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  Panel, Socialism 2026Russian Neofascism: Imperialism Abroad, Repression at HomeSunday, September 6, 2026TIMES: Los Angeles 08:00 | Chicago 10:00 | New York, Montreal, Vermont 11:00 | Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires 12:00 | England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland 16:00 | Central European Time 17:00 | Ukraine 18:00 | Moscow 18:00 | Tbilisi 19:00 | Karachi 20:00 | New Delhi 20:30 | Taipei, Hong Kong 23:00 | Tokyo 24:00| Sydney 01:00 Monday | Auckland 03:00 Join Zoom Meeting https://stmarys-ca.zoom.us/j/98753615148?pwd=qS20DZjbnSX1uajdOmPNUbahyHBpVW.1 Meeting ID: 987 5361 5148 Passcode: 020808 Join instructions https://stmarys-ca.zoom.us/meetings/98753615148/invitations?signature=PUXtC4Y5l5eoYLs7OiomRsGqPxMebm5wlJtz17LMoUM Vladimir Putin responded to democratic uprising in Russia’s former empire by repressing domestic dissent and launching an imperialist war on Ukraine. In a discussion of their new book, Russia’s New Imperialism, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev will be joined by Robert Brenner and Yulia Yurchenko to examine Putin’s neofascist project, Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination, and today’s inter-imperial rivalries. Speakers: Ilya Budraitskis, co-author of Russia’s New Imperialism Ilya Matveev, co-author of Russia’s New Imperialism Robert Brenner, Professor Emeritus UCLA, editor at New Left Review, author of Economics of Global Turbulence Yulia Yurchenko, author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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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) Decades After Tupac’s Murder, a Talkative Gang Member Is Convicted
Duane Keith Davis, 63, was found guilty of first-degree murder after he went on an interview tour discussing his role in the 1996 drive-by shooting.
By Julia Jacobs and Anusha Bayya, Aug. 31, 2026
A jury in Las Vegas on Monday found a man guilty of orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, delivering a conviction nearly 30 years after one of hip-hop’s most notorious killings.
Duane Keith Davis, 63, was accused of obtaining the gun used in the shooting and pursuing Mr. Shakur during a gang war that had become entangled with a feud between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop labels.
After about three hours of deliberations, the 12 jurors announced they had found Mr. Davis guilty of first-degree murder. Members of Mr. Shakur’s family who were seated in the courtroom embraced and passed around tissues to wipe away tears.
Straight-faced but agitated after the verdict, Mr. Davis addressed the judge to promise he would appeal. He is scheduled to receive his sentence — up to life in prison — on Oct. 13.
In a three-week trial, prosecutors depicted Mr. Davis as a shot caller for a group of Crips from Compton, Calif., who were out for revenge on the night of Sept. 7, 1996, when they happened to encounter Mr. Shakur in a black BMW stopped at a traffic light. Mr. Shakur, who was 25 and in the prime of his career, was shot four times and died at a hospital days later.
A socially conscious poet who was on his way to becoming a cultural icon, Mr. Shakur became only more popular as he was increasingly associated with violence and gang culture. His death turned him into a hip-hop martyr, joined only six months later by Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as the Notorious B.I.G., a onetime friend who turned into a bitter rival.
After Mr. Wallace was gunned down in Los Angeles in March 1997, the shootings became twin tragedies that had never led to a conviction, until now.
For years, the Shakur case had languished as important evidence, including the murder weapon, remained missing and key witnesses — including Mr. Shakur’s label boss, Marion Knight, known as Suge — refused to cooperate. The standstill turned the case into fodder for true-crime enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists.
Then, in 2008, Mr. Davis began speaking to the police in an effort to avoid drug charges that could have put him in prison for life. Law enforcement considered him untouchable because he had shared the information under an agreement that he could not be charged based on it.
But prosecutors changed their calculation once Mr. Davis began repeatedly addressing the shooting publicly — in podcasts, a documentary and a 2019 memoir.
“I’m one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing,” read the introduction to the memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”
Under the mistaken belief that he was fully immune from prosecution, Mr. Davis effectively handed prosecutors the evidence they needed to bring a case.
After he was indicted on a charge of murder in 2023, Mr. Davis, who is known by the nickname Keffe D, asserted that the statements in his memoir and in interviews were fictional stories invented to turn a profit on the hip-hop media circuit.
“Mr. Davis is attempting to escape responsibility for a crime everybody knows he committed — even him,” Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor in the case, said in court on Monday, “and he admits to it seven or eight times over the course of 30 years.”
Throughout the trial, Michael Sanft, Mr. Davis’s lawyer, argued that the prosecution’s case was based on presumptions rather than hard facts, and that it was absurd to rely on Mr. Davis’s own statements, which were riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies.
“What facts do they have to even put Keffe D in a car in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996? What facts?” he said at the trial.
The two weeks of testimony at Clark County District Court chronicled a story that had long been told in books, podcasts and true-crime specials, but never at a murder trial.
Prosecutors painted a picture of simmering gang tensions in Compton between local sets of Bloods and Crips, the temperature increasing by their entanglement with the bicoastal rap beef of the 1990s.
The Bloods were aligned with Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight’s Los Angeles-based Death Row Records, prosecutors said, while the Crips were hired to provide security when New York’s Bad Boy Records, run by Sean Combs, traveled out west.
In 1996, two gang skirmishes sent hostilities boiling over.
There was a brawl over a Death Row chain between young Crips and Bloods at a Southern California mall. Then, in September, both sides converged in Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson prizefight. After the fight, Orlando Anderson, a member of the Crips who had been present at the mall, received a beating by a group of men that sent him to a hospital.
Among the assailants, identified to jurors on hotel security footage at the MGM Grand, were Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight.
According to Mr. Davis’s account to the police and in interviews, he obtained a .40-caliber Glock from an associate and set out with a group of Crips to find Mr. Shakur and his boss. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light,” his memoir read.
Driving around Las Vegas in a white Cadillac, the group spotted Mr. Shakur on the road, visible in the passenger’s seat of a black BMW driven by Mr. Knight.
In an interview with law enforcement in 2009, Mr. Davis described how his associate behind the wheel made a U-turn to pull up alongside Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight’s vehicle.
A woman in a car nearby, Ingrid Stokes, testified that a hail of gunfire erupted. “All hell broke loose,” she told jurors.
The BMW was riddled with bullet holes, the tarmac glinting with spent cartridge cases. Mr. Knight had been grazed in the head; Mr. Shakur, in far worse condition, was loaded into an ambulance.
Garry Dale, a former police officer who rode with Mr. Shakur on the way to the hospital, testified that he had asked him to divulge the names of the assailants but that Mr. Shakur had brushed him off.
“We’ll take care of it,” Mr. Shakur replied, according to Mr. Dale.
Word soon spread in Compton that Mr. Anderson had been the person to open fire in retaliation for the beating at the MGM Grand, but other accounts suggest it was Deandrae Smith, who had been sitting next to him in the back seat. Mr. Davis is the only person still alive who was said to have been in the white Cadillac.
Although Mr. Davis did not testify, the prosecution centered its case on his own words, played for the jury through audio of interviews with police officers, documentary filmmakers and YouTube personalities.
Prosecutors acknowledged that his statements could be inconsistent, and they did not embrace everything as true. His repeated allegation that Mr. Combs had offered him $1 million to kill Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight, which the music mogul has vehemently denied, was left on the far periphery of the case.
In total, the jury heard more than eight hours of Mr. Davis’s voice, according to prosecutors.
“I didn’t tell nobody, nothing, that we killed Tupac,” Mr. Davis said in 2009, when he was speaking to the police.
He added: “I was gonna keep this secret.”
Jonathan Abrams contributed reporting.
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2) How the Pentagon Is Getting Into the Venezuelan Oil Business Under Trump
The Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, founded by the Biden administration to give loans to bolster the U.S. defense industry, is helping lead President Trump’s oil deal.
By Edward Wong, Rebecca F. Elliott and Anatoly Kurmanaev, Published Aug. 31, 2026, Updated Sept. 1, 2026
Edward Wong reported from Washington, Rebecca F. Elliott from New York and Anatoly Kurmanaev from Skopje, North Macedonia.
President Trump said his defense secretary and secretary of state reached an agreement with the Venezuelan government on securing billions of barrels of oil reserves “through a partnership with private business.” Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
As the U.S. government faced shortcomings in the country’s weapons manufacturing, the Pentagon set up a new office that would make investments to help boost defense industrial production.
That effort, which began in 2022 during the Biden administration, is now taking a sharp turn with the Pentagon’s involvement in an oil production deal between the United States and Venezuela that President Trump announced on Friday.
The Pentagon’s little-known Office of Strategic Capital, which reports to the deputy defense secretary, is the leading U.S. government entity in forming a partnership with a private oil producer whose founder, Alejandro Betancourt López, is a powerful and polarizing figure in international commerce.
Mr. Trump said Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and White House national security adviser, reached the agreement with the Venezuelan government on securing billions of barrels of oil reserves “through a partnership with private business.”
The deal would give the Pentagon the option to take up to a 35 percent stake in the parent company of Mr. Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners. This would come in the form of a financial instrument known as a warrant, plus preferential access to much of the oil that the company produces.
Warrants would give the government the right to buy shares in the oil company at a predetermined price. The value of warrants, which can be bought and sold, fluctuates based on the value of the company that issued them.
In this case, the warrants would be what are known as penny warrants, according to two people familiar with the deal, meaning they could be converted into shares for very little money, often just 1 cent.
Typically, companies issue warrants in exchange for something of value. During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, the federal government bailed out U.S. airlines with more than $50 billion in grants and loans to help the companies pay employees and cover other costs. In return, the Treasury Department received warrants from roughly a dozen airlines, most of which it later sold to private investors.
In this case, the deal would come “all at zero cost to the United States,” the White House said in a statement on Monday night. The federal government’s partnership and seal of approval could make it easier for the company to raise money from private investors and also shield it from legal scrutiny or political upheaval in Venezuela.
In a statement, Mr. Betancourt said the deal would unleash Venezuela’s potential “to the great benefit of both Venezuelans and Americans.”
The deal has come under intense criticism from some Democratic lawmakers. On Monday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “President Trump’s effort to turn the U.S. military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”
Mr. Reed added that he was demanding a full accounting of the legal authority for this move and the complete financial terms.
During the Biden administration, the Office of Strategic Capital made loans to private companies to bolster strategic industrial production in the United States, and asked for repayment of the loans with interest at below-market federal rates. In the Trump administration, the office has typically asked companies to give it warrants as well as repay the loans.
The office falls under Stephen A. Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense. Mr. Feinberg, a billionaire businessman and political appointee under Mr. Trump, has been tasked with trying to help rejuvenate the U.S. defense industrial base. Mr. Feinberg approves the office’s deals.
The office was founded under the previous defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III. At that time, in 2022, U.S. officials were concerned about the fact that critical items for certain weapons systems were made in China. They were also grappling with weaknesses in arms production exposed by Russia’s war against Ukraine and global supply chain problems exposed by the pandemic.
Those issues have become even more acute, given the drawdown of U.S. weapons stockpiles during the war against Iran that Mr. Trump and Israel started six months ago.
The office’s initial $1 billion loan authority has ballooned to $200 billion, largely because of a boost from Mr. Trump’s major domestic policy legislation that Congress passed in July 2025.
The director of the office is now David Lorch, who worked at Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm co-founded by Mr. Feinberg. In November, the month Mr. Lorch started his job, the office announced a loan of $620 million to Vulcan Elements and one of $80 million to ReElement Technologies to increase domestic magnet production and “significantly bolster U.S. critical minerals supply chains.” The office said it would get warrants from those companies.
That kind of financing would help the United States decrease its dependency on Chinese manufacturing. But Vulcan Elements has financial ties to the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., which prompted Democratic senators to criticize the arrangement. Peter Navarro, a White House aide and friend of the younger Mr. Trump, requested the financing, ProPublica reported.
By July, the other company, ReElement Technologies, a rare earths firm, had withdrawn from the loan process because it was struggling to meet federal due diligence standards, Reuters reported.
On Saturday, the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement that the office “does not take equity stakes in private companies.” The White House’s statement on Monday about the deal contradicts Mr. Parnell’s assertion.
In addition to receiving warrants, the federal government would be guaranteed 20 percent of the oil that Mr. Betancourt’s company produces “at production cost,” according to the White House, meaning at a favorable price. The State Department would also have right of first refusal to buy the remaining 80 percent of the company’s output.
That would put the State Department in an unusual role since it is oil companies and other traders who typically buy and sell oil. Any decision to buy oil to refill U.S. government stockpiles would require authorization, including from Congress, and typically be handled by the Energy Department.
In any case, it would most likely take years for new projects in Venezuela to generate meaningful amounts of oil.
The White House also said that the U.S. government would have veto power over the appointment of any board member to Mr. Betancourt’s company, and the majority of board members would have to be U.S. citizens.
Most of the “incremental” fields that would now be overseen by Mr. Betancourt’s company were controlled or operated by Russian or Chinese firms or by businesspeople close to Venezuela’s previous leaders, the White House said.
Mr. Betancourt, the U.S. government’s partner, received no-bid oil contracts in Venezuela many years ago. He has been under investigation in Spain and Switzerland on accusations of money laundering and tax fraud. He usually lives in Britain and was barred from foreign travel by the British government while he was in that country because of an extradition agreement with Switzerland, where prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant.
However, Mr. Rubio wanted to get Mr. Betancourt to Venezuela to work on oil deals and production, and the State Department in recent months pressed the Swiss and British governments to ease up on him, said a person with knowledge of that effort.
“Mr. Betancourt has never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction,” Sara Chouraqui, general counsel for North American Blue Energy Partners, said in a statement on Saturday.
Kate Kelly contributed reporting.
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3) Military Officers Can’t Look Away From This Any Longer
By Frank Kendall, Sept. 1, 2026
Mr. Kendall was the secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
I attended a military retirement ceremony last month at which Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the presiding officer and featured speaker. It was eerily, even alarmingly normal. In a large room full of current and retired senior military officers, everyone was playing the same game of “Let’s pretend everything is fine.”
Denial is one of the two approaches the nation’s senior military leaders seem to have taken to cope with Donald Trump’s presidency. When they aren’t ignoring how abnormal things have become, they turn to the other approach, claiming that they have no responsibility for the actions the armed forces have been ordered to take because those orders were “policy” choices outside the scope of their duties. This is a cop-out, and it is putting our democracy at risk.
General Caine has even advocated this strategy. In a recent speech to graduates at the National Defense University, he talked about the need for “perfect beautiful clarity” on the distinction between two questions: Can we do something? and Should we do something? The “can” question was a military matter, he explained. The “should” is “at the policy level, and we don’t do that,” he said.
The message is that a senior officer’s only professional obligation is to tell the president and the secretary of defense whether the military can do whatever civilian leadership asks it to do; that a senior military leader has no duty to say whether the military should do the things the president wants, and that it would be wrong to try.
It isn’t that simple.
The Trump administration is committing acts that military officers should consider outrageous and unacceptable. The military has conducted extrajudicial executions of alleged drug dealers at sea and of a country’s head of state, along with several of his family members. The administration has kidnapped another head of state. And the president started a war without even consulting Congress, much less obtaining congressional authorization. In an indication of what may be still to come, the president has put National Guard troops on the streets of Democratic-governed cities without local leaders’ request or consent.
Many lower-level officers I have spoken with are privately appalled but afraid to challenge what they are seeing. The collective hope seems to be that if they can all just go on as if nothing unusual is occurring, that this time will pass and nothing bad will happen to them — no loss of position, no demotion or forced retirement, no loss of reputation, no removal from a promotion list by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
But all officers take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” This demands that they think about what the military should or should not do and advise the president and the secretary of defense on the policy choices they make. It also means that there are some lines that they cannot cross, even if ordered to do so by the commander in chief. The country’s top military leaders serve at the very nexus of the application of military force and policy; that role requires them to be more than mere military technocrats.
As secretary of the Air Force, I recommended many officers for four-star positions. These jobs require the character and courage to do one’s duty and behave honorably whatever the personal consequences. I have been asked by some retired officers if it is fair to expect a senior military leader to stand up to or refuse to accept an immoral, unethical or illegal order from the president or the secretary of defense — particularly when a senior leader gets supposedly independent guidance from a government lawyer to accept the order.
But fairness is irrelevant. It also isn’t fair to send some people into combat and not others, yet the responsibility comes with the job, and no one is forced to accept these positions.
At the start of his second term, Mr. Trump removed one of the finest officers I have ever known, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I always thought well of General Caine, but he lacks the experience and stature that General Brown had. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth do not want candid, sound and independent advice from senior military leaders, including General Caine. They want personal loyalty and compliance with their orders.
To ensure this result, the president and secretary of defense replaced senior military lawyers with loyalists who seem willing to support legal justifications for the things the executive wants to do, however frivolous or flawed. For the most part, Mr. Trump seems to be getting what he wants from his lawyers and from his generals.
Our senior military leaders, including General Caine, might face even tougher tests from here. Although General Caine has indicated that there are no plans for the use of troops in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility. No pretense of normality, no artificial distinction between policy and military matters, and no lawyer’s justification can relieve our senior military leaders from their oath, the burdens of their conscience, or of the judgment of the men and women they lead, the American people and history. From all of these, there is no place to hide.
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4) We Know How to Help America’s Poorest Kids. Don’t Throw That Away.
By Zayn Siddique, Sept. 1, 2026
Mr. Siddique was the principal deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council from 2022 to 2023.
"At a time when children under 5 are the poorest age group in America, we cannot think small about children’s opportunity. We also know more than the Johnson administration’s team did in 1965. Researchers have documented how toxic stress in a child’s early years reshapes brain architecture and how supportive relationships can buffer the damage. Children in poverty need what children with means are far more likely to receive — medical attention, emotional support and individualized care."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/opinion/head-start-education-funding.html
Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
In 1965, as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the federal government asked experts a novel question: What does a poor child in America need to start kindergarten on equal footing with their better-off peers?
The answer was, essentially, a whole lot. Early learning classes, physical checkups, mental health services, nutrition support and disability services, all provided in partnership with families and communities because poverty affects every part of a young child’s life. That answer became the basis of the federal Head Start program. For 60 years it has stood as the U.S. government’s clearest statement about what we owe our poorest children.
In August, the Trump administration proposed replacing many of Head Start’s federal standards with state child-care licensing minimums. An analysis from Arizona State University’s Children’s Equity Project found that in the vast majority of states, this change would weaken requirements for Head Start teacher qualifications, class sizes, health screenings and family services. The administration calls this deregulation. What the administration is actually doing is hollowing out the only place in federal law where the government spells out what a poor child deserves.
The recent debate over Head Start has focused on whether federal programs have too much red tape and whether states could better spend those dollars by tailoring programs for their own needs. Those questions miss the point of Head Start’s federal floor, which is to ensure that all children living below the poverty line receive the same basic services, no matter where they live. No other federal program for children makes promises that specific and, without them, what remains is just another source of funding, not any real standards.
I started my career as a community organizer in New York City public housing, where Head Start was often the first institution that treated all of a family’s needs as connected. A child could get a vision screening in the same building as a parent learning about nutrition or a social worker helping with a housing application. Later, working on domestic policy in the White House, I led the team developing Head Start policy in the Biden administration. As an organizer and from the West Wing, I have seen Head Start works because it makes specific and exacting demands, not in spite of them.
The Trump administration says it wants to loosen the existing federal standards for Head Start to serve more children with the same dollars. Having worked on the Head Start rules, I know firsthand how difficult it is to maintain high standards when there aren’t enough qualified educators and budgets are tight.
When we saw Head Start programs were struggling to retain staff members who could earn better wages elsewhere, we knew raising salaries would require a delicate balancing act. After careful analysis, we settled on a plan that would phase in wage increases and exempt small programs that were under the most strain. We applied that same rigor when we started taking into account family housing costs for Head Start eligibility and when we put in place new lead-testing requirements. Ensuring the program kept up with the evolving challenges faced by poor families took hard work, but it was well worth doing. We never considered sacrificing the quality of services children received.
The proposed rollback does none of that work. It’s simply another attempt to render Head Start a dead letter; previously, Mr. Trump had contemplated eliminating Head Start funding in line with Project 2025’s recommendations. State licensing programs like those this rule change would adopt for Head Start do important work, but their aim is different. Many focus on child safety, while Head Start is instead asks what children in poverty need to thrive. A program that no longer requires health screenings, mental health support or structured family engagement abandons Head Start’s ambition that no American child should be, as President Johnson put it, “condemned to failure by the accident of his birth.”
Multiple recent studies have found children who attended Head Start showed lasting gains in high school graduation and employment rates and reduced rates of adult poverty. The high standards the program sets are working — and they remain legally required. When Congress last reauthorized Head Start in 2007, it included a provision that all but forbids the government from reducing quality precisely to prevent the unaccountable wholesale rollback the Trump administration is now attempting.
At a time when children under 5 are the poorest age group in America, we cannot think small about children’s opportunity. We also know more than the Johnson administration’s team did in 1965. Researchers have documented how toxic stress in a child’s early years reshapes brain architecture and how supportive relationships can buffer the damage. Children in poverty need what children with means are far more likely to receive — medical attention, emotional support and individualized care.
Head Start has been this country’s best attempt to make real the American dream. It is an institution that does not just serve children in poverty but declares what they are worth. The Trump administration’s proposal walks away from this. We should not let that happen. The nearly one million children the program serves depend on it.
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5) Israeli Operation in Gaza Kills 4, Palestinian Officials Say
Israel’s defense minister said the operation resulted in the capture of a senior Hamas member. Hamas said Israel sent covert operatives into Gaza City.
By Aaron Boxerman and Abu Bakr Bashir, Sept. 1, 2026
The site of an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Tuesday. Credit...Ebrahim Hajjaj/Reuters
The Israeli defense minister said Tuesday that Israel had captured a senior Hamas figure in Gaza, in an operation that local officials said had killed at least four people in the enclave and wounded several others.
The minister, Israel Katz, described the operation in a statement but many of the details — including the identity of the detained Hamas member — remained unclear on Tuesday afternoon.
The Hamas-run government in Gaza said in a statement that Israel had sent covert operatives into Gaza City but that they were subsequently discovered, leading Israeli forces to bombard the area so as to enable their escape.
Israel’s military did not respond to questions about Hamas’s account of events. It said in a statement that it had “struck several targets” in Gaza in order to “remove threat to the security forces.”
Mohammad Abu Aisha, a Palestinian living in Gaza City, described in an interview hearing gunfire and seeing a car that had been struck. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of nearby Al Shifa hospital, said casualties had been brought to his facility.
Ismail Thawabteh, a spokesman for the Hamas-run government, said it was not clear whether Israeli forces had carried out the raid themselves or had worked with members of Israeli-backed Palestinian militias inside Gaza. The Israeli military declined to comment further.
Over 10 months after the Trump administration helped broker a truce in Gaza, Israel has continued to bombard the enclave on a near-daily basis. Mediators had hoped the cease-fire would lead to an end to the two-year war between Israel and Hamas, but the situation resembles war more closely than peace.
According to health officials in Gaza, more than 1,300 people have been killed in Israeli attacks since the cease-fire, which secured the release of the last hostages held by Hamas since the October 2023 attack on Israel that started the war. The officials’ tally does not say how many were combatants.
As part of the cease-fire, the Israeli military withdrew to an agreed-upon line inside Gaza but still controls more than half of the territory. That Israeli-controlled area was devastated during the war and, while most Palestinian residents were displaced, many of those who remain are affiliated with a handful of Gazan militias opposed to Hamas and backed by Israel.
Most of Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents are otherwise crowded into a small area along the coast, where Hamas remains entrenched. Aid officials say that while food is now more readily available than during the war — when many Gazans faced extreme hunger — most people are still living in squalid tent camps or half-destroyed homes.
In late July, President Trump announced a deal with Hamas that would see the group give up its weapons, a key Israeli precondition for allowing large-scale reconstruction in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, swiftly rejected the deal, saying it would not be effective in disarming Hamas.
Saher Alghorra contributed reporting.
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6) Employer Health Costs Are Expected to Spike in 2027
A new U.S. survey anticipates an average increase of 11 percent unless benefits are cut, the highest rate in decades. Other findings also predict a sharp rise.
By Reed Abelson, Sept. 2, 2026
U.S. employers are bracing for what looks to be the sharpest increase in health care costs in more than two decades. Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times
Large and small employers are bracing for what looks to be the sharpest increase in health care costs in more than two decades. The cost per worker is projected to go up an average of 11 percent next year, or somewhat lower if workers’ insurance benefits are reduced, according to a U.S. survey released Wednesday.
Estimated annual health plan cost increases per employee
The employers’ final costs, after they make changes to health plans, are still expected to increase about 8 percent next year, the steepest since 2003, according to Marsh, the benefits consultant formerly known as Mercer.
More than a third of the 1,800 employers surveyed said they anticipated that costs would rise at least 10 percent after making cuts.
“This year was a rough year, and next year looks like it will be even rougher,” said Beth Umland, director of employer research for health and benefits at Marsh, in an interview.
The Marsh survey is the latest report by an employer group or benefit consultant predicting a sharp rise in health care costs next year. Many Americans, even those with insurance, are already struggling to afford care, according to various surveys, and health care has become a top issue for voters.
“This seems to be a new normal,” said Ellen Kelsay, the chief executive of Business Group on Health, which represents large employers that offer health benefits.
From 2018 to 2027, health care costs could increase 76 percent, roughly twice the rate of general inflation, according to a survey the employer group released last month. For next year, companies predicted a 9.2 percent median increase, which fell to 8 percent after they made benefit changes.
The cost of providing coverage to employees is becoming an existential business issue, said Mike Pasterick, an executive at the insurance broker Aon, which issued its own projection last month. Aon estimated employers’ costs would rise 9.5 percent next year, pushing the average cost per employee above $19,000 if no changes are made. “This is impacting the companies in a very material way,” he said.
The upshot is that about 160 million people under 65 who rely on employers for health insurance will again confront higher costs and shoulder more of the burden. More and more, workers are facing year-over-year increases that further stress household budgets already dealing with the growing expenses of groceries and gasoline.
Workers are facing higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays, which require them to carry a larger share of their medical bills. Some companies are cutting benefits by discontinuing coverage of expensive GLP-1 drugs to treat obesity, or dropping coverage for spouses who have other insurance options.
Employers and benefits consultants cited a number of factors contributing to higher costs: rising prices for hospital care and prescription drugs, including expensive medicines for cancer, and robust demand for GLP-1 drugs to treat conditions like diabetes.
But they also pointed to new contributors like hospitals’ and doctors’ use of artificial intelligence to increase payments through better documentation of care. They also blamed increasing reimbursements to some doctors who are out of network and are exploiting a new consumer protection law that allows them to challenge what they were originally paid.
The pressure by hospitals and doctors to charge employers even more is likely to intensify with looming cuts to government plans like Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income individuals. Hospital groups are already seeing an increase in the number of patients who don’t have insurance or can’t pay their bills, and many are expected to charge employers more to help make up for lost revenue.
Many employees are already being asked to pay significantly more of their medical bills. Workers are paying an average of 10 percent more in out-of-pocket costs in 2026 — some $2,167 — than they were last year, Aon estimated.
These kinds of increases are not sustainable, said Rosa Novo, the benefits administrator for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which covers about 45,000 employees and their families. “It’s become really, really difficult, extremely difficult,” she said. The bulk of the system’s costs are for hospital care, she said, but among the fastest-growing expenses are pharmacy costs.
For the first time, the school system is exploring new ways of delivering care. “We’re having to reinvent the way we operate,” Ms. Novo said. The system is considering contracting directly with hospitals and doctors for some of its employees’ care, like imaging, rather than relying on its insurer to negotiate for it. The system is also starting to demand more visibility into what it pays for care, requiring audits and detailed information about claims.
“I personally see a readiness to do things differently,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive of the Purchaser Business Group on Health, which represents employers. She said employers were more interested in seeing more information from insurers about how they were spending their money and consideration of alternatives.
“It’s more than just talk,” she said, saying many companies are revisiting their arrangements with their insurer or pharmacy benefit manager.
Like the Miami-Dade school system, many companies are in discussions directly with local hospital groups or other organization to provide care outside their traditional insurance plans. Others are contemplating ways to steer patients to select hospitals or doctors, either by charging them less to see those providers or limiting where employees can get care.
“We’re seeing a lot of employers taking a closer look at the network,” said Eric Miller, a vice president at Segal, another benefits consultant, despite concerns that employees will be upset if they can’t see their longtime doctor or go to the hospital of their choice.
“Unequivocally, there is more openness to change and disruption than there ever has been,” he said.
Smaller employers may be making the most significant changes, said Shawn Gremminger, the chief executive of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, many of whose members are smaller companies.
“I think it’s the smaller market where the pain is most acute,” he said.
While some are considering moves like offering employees a fixed amount of money to pay for a plan, others are taking a close look at the giant companies that sell them insurance or pharmacy benefit management. In the alliance’s most recent survey, 54 percent of employers said they were working with one of the three largest pharmacy benefit managers, a drop from 63 percent the year before. Many said they were moving to one of the smaller pharmacy benefit managers, many of which promise more transparency about how they operate and what they pay for drugs.
“We may be seeing a tipping point,” Mr. Gremminger said.
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7) U.S. and Iran Survey the Damage After a Night of Intense Strikes
The American military said its barrage was retaliation against recent attacks on U.S. forces and marine traffic. Iranian officials said a wedding was hit and civilians killed.
By Yeganeh Torbati, Sept. 2, 2026
A still from a video provided by the Iranian Red Crescent rescue service showed damage in Kuhestak, southern Iran, on Wednesday. Credit...Iranian Red Crescent Society, via Reuters
The United States and Iran exchanged a barrage of strikes overnight, an outburst of violence that killed both military personnel and civilians in Iran, including four people at a wedding, according to Iranian news media and officials.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees the military’s operations in the Middle East, said that it had struck Iranian military targets in retaliation for attacks on ships and American forces in the region.
Four members of the aerospace division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed in a U.S. strike in the western city of Kermanshah, according to a Guards statement published on Wednesday by Tasnim, an Iranian news agency. At least 12 people were killed in strikes across Iran’s southern region, the Iranian state outlet Press TV reported on Wednesday.
In response to the latest attacks, the Revolutionary Guards said in statements Wednesday morning that they had launched missiles overnight at an American military base in Jordan, at U.S. military equipment warehouses in Iraq and at an air base in Kuwait hosting American forces.
The deadly back-and-forth was a demonstration of the stalemate between Washington and Tehran more than six months after President Trump launched strikes on Iran, saying that he expected a quick resolution.
Among the locations hit by the U.S. military was a wedding in a residential area in the small port town of Kuhestak in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, according to Iranian officials. Four people, including a child, were killed in the attack, with around 50 others wounded and hospitalized, Iranian state media reported.
U.S. Central Command said it was aware of the reports. “The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the I.R.G.C.,” the military said, referring to the Revolutionary Guards.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, condemned the strike and vowed that Tehran would respond “with firmness.”
The military in Jordan said on Wednesday that 13 ballistic missiles had entered the country’s airspace. Ten were intercepted and three others fell in remote, unpopulated areas, the military said on social media. Kuwait’s military said on Wednesday that its air defenses were confronting attacks by Iranian drones, and Bahrain’s military said that it had intercepted Iranian aerial attacks.
Later in the day, Mohsen Rezaei, a top Iranian security official, wrote on social media that Iran would soon unveil a “new strategy on the battlefield, in diplomacy, and in confronting the economic blockade,” referring to an ongoing U.S. naval blockade of Iran’s ports.
Iran has insisted that it should control the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which sits on its southern coast and, before the start of the U.S.-Israeli war, was a key waterway for the transit of oil and other critical resources. The U.S. Navy has been helping ships navigate a southern route through the strait, near the coast of Oman, drawing attacks from Iran.
In a statement, the Revolutionary Guards promised unspecified “additional punishments” for ships that took the U.S.-backed route. The Guards added that two oil tankers trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz had struck mines, exploded and were on fire. That claim could not be immediately verified.
The Saudi foreign ministry said Wednesday that Iran had targeted a Saudi tanker named Sidr passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Bahri, a Saudi shipping company that operates the tanker, said in a statement that two Filipino seafarers were killed during a “security incident” on Monday.
Adam Rasgon and Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
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8) To Save My Home, I Fly the American Flag
By Loui Ridi, Sept. 2, 2026
Mr. Ridi is a Palestinian American businessman whose home has been besieged by Israeli settlers for weeks. He wrote from Qusra, West Bank.
"Israeli settlers follow a playbook: They build outposts in Palestinian villages that are considered illegal even under Israeli law. Those outposts become springboards from which settlers menace Palestinian communities, using tactics that Amnesty International declared to be carried out “with full political, legal and financial state backing.” These outposts are often retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. Then, the Israeli army will declare the Palestinian area a “closed military zone,” ostensibly to keep the settlers out but also effectively controlling all aspects of life there. And eventually, under these absurd conditions, many Palestinians are forced to flee our own homes. This is part of why more than 36,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been forcibly displaced in one year alone."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/opinion/israel-settlers-palestine-america.html
The writer, Loui Ridi, and another man installing the flag at his house in the West Bank last month. Ammar Awad/Reuters
Since Aug. 9, my home in the West Bank village of Qusra has been under siege. Dozens of Israeli settlers have surrounded it as well as other homes in my village throwing objects at my house, destroying the fence around my property, and even cutting off our water and electricity in an apparent effort to drive out my family and our neighbors and take our village over.
I live in the United States full time, but built this house in Qusra, where my mother and much of my family still live. When Israeli settlers began attacking our village, I was in Toledo, Ohio, where I live, so my brother and nephew went to stay at the Qusra house to prevent them from seizing it. As access to our village started to be cut off, my brother called me to tell me he and my nephew had begun rationing food. I decided then that they wouldn’t face this alone. I packed my bags and began my journey to the West Bank carrying the only defense I could think of: an American flag.
I’m a U.S. citizen, and have been for the past 17 years. But I was born and raised in the West Bank, in Qusra, where I am writing from now. Throughout my childhood, I watched our land and freedom be stolen from us by Israeli policies that expanded illegal settlements and deepened Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. Now, those policies have emboldened settlers to make me a prisoner in my own home. As a Palestinian, I have next to no rights here. That’s why I’ve put an American flag above my house: I hoped that my American identity might afford me a degree of protection that my Palestinian identity could not.
Illegal activity by Israeli settlers in the West Bank is nothing new. For decades, they have taken over Palestinian hillsides and family olive groves, choking our economy as they seize tracts of Palestinian agricultural land. Israel subjects Palestinians to military law in all of the West Bank. Israeli settlers in the West Bank, by contrast, live under civilian laws and are granted many more freedoms.
If you’re Palestinian, something as small as a visit to the grocery store or as urgent as an emergency visit to the hospital becomes an hours-long journey of humiliating checkpoints, iron gates and military outposts. International human rights groups have called this system apartheid. The settlers who attack our villages — radicals with racist ideology toward Palestinians — are often armed. Being harassed by them has become a daily occurrence for many; walking in your front yard a death wish for others.
Just a month before the siege on my village, a Palestinian man in a neighboring village, Jalud, reported that Israeli settlers had seized the house he was building for his newly engaged son to start his married life. Years of hard work and money gone in an instant.
Israeli settlers follow a playbook: They build outposts in Palestinian villages that are considered illegal even under Israeli law. Those outposts become springboards from which settlers menace Palestinian communities, using tactics that Amnesty International declared to be carried out “with full political, legal and financial state backing.” These outposts are often retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. Then, the Israeli army will declare the Palestinian area a “closed military zone,” ostensibly to keep the settlers out but also effectively controlling all aspects of life there. And eventually, under these absurd conditions, many Palestinians are forced to flee our own homes. This is part of why more than 36,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been forcibly displaced in one year alone.
Since I arrived at my house a few weeks ago, I’ve awakened to settlers walking freely in the hills around my property. I can hear Israeli soldiers exchanging jokes with the very settlers who they claim to be impeding. The Israeli military dispersed some of the settlers and said it had detained one Israeli. But the settlers came back and many have remained under the military’s watch. The prime minister and president of Israel have condemned their actions, and the police has made arrests elsewhere in the West Bank. But in Qusra, there have been no reported arrests of the settlers assaulting our homes, while the Israeli military reportedly arrested six Palestinians before releasing them. Because the Israeli army declared my own land a “closed military zone,” it can take days to get food to our house. If I try to take a walk on my property, Israeli soldiers yell at me to stay inside, threatening to use force if I step foot in my own front yard.
I am effectively a prisoner in my own home.
The U.S. Embassy, and my elected representatives, have helped mitigate the situation. Ambassador Mike Huckabee described these settlers as “terrorists.” My congressional representative in Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, helped ensure my safe travel upon arrival, and has checked in on me regularly. And on one occasion, when my relatives were trying to bring me food and water and were held for hours at an Israeli checkpoint, the U.S. embassy intervened so they could pass.
None of that should be necessary. What these settlers are doing to my family is illegal both under international law and Israeli law. There is a simple solution to this: The Israeli government should dismantle all illegal outposts and hold every settler responsible for this violence accountable. It has both the authority and the responsibility to do this.
As Israel’s most important ally, the United States can do so much more to stop settlement expansion and violence in the West Bank. Most countries and the United Nations regard all Israeli settlements in the West Bank unlawful. Yet, for decades, successive administrations in Washington have provided tens of billions of dollars in military funding to Israel while offering diplomatic cover to its government. There have been measures to punish settlers: Under President Joe Biden, for instance, several settler groups and individuals were placed under sanctions. But almost as soon as he entered office, President Trump rescinded them. Decades of inaction from multiple administrations have effectively enabled the very system that keeps my family trapped inside our home.
As I sit in my home now, surrounded by violent settlers and with even more said to be making their way to our village, the American flag continues to fly from my roof. I will keep flying it as a signal to the American people and the U.S. government to take action against this violence, end the siege on Qusra, and impose sanctions on these settlers.
The hope that it might afford my family a measure of protection that our Palestinian identity alone could not speaks to the profound dehumanization of my people. My life should not suddenly become more valuable because I am an American citizen — and yet, that’s exactly what has happened. The attention my family has received is a reflection of my passport, not the righteousness of my fight.
Every Palestinian family facing settler violence possesses the same fundamental right to live safely in their homes. I raised the American flag because I needed the world to pay attention to protect my family. But no Palestinians should need a foreign flag above their home for their humanity to be recognized.
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9) Chevron Expansion in Venezuela Extends U.S. Influence Over Oil Riches
The U.S. energy giant, which stayed in the country after other Western companies left, will invest $7 billion in the country to more than double its production there.
By Rebecca F. Elliott, Sept. 2, 2026
Oil infrastructure in Cabimas, Venezuela. Chevron’s expansion is separate from President Trump’s deal for control of oil reserves in the country. Credit...Maryorin Mendez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Chevron plans to significantly expand its operations in Venezuela, the U.S. oil giant said on Wednesday, taking yet another step to broaden the U.S. sphere of influence in the South American country.
The Houston-based company, already Venezuela’s largest private oil producer, said it would more than double its production in the country over the next five years to 600,000 barrels a day. That represents over half of Venezuela’s current output.
Chevron, which is gaining access to new areas in the oil-rich Orinoco Belt region, plans to invest more than $7 billion in Venezuela in that period.
The company announced its plans days after President Trump said his administration was pursuing a highly unusual partnership with a different oil company that would give the U.S. government a direct hand in extracting oil on foreign soil.
The two deals are separate, but both advance Mr. Trump’s goal of exerting much more control over Venezuela’s energy industry after U.S. forces captured the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January.
“Our expanded position reflects our confidence in the country’s deep resource potential and its ability to compete for investment within our portfolio for decades,” Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, said in a statement.
A signing ceremony is scheduled for later on Wednesday at the presidential palace in Caracas. Mr. Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, and the U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, are expected to attend.
Under pressure from the Trump administration, Venezuela has been making changes to attract American companies and other foreign investors roughly two decades after the country nationalized the oil industry. In January, the country’s National Assembly voted to give foreign companies much greater control over their Venezuelan operations.
Chevron, in turn, has been steadily expanding in the Orinoco Belt, including by agreeing earlier this year to trade assets with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.
As of earlier this summer, Chevron was producing around 280,000 barrels of oil a day in Venezuela and expected to increase that by up to 50 percent by the end of 2028, said Eimear Bonner, the company’s chief financial officer. That output is shared with the Venezuelan state oil company, its partner there.
Chevron pumps around 4 million barrels of oil and natural gas a day globally at an estimated cost of more than $18 billion in capital spending this year.
Chevron is unique among big American oil producers for remaining in Venezuela after the country forced foreign companies to accept smaller stakes in their projects when it nationalized the industry. Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips left after refusing to accept those changes.
Chevron’s decision to stay — which looked at times like a very bad bet — now appears to be paying off. The company has been in a prime position as the Trump administration has sought to carve out a bigger role for U.S. companies in Venezuela.
That said, the Trump administration’s new partnership, which is with an influential and divisive Venezuelan businessman, Alejandro Betancourt López, may complicate Chevron’s standing in the country by elevating a competitor. Mr. Betancourt’s family controls Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer, North American Blue Energy Partners.
Under the deal announced by the administration, the U.S. government would receive the option to acquire an ownership stake of 35 percent in the parent company of North American Blue Energy Partners. The United States would also secure preferential access to the oil that the company produced and considerable say over its corporate governance.
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10) Netanyahu’s Israel Is Looking for a Fight in Every Direction
The Israeli leader, facing a tough re-election contest, may need a security crisis to rally voters behind him and hold on to his job.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 2, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/world/middleeast/netanyahu-israel-election.html
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is up for re-election in October, but is trailing in the polls. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
For weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has presided over the shelling of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon, the targeted killings of more than 20 people in Gaza and the bombing of an air base in northern Syria, a warning to Turkey.
He has also failed to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank that his own generals have warned risks igniting a new Palestinian uprising.
The ratcheting-up of tensions in every direction is straining an army that was already overstretched after nearly three years of war, not to mention a citizenry that remains frazzled and exhausted by it.
However valid the national-security rationale for Israel’s actions, though, Mr. Netanyahu has his own reasons to be looking for a fight.
The Israeli leader is up for re-election on Oct. 27 and is trailing in the polls, which show his opponents with nearly enough support to send him and his coalition packing.
Allies and rivals alike are attacking him from the right on national-security matters, prompting him to adopt a more bellicose tone himself. Even so, his chief rival, the former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, now leads him in polling on how much voters trust each candidate on security matters. Clearly, Mr. Netanyahu is still weighed down by his having been in charge when Hamas launched its devastating attack on Israel in October 2023.
Yet incumbency, at this late stage, still offers one unbeatable advantage for a sitting prime minister: the rally-around-the-flag effect.
“Netanyahu wants to light every front on fire, because it positions him as Mr. Security,” said Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at the RAND Corporation, a U.S.-based research group.
“But it also helps him deflect from the failures of Oct. 7 and the last three or four years in office, because the conversation will be about the security situation and not the damage his government brought on Israel,” Ms. Efron said.
Indeed, Mr. Netanyahu is openly trying to turn the regional tensions to his political advantage. In a video he posted on Tuesday, he says he heard that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, “wants me to lose the elections.
“The ayatollahs want me to lose the elections,” he continues, grinning. “Hezbollah and Hamas want me to lose. Turkey does too, by the way. They say this openly. Ask yourselves, who do Israel’s enemies want to win these elections?”
And on Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu posted a video from a visit to Gaza, in which he wore a flak jacket and army helmet and told Israelis, “We’re doing everything to reach our goal, which is to disarm Hamas, to demilitarize Gaza. Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel.”
Israeli pollsters say that if national security is at the top of voters’ list of concerns on Election Day it could be worth as many as three seats in Parliament to his Likud party. That would perhaps be enough to deny the opposition a majority, which could keep Mr. Netanyahu in power until another election can be held.
There is one big issue standing in the way of the kind of national-security emergency that could aid Mr. Netanyahu. In almost every theater of conflict, Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is urging the country to chill out.
Israel has been benched from the battle with Iran by President Trump, who for the moment is letting economic sanctions serve as a substitute for military action. In southern Lebanon, Israel is participating in a slow-moving political negotiation overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, under which it has agreed to give the Lebanese military time to clear out Hezbollah forces and take over security control of certain areas near the Israeli border.
In Syria, far from posing an immediate threat to Israel, the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa has sought U.S. help to try to negotiate a security arrangement with Jerusalem that could lead to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the buffer zone.
In the West Bank, where violent Israeli settlers and some soldiers have been harassing, attacking and displacing Palestinian civilians, Israel’s government has come under a degree of pressure from the American ambassador, Mike Huckabee, ordinarily an ally of the settlers, to rein in what he has called “Israeli terrorists.”
And in Gaza, Israel has had its hands tied somewhat by Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace, an entity largely overseen by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and unofficial project manager for the Middle East.
In July, the board got Hamas to agree for the first time to a full disarmament plan. Israel rejected it and ordered renewed strikes in Gaza. On Aug. 26, the board’s high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, criticized Israel for those strikes in a speech to the U.N. Security Council, saying they accomplished little and only delayed the demilitarization of Gaza.
Nimrod Novik, a former foreign diplomatic adviser and envoy for Shimon Peres, whom Mr. Netanyahu defeated to become prime minister in 1996, said Mr. Netanyahu appeared to be casting about in vain for a conflict that he could heat up unimpeded by Washington.
“It’s like a thief in a hotel — you try every door to find out which one will open,” he said. “Which is the point of least resistance by the Trump administration?”
That may help explain the curious case of Israel’s surprise Aug. 18 bombing of a defunct air base in northern Syria only 40 miles from the Turkish border.
It was not only left-leaning Israelis who saw a possible political motivation. In a podcast interview after the attack, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy to Syria, said that “one theory” for why Israel had ordered it was as a “well-received pre-election concept.” Mr. Barrack did not respond to requests for comment.
Israeli officials described the attack on the Abu al-Duhur air base as a warning to Ankara not to try to establish its own military presence at the site. A Turkish delegation had recently visited the airfield, in Idlib Province, as part of discussions on its rehabilitation, according to two Syrian officials. Israel asserted that Syria planned to allow Turkish troops to deploy there, and that “Syria chose to ignore” Israel’s warnings not to.
Israeli experts said that the main threat to Israel could arise if Turkey installed air-defense systems at the base that could threaten Israeli jets operating in Syrian airspace. Israel has used Syria as a key corridor through which to attack Iran. The Syrian government has complained about Israel “violating Syrian airspace.”
Absent from the Israeli messaging was any recognition that Syria is a country with its own prerogatives, and that Israel had violated its sovereignty. Rather, Israel seemed to be treating the Syrian skies as another Israeli buffer zone — much like the 400 square kilometers of land in southern Syria that Israeli troops are already occupying as a forward defense of their country’s border.
Notably, Israel’s statements seemed to operate on two frequencies. For international consumption, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in English that Israel merely wanted to restore the “status quo” between itself and Syria.
For a domestic audience, however, the Israeli leader released a video in Hebrew in which he was more bellicose, and sounded more as if his saber rattling was aimed at Ankara. “We will not tolerate the establishment of a Turkish military presence that extends southward, because it threatens us,” he said, adding: “We’ve conveyed the message. How shall I put this message? ‘Don’t.’”
Indeed, Mr. Netanyahu is openly trying to turn the regional tensions to his political advantage. In a video he posted on Tuesday, he says he heard that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, “wants me to lose the elections.
“The ayatollahs want me to lose the elections,” he continues, grinning. “Hezbollah and Hamas want me to lose. Turkey does too, by the way. They say this openly. Ask yourselves, who do Israel’s enemies want to win these elections?”
And on Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu posted a video from a visit to Gaza, in which he wore a flak jacket and army helmet and told Israelis, “We’re doing everything to reach our goal, which is to disarm Hamas, to demilitarize Gaza. Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel.”
Israeli pollsters say that if national security is at the top of voters’ list of concerns on Election Day it could be worth as many as three seats in Parliament to his Likud party. That would perhaps be enough to deny the opposition a majority, which could keep Mr. Netanyahu in power until another election can be held.
There is one big issue standing in the way of the kind of national-security emergency that could aid Mr. Netanyahu. In almost every theater of conflict, Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is urging the country to chill out.
Israel has been benched from the battle with Iran by President Trump, who for the moment is letting economic sanctions serve as a substitute for military action. In southern Lebanon, Israel is participating in a slow-moving political negotiation overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, under which it has agreed to give the Lebanese military time to clear out Hezbollah forces and take over security control of certain areas near the Israeli border.
In Syria, far from posing an immediate threat to Israel, the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa has sought U.S. help to try to negotiate a security arrangement with Jerusalem that could lead to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the buffer zone.
In the West Bank, where violent Israeli settlers and some soldiers have been harassing, attacking and displacing Palestinian civilians, Israel’s government has come under a degree of pressure from the American ambassador, Mike Huckabee, ordinarily an ally of the settlers, to rein in what he has called “Israeli terrorists.”
And in Gaza, Israel has had its hands tied somewhat by Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace, an entity largely overseen by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and unofficial project manager for the Middle East.
In July, the board got Hamas to agree for the first time to a full disarmament plan. Israel rejected it and ordered renewed strikes in Gaza. On Aug. 26, the board’s high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, criticized Israel for those strikes in a speech to the U.N. Security Council, saying they accomplished little and only delayed the demilitarization of Gaza.
Nimrod Novik, a former foreign diplomatic adviser and envoy for Shimon Peres, whom Mr. Netanyahu defeated to become prime minister in 1996, said Mr. Netanyahu appeared to be casting about in vain for a conflict that he could heat up unimpeded by Washington.
“It’s like a thief in a hotel — you try every door to find out which one will open,” he said. “Which is the point of least resistance by the Trump administration?”
That may help explain the curious case of Israel’s surprise Aug. 18 bombing of a defunct air base in northern Syria only 40 miles from the Turkish border.
It was not only left-leaning Israelis who saw a possible political motivation. In a podcast interview after the attack, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy to Syria, said that “one theory” for why Israel had ordered it was as a “well-received pre-election concept.” Mr. Barrack did not respond to requests for comment.
Israeli officials described the attack on the Abu al-Duhur air base as a warning to Ankara not to try to establish its own military presence at the site. A Turkish delegation had recently visited the airfield, in Idlib Province, as part of discussions on its rehabilitation, according to two Syrian officials. Israel asserted that Syria planned to allow Turkish troops to deploy there, and that “Syria chose to ignore” Israel’s warnings not to.
Israeli experts said that the main threat to Israel could arise if Turkey installed air-defense systems at the base that could threaten Israeli jets operating in Syrian airspace. Israel has used Syria as a key corridor through which to attack Iran. The Syrian government has complained about Israel “violating Syrian airspace.”
Absent from the Israeli messaging was any recognition that Syria is a country with its own prerogatives, and that Israel had violated its sovereignty. Rather, Israel seemed to be treating the Syrian skies as another Israeli buffer zone — much like the 400 square kilometers of land in southern Syria that Israeli troops are already occupying as a forward defense of their country’s border.
Notably, Israel’s statements seemed to operate on two frequencies. For international consumption, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in English that Israel merely wanted to restore the “status quo” between itself and Syria.
For a domestic audience, however, the Israeli leader released a video in Hebrew in which he was more bellicose, and sounded more as if his saber rattling was aimed at Ankara. “We will not tolerate the establishment of a Turkish military presence that extends southward, because it threatens us,” he said, adding: “We’ve conveyed the message. How shall I put this message? ‘Don’t.’”
That last word, which Mr. Netanyahu said in English, has a special resonance in the Middle East. It was memorably employed by then-President Joseph R. Biden in October 2023, a week into the Israel-Hamas war, when he warned Hezbollah and Iran against joining the fight against Israel. “Don’t,” Mr. Biden said on “60 Minutes,” adding: “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
For Mr. Netanyahu to issue a similar warning in relation to Turkey was worrisome, said Gallia Lindenstrauss, an expert on Israeli-Turkish relations at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“He’s presenting to the Israeli public that Israel has unlimited power, and that’s very dangerous,” she said.
Talking tough to Turkey is not the same as to Hamas, Hezbollah or Syria, however. Turkey has the second-largest military in NATO, and its president is a close ally of Mr. Trump.
Turkey also had reason to expect Israeli deference rather than an abrupt airstrike so close to its border, Ms. Lindenstrauss said: “Northern Syria is an area where in the balance of interests, Turkey’s are greater than Israel’s.”
Still, she said, judging from Turkish media coverage, Ankara did not appear to take Mr. Netanyahu’s warnings too seriously as a threat of military confrontation, at least for the moment.
“Luckily,” she said, “Turkey is understanding this Israeli action as part of Netanyahu’s political campaign.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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11) Deaths of 2 Men in Los Angeles Police Custody Set Off Investigations
Mayor Karen Bass questioned police training to handle mental health crises after the city released graphic video footage of officers’ actions.
By Jill Cowan and Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2026
The Los Angeles Police Department has released footage showing officers involved in the deaths of two men. Credit...via Los Angeles Police Department
Graphic footage showing the deaths of two men in the custody of the Los Angeles Police Department prompted calls this week for additional oversight of the department. Experts raised questions about how officers had responded to two recent encounters, both of which appeared to involve mental health crises, and Mayor Karen Bass said she had doubts about how officers had been prepared for such challenges.
“What is the training?” Ms. Bass said in an interview on Tuesday. “My impression is that it does not seem to be adequate.”
Video footage of the two deaths, which was captured by law enforcement cameras, jarred the nation’s second-largest city when authorities released it late last week. Police accountability laws in California are among the more stringent in the United States, a response dating to riots in 1992 that were sparked by the beating of Rodney King.
Videos from July 15 show detention officers in a city jail converging on a man brought there after family members had called the police, saying he was brandishing a knife at them.
After an hourslong standoff with crisis negotiators and SWAT officers, the man, Jose Carlos Hoyos-Munoz, 58, had been arrested. At the holding facility in the San Fernando Valley, however, police said he resisted their efforts to fingerprint him. In the video, officers can be seen moving him to a fingerprinting area, where they hold him down while they cover his head with a “spit sock” — an effort, officials said later, to stop him from biting and spitting on them.
Later footage from a cell shows officers swarming him as he stands on top of a toilet with his hands cuffed behind his back. Several officers wrestle him onto a cot, face down, the video shows, then back away from his prone body several minutes later.
Mr. Hoyos-Munoz was pronounced dead a short time later. The authorities have yet to release a cause of death.
In a second video, officers can be seen shooting a man who was reported to be swinging an aluminum baseball bat at pedestrians and cars along a Los Angeles sidewalk on July 29. The man, Alejandro Luis Garcia, 33, died in the shooting.
In the footage, officers shout at the man to drop the bat. Seconds later, an officer opens fire.
Los Angeles police officials said that both deaths were under review by internal investigators and outside agencies, including Los Angeles County prosecutors. No criminal charges have been filed or disciplinary actions taken against the officers.
“Our officers are committed to protecting the public, preventing violent crime, and responding with compassion to individuals experiencing a mental health crisis or severe emotional distress, often in rapidly evolving and complex situations,” a statement from the department said. “In these moments, officers must make split-second decisions to safeguard innocent lives.”
Law enforcement officers are allowed to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or someone else.
In Los Angeles, detention officers at city jails are not sworn officers, but civilians who receive some training in handling people with mental illness, according to department officials. Los Angeles police officers receive at least 40 hours of mental health intervention training, and mental health professionals are deployed with every SWAT call, according to the department’s policy.
Jeff Wenninger, a retired Los Angeles police lieutenant who consults on use of force issues, said that footage of the jail death raised concerns. At several points, he said, officers appeared to have pinned Mr. Hoyos-Munoz down in a way that might have restricted his breathing. A spokesman for the police department declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.
In 2021, after the death of George Floyd led to a national reckoning on police abuses, California made it illegal for law enforcement officers to use any restraint or transport method that puts people at substantial risk of so called “positional asphyxia.” City policy requires that officers be trained to restrain people without restricting their breathing.
Nithya Raman, a City Council member who is challenging Ms. Bass in the mayoral race, has sparred with the mayor over police funding and the police union’s support for Ms. Bass.
On Tuesday, Ms. Raman said that she would strengthen oversight of the police.
“What happened to Jose Carlos Hoyos-Munoz and Alejandro Garcia is disturbing and demands justice,” she said. “Both cases need a full, independent investigation with real accountability.”
A woman who identified herself as Mr. Garcia’s sister declined to speak with a reporter.
Mr. Hoyos-Munoz’s brother described him as a kind man who took particular care of their mother after their father’s death several years ago. The brother, Jorge Hoyos, said Mr. Hoyos-Munoz had moved from Peru roughly two decades ago and worked in the dental field.
He struggled with his mental health, his brother said, requiring medications that he had stopped taking last year after complaining that they were affecting his sleep.
On the day that Mr. Hoyos and his mother called the police, the family had hoped that officers would take Mr. Hoyos-Munoz to the hospital.
“He was not taking the medicine by himself and he refused to take it from me,” Mr. Hoyos said. “What he did was very small, but the police considered him like a criminal.”
Mr. Hoyos said he told officers he didn’t want to press charges, only to get help for his brother, whom the family called Pepe.
“We’re missing him,” he said.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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12) Wondering How Nuts Trump’s Tariffs Are? Consider Aluminum.
By Bill Saporito, Mr. Saporito is an editor in Opinion, Sept. 2, 2026
Tobias Nicolai/Connected Archives
The list of Canadian imports now subject to 50 percent tariffs in the United States includes steel, seaweed, ink, animal hides, dog leashes, saddlery, suitcases, plywood, knit hats (toques, to Canadians), floating docks, furniture, whiskey, honey and, of course, hockey sticks. But the tariffs on aluminum show most starkly the irrationality of President Trump’s trade war with our northern neighbor.
Canada shipped nearly $10 billion in aluminum products to the United States last year. The metal is used in construction, cars, furniture, drink cans and countless other things. Mr. Trump has every obligation to enforce trade laws and prevent other nations from taking unfair advantage of us. But the Canadian aluminum industry hasn’t bilked the United States. America needs aluminum to keep its auto plants running and to keep food and drink prices down, and Canada is just better at making it.
Aluminum isn’t cooked like steel; it’s made from alumina, a powder refined from bauxite ore and zapped with electricity until it renders into a metal. The electric bill alone can account for up to 40 percent of the manufacturing cost. When you think about trade with Canada, it’s useful to imagine aluminum not as a metal but as electricity in solid form.
With its abundant snow, lakes and rivers, Canada has huge hydroelectric power resources, often in sparsely populated areas. As a result, the country has lots of reliable, inexpensive electricity, which gives it an edge over the United States in aluminum smelting. Today there are eight smelters operating in Quebec and one in British Columbia, producing about 3.6 million tons of metal annually. The United States gets 60 to 70 percent of its imported aluminum from Canada.
The United States tried to develop a competitive domestic aluminum sector. It began to expand with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era project that was a model for rural electrification initiatives across the country. Low-cost energy attracted increased investment in aluminum smelters, like the one in Alcoa, Tenn., the ultimate company town. Alcoa, founded in 1888 as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, became the biggest aluminum smelting operation in the country. But the population grew after World War II, and in the second half of the 20th century the energy crises helped flip the cost calculus. Many American smelters shuttered.
Canada’s often less expensive, more reliable energy supply — nobody’s moving into northern Quebec to compete for it — proved decisive.
Since 1980, almost 30 American smelters have shut down, with companies typically citing inadequate guarantees about the supply and price of power as the reason. You can’t just hope that there’s enough juice to run the smelter.
Alcoa led the retreat to Canada. The company today operates three aluminum plants in Canada and has just two operational plants in the United States. It’s looking to sell some 10 of its shuttered or curtailed sites to the data center industry. One of its remaining smelters, in Massena, N.Y., depends on a New York State allocation of low-cost power and recently received several million dollars in incentives. Alcoa is investing nearly $60 million in the plant through 2028. Canada might call that a state subsidy — cheating — but without it, the company can’t operate competitively.
The closure of struggling American smelters means that the United States must import — and that the cost of tariffs is destructive to American industry. As of March, the automobile industry had paid more than $35 billion since 2025, thanks to tariffs on aluminum, steel and car parts and other items. This is money that carmakers could have spent on research and development or lowering car prices.
Mr. Trump wants to reverse history and create domestic manufacturing jobs in industries such as aluminum. He’s not the only one. The dream of increasing well-paying manufacturing jobs was what inspired states such as New York to shell out money to open factories and keep them in business. Alcoa’s plant in Massena pays $37.71 an hour for a general mechanic.
The president has largely failed, at least so far. Manufacturing jobs have declined in his second term. On aluminum specifically, Mr. Trump is promoting a $4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, backed by the United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum, along with $500 million in federal dollars and a couple of hundred million in state incentives, including tax breaks. This factory might get built, but few — if any — others will.
Even with all the incentives, building smelters in the United States isn’t all that appealing. Our electric grid is in terrible shape, electricity rates are rising, and the Trump administration is actively discouraging new sources of power, such as renewables. And no one knows whether Mr. Trump will waver on tariffs again. Try selling your board of directors a multibillion-dollar, two- or three-year investment on that basis. Emirates Global might be willing to shoulder the risk, but few other companies are.
It’s not cheating when Canadians undersell American aluminum producers. It’s an advantage. It’s logical for the United States to import lower-cost Canadian aluminum and invest in industries in which America enjoys its own advantages — chip design and artificial intelligence, for instance.
Who would flout this logic, trashing a 150-plus-year relationship with a close ally in a disruptive attempt to separate two interdependent economies? Oh, right.
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