear-mongering and that ICE was not patrolling polling places. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place,” he said, “or we’re serving a warrant.”
The lawsuit points specifically to the Trump administration’s recently expanded efforts to identify noncitizens registered to vote, despite no evidence of rampant voter fraud by noncitizens.
Taken together, the lawsuit argues, the actions and statements constituted a violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which broadly prohibits actual or attempted intimidation, threats, and coercion directed at voters and anyone helping to facilitate voting. This section of the Voting Rights Act was not affected by a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the landmark civil rights legislation.
The act, the lawsuit says, broadly protects against voter intimidation, and requires only that voters reasonably fear being subject to harassment or violence for casting a ballot. “The breadth of Congress’s words was by design,” the lawsuit says.
This is at least the second lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from deploying armed federal agents near polling stations. Last week, the City of Denver, Latino civil rights organizations and government watchdog groups argued in a lawsuit that allowing immigration agents at voting locations violates a separate federal law protecting free and fair elections.
For months, Democrats have voiced concerns that Mr. Trump is seeking to assert greater control over the coming elections and sow doubt about the outcome. While Trump administration officials have said there is currently no plan to deploy armed agents to polling sites, they have also not ruled out the possibility of doing so.
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12) A Central African Hotel Has Become a Nightmare Prison for U.S. Deportations
Witnesses say men were hooded and beaten in Equatorial Guinea. The autocratic government there is a partner in President Trump’s deportation program.
By Megha Rajagopalan and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 18, 2026
The Hotel Bamy, on the outskirts of Malabo, has been transformed into a makeshift prison. Credit...Monika Pronczuk/Associated Press
Two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers.
The deportees said the beatings and subsequent arrests were intended to stop them from telling the outside world about the deteriorating conditions and growing violence inside the hotel, which has become a de facto prison for 29 men and women from different countries.
Experts and human rights advocates predicted such abuse after the Trump administration began deporting people to authoritarian countries where they had no ties or, in many cases, legal rights. Equatorial Guinea, like other countries cooperating with the U.S. deportation program, is notorious for human rights violations, including torture and arbitrary arrest, according to the State Department.
Equatorial Guinea, a small autocracy on Africa’s western coast, is one of many countries that have agreed to accept immigrants deported from the United States. With no legal status in the country, the deportees are being held in the Hotel Bamy — a dilapidated building on the outskirts of the city of Malabo. Armed police officers stand guard 24 hours a day and frequently harass and intimidate people there with impunity, deportees said.
“We are in imminent danger now and can’t keep living like this,” Ahmed Soliman, a deportee at the hotel, said in a text message to The New York Times this month. “I’m tired and genuinely afraid for my life.” He was one of the two men who were later beaten and hooded, witnesses and the human rights group Amnesty International said.
Though the hotel operates as a prison, none of the immigrants are charged with a crime in Equatorial Guinea. The indefinite detention reflects a contradiction at the heart of many arrangements between Washington and foreign governments. Equatorial Guinea agreed to take people but has given them no legal rights or documents that would let them live or work there, even temporarily.
American judges had ruled that a majority of the immigrants in the hotel could not be deported to their home countries because they were likely to be tortured or persecuted. For years, officials allowed many such people to stay in the United States by default, despite their lack of legal standing. The Trump administration ended that policy and is working to find countries, like Equatorial Guinea, willing to accept them.
Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.
The police officers shouted: “Where is the phone? Where is the phone!” witnesses said. The immigrants had been using cellphones to speak to journalists and lawyers about the lack of running water, nutritious food or medical care. The beating, witnesses said, followed the release of a video, first reported by Reuters, showing the deteriorating situation in the hotel.
Police also ransacked hotel rooms, searching for cellphones, deportees said.
The deportees spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the threat of retaliation. Western lawyers including Bella Mosselmans, Alexandra Smolyar and Meredyth Yoon, who represent some of the deportees, discussed details of the beatings and arrests. A local lawyer spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Messages seeking comment from the government of Equatorial Guinea, left with its embassies in London and Washington, were not returned.
The police arrested the two men, Mr. Soliman, originally from Egypt, and Samson Birhane, of Eritrea, ostensibly over a broken mirror in the hotel’s elevator. Ms. Mosselmans said that the authorities were retaliating because the two had tried to make their mistreatment known to the public. They were held in a local jail and then vanished for two days, their lawyers said, before being returned to jail.
The State Department did not respond to a message seeking comment early Friday morning. The government has said little about these so-called third-country-deportation deals. In court documents, the Trump administration has argued that once someone is deported to a foreign country, it cannot control what that government does.
Equatorial Guinea had promised the United States, in a diplomatic note, that it would not subject the deportees to torture or other maltreatment.
The New York Times interviewed four deportees in recent weeks who described abusive treatment from armed police officers. The officers, mostly young men, carry semiautomatic firearms and periodically arrive at the hotel. Sometimes, two of the deportees said, the guards are drunk.
In July, police officers stormed five hotel rooms, grabbed people by the necks and tackled them, according to deportees and lawyers. The officers took the immigrants outside the hotel, pointed guns at them and threatened to have them killed — and buried in a field across the hotel property — if they did not voluntarily return to their home countries, they said.
“They are telling us, ‘America doesn’t know where you’re at,’” one witness said. “They say, ‘We will put you on a plane, kill you all, throw you in prison, and nobody will see you again.’”
A video shared with The Times shows a separate incident in which a government official tells an Ethiopian man that his options are to “go back to your home country” or “go to prison.”
The government has already returned a least a dozen people to their home countries, despite the U.S. legal protections and the risk of abuse there, according to lawyers. Many of these deportees have since disappeared or gone into hiding, the lawyers said.
In May, United Nations experts appealed to Equatorial Guinea’s government for access to medical care and basic necessities at the hotel.
One video shared with The Times shows a bathroom tap that does not dispense water. A local lawyer who recently visited said he found no medical supplies even though several people had serious health conditions, including diabetes and a severe hernia.
The government also recently used the hotel to quarantine a suspected Ebola patient, one of the lawyers said. Videos shared with The New York Times show health workers in hazmat suits appearing to move patients to the hotel. Mr. Soliman, in interviews with The Times before he was arrested, said nurses and police officers told him that the patient had Ebola.
The two men who were beaten and arrested, Mr. Birhane and Mr. Soliman, were taken to a detention center that is called La Luna and known to be deeply overcrowded. A lawyer who was in touch with the men said they had been denied food and that their bodies were covered in bruises.
Mr. Soliman, 31, held a green card in the United States, where he had lived since he was 3, according to records submitted to the African Commission. He lost that status after being sentenced to prison in 2023 for drug possession and aggravated assault. While Mr. Soliman was serving a prison sentence, a judge ruled that he could not be deported to Egypt because, as a gay man, he would most likely be tortured there. He was deported to Equatorial Guinea this year.
Mr. Birhane, 47, came to the United States America as a refugee at 13. He was deemed deportable after a second-degree robbery conviction in 1998, while he was in high school. A judge ruled he could not be returned to Eritrea given the risk of torture there.
He had lived in the United States since then, checking in regularly with immigration officials. At one of those check-ins this year, he was arrested and then later deported.
Lawyers have sent several emails to David Gilmour, the U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, and others at the U.S. Embassy, according to correspondence they shared with The Times. The emails have not been answered, they said.
On Sept. 11, the day that Mr. Soliman and Mr. Birhane were beaten and arrested, Mr. Gilmour met with the vice president of Equatorial Guinea, who is also a son of the president.
The vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, also made a phone call to Stephen Miller, a White House adviser and key driver of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. The two discussed “different issues related to migration,” according to a statement posted on the ruling party’s website.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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13) Iran War Will Make Winter More Expensive for Some Americans
The cost of heating oil, which is similar to diesel and used extensively in Northeastern states, has climbed sharply because of the war in Iran.
By Aruni Soni, Sept. 18, 2026
The price of heating oil, which is mostly used in the Northeast and Alaska, is up around 60 percent since the war in Iran started. Andrew Rush/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Associated Press
Jonathan Robidoux, a Long Island resident, calls his heating oil supplier every fall to have his tank filled for the coming winter. He spent $1,200 on the fuel last winter.
This year, he will likely pay a lot more.
The price of heating oil, a fuel that is very similar to the diesel used in trucks, is up roughly 60 percent since Israel and the United States started attacking Iran on Feb. 28.
The war has sent oil and fuel prices soaring, leaving Mr. Robidoux and many others facing difficult financial decisions. About 3 percent of U.S. households use heating oil, and most of them live in the Northeast or Alaska.
Mr. Robidoux, who rents a home in New Hyde Park, N.Y., is trying to decide if he should buy heating oil now or wait until the weather gets colder, in the hope that prices will drop.
“I might just buy some now, but I don’t have that much liquidity, so it’s a tough decision,” said Mr. Robidoux, 41.
People who use natural gas or electricity to heat their homes are expected to face more modest increases in heating bills but many of them could also find it hard to make ends meet, energy experts said.
Many Americans are heading into a “much more expensive” winter, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state officials that help dispense government aid to residents who meet certain income-based qualifications. The organization urged Congress in July to offer more financial assistance to families struggling with rising energy costs.
“Those numbers, if you’re middle class, that’s a significant hit to your budget,” he said.
Who will face higher costs and why?
As with gasoline and diesel, heating oil prices can vary a lot based on where you live. The national average, which was $4.10 a gallon the week before the war, jumped 35 percent to $5.54 just a month later, according to weekly data from the Energy Information Administration, which will begin releasing weekly price data for heating oil in the fall.
In New York, the average price of heating oil was $6.14 a gallon the week of Sept. 14, up from $3.70 a year earlier, according to the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority.
More than 80 percent of U.S. heating oil is used in the Northeast. In the winter of 2023 to 2024, 4.79 million households used oil as their primary heating fuel, according to the E.I.A.
Despite skyrocketing prices, investors are expecting them to fall. Futures contracts for heating oil delivered in December were trading at $4.61 a gallon on Thursday afternoon, compared with $5.10 a gallon for the October contract. Retail prices paid by residents are higher than those for futures contracts.
Of course, traders have been wrong before. Oil and fuel prices dropped sharply after President Trump and Iranian officials announced a tentative agreement to pause the war in June. But prices began climbing again when hostilities resumed.
The uncertainty about what heating oil will cost in a few months is prompting many people to make anxious calls to oil suppliers like the Energy Co-op of Vermont.
“There’s definitely been people trying to hold off that way or make plans of getting a minimum amount of gallons delivered at this point, hoping to stretch it till the next time, hoping that’ll be a little bit lower in cost,” said Rose Friedlander, the co-op’s marketing manager.
What other options are available to stay warm?
Many people use oil because switching to a different source of heat can be expensive or difficult.
Natural gas is not an option in many rural and suburban areas because laying pipelines over long distances is often financially unfeasible. Some states have offered incentives to get residents to switch to electric heat pumps, which are much more energy efficient and contribute much less to climate change, but installing the devices can still cost residents thousands of dollars.
Consider Vermont, where 35 percent of homes use heating oil. Of its 285,000 homes, about 80,000 have heat pumps, said Philip Picotte, a utilities economic analyst with the Vermont Department of Public Service. Around 8,000 to 10,000 heat pumps are installed in Vermont every year.
That said, the use of heating oil has been dropping. In 2010, about 6 percent of Americans used it. Some states have weaned a lot residents off the fuel. Maine has decreased the number of homes that primarily rely on heating oil from 62 percent in 2018 to around 50 percent in 2025.
One hurdle to heat pumps is that electricity rates tend to be higher and homes tend to be older in the Northeast than in other regions. That means using heat pumps may not lower heating costs unless they are paired with other home upgrades like insulation and sealing that help minimize energy use.
Another option is propane, a fuel made from the processing of natural gas or crude oil. Around 5 percent of American households use it, and prices for the fuel have climbed modestly this year — in New York, they’re up about 5.7 percent compared with last year. But switching to propane also requires replacing home heating equipment, which can be beyond the means of many people.
Natural gas and electricity prices are up less.
Households outside the Northeast and Alaska generally will not face as big a financial shock this winter. That’s because about 47 percent U.S. homes heated with natural gas as of 2024 and the United States has plenty of it on hand, unlike Europe, where the price of that fuel has been rising sharply.
“We’re really, very well supplied for natural gas, and that’s where you see prices where they are,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler.
The wholesale price of natural gas in the first week of September for natural gas have actually been lower than prices in September last year, according to the E.I.A.
But the price of gas delivered to homes, which also includes the cost of maintaining pipelines, has been rising. In June, the average retail price was $24.09 per thousand cubic feet, up 3.6 percent from a year earlier, according to to the E.I.A.
About 42 percent of U.S. homes used heat pumps or other electric heaters as of 2024, according to RMI, a research group formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. These people will likely also pay somewhat more this winter. In June, the national average residential electricity rate was 18.34 cents per kilowatt-hour, up about 5 percent from a year earlier, though rate increases vary a lot by state and utility.
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14) What I Found Out About Organ Donation Shocked Me
By Greg Segal, Sept. 18, 2026
Mr. Segal is the founder and chief executive of Organize, a nonprofit focused on reforming the organ donation system.
Kensuke Koike
For two years, I stopped answering my mother’s phone calls.
My father was waiting for a lifesaving heart transplant, and I feared she was calling to tell me he’d run out of time. I’d let the call go to voice mail, hoping the tone of her voice would give me enough warning to steel myself before calling back.
He survived, but only barely. At his sickest, his heart was pumping at just 8 percent capacity. After five years and three open-heart surgeries, he was on his way to meet an end-of-life counselor when a new heart finally became available.
He received his transplant on Feb. 10, 2009. Four days later, our family celebrated Valentine’s Day with a new heart. Our joy was unequivocal; we didn’t yet know that the system that saved my dad could also produce so much harm.
My dad blamed his lifelong Boston Red Sox fandom for his heart troubles. Genetic testing revealed the real cause: a fatal mutation that weakens the heart muscle and is so rare that no other family besides ours has ever been found to carry it. In the years that followed, my dad’s younger sister also received a heart transplant, while his older sister died waiting for one.
Two of my siblings and three of my cousins also carry the mutation and will almost certainly need heart transplants. I don’t carry the mutation. My mother made me promise that I would always take care of them.
I founded Organize, a nonprofit making it easier to register to become an organ donor. In 2015, Organize was selected for a role embedded inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which put us on the radar of whistle-blowers. I soon became inundated with allegations from people working inside the organ donation industry who felt they had nowhere else to turn.
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I know as well as anyone that organ donation saves lives — over 40,000 annually in the United States in recent years. But I was stunned to learn that organ procurement organizations — the federal contractors that coordinate organ donation from the deceased — that made those transplants possible were routinely violating ethical standards and putting patients at risk.
I heard allegations of negligence and financial fraud, including industry executives’ billing taxpayers for joyrides on private jets meant to transport organs; of organizations performing unnecessary procedures as part of a scheme to overbill Medicare. (Organ procurement organizations are nonprofits, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to maximize financial reimbursements.) I’ve heard of poorer Americans waiting to receive organs passed over in favor of wealthier ones.
But one case in particular led me to remove myself from the donor registry and testify before Congress.
Anthony Thomas Hoover II was 33 when he arrived at a hospital in Kentucky, unresponsive after a drug overdose. Doctors told his family he was brain-dead, and the family agreed to remove him from life support. A procurement organization was called in to collect his organs.
While being evaluated for donation, Mr. Hoover opened his eyes and thrashed on the bed. The case should have been stopped. Instead, Mr. Hoover was sedated and given a paralytic drug. Hours later, he awoke again and moved his toes on command; his family was told he was merely exhibiting reflexes.
In the operating room, Mr. Hoover pulled his knees to his chest and shook his head “no.” Tears rolled down his face. The surgeon refused to proceed. Whistle-blowers say procurement executives called their staff member on-site at the hospital and demanded she find another surgeon to take the organs. No surgeon would.
Mr. Hoover survived, though he still asks his older sister, “Why did they try to kill me?”
It would be reassuring — and, for some, convenient — to treat Mr. Hoover’s experience as an exaggeration, even some macabre campfire tale. After all, a strict firewall is supposed to separate treating physicians (who are charged with decisions around the removal of life support and declaring when a patient is dead) and organ donation teams.
But a federal investigation found that firewall is often ignored. And The New York Times reported that health care workers in several states said they had witnessed procurement staff members “persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors.” A former Obama White House official testified before Congress that she had heard directly from whistle-blowers at procurement organizations that they were trained to target inexperienced physicians, especially in rural areas, who may be less likely to push back.
Investigators have documented procurement organizations’ retaliating against whistle-blowers, withholding documents from federal investigators, manipulating medical records and engaging in fraud. That is not mere dysfunction. It is corruption.
Many of these cases have been documented by federal authorities and are under investigation by state and federal law enforcement.
For decades, the organ donation industry’s most visible failure was the opposite one: Most procurement organizations were not motivated enough to recover lifesaving organs.
Each procurement organizations, with its own distinct jurisdiction, is one of the few government-sanctioned monopolies. Historically, there were few consequences for their poor performance, which meant they left thousands of lifesaving organs unrecovered. They also often prioritized the recovery of skin, tissue, bone and corneas, which can be far more lucrative than organs. That meant that patients like my dad languished on waiting lists; patients like my aunt died for lack of available organs for transplant.
In 2020, the federal government strengthened rules to hold procurement organizations more accountable; for the first time, poor performance could cost them their government contracts. The reforms have worked, helping drive a 25 percent increase in transplants.
The organizations have lobbied to weaken these standards, arguing that pressure to recover more organs pushes them to be overly aggressive in harvesting organs and threatens patient safety.
That is a false choice: The problem is not that the government demanded procurement organizations do a better job collecting more organs; it is that it failed to impose equally rigorous measures to ensure patient safety. Both my aunt and Mr. Hoover deserved to live.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and a former heart transplant surgeon, has promised to be “a new sheriff in town” on this issue. He should prove it by enforcing the 2020 performance rules, which more than a dozen procurement organizations have gone to court to shut down.
The centers should also use their patient-safety authority to immediately close any procurement organization that endangers patients. They recently did so in South Florida and have moved to do so in Kentucky. The organization serving New Jersey faces alarming allegations and should be next.
The White House should make procurement organizations a priority of its Medicare fraud crackdown. When he was a senator, Vice President JD Vance cosponsored 2023 legislation to break up the national organ monopoly, and he now leads the White House’s antifraud task force. He should push for more resources to expand the Justice Department’s organ donation investigations.
I spent years asking people to register as organ donors. I look forward to the day when I can add my own name back to the list. But first, the government needs to make the system worthy of that trust.
As a registered organ donor, I’m left disappointed and troubled, but intend to remain so. Not offering my organs won’t help repair a blighted, crucial resource delivery system, and I hope to have ways to leverage my participation in that system to create conditions that support and compel reform.
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