Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, September 6, 2026

  

Panel, Socialism 2026 Russian Neofascism: Imperialism Abroad, Repression at Home Sunday, September 6, 2026   TIMES: 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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See the full list of signers and add your name at letcubalive.info

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/opinion/cuba-government-us-trump.html

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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli 

Organization Support Letter

Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)

To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,

We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.

Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.

Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.

A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."

Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.

A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.

In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.

We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:

Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.

We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.

Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations

Endorsing Organizations: 

Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.

Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:

https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/

IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:

PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast

FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement

CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net

CONTACT INFO:

Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow

Email us:

 xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com

COALITION FOLDER:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR

In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.

Write to:

Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735

TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit

PO Box 660400

Dallas, TX 75266-0400

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Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign An appeal for financial support May 12, 2026   Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign,   It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits.   The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris.   The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March.   That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of  conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents.   The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression.   We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide.   Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California.   The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo   Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw   We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running.   Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols on behalf of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky  By Monica Hill In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:  “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.  Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth                                       *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper

Funds for Kevin Cooper

 

Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.

 

https://www.gofundme.com/f/funds-for-kevin-cooper?lid=lwlp5hn0n00i&utm_medium=email&utm_source=product&utm_campaign=t_email-campaign-update&

 

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 speaking at a rally in support of his reinstatement as Professor at Texas State University and in defense of free speech.

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

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/24/fired-for-advocating-socialism-professor-tom-alter-speaks-out/

  

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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 

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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) Something Alarming Is About to Happen in Germany

By Hans Kundnani, Sept. 4, 2026

Mr. Kundnani is an expert on European politics and the author of “The Paradox of German Power.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opinion/afd-germany-saxony-anhalt.html

Nikita Teryoshin

The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is set to make a major breakthrough.

 

Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state of around two million people, is relatively small. But the significance of the election there on Sunday could be seismic. The AfD is on track to win overwhelmingly and perhaps even secure an overall majority, which would mean that it could form a state government for the first time in its history. Long confined to the opposition, the AfD now stands on the cusp of wielding power — regionally, at least.

 

The rise of the AfD has already made coherent and stable government difficult at the national level. Its success in last year’s federal election, in which it came in second, with 20 percent of the vote, forced the center-right Christian Democrats to form a government with the center-left Social Democrats. The two parties have squabbled since Friedrich Merz became chancellor, and the AfD has surged in the polls. Now it is by far the most popular party in Germany.

 

What makes the AfD’s rise especially shocking is that it is much more extreme than other European far-right parties that are either already in power, like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, or could be soon, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Whereas those parties have sought in some ways to detoxify and moderate themselves, the AfD has become more radical over time, deepening its ties to neo-Nazis and promising to repatriate migrants. As it has done so, it has grown more popular.

 

Last year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the party as “right-wing extremist.” But the scale of the party’s support means it is too late to ban it. Instead, it has fallen to Mr. Merz’s government to stop it. Yet preoccupied with remilitarization and foreign policy, it is seemingly incapable of doing so. For Germany — and the rest of Europe — the implications are truly alarming.

 

At the heart of the matter is the economy, which is going through a deep structural crisis. Over the past two decades, the German economy was often described as Europe’s strongest. In reality, its extreme dependence on exports made it quite fragile. This fragility has now caught up with it: Germany’s manufacturing industry, the basis of its economic success, is being hit by a combination of American tariffs and Chinese competition — what is often referred to as China Shock 2.0. This economic decline underpins the AfD’s recent surge in support.

 

The AfD actually began with economic issues. It was created in 2013 as a direct response to Angela Merkel’s insistence that there was no alternative to bailing out Greece — hence its name — and was originally a party of fiscal hawks who opposed a redistributive European Union. After the refugee crisis in 2015, it repositioned itself as an anti-immigration, anti-Islam party; two years later it got into the Bundestag, leading some to imagine that it had become focused only on cultural issues. But alongside xenophobes and nativists, fiscal hawks retained a home in the AfD.

 

Central to their concerns was maintaining the so-called debt brake, a constitutional amendment that limited government borrowing. During his 2025 campaign, Mr. Merz promised to keep it, even as it prevented much-needed investment. But after the Christian Democrats won the election, he reached an agreement with the Social Democrats and the Greens before the new Parliament had been formed to amend the constitution, exempting military spending from the brake. This democratically dubious move alienated many right-wing voters. It was around this point that the AfD overtook the Christian Democrats in the polls for the first time.

 

Mr. Merz didn’t dismantle the debt brake entirely. That would have made it possible to begin to solve some of Germany’s problems. Instead, as nonmilitary spending remains subject to the debt brake, Mr. Merz has continued to cut back the welfare state and told Germans that they need to work harder so that the economy can regain its “competitiveness.” This approach — increasing military spending while cutting elsewhere — may appeal to foreign policy analysts, but it is politically disastrous. A significant part of the AfD’s appeal lies in its focus on job losses and declining prospects.

 

Germany’s remilitarization has also been disastrous in another way. Since 2022, centrist parties in Germany have largely abandoned their commitment to the idea of Germany as a “Friedensmacht,” or force for peace, and now speak more about preparing for a full-scale war with Russia. Mr. Merz, for his part, says he wants Germany to possess “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” This has allowed the AfD to present itself as the party of peace — not unlike the way that President Trump positioned himself in opposition to the “forever wars” undertaken by American Democrats and Republicans alike.

 

The increase in military spending has caused some to wonder whether Germany could become “Europe’s next hegemon.” But that is a fantasy. For one thing, it is far from clear that Germany’s spending plans will translate into real military capabilities, to say nothing of reviving the economy. For another, Germany is increasingly isolated within the European Union, not least because of its unconditional support for Israel and willingness to block any measures against it, like suspending the European Union’s association agreement with it. Perhaps most important, there is little support for military power, let alone war, among German voters.

 

When Mr. Merz was running to be chancellor, he promised to reduce the AfD’s popularity — chiefly by taking tougher measures against immigration, including what in the coalition agreement was called a “deportation offensive.” Then, on the night of the election, he declared that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,” producing much excitement among supporters of greater European autonomy. A year and a half in, both objectives remain further away than ever.

 

Two more regional elections later this month are likely to produce further advances for the AfD, deepening the sense of national crisis. Some Christian Democrats, in a panic, are already speculating about Mr. Merz’s future. Yet what the country needs is not a different chancellor but a completely different approach. Until then, the AfD will continue to inch closer to power.

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2) This Is the Real Point of College

By Michael S. Roth, Sept. 4, 2026

Dr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opinion/college-freshman-education.html

James Gallagher for The New York Times

Three cheers for students starting college! They’ve heard doubts about whether it’s worthwhile; they’ve heard Silicon Valley’s claim that A.I. can feed them all the information (and misinformation) they could possibly want; they know college is expensive. Yet right around now, thousands and thousands of them are starting their undergraduate careers with enthusiasm.

 

Colleges and universities, like almost all institutions, have suffered from a decline in trust, but that isn’t stopping families from New Orleans to Appleton and from Berkeley to Tuscaloosa from gathering their financial and emotional resources to launch their young people toward a memorable educational experience. Parents will cry; kids will check one another out.

 

Even the Trump administration, which enjoys berating schools (for not protecting Jews or admitting too many Black people or just not promoting its preferred version of American history), has softened its tone for the moment. Last month, the secretary of education took a break from dismantling her department to issue a national call to action, asking college and university leaders to “advance American security interests, deliver academic programs that meet urgent work force needs, and contribute materially to the nation’s prosperity.” Laudable goals to be sure, and nothing to be neutral about, despite the call’s insistence elsewhere on institutional neutrality. But these are not the goals of students.

 

A significant percentage of first-year students are entering community college, and many of them will be looking for classes that prepare them for jobs in the near term. Nursing, information technology, the electrical trades and education will appeal to many, but the most popular areas of study are in the liberal arts. That’s no surprise because the liberal arts prepares students to pivot in many directions given shifting labor force needs.

 

And those shifts will be significant. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how tasks are completed almost everywhere. That’s why students at community colleges, like their counterparts at four-year schools, hope to learn to use large language model tools and develop the human capacities for discernment, for making sense of when and how to use the powerful research and analytic powers of A.I. The students are learning specific skills, to be sure, but they are also learning how to add human value to work in a marketplace infatuated with the wonders of automation.

 

Despite the pressures of a perilous job market, students often use the first semester for exploration. Course catalogs will include titles that baffle recent high school graduates and lead to head-scratching moments for parents and pundits. But this is nothing new. Some schools provide a core curriculum, and despite oft-repeated stories of far-left professors pouring woke doctrine down the throats of naïve youngsters, the writings of Plato, Machiavelli and Mary Shelley remain among the most assigned college readings in America.

 

Students in my humanities course this fall will begin with Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas. Very few of my undergrads will major in philosophy but almost all, I expect, will approach the material with energetic curiosity. They always do. Why? Because they are taking the opportunity to discover who they are as readers, as conversation partners, as people. They are figuring out what kind of work they find fulfilling, what they love to do.

 

That said, it is essential that students also learn how to get better at the work they’ve signed up for. Discovering one’s passion is not enough. Through vigorous practice students should learn to work harder and better, so they can go further than they’d thought possible. If they use A.I. to avoid having to work hard, they’ll learn little.

 

Grade inflation, too, is pernicious, because it signals to young people that they’ve already mastered a task when they’ve really just begun to get the hang of it. Teachers must get over their fear of alienating students by setting high standards, and undergraduates must come to understand that they can do much better than they’ve already done. And they need to learn without undue dependence on technology.

 

I’ve been teaching college students for over 40 years, and one of the great pleasures for me at the beginning of the school year is seeing students develop friendships in their new surroundings. It may happen in a science lab or on a sports team, or through a discussion begun in class and carried over into the dining hall or the dorm. Every year I meet alumni in ripe old age who are still buddies with (or even married to) people they got to know in the first weeks of school. I’m convinced that there is something about young folks opening themselves to new possibilities in college that sets a durable foundation for long-lasting relationships.

 

Yes, college is less affordable than it should be; yes, there’s still a long way to go in improving intellectual diversity and pluralism on campus. Yes, it’s all too easy to mock the bombast or simple riotousness of the young. From Thomas Jefferson to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, people have raised complaints about college students. After all, these students are learning how to practice freedom — the opposite of trying to figure out just how to fit into the world that is being left them.

 

Today’s students are trying to work out what it means to be decent humans in world growing more heated, hostile and, sometimes, heartless. We should cheer them on, for their sake and ours.

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3) Behind the Investigations Into the Venezuelan Oilman Partnering With Trump

Alejandro Betancourt has been targeted by multiple investigations. Now he’s the U.S. government’s unrivaled partner in President Trump’s bid to control Venezuelan oil resources.

By Simon Romero, Julie Turkewitz, Edward Wong and Alan Feuer, Sept. 4, 2026

Simon Romero and Julie Turkewitz have covered Venezuela for years. Edward Wong reports on U.S. foreign policy, and Alan Feuer covers the U.S. Justice Department.

“The deal with Mr. Betancourt holds some parallels with the transition from state socialism to market capitalism in post-Soviet Russia, when the West worked with newly anointed oligarchs to gain access to Russian oil reserves.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/world/americas/venezuela-oil-trump-alejandro-betancourt.html

A refinery operated by the Venezuelan state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, in Punto Fijo. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Prosecutors in Spain targeted the Venezuelan oilman Alejandro Betancourt in one money laundering inquiry. Swiss authorities investigated him in another. Both countries requested his extradition from Britain, where Mr. Betancourt lives in a 14-bedroom country estate, and British authorities arrested him less than a year ago, barring him from traveling abroad.

 

All of it hardly mattered.

 

As part of the Trump administration’s takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry, the United States is forming an extraordinary partnership with Mr. Betancourt. Under the arrangement, the Pentagon could seek to take a large stake in his company, a deal that defies easy comparison in recent American history, oil analysts say.

 

That would make Mr. Betancourt the main partner of the Trump administration as it pushes not just to control the sale of Venezuela’s oil, but to own a chunk of it directly. And it would place Mr. Betancourt at the core of Venezuela’s deepening transformation from a sovereign nation into essentially a vassal state of the United States.

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio brought up Mr. Betancourt in a White House meeting in the spring. He had decided that Mr. Betancourt could be a viable partner for the United States because he had experience forging oil deals in Venezuela and increasing production there, said a person familiar with U.S. efforts to support Mr. Betancourt.

 

That meant Mr. Betancourt would need to be able to travel freely. Officials from the State Department and the Justice Department intervened in the Swiss investigation by reaching out to Swiss counterparts to persuade them not to go forward with the extradition, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

They also asked Britain’s government to ease travel restrictions on Mr. Betancourt, the people said, allowing him to travel to Venezuela and to the United States to meet with Trump administration officials. The British government was reluctant but eventually agreed to the request.

 

Under the deal with the Trump administration, a financing office within the Pentagon plans to partner with Mr. Betancourt’s oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, which is being granted 100-year concessions to operate 17 oil fields in Venezuela.

 

Mr. Betancourt does not own the fields, but the concessions give him the exclusive rights to exploit them — and they are potentially enormous. In all, these oil fields have estimated reserves of 65 billion barrels, nearly as much as all the proven reserves in the United States.

 

“The United States has wreaked havoc on us” with this deal, said Rafael Ramírez, a former Venezuelan energy minister. He called the unusual arrangement with Mr. Betancourt “grotesque” and “unsustainable in the long run” because it was done in secret with an authoritarian government many Venezuelans view as illegitimate, echoing criticism across Venezuela’s normally polarized political spectrum.

 

Sara Chouraqui, a spokeswoman for Mr. Betancourt and the general counsel for his oil company, rejected the criticism.

 

“To Alejandro, this isn’t political,” Ms. Chouraqui said. “The fact that he is now in a position to revitalize the country’s long-dormant economic potential is in itself a win, not for any one political party, but for all of Venezuela.”

 

This article is based on interviews with oil executives, current and former U.S. officials, and former Venezuelan officials, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

 

In settling on Mr. Betancourt, the Trump administration opted against partnering directly with a U.S. oil giant like Chevron, which has had extensive operations in Venezuela for decades, or Petroleos de Venezuela, the country’s state-owned oil company.

 

The deal with Mr. Betancourt holds some parallels with the transition from state socialism to market capitalism in post-Soviet Russia, when the West worked with newly anointed oligarchs to gain access to Russian oil reserves.

 

“It’s actually eerily similar,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist. In both cases, Mr. Rodríguez said, weak governments handed over key parts of their oil industries to well-connected figures. In Russia, he noted, these oligarchs grew immensely rich while often supporting authoritarian rule.

 

In response to a request for comment on U.S. efforts to press Switzerland and Britain to lower the legal pressure on Mr. Betancourt, the State Department cited a briefing on Tuesday in which a top U.S. official told reporters that the administration had found “no pending legal problems in the United States.” The ongoing legal cases had largely originated from U.S. prosecutors’ efforts to look into Mr. Betancourt’s dealings about a decade ago, the official said.

 

The White House had no comment, while the Justice Department and the British Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. The Washington Post reported earlier on some details of U.S. efforts to help Mr. Betancourt with his legal challenges.

 

Explaining the deal, Mr. Rubio told a Venezuelan journalist this week that the partnership with Mr. Betancourt was “going to be professionalized” and will “operate under laws that will apply to it so that the money is never used improperly.”

 

President Trump has promoted the deal as a way to lower gasoline prices and replenish U.S. strategic oil reserves, though the effort could take years, at best, and there are questions about whether the Pentagon has the legal authority to pursue the deal.

 

Mr. Betancourt has a long history operating in the shadowy world of secretive oil deals, regime power struggles and multiple financial crime investigations.

 

But until news of the deal emerged in recent days, Mr. Betancourt, 46, born into an upper-crust family that traces its lineage to a 19th-century Venezuelan president, was largely known for mastering the art of landing deals with Venezuela’s authoritarian leaders while still in his 20s.

 

Reaping a bonanza from no-bid contracts with Venezuela’s government, he plowed that money into trophy real estate around the world, including a penthouse in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower and a castle in Spain with extensive hunting grounds, as he shifted into new ventures, from African banks to pumping Venezuelan oil.

 

While the deal with the Trump administration is unorthodox, there is strong reasoning for this new approach, according to Venezuelan oil experts.

 

Franco Sampieri, the director of the Petroleum Chamber of Zulia, the oil-producing state in western Venezuela, said he believed the deal would bring many direct and indirect jobs to the region.

 

“We are 30 years behind,” Mr. Sampieri said, emphasizing that Zulia desperately needed such an initiative to help resuscitate the industry.

 

Petróleos de Venezuela is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was, hobbled by mismanagement and corruption, dimming its allure as a potential partner. Mr. Betancourt also has a reputation, however marred by allegations of impropriety it may be, of getting business done and raising oil production in Venezuela.

 

The Trump administration may also have a kind of leverage over Mr. Betancourt that it couldn’t exert over a major U.S. oil company, especially after his arrest in Britain last November in connection to international money laundering inquiries.

 

If Mr. Betancourt doesn’t toe the line, the Trump administration could reverse course and press foreign legal authorities to revisit allegations, or push the Justice Department to reactivate its investigation into a U.S. money laundering case in Miami. In that case, Mr. Betancourt was identified, albeit not by name, as an unindicted co-conspirator, according to a person familiar with the case.

 

The help Mr. Betancourt has gotten from the U.S. government to evade further scrutiny — instead of it treating him as a potential witness in other corruption inquiries, or even as an unindicted co-conspirator — has shocked former Justice Department officials, the person familiar with the Miami investigation said.

 

Mr. Betancourt has recently become close to Mauricio Claver-Carone, a powerful political operator close to Mr. Rubio, according to two people with knowledge of their relationship. Mr. Claver-Carone has been instrumental in shaping Venezuela policy despite holding no formal role in the Trump administration.

 

Mr. Betancourt comes from a privileged background. His father was a cardiologist and pianist, and his mother a jewelry designer. He attended an elite private high school in Caracas before studying business at Boston’s Suffolk University.

 

When he returned to Venezuela, high oil prices were setting off an economic boom. Hugo Chávez’s revolution was in full swing as the Venezuelan leader sought to use oil revenues to consolidate power, fund antipoverty projects and lift Venezuela’s profile on the world stage.

 

But amid Mr. Chávez’s expropriations and anti-American rhetoric, there were also opportunities to make a great deal of money in a short amount of time. Mr. Betancourt cut his teeth selling turbines, which allowed him to develop ties with government officials.

 

Leveraging those contacts, Mr. Betancourt got into the business of building power plants at a time when Venezuela was experiencing electricity shortages. Despite having little experience in the power generation sector, Mr. Chávez’s government awarded him an array of no-bid contracts.

 

José Aguilar, an independent Venezuelan energy auditor who often coordinated his work with Venezuelan civic transparency organizations, found that Mr. Betancourt’s company overbilled state entities by more than $800 million for the power plants, often by tacking on massive markup fees.

 

Separately, prosecutors in Europe and the United States investigated claims that executives at Mr. Betancourt’s company paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to secure the contracts.

 

Mr. Betancourt was not charged as a result of the multiple investigations into these activities, and Ms. Chouraqui, his spokeswoman, said he had never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction.

 

Even so, Mr. Aguilar called the U.S. government’s decision to partner with Mr. Betancourt “shameful.”

 

All of Mr. Betancourt’s early deals laid the foundation for a rapid accumulation of wealth. But they also exposed him to scorn from many Venezuelans who viewed him as a traitor for dealing with a government that was jailing dissidents, purging the civil service of critics and nationalizing parts of the economy.

 

Mr. Betancourt made his foray into Venezuela’s oil industry in 2011 by acquiring a minority stake in Petrozamora, a state-controlled producer operating oil fields in Lake Maracaibo.

 

Coordinating with other minority owners from Russia, Mr. Betancourt held on to his stake in Petrozamora until 2022, when one of the Venezuelan government’s periodic purges pushed him out of the company at the behest of Tareck El Aissami, the oil minister at the time and a rival of Delcy Rodríguez, then the vice president.

 

But Mr. Al Aissami’s purge was short lived, and served as the catalyst for his own arrest in 2024 on corruption charges.

 

After his stake in Petrozamora was expropriated, Mr. Betancourt navigated the fallout by aligning with the regime faction led by Ms. Rodríguez, who is now Venezuela’s president, and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly.

 

He regained his stake in Petrozamora in 2024 through NABEP, a newly created company registered in Barbados. The company helped execute a rapid operational turnaround, lifting production from 20,000 barrels a day to about 200,000.

 

In doing so, NABEP emerged as the second-largest private oil company in Venezuela, coming within reach of Chevron’s production of about 280,000 barrels a day.

 

As the Trump administration tries to ramp up Venezuela’s overall oil output, that positioned Mr. Betancourt not only as a key interlocutor between Washington and Caracas, but someone poised to amass even greater wealth and power as a partner of the U.S. government.

 

Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.

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4) Israel Says It Is Cementing Its Foothold in Southern Lebanon

The recent capture of a strategic ridge has further entrenched the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, as efforts to broker lasting peace have floundered.

By Euan Ward and David M. Halbfinger, Sept. 4, 2026

Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon and David M. Halbfinger from Jerusalem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/world/middleeast/israel-captures-ridge-occupation-katz.html

In a screen grab obtained from a social media video released on Aug. 22, smoke rose following strikes on Ali al-Taher ridge in Nabatieh, Lebanon. Credit...Social Media, via Reuters

The Israeli defense minister said Friday that the military’s capture of a strategic ridge in Lebanon a day earlier had consolidated its foothold in the south of the country, adding to concerns that Israel intends to prolong its monthslong occupation there.

 

The Ali al-Taher ridge, about six miles from Lebanon’s border with Israel, sits above a sprawling underground base for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that Israel has long fought.

 

The ridge had increasingly become a focal point of the conflict, which reignited in March after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Hezbollah’s chief backer.

 

The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a video statement that the capture of Ali al-Taher marked “the completion of the process of consolidating our hold on the security zone in southern Lebanon,” referring to an Israeli-occupied strip of Lebanese territory along the border.

 

Hezbollah’s media office did not respond to a request for comment on Israel’s claim that it had captured the ridgeline. The office of the Lebanese presidency declined to comment.

 

In June, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a U.S.-brokered framework intended to end the fighting and eventually restore Lebanese control over the country’s south.

 

Under the plan, the Lebanese military would disarm Hezbollah and deploy in designated “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops progressively withdrew. That process has largely stalled, however, with Israel and Hezbollah at odds over which side must act first. Hezbollah has consistently rejected demands to put down its weapons.

 

Israel has said for months that its forces would remain in Lebanon until Hezbollah has been disarmed. Mr. Katz reiterated that in his statement on Friday, as the capture of the ridge underscored how entrenched the Israeli military has become in Lebanon, with little sign of an end to the occupation.

 

It remained unclear what Israel’s capture of the Ali al-Taher ridge would mean for the broader U.S. conflict with Iran. Tehran has insisted that any agreement to end that conflict must stop fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon.

 

Iran warned the United States on Thursday that Israel’s capture of the ridge would cross a red line and that Tehran would retaliate forcefully if the offensive continued, according to an Iranian official and a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said the message was sent via Oman.

 

The Revolutionary Guards official said that roughly 70 to 100 Hezbollah members, along with Iranian military advisers, had been trapped inside the complex beneath the ridge as Israeli forces encircled it.

 

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had established “operational control” over the ridge after an operation that began in June, when thousands of Israeli troops surrounded the underground facility, one of Hezbollah’s largest in Lebanon, and trapped dozens of militants inside.

 

The Israeli military said its soldiers had cleared Hezbollah militants from two underground routes beneath the ridge, killing some while others fled. Mr. Katz said on Friday that the military would now work to neutralize the tunnels and deploy around the ridge to maintain its hold and prevent Hezbollah from re-establishing itself there.

 

Sarit Zehavi, the president of the Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli group focused on security along the northern border, said the capture of the ridgeline was significant but would not fundamentally alter the state of the conflict.

 

The central question was whether Hezbollah would return to the border region if Israeli forces withdrew, Ms. Zehavi said, arguing that the Lebanese government had not done enough to prevent Hezbollah reconstituting in those areas.

 

“I don’t feel that it’s a different day,” she added. “There is still a lot of work to do.”

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5) IN AN AGE OF PERPETUAL CLIMATE DISASTER, REBUILDING IS THE WRONG GOAL

By David Wallace-Wells, Sept. 4, 2026

“Disaster is a trial through which communities must pass, ideally transformed positively by the experience. Recovery could be much more ambitious than stanching the blood loss from an immediate wound. It could mean designing and building a whole new world, one that makes the protection of people and promotion of human flourishing a higher-order goal than restoring the value of real estate.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/magazine/climate-change-disaster-rebuilding.html

Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, 2024. Credit...Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

This spring, the Southeast was on fire. Ninety-five percent of the region was in severe drought, and in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas what was burning was what’s called the “blowdown” from Hurricane Helene — the fires tearing through landscapes heavy with trees felled a year and a half ago and left to bake into ready fuel, waiting for a spark.

 

This is not a climate fable; it is a pattern. Disaster intervals are collapsing, with one catastrophe following another in such quick succession that one bleeds into the next and the old metabolism of disaster recovery fails to keep pace. Climate scientists sometimes talk about whiplash: conditions of extreme drought followed by conditions of historic rainfall, for instance, with flooding made worse because the dirt and soil has been baked into a surface as unwelcoming to water as concrete.

 

Wildfires often denude hillsides, leading to lethal mudslides when storms come; fires can even be fed by heavy rains, as happened in Europe this summer, when spring precipitation nurtured new vegetation which baked under the continent’s historic heat waves and then burned. When rains hit desert, you can get achingly beautiful floral superblooms in Death Valley or lethal flash flooding in the Grand Canyon. This summer we got both. When decades of glacier loss is followed by an unusually hot summer in the Himalayas, you can get landslides that feel like a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

 

Cosmic anomalies now arrive serially, disrupting paradigms as reliably as they do landscapes. When a thousand-year storm hits the Texas hill country and the floodwaters drown 139 people and the entire grounds of Camp Mystic, it might look like an act of God, even when the waters overwhelm something long known to locals as Flash Flood Alley. When another flood hits 12 months later, it suggests a very different calendar of grief — and recovery.

 

Disasters of this scale used to scar communities for generations, if not centuries. Rebuilding could unfold over decades, too: new infrastructure, new patterns of development, perhaps new evacuation routes and emergency-response units. When truly scarring cataclysms struck, survivors built whole new worlds in their wake. This work was difficult even in stable circumstances. But increasingly, weather extremes are arriving not only as crises but premonitions, with future disasters following now within a generation, often within years, and sometimes, unnervingly, within months.

 

“Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama and now a disaster-management scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But the whole apparatus was built on the assumption that disasters were random and rare and that recovery was one and done.”

 

This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.

 

For years, one promise of rapid decarbonization was that it might allow us to secure a stable climate, familiar and comfortable by the standards of the past, into which we might innovate and adapt to build a more hospitable world. Today the green transition is proceeding at inspiring speed and we have flattened the curve of global carbon emissions. But warming isn’t slowing, at least not yet. Instead it’s accelerating, drawing the world quickly past temperature thresholds we once called the dividing line between livable futures and a much darker world.

 

Perhaps that bright line was a projection of hyperbole and panic, since ecosystems are not ruled by neat binaries and humans will find ways to adapt to the jaggedness of warming, often by normalizing its recurring brutality. But it is no longer possible to dream of a world unperturbed by what was once called catastrophic global temperature rise. And it is no longer sufficient to see disasters only as tragedies, or policy failures, or even a shameful form of carbon comeuppance. They are opportunities, too: not simply to defiantly restore what was damaged or destroyed but to better prepare for, and protect against, a world we once hoped to avoid even imagining.

 

Just think of a recent disaster — the Palisades fire; Hurricane Helene. The immediate playbook of recovery is familiar, even for those watching from afar: search-and-rescue, clearing debris, restoring some basic public services and temporarily standing up others. “But when Anderson Cooper leaves town, it’s not as sexy,” Kayyem says. “It’s not all the madness, with the cops and the firefighters, and it’s not the child reunited with the mother or the dog reunited with the senior citizen. It’s just the really difficult stuff, which we didn’t take seriously before, because we all figured disasters were random and rare. We figure we’ll just throw a lot of money at the problem, get the community back on its feet and move on.”

 

Perhaps some local group will rally for new flood barriers, or a county official will press a weather-hardening initiative for local homes. But once you’re out of immediate danger, the recovery often grows rudderless against an ocean of contrary currents. Insurance payments frequently reward rebuilding in precisely the same spot, and for homeowners the highest priority is typically to return as quickly as possible — even if that means not waiting for new codes and building guidelines, let alone paying more to implement them. The tax base has a status quo bias, too, since localities expect certain revenue to stream from certain places, which happens only if the community returns to form. Local transportation and social services, too, were designed to serve the needs of the old community.

 

And then there are the more human factors, also understandable: coping and nostalgia, bureaucratic sclerosis and the effective veto power of victims over the terms of their own rebuild, the basic desire among individuals and communities to be made whole again. The layouts of streets and parks, the operation of public services, the locations of homes and what they looked like — ideally it would all be as it had been, with the disaster itself lingering more like a bad dream than a crucible in which a new community could be forged.

 

In an age of serial disaster, that’s no longer enough, even when it can be achieved. One problem is that there is rarely someone truly in charge — no “recovery czar,” Kayyem says. “But you need someone to own this, because the communities don’t really have the capacity. They don’t have the access to federal authorities. They don’t have the right training and perspective.” Emergency response was professionalized decades ago, she says. Recovery, though, is a different story. “Nobody owns it, nobody really wants to own it, and nobody seems to have all that clear an idea of what it needs.”

 

Sometimes local leaders will invoke a “new normal” when describing the scale of the challenge ahead. Never mind that it was precisely “normal” that has been revealed as vulnerable, the intuitive measure of success is how quickly visitors can return without noting signs of calamity at all. “The idea that you would be required only to recover from the disaster already behind you but not adapt to the next one — it’s insane,” Kayyem says. “Just insane.”

 

But for decades, this approach to recovery was required by a federal law called the Stafford Act, with FEMA disbursing most of its funds for projects that altered nothing about the structures that had been destroyed. Buildings were supposed to look the same, built with the same materials in the same place and put to the same purpose. The law has been reformed several times over the last couple of decades, with some recovery money set aside for new resilience and guidelines softened to allow communities to rebuild in different ways, and different places, rather than being bound by what had stood before. But the impulse to restore persists.

 

When New Orleans rebuilt its levees after Hurricane Katrina, they were not sufficient to prevent flooding in the case of a Category 5 storm. Nearly eight years since the Camp fire tore through Paradise, Calif., only 40 percent of the destroyed homes have been rebuilt, and many of the surviving structures still bear some of the same hazards — wood-shingle roofs, overgrown brush and piles of dead leaves, slack power lines — that doomed their neighbors. The homes being rebuilt now in the Palisades and Altadena have been exempted from a number of local codes and regulations in order to speed recovery on what’s been called a “like-for-like” approach to rebuilding. Their neighbors in equally vulnerable neighborhoods like Brentwood and Beverly Hills have spent much of the past 20 months fighting new responsive requirements tooth and nail — though the updated guidelines, called Zone Zero, were finally adopted in August.

 

These are only one kind of recovery story. There are encouraging ones, too, both big and small. In 2013, Kayyem tells me, a tornado powered by 200-mile-per-hour winds tore through Moore, Okla., the third in less than 15 years, flattening more than a thousand homes and killing several dozen people. In rebuilding, the town added not a binder full of new requirements but just two pages’ worth — then stood proud as the new buildings survived a tornado two years later. The Houston area has emerged from at least three 500-year storms in five years with better flood maps and perhaps more honest insurance policies, more defensive infrastructure and much greater willingness among voters to actually spend on that stuff. In New York, nearly 15 years after Hurricane Sandy, flood barriers are going up around Lower Manhattan — and though the system isn’t perfect, it was built much more quickly than the Second Avenue subway.

 

The big question is how to ensure devastated communities get on one of these paths rather than the other. In 2024, Kayyem convened a task force at the Kennedy School to ask exactly this question, examining almost 3,000 recoveries from billion-dollar disasters between 2000 and 2017, identifying 625 of what they called “leading” recoveries — in which local economic activity exceeded pre-disaster levels for a period of at least five years — and 1,259 of what they called “lagging recoveries,” where battered communities never got back to base line.

 

The most important measure of success, they found, is not speed — how quickly you can distribute disaster relief, bring people back and conjure at least the illusion that everything is back to normal. It’s resilience — how effectively you’ve managed to protect the community against future risk. In successful recoveries, they found, more money had been invested in resilience ahead of time by local officials who seemed to understand the risk. After impact, money was distributed more quickly and more flexibly, often thanks to ready-to-use blueprints and sometimes because leaders had stocked money away in anticipation of a coming disaster.

 

These are local lessons, which is part of the point. Federal response predominates in the national imagination — think of George W. Bush and Katrina, Barack Obama and Sandy, FEMA and Helene — but the actual work is increasingly falling to local communities. Partly that’s because real recovery lasts longer than the federal attention span. Partly it’s because it depends on local knowledge as much as domain expertise. And partly it’s because disasters are now frequent enough that they have begun to overwhelm the federal government’s ability to respond — America’s 20th-century institutions running up against 21st-century weather.

 

In the five years before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracked an average of 5.4 “billion-dollar disasters” each year, inflicting an average of $39 billion in damages. In the last five years, the country has averaged 23.2 such disasters each year, totaling $140 billion in damages each year. Even before President Trump returned to office, promising to radically overhaul and possibly eliminate FEMA, liberals would tell you that the federal government was simply not capable of handling so much catastrophe and that the old system of centralized response was no longer fit for purpose. It’s not yet clear what FEMA will look like come January 2029. But almost invariably, it seems, local communities will have to learn to do more.

 

Disasters are always opportunities of a kind. In 2007, Naomi Klein described what she called the “shock doctrine” — the pattern by which, in the age of globalization and neoliberal financial capitalism, crises were exploited to push through predictably right-wing policy responses, ranging from austerity to privatization. Her focus wasn’t climate disaster, but it was easy enough to connect the dots: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the New Orleans public school system was liquidated, with education turned over to charter schools. Emergency response was largely handed off to for-profit contractors, earning the derisive description “Disaster Inc.”

 

In 2024, Sarah Labowitz and Katie Mears, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, proposed an optimistic inversion: “Adaptation through shock,” they called it. “We know the world will look dramatically different 100 years from now,” they wrote. “It’ll be hotter, the oceans will be higher and the most productive farmlands will be further north. Many of the places where we live won’t be recognizable or even exist, and hundreds of millions of people will have moved.” But we also know, they wrote, that “disasters are moments when change happens in communities: Resources flow, and decisions, big and small, are made to rebuild, to elevate, to harden or to say goodbye.” Everyone allows themselves to contemplate new futures, if only briefly — to ask what of the old order should be preserved. And what should not.

 

What Labowitz and Mears imagine is a recovery framework that begins from that premise: Disaster is a trial through which communities must pass, ideally transformed positively by the experience. Recovery could be much more ambitious than stanching the blood loss from an immediate wound.

 

It could mean designing and building a whole new world, one that makes the protection of people and promotion of human flourishing a higher-order goal than restoring the value of real estate. This could mean more focus on food-aid programs or providing generous direct-cash transfers to those whose livelihoods have been directly affected. It might also mean much more consideration to move people out of harm’s way rather than straining to return them into communities marked once already by climate disaster, perhaps by subtly redesigning neighborhoods, or in some cases through what’s been called, almost always in scare quotes, “managed retreat” from whole regions.

 

In the case of the Palisades or Altadena, for instance, it could mean a new street map that does not follow the wind paths flowing down from nearby mountains, or purchasing a few strategically located lots to be rebuilt instead as firebreaks. It could mean buying out homeowners at pre-fire prices to enable relocation, or forward-looking revisions to insurance policies so that rebuilding in the same place is not rewarded. For now, recovery tends to anchor you in the zone of exposure, and migration tends to be in the opposite direction. That is, toward risk — invariably underpriced, as we learn again with each disaster. And then forget.

 

Look at the burn scars in Lahaina or Spokane, or the path of destruction Helene cut through seven states, or the fact that unspectacular thunderstorms now routinely deliver more than a billion dollars in local damage, and you might assume that money would be the chief challenge in recovery — and that ambitious recovery might fail because of pinched budgets.

 

In fact, the money isn’t such an obvious problem, Labowitz says, since, in general, federal disaster funding flows quite freely and abundantly. In Trump’s second term, FEMA has been far more partisan in its distribution of funds, with nearly 40 times as much money sent to red and purple states wrecked by Hurricane Helene than to California in the aftermath of its fires. But over the last decade, the federal government has distributed $558 billion in disaster relief. . If we’re going to be spending all that money, she says, we should try getting a bit better at it.

 

“Why are we spending so much money?” Labowitz asks. “It’s because it’s the right thing to do. There’s something kind of beautiful and moral about it that we collectivize risk in a big and rich country,” she goes on. “It’s beautiful — the government helps you after a disaster. But we should be thinking about the money that we spend on disaster recovery in terms of what we could get for it. Not just in rebuilding what was there before, but preparing for the next disaster, too.”

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6) Colombia’s New President Poses With Dead Bodies in Show of Force

In Colombia, as in the United States and El Salvador, leaders are increasingly using images of captured or killed enemies to project power.

By Genevieve Glatsky, Genevieve Glatsky reported from Bogotá, Colombia, Sept. 4, 2026

"The video was an especially stark expression of a political tactic increasingly visible across the Americas: leaders who campaign on law and order using images of alleged criminals as a spectacle of state power. Experts say the imagery reflects a regional trend of treating people labeled terrorists as enemies who do not merit the protections of due process. They pointed to the Trump administration’s designation of drug traffickers as terrorists and its military strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 223 people, as part of that shift. … The identities of the dead have not been disclosed, and the operation has not yet undergone the investigations required after a military action resulting in deaths. By displaying the bodies as defeated ‘terrorists,’ the government collapsed distinctions between combatants and civilians, adults and children, and legal and illegal uses of force, Mr. Restrepo said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/world/americas/colombia-de-la-espriella-bodies.html

An image taken from a social media account of President De La Espriella shows rows of body bags containing what he said were the bodies of rebels killed in a military operation.

Colombia’s leader sits at a desk surrounded by military and police officials, presenting what he describes as evidence of a successful military operation. But the rows in front of him are not boxes of seized cocaine or weapons. They are dead bodies.

 

Wearing the same dark green as the military officials with him, President Abelardo De La Espriella can be seen in a video posted Wednesday morning on his X account walking beside white body bags said to hold the remains of rebels.

 

The video was an especially stark expression of a political tactic increasingly visible across the Americas: leaders who campaign on law and order using images of alleged criminals as a spectacle of state power.

 

Experts say the imagery reflects a regional trend of treating people labeled terrorists as enemies who do not merit the protections of due process. They pointed to the Trump administration’s designation of drug traffickers as terrorists and its military strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 223 people, as part of that shift.

 

President Trump has publicized videos of immigration raids, sometimes accompanied by popular music. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has made images of prisoners part of his security strategy, releasing videos of inmates being shaved and marched into prison.

 

“When the U.S. is behaving like this, it makes it easier for everyone else to fall into that behavioral trap,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, the deputy director for Latin America for the International Crisis Group. “It’s not just: He did something bad, but he is a bad person and therefore deserves whatever punishment we assign.”

 

Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institute, said, “It’s trying to get people excited about not just statistics about the homicide rate, but actually about these visuals in almost a cartoonish or pro-wrestling kind of way to appeal to people’s basest instincts.”

 

But that imagery carries particular weight in Colombia.

 

During decades of armed conflict, the military’s practice of measuring success by enemy casualties produced one of the country’s darkest human rights scandals: Soldiers killed nearly 8,000 civilians, then cast them as guerrillas killed in combat to inflate their body count.

 

The legacy of that scandal in the early 2000s, known as the “false positives,” remains deeply embedded in Colombians’ memory.

 

“Colombia has a long history of almost glorifying violence and the violent deaths of criminal leaders,” Ms. Dickinson said. “There’s a performative aspect of what’s happening here. And it really does mark a shift and a return to times past.”

 

For communities that have lived through decades of violence from both armed groups and the state, the images send two messages at once: that the government is capable of defeating criminals, but also that a new era of mass violence could be emerging.

 

Mr. De La Espriella, a right-winger backed by Mr. Trump, called the operation a “lethal blow” to the group’s territorial control and the most successful military operation in Colombia in the past 12 years.

 

“The time when you could move through Colombia with safe passage from a government that played freeze tag with you is over,” he said. “The determination to eradicate you — because you are a cancer — is absolute.”

 

Mr. De La Espriella said that 23 people had been killed and six captured, including aleader of a dissident rebel group who was known by the alias “Tigre.” He described him as the group’s third in command.

 

The president said the group had recruited children and attacked members of the army and navy during this year’s presidential elections. He also said that one child recruit had been rescued and placed in the care of the country’s child welfare agency.

 

The photographs, Colombian security experts said, are intended to demonstrate the government’s zero-tolerance approach.

 

“It is not just a punishment in terms of law and order, it is a moral punishment,” Ms. Dickinson said. “The celebratory aspects of their deaths plays into that narrative about this being an existential good versus evil conflict. It’s hard to overstate how powerful these images are.”

 

In 2016, Colombia forged a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel group, ending a 50-year conflict with the Marxist guerrilla group. But dissident factions that rejected or later abandoned the agreement, among other groups, continue to operate in parts of the country.

 

During the height of the conflict, the government sometimes released photographs of the bodies of major guerrilla leaders, including images in which the dead were presented alongside senior government officials.

 

But an image of the president himself alongside bodies represents something different, said Jorge Restrepo, director of the Conflict Analysis Resource Center, a Colombian research group.

 

“It feels novel in this post-conflict period,” he said.

 

The identities of the dead have not been disclosed, and the operation has not yet undergone the investigations required after a military action resulting in deaths. By displaying the bodies as defeated “terrorists,” the government collapsed distinctions between combatants and civilians, adults and children, and legal and illegal uses of force, Mr. Restrepo said.

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7) Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists

As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.

By Benjamin Mueller and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/health/fauci-morens-covid-prosecutions.html

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in March 2020. Doug Mills/The New York Times

In early 2025, Dan Bongino, the fiery No. 2 official at the F.B.I., summoned dozens of agents to the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

 

Mr. Bongino, a conservative media personality recently elevated to the deputy’s role, demanded to know why a yearslong inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic had stalled — and why investigators had not more forcefully scrutinized the role of government scientists, current and former officials said.

 

At one point, he squared off against an official who questioned the theory that he and many supporters of President Trump had long promoted: that the virus had not merely leaked from a Chinese lab, but that American researchers, among them Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, had orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up that fact.

 

The meeting became so heated that Mr. Bongino ultimately asked the official to leave the room, an attendee said.

 

Mr. Bongino, who stepped down from the F.B.I. in January to return to podcasting, and other officials helped set in motion a sprawling and aggressive investigative effort that has outlasted his tenure, The New York Times has learned.

 

As part of that effort, F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors have sought evidence related to at least eight scientists, among them a Nobel laureate and influential former government researchers like Dr. Fauci.

 

Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records, as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.

 

This account of the investigations is drawn from interviews with six current and former officials familiar with them, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, as well as documents reviewed by The Times.

 

It is not clear what evidence those inquiries have produced or what their status is. Dr. Fauci, once the government’s chief infectious disease scientist, received a pre-emptive pardon last year from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that protects him from federal prosecution for official actions from 2014 to 2025.

 

The inquiries were underway well before Republican lawmakers last month asked the Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before a Senate panel. They have continued playing out behind the scenes as those lawmakers released documents that have bruised Dr. Fauci’s reputation.

 

Many scientists see the federal government’s investigative effort as an attempt to punish political enemies and deflect blame from the first Trump administration for the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.

 

While the origins of the coronavirus have not definitively been established, these researchers point to the fact that the inquiries have failed to produce any clear evidence that Dr. Fauci or other American scientists covered up knowledge of a lab leak, or funded or collaborated on research that led to one.

 

Mr. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, accuse those scientists of helping to start the pandemic and aggravating its harms, and believe the inquiries represent overdue accountability.

 

The F.B.I.’s efforts during the Biden administration focused mainly on whether Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, though federal investigators also began examining some individual scientists.

 

Under Mr. Trump, the investigation has expanded as federal agents and prosecutors sought evidence against new targets and intensified their scrutiny of scientists.

 

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal federal records by steering government emails into a personal account. In those emails, Dr. Morens discussed efforts to defend researchers who were under suspicion for collaborating with the Wuhan lab.

 

Dr. Morens wrote that he was trying to protect researchers from what he described as baseless “political charges” of a lab leak.

 

A subpoena for documents in that case, dated September 2025 and reviewed by The Times, showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland sought evidence about Dr. Fauci, too, including any emails he sent to certain researchers from his personal account or payments he received for intervening on behalf of federal grantees.

 

Prosecutors in Maryland also recently demanded the testimony before a federal grand jury of a former staff member at EcoHealth Alliance, a defunct nonprofit that the Trump White House has said used N.I.H. funding to facilitate “dangerous” research at the Wuhan lab where the administration believes the pandemic started.

 

EcoHealth executives have denied those claims. The N.I.H. has said that viruses being studied there with American funding bore no resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.

 

In a separate line of inquiry, agents in the F.B.I.’s Cleveland office have recently examined whether Dr. Fauci and other government scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to downplay the possibility that the pandemic originated in a lab. Mr. Bongino last year singled out one of those agents as a key player in an expanded investigation.

 

The F.B.I. and Department of Justice declined to comment for this article. Mr. Bongino conceded on his podcast last month that “there are a lot of complications with any case that may develop against Anthony Fauci because of the pardon,” even as he credited “the cleanup operation we instituted when we went over there” for Dr. Morens’s indictment.

 

On his podcast in 2024, Mr. Bongino said that government scientists had dismissed the lab leak theory because they wanted to undermine Mr. Trump.

 

“They knew that would be a destructive narrative for them because Donald Trump had been talking about the danger of China the entire time,” Mr. Bongino said. “So they hid the lab leak.”

 

A Theory About a Cover-Up

 

Shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his administration pulled down a website meant to help Americans find Covid vaccines and treatments and, in its place, posted a full-length image of Mr. Trump atop a new page that described why true blame for the pandemic rested with scientists.

 

“LAB LEAK,” the page declared — a leak that it suggested Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens and EcoHealth scientists had helped to conceal.

 

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran for nearly 40 years, financed collaborations between EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that studied coronaviruses in the city where the Covid outbreak began.

 

Some researchers favor the idea of a lab leak, whether or not American funding was involved, citing assertions by intelligence officials that the lab probably failed to use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time.

 

Most scientists favor a so-called natural origin theory, pointing to new data published in recent years supporting the idea that the virus spilled from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, a tried-and-true route for emerging deadly viruses, including past outbreaks in China.

 

American intelligence officials have said there was no indication that the Wuhan lab had been in possession of the pandemic coronavirus “or a close progenitor” before the Covid outbreak.

 

In Congress, Republican lawmakers began gathering evidence against scientists as the 2024 election approached.

 

“You make a pyramid,” said Mitchell Benzine, the staff director of the Republican-run Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic from 2023 to 2025, describing the panel’s strategy. “You talk to and get documents from the bottom of the pyramid, and you work your way up.”

 

If Dr. Fauci was at the top of the pyramid, Dr. Morens, his former adviser, was nearer its base. The subcommittee discovered a trove of brash emails from 2020 and 2021 in which Dr. Morens described plans to evade federal records laws, including by learning how to “make emails disappear.”

 

Dr. Morens wrote about trying to quietly involve Dr. Fauci in efforts to defend against what he described as threats to “scientific independence” and to EcoHealth, whose N.I.H. grant was canceled under orders from the first Trump administration in 2020.

 

Dr. Morens said in the emails that he wanted to protect scientists from attacks he suggested were analogous to the “Salem Witch Trials.”

 

It is not clear precisely when federal prosecutors in Maryland began investigating those emails, but documents reviewed by The Times indicate it was toward the end of Mr. Biden’s presidency.

 

By last fall, federal prosecutors were also examining Dr. Fauci and a half dozen other scientists, including Richard J. Roberts, a Nobel laureate in medicine, who had organized a letter denouncing the cancellation of EcoHealth’s grant, according to a September 2025 subpoena to EcoHealth.

 

The subpoena asked for evidence that Dr. Fauci had drafted or edited documents for EcoHealth, including records related to the Wuhan lab; correspondence from Dr. Fauci’s personal email address to EcoHealth; and evidence that the group had compensated Dr. Fauci with “currency, gift baskets, wine, meals, travel” or other items.

 

In addition to violations of federal records laws, Dr. Morens pleaded guilty last month to receiving illegal gratuities in the form of two bottles of The Prisoner Red Blend Napa Valley wine from Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s former president.

 

Dr. Daszak said the wine had been a joking allusion to calls in 2020 for his and other scientists’ imprisonment. (Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth were later barred from federal contracts under Mr. Biden over allegations that they failed to properly monitor work at the Wuhan lab, which Dr. Daszak and the nonprofit denied.)

 

Government oversight experts criticized Dr. Morens’s efforts to hide critical correspondence about the pandemic, while noting that Trump administration officials have themselves been said to conduct government business on private email accounts or an encrypted messaging app.

 

“It seems like retaliation,” Dr. Daszak said of the case, in which he appears as an unnamed co-conspirator. “The right learned pretty early on in Covid that public health is a threat to power.”

 

Timothy Belevetz, Dr. Morens’s lawyer, said that Dr. Morens “has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”

 

Dr. Fauci has said he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s actions. His lawyers have created a defense fund to respond to what they described as a “legal barrage” that followed his refusal to answer questions from a Senate panel in July, including the announcement of state investigations. The panel voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.

 

“Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong, and there is no basis for any investigations, whether by Congress, the Department of Justice, or state attorneys general,” David Schertler, his lawyer, said.

 

“The only thing that will come from these completely unjustified efforts to besmirch Dr. Fauci’s reputation and his lifelong commitment to public health is wasted time and resources that would be better used on real issues.”

 

The F.B.I., which has for years asserted that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, has also more recently examined whether Dr. Fauci pushed a group of scientists in early 2020 to downplay early suspicions that the coronavirus may not have evolved naturally.

 

Republicans have long suggested that Dr. Fauci pressured those scientists into changing their view as they prepared an article about the pandemic’s origin, perhaps by plying one of them with a federal grant.

 

Dr. Fauci and the scientists deny those claims. The grant in question was reviewed and approved for funding before Dr. Fauci discussed the origin with those scientists, he said.

 

The researchers said their initial suspicions were allayed instead by more extensive analyses of coronaviruses in other species, like bats and pangolins, which showed that unusual-seeming features of the novel virus were in fact present in naturally occurring viruses.

 

Democratic lawmakers said that the attacks on Dr. Fauci and other scientists echoed past efforts to prosecute political enemies.

 

“It smacks of McCarthyism because it seeks to demonize individuals for seemingly fictional and illusory reasons,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “The question is whether there’s selective targeting.”

 

Mr. Bongino has blamed Dr. Fauci and other government scientists not only for financing research that led to the pandemic, but also for using the resulting catastrophe to push social distancing measures and mail-in balloting provisions in 2020.

 

He has said on his podcast that those measures were introduced for one purpose, referring to an outcome that multiple investigations have established did not happen: “Steal the election. One hundred percent.”

 

Kirsten Noyes and Georgia Gee contributed research. Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

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8) Why the War on Terror Is Still Haunting Us

In “All the Presidents’ Wars,” the journalist Peter Bergen traces the many missteps of U.S. military action in the Middle East.

By Scott Anderson, Sept. 5, 2026

Scott Anderson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author, most recently, of “King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/books/review/all-the-presidents-wars-peter-bergen.html

The aftermath of U.S. and Israeli attacks on oil storage depots in Tehran earlier this year. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

Quite early in “All the Presidents’ Wars,” the journalist Peter Bergen’s chronicle of the “war on terror,” the reader is likely to conclude that the groups of American officials who have presided over the past two and a half decades of conflict in the Middle East consist of idiots, fools or knaves. The further one progresses into this damning and meticulously researched book, the more this assessment seems confirmed.

 

In fairness, the war on terror hasn’t been an unmitigated catastrophe. The development of advanced weaponized drones facilitated the killing of Qaeda leaders at long range and with little risk. American military commanders also eventually adopted counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq that proved very effective, even if they failed to change the ultimate outcome of that conflict. And while it is difficult to get all hopped up over something that didn’t happen, the fact is that there hasn’t been a large-scale terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11.

 

Still, at the cost of trillions of dollars, the lives of some 7,000 U.S. servicemen and women, as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and two failed war efforts — with a third in progress — one would hope for some more bright spots.

 

Bergen covers a tremendous amount of ground in his book. Starting with the many pre-9/11 missed warnings that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack in the United States, he swiftly moves on to the ousting of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous invasion of Iraq, on up through the rise of ISIS and the Taliban’s return to power. The book was sent to the printers soon after President Trump launched his air war against Iran this past winter.

 

Bergen is distinctly suited to tell this sprawling story. A veteran journalist, professor and CNN national security analyst, Bergen had his first major brush with history in early 1997 when he journeyed to Afghanistan as part of a CNN team that was interviewing an Islamic extremist then barely on anyone’s radar: Osama bin Laden. In the years since, he has written or edited a dozen or so books on the themes of terrorism and counterinsurgency.

 

He also is in possession of a formidable Rolodex. In the wake of fiasco, there is nothing more likely to get an American government official to blab to a journalist than the fear that one’s bureaucratic rivals are already doing so. It is testament to both Bergen’s tenacity and the sheer number of fiascoes under discussion here that his collection of interview subjects runs to over 500 people.

 

The result is less an edge-of-your-seat narrative — to attentive newshounds, the book’s broader canvas will be familiar — than a steady accretion of revealing anecdotes and insider details that transport the reader from surprise to a peculiar sense of wonderment at the scale of the ineptitude.

 

Bergen delivers a particularly scorching portrait of the way George W. Bush groped for pretexts to invade Iraq after 9/11, and then expended tremendous energy trying to minimize the political fallout as the quagmire there deepened. Also coming in for Bergen’s opprobrium: the first administration of Donald Trump. Ironically, Trump’s original 2017 team of foreign and defense policy advisers included some of the military officers who’d proved most successful in fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Trump steadily shed this talent pool, preferring to follow his “instinct” over anything that smacked of strategy, consistency or logic.

 

Trump often seemed most interested in optics. In one darkly hilarious anecdote, Bergen recounts how Melania Trump inexplicably wandered into the Situation Room on Oct. 27, 2019, while her husband and his advisers were watching a live feed of an operation to kill or capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS.

 

After an American K9 dog chased Baghdadi into a tunnel where he blew himself up with a suicide vest, the high-level discussion turned to how the president might best convey the news to the public. “You should talk about the dog,” Melania advised. “Everybody loves dogs.” Proof that Trump does sometimes listen to advice, he told the press about the K9, which had been slightly injured — “a beautiful dog, a talented dog.”

 

Far less amusing, in Bergen’s view, was Trump’s betrayal of the American-allied Afghan government. Anxious to be able to announce a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before the 2020 election, Trump had his representatives negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban while excluding the democratically elected government, enabling him to announce before the election that the last American soldiers would leave the country as early as May 2021.

 

As Bergen archly points out, when one side in peace talks offers up a withdrawal date, the talks are no longer a negotiation but a surrender — or, in his word, a “giveaway.” While holding Trump chiefly responsible for this shameful episode, which hastened the fall of the Afghan government, Bergen also blames Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, for failing to countermand the deal. That decision turned an embarrassing retreat into a truly disgraceful and tragic one. The image of a quavering America, Bergen argues, may also have helped embolden Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine the following year.

 

Bergen goes easier on Barack Obama. Certainly, Obama benefited from the growing proficiency of the drone, a weapon that allowed the United States to wage war remotely, but he turned to the weapon with such frequency that it resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and fueled growing resentment throughout the Middle East. As Obama himself reportedly noted, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.”

 

One might wish that “All the Presidents’ Wars” was coming out a few months from now, in time for the full magnitude of the stupidity attending Trump’s war of choice against Iran to be realized. As it is, Bergen’s last words were penned in mid-March 2026, just a few weeks into this latest American misadventure.

 

As has been the case so many times over the past 25 years, this folly, too, was peddled as part of the war on terror, but undertaken with even less forethought than its predecessors. Incredibly, Trump seemed to take no notice of how the weaponized drone has enabled Ukraine to keep the vastly larger Russian Army at bay for over four years. Nor did he seem to consider how this innovation might factor into a conflict with Iran, one of the world’s pioneers in the manufacturing of cheap and sophisticated drones.

 

A major theme of Bergen’s book is the repeated failure of American leaders to plan for “the day after” a military action is taken, but in Iran, he makes clear, Trump didn’t even plan for “the day of.” As a result, it is now all but certain that the United States is headed for another major defeat in its war on terror. For the gory details on that, though, one will have to wait for Bergen’s next book.

 

ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ WARS: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror | By Peter Bergen | Norton | 401 pp. | $32.99

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9) Pierre Damas Bel Should Still Be Alive

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Sept. 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/columnists/pierre-damas-bel-haiti-trump.html

Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Pierre Damas Bel wanted to be a doctor.

 

He came to the United States in 2024 to reunite with his parents, who had fled Haiti three years earlier fearing for their lives. Living in Springfield, Ohio, he had temporary protected status and a pending asylum case. Bel took quickly to life in the United States. He was a member of the Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. He played soccer. He graduated from high school with honors and recently started as a freshman at Wright State University, just a half-hour drive from his home.

 

Not too long after Pierre Damas Bel arrived in the United States, Ohio’s junior senator, JD Vance — then running to be vice president of the United States — accused the Haitian community in Springfield of stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” he said on X. These “reports” were false but, as Vance would explain later, they were useful: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

 

After Vance created his story, Donald Trump amplified the charge to a prime-time audience of 67 million people during his debate with Kamala Harris. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”

 

The conservative media apparatus then went to work. Fox News broadcast the smear far and wide. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, a professional provocateur and propagandist known for his gleeful race baiting, offered a “$5,000 cash bounty” to anyone who had evidence that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield. He later posted a video purporting to show just that. It was a lie; the people in the video were eating chicken.

 

Building on the frenzy, Trump spun a new tale. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” he said at a rally in Tucson, Ariz. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”

 

Trump had long disparaged Haiti as a country that is “filthy, dirty" and “disgusting.” He has said that Haitians “probably have AIDS” and that Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” If elected president again, he promised, he would start his mass deportations in Springfield.

 

In July, the Trump administration revoked the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, including Pierre Damas Bel. Bel was ordered, like many others, to a local ICE office to receive an ankle monitor, which is one way the agency tracks immigrants it seeks to remove from the country.

 

Ankle monitors are heavy and uncomfortable. They constrict movement and wearing one can be painful. They’re also easy to see — a visible stigma and a mark that, in the eyes of the government, you are a suspect person.

 

Bel felt that stigma. Hobbled by the monitor, he could not play soccer as he used to. His peers mocked him. When his R.O.T.C. instructor handed students their uniforms, he did not receive one. His father, Pierre Ronal Bel, believes it was because of the device. On Instagram, Bel shared a picture of the ankle monitor. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

 

On Monday morning, Pierre Damas Bel called his father. “I’m not feeling OK,” he said. His father told him to come home so they could talk.

 

That afternoon, Vice President Vance was in Michigan to campaign for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate running for Senate. During his speech, Vance accused Abdul El-Sayed, Rogers’s Democratic opponent, of dividing the country. “If you look at his politics, it is all about saying, ‘This group of people is good, this ethnicity is bad, and I’m going to fight to give from the bad group of people to the good group of people.’ I think that’s a despicable way to think about your fellow Americans.”

 

Vance is right: This is a despicable way to think about your fellow Americans. But then the vice president has a narrow view of what it means to be an American. For him, it is defined by blood, soil and heritage. It does not apply, for example, to the Haitians of Springfield. They can be smeared and libeled and hounded and hunted. They can be treated as less than human. They can live under a miasma of hate brought on by him, his boss and their enablers.

 

Sometime before 8:45 a.m., but after the call to his father, Pierre parked his car on the shoulder of the Interstate in Springfield. Hours later, police officers arrived at Pierre Ronal Bel’s home to tell him that his son “threw himself under a truck.” He was pronounced dead at the scene.

 

Pierre Damas Bel was just 20 years old.

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10) Trump’s Empire of Extraction Will Backfire

By Francisco Rodríguez, Sept. 5, 2026

Mr. Rodríguez is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/trump-venezuela-oil-delcy-betancourt.html

Federico Yankelevich

What a difference a year makes. Last fall, President Trump was ordering U.S. warships to block oil tankers leaving the coasts of Venezuela. Less than 12 months later, Mr. Trump has announced “the biggest oil deal in world history” with the country’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez. This is the same Ms. Rodríguez, of course, who was appointed Venezuela’s vice president by Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan leader who was captured during a U.S. military operation in January and is now awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail on charges of narco-terrorism.

 

The agreement might appear to be some rare good news for Venezuela. The country sits on some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, yet produces only around 1 percent of the world’s oil supply. A partnership with Washington to mobilize funding could, in theory, jump-start growth and get the country’s battered economy, freshly bruised by a devastating earthquake, back on track. The arrangement, though, seems closer to an opaque privatization of the country’s oil wealth — one whose gains are unlikely to be distributed across Venezuela, and that could stunt the increasingly improbable emergence of a sovereign democracy.

 

There is still a lot we don’t know about the deal. Mr. Trump claims that it will come at no cost to American taxpayers and that it will serve to replenish the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is running at its lowest level since 1982. Ms. Rodríguez claims that the pact will attract $100 billion in capital investment and will allow Venezuela to raise production by 1.5 million barrels a day, more than doubling current levels. The U.S. government is partnering with a Venezuelan oil baron, Alejandro Betancourt López, who is best known for receiving billions of dollars in no-bid state contracts to build electrical plants, much of which he plowed into real estate abroad. This joint venture will receive 100-year concessions in fields that hold one-fifth of Venezuelan oil reserves.

 

The Trump administration has claimed that its blueprint for transforming Venezuela follows a three-stage plan: stabilization, economic recovery and transition toward democracy. If that is indeed still the goal, this deal is a clear step back.

 

History teaches us that when governments transfer resources to politically connected elites through murky privatization processes, democracy suffers. Take Russia: In the mid-1990s, Boris Yeltsin’s government transferred controlling stakes in state-owned oil companies at fire-sale prices through rigged auctions to some of its key political allies. The deal created immense fortunes but generated few tangible benefits for the Russian people, who within a few years were facing the collapse of their currency and banking system. Most damaging, it created a class of oligarchs with an interest in blocking the transition to a democracy that could challenge the provenance of their wealth. The concentration of economic power that resulted from that privatization played a key role in Russia’s ultimate reversion toward authoritarian rule, foreshadowing what could happen in Venezuela.

 

When governments use their authority to illegitimately or arbitrarily grant economic power, institutions that restrain that power are unlikely to emerge. That is why reforms to strengthen governance and the rule of law need to be in place before you privatize state assets. It is also why valuable public assets, like Venezuela’s oil, should be sold through open and transparent bidding. Venezuela already ranks last out of the 143 countries in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. It has no independent judiciary, no institutional tradition of accountability and no effective distinction between the state and the governing party. This is a country where no one should be surprised to see privatization fail.

 

Nor is this deal likely to make a dent in global oil prices, which the Trump administration has presented as one of the key goals of the plan. It will take years for Venezuelan oil production to increase in a significant way — and even if it does, it will not keep pace with the projected growth in world demand over the next 25 years. Any oil that ends up in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will not be sold in global markets.

 

The deal clarifies Venezuela’s emerging status as a U.S. protectorate in all but name. In the months following the ouster of Mr. Maduro, Ms. Rodríguez’s government has carried out joint military operations with U.S. forces in Venezuelan territory; restored ties with Israel, a key U.S. ally; and formalized its decision to leave the International Criminal Court, which has become a target of Mr. Trump’s ire. While the Trump administration has stopped short of trying to administer the day-to-day affairs of the Venezuelan government, it has made clear that it expects its instructions to be followed. If any reminder was needed that the White House expects Ms. Rodríguez to toe the line, the presence of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, in the oil deal negotiations most likely served as a not-so-subtle hint at the consequences of noncompliance.

 

This is not the first time that the United States has attempted to manage a country it has invaded. More than a century ago, citing Theodore Roosevelt’s interventionist interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, Washington imposed similar protectorate regimes on Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

 

These experiences did not end well. By stimulating the emergence of politicians more concerned with currying favor with Washington than with responding to the demands of their people, these regimes stifled the development of the institutions necessary for self-governance — and fueled long-lasting animosity toward the United States.

 

Over the past two decades, Venezuelans have lived through the destruction of what was once a prosperous economy and a vibrant democracy. The United States now has both the opportunity and the responsibility to help them rebuild their country. A hazy privatization process that reduces accountability, deepens inequalities and sidesteps institutional reform will not bring democratic change closer. It will push it further away.

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11) U.S. Military Sinks Boats Said to Aid Drug Smuggling Near Ecuador

Unlike dozens of similar strikes, no one was killed after people suspected of drug smuggling were removed from what the U.S. military described as a floating refueling station.

By John Ismay, Sept. 5, 2026

John Ismay, who covers the Pentagon, reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/us-military-sinks-boats-near-ecuador.html

Fishermen made their way to the ocean along Ecuador’s coast, in June. Karen Toro/Reuters

U.S. forces operating near Ecuador on Saturday intercepted and destroyed several commercial vessels believed to be used for refueling boats smuggling drugs to the United States.

 

It was the fourth interdiction of vessels used as floating refueling platforms in the eastern Pacific, according to a U.S. official, who said no one on either side was hurt or killed.

 

The mission was carried out as part of U.S. Southern Command’s efforts to hinder narcotics smugglers in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, a campaign that began just over a year ago.

 

A video posted to social media by the command, which directs military operations in Central and South America, shows a U.S. military vessel, an 11-meter rigid-hull inflatable boat, approach what appears to be a larger civilian craft with fuel jugs lining a raised open deck. A Marine Corps helicopter hovered off the vessel’s starboard side.

 

The video shows the inflatable boat moving out of the frame, then shows the larger vessel’s bow erupting in an explosion.

 

People aboard the refueling vessel were transferred to the custody of Ecuadorean government officials, who were nearby as part of the operation, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the mission.

 

The operation was supported by sailors and Marines aboard the amphibious ship U.S.S. San Antonio, which launched helicopters that fired munitions into other accompanying vessels and sank them, the official said.

 

Southern Command, which is based in South Florida, said the refueling operation was run by Los Choneros, which the State Department designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” just days after the campaign against suspected smuggling vessels began on Sept. 2, 2025.

 

In that time, the U.S. military has launched 68 attacks on what it said were drug smuggling vessels in the region, killing 227 people, according to a New York Times analysis.

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12) How a Memphis Gambling Raid Became a Sweeping Immigration Operation

More than 120 people were arrested at a Memphis cantina, in one of the biggest immigration operations in Tennessee this year.

By Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochrane, Sept. 6, 2026

Eduardo Medina reported from Memphis, and Emily Cochrane from Nashville.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/us/memphis-cantina-gambling-raid-immigration.html

In May, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement for help identifying an undocumented man it suspected was involved in criminal activity at El Corralón, court records show. Brad J. Vest for The New York Times

For the people dressed up in sparkly skirts and cowboy boots, Saturday nights were best spent at El Corralón.

 

The cantina, tucked in the middle of Berclair, a heavily Hispanic neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn., was a rowdy joint where the mix of regional Mexican music and bachata was loud, the pool tables plenty and beer cheap enough. Gambling machines jangled by the wall.

 

Then, in recent weeks, neighbors started spotting drones overhead. Suspicious vans parked by the dumpsters. Unfamiliar patrons came in and left quickly. Some in the neighborhood believed the gambling machines, illegal in Tennessee, might make the business a target.

 

But the cantina remained open. Last Sunday, a crush of agents raided El Corralón, searching for the owner, Marco Sabillon-Urbina, an immigrant from Honduras, but detaining anyone who was in the country illegally.

 

In the end, the operation targeting illegal gambling and drugs spiraled into one of Tennessee’s largest sweeps of undocumented immigrants this year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement escalates its operations across the country. More than 120 people were detained, inflaming tensions in Memphis, where many residents were already on edge over a separate federal anti-crime task force that, among other things, has also targeted immigrants.

 

“This takes them back to being afraid and not wanting to go out again,” said Jose Salazar, a community organizer who assists the immigrant community in Memphis. “All those fears and concerns are worse now.”

 

Arrests by ICE surged across the country this summer as the Trump administration pulled back from highly visible raids in Minneapolis and other cities earlier this year. The agency has carried out lower-profile operations, including targeting predominantly immigrant neighborhoods like Berclair last weekend.

 

Tennessee and other Republican-led states have also deepened coordination with the Trump administration and immigration authorities. In May, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation asked ICE for help identifying an undocumented man it suspected was involved in criminal activity at El Corralón, court records show.

 

The man, Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, first arrived in the United States in 1994 and received Temporary Protected Status in 1999; that status lapsed in January 2020 after he failed to renew the paperwork, federal law enforcement said in court records.

 

He was sent back to Honduras in 2023 as part of a federal plea agreement in connection with possession of drugs and a firearm. He was deported again in 2024 after trying to re-enter the United States.

 

Immigration and state agents executed two search warrants last weekend for the bar, related to drugs and illegal gambling. Mr. Sabillon-Urbina was named in one of the sealed warrants, photographs of which were reviewed by The New York Times. A lawyer for Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, who was detained on Sunday, did not return multiple requests for comment.

 

Mr. Sabillon-Urbina ran the bar with his wife, who was also detained, according to a former employee and neighbors in touch with their children. She could not be reached for comment.

 

Several residents said Mr. Sabillon-Urbina should have tried to be more careful.

 

“He could have said: You know what, close this up because they’re going to be investigating me and they may take a lot more people in the process,” Mery Sandra Rodriguez, who knows the Sabillon-Urbina family, said in Spanish.

 

El Corralón, which some residents described as seedy, had experienced trouble before. In 2019, a security guard was shot after breaking up a fight between two men, according to the police.

 

Still, on most nights, neighbors said, it was just a nearby place to dance and drink. Many had been scared of venturing far for a night out and risking being stopped and detained by the authorities.

 

“Sadly, because this place irresponsibly had illegal machines, the consequence of that is that our neighbors have been taken,” said Sandra Pita, a lead community organizer with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “These were mothers, fathers, sons who had nothing to do with the problems of this business.”

 

Before the raid began, it was a typically busy Saturday night, according to two people who were there. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared drawing more attention from law enforcement.

 

Inside it smelled of perfume, spilled fruity drinks, a faint whiff of body odor near the dance floor, they said. The D.J. sprinkled in some reggaeton. There were people in high-heels, cowboy boots and tucked-in button-downs.

 

Then, around 1 a.m. Sunday, more than a dozen agents walked in. They spread out across the cantina, some toward the D.J. booth to turn off the music, others toward the bar and gambling machines, telling people to stay calm.

 

People inside screamed, according to the people who witnessed the incident. One person scrambled to hide under a billiards table; another tried to hide behind large speakers. Agents told people to gather on the dance floor, where they asked if they were legally in the country one at a time. One man who appeared to be intoxicated cursed at the agents. Another repeated the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. A woman begged them not to take her because she had small children.

 

A person who tried to record the scene was stopped by agents, the witnesses said.

 

Those who were undocumented — including bartenders, servers and some who were designated drivers that night — were zip-tied, taken out a side door and placed on buses or vans that would transport them to an ICE detention facility in Mason, Tenn.

 

A spokesman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said agents had seized “narcotics and evidence of illegal gambling” but declined to say more, citing an ongoing investigation.

 

“This criminal enforcement operation to arrest illegal aliens and eliminate drug activity in our community is part of the highest priorities of this administration,” said Scott Ladwig, the acting director of the New Orleans ICE office, in a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security.

 

ICE did not respond to additional questions about the operation or the people detained.

 

In the news release, D.H.S. singled out the criminal histories of five people detained, including arrests for larceny and drug possession. It has not provided more information on the other detainees.

 

Mayor Paul Young of Memphis, a Democrat, said in a statement that Memphis Police officers were not part of the operation and were called to the bar only after people had begun to gather outside.

 

Several relatives of people were who detained said they were angry at both ICE and Mr. Sabillon-Urbina. They said the bar owner had risked the lives of the very immigrants his business catered to.

 

Sofia, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras in her 20s who asked to be identified by only her first name because of her status, said her mother was detained that night and could soon be deported. She was saddened to see comments on Facebook criticizing people like her mother who had risked going out.

 

Her 8-year-old brother believes their mother is out on a work trip. But soon, Sofia said, she will have to tell him what really happened.

 

Hamed Aleaziz and Christina Morales contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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13) It’s Not Just the West Bank Settlers. It’s Israel.

By Mairav Zonszein, Sept. 6, 2026

Ms. Zonszein, a contributing Opinion writer, wrote from Tel Aviv.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/opinion/israel-west-bank-settlers-violence.html

Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Of all the fronts on which Israel is exerting force, the West Bank is where the Jewish state is the most invested, exerts the most control and has received the least American pushback. It is also where over half a million Israeli citizens live among some three million Palestinians who are under military occupation without citizenship. President Trump has not put any brakes on Israeli settlement expansion, creeping annexation, military raids, demolitions of Palestinian homes or settler attacks — all of which have reached record numbers under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

The West Bank is far more strategically and ideologically vital to Israel than any war it is fighting, and it is the area in which Israel has the most longstanding, coherent and unchallenged goal: as much land for Jews with as few Palestinians as possible. The West Bank is also the only arena in which Jewish settler militia groups are operating like a paramilitary force to advance Israel’s goals.

 

These militias are not rogue entities, as Israeli leaders have proclaimed. They are organized groups of civilians made up of a combination of Israeli settlers who establish new settlement outposts across the West Bank, settlers who were called up for reserve duty since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and serve in regional defense units, and rapid response squads, which are local volunteer emergency teams tasked with providing first response in their settlements. Imagine a neighborhood watch, but with military-grade weapons and the use of deadly force. In June, a United Nations report found that “financial and military support” from Israeli authorities had “enabled settler attacks.”

 

On Aug. 9, one such militia began to terrorize three Palestinian families in the village of Qusra. They set up a tent outside their home, cutting off access to electricity and water and stymying their freedom of movement.

 

In this case, one of the homes is owned by Loui Ridi, a Palestinian with American citizenship from Ohio. He traveled back to Qusra, putting up an American flag on the roof of his house. Israeli forces had declared the area a “closed military zone” and removed the tent settlers had erected, but did not restore the Palestinian residents’ ability to move in and out freely. Settlers still roamed around, in violation of the order, while the Israeli Army effectively replaced the settlers in surrounding the homes.

 

“Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting,” the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said in a statement on X. Mr. Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog have also condemned these attacks. But the settler militias terrorizing Qusra and other villages across the West Bank could not continue to act as they are without state and military cover. These are not isolated extremists or hooligans, as Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders have said.

 

Nor is this simply settler violence. In the West Bank, Palestinians live in daily fear for their lives. Mr. Ridi is not the only homeowner at risk. Even as the U.S. flag waved over his home, there was another settler attack against a different Palestinian home in Qusra on Aug. 29. Israeli settlers arrived in white pickup trucks, their faces masked, throwing stones. Despite a statement by Mr. Netanyahu condemning the act and assuring that authorities would take action, there has been only one reported arrest related to the attacks in Qusra and a handful of arrests related to other settler-based violence in the area. These moves may not result in much: Even when arrests are made, only 3 percent of settlers are convicted.

 

In other words, what’s happened in Qusra is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy, which has expanded and deepened its control over the occupied territory over the last four years. This has been accomplished through intensifying economic strangulation, restrictions on freedom of movement, transferring governing powers from military to civilian control and, most egregiously, the emboldening of settler militias. Such groups already existed when the current government was formed in late 2022. But in the past three years, these militias have been largely given free rein to intimidate, harass and make Palestinian life in the West Bank unbearable. Since 2023, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by a combination of settler attacks, military operations and restrictions on access and movement. On Sept. 2, Israeli forces demolished homes and structures in the Palestinian village of Khirbet al Tabban in the southern West Bank, rendering the village’s 70 residents homeless.

 

The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, the deadliest single attack on Israelis in the country’s history, accelerated the use of violence in general, and settler militias in particular, under the most pro-settler, far-right government in Israeli history. Under this government, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, has expedited the destruction of Palestinian homes while streamlining the building of Israeli ones, whereas Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, has distributed arms to Israelis by easing regulations for licenses, adding around 7,000 firearms to settlers. This has further blurred the line between civilian and soldier, enabling armed settlers to act with a sense of authority whether wearing a uniform or not, most acting without any command structure and with a sense of entitlement — and impunity.

 

While reversing the settlement enterprise is the only politically and morally sound path, it is unlikely, even if Mr. Netanyahu’s government finally falls in October.

 

The two dominant camps within the Israeli political landscape today are what might be called the annexation camp and the control camp. The annexation camp is best represented by the far-right politicians in the Netanyahu coalition. They have worked tirelessly to quash the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Most of them prefer the formal annexation of all of the West Bank to Israel, while the more moderate among this group, including some politicians in the opposition, aim for formal, or at least de facto, annexation of what was known under the Oslo Accords as Area C — the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control and where Israeli settlements are largely located.

 

The control camp includes much of the defense establishment and centrist leaders. Among this group, the hope is to preserve Israeli military control over Palestinians and retain many of the settlements without establishing provocative new settlements, while minimizing friction with Palestinians, primarily by reining in settler violence — a quieter occupation of sorts. Flashpoints, like the recent approval of construction in an area known as E1 east of Jerusalem, a divisive plan that would further cantonize Palestinians and cut the West Bank in half, would thus most likely be avoided. However, if this government actually manages to start construction there, it’s unclear whether a new government would reverse the move.

 

The phenomenon of settlement expansion and terror did not begin with the current Israeli government and, in all likelihood, will not end with it. Settler militias clearly act with state backing in the service of a greater national project that is largely uncontested in Israel: Israel’s permanent control over much of the West Bank. A recent poll found that 55 percent of Israeli Jews want to keep settlements in any future agreement with the Palestinians, while 38 percent support annexation of the West Bank.

 

While any reduction in settler violence is a welcome and necessary step, to end the systematic destruction of Palestinian life and truly facilitate Palestinian self-determination, external pressure from countries around the world will be necessary. First, the international community must insist that the next Israeli government put an end to settler militias. It must then compel Israel to dismantle the settlement enterprise as a whole.

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14) The Ex-Salesman Bringing the Far Right to the Cusp of Power in Germany

Ulrich Siegmund, 35, once sold air fresheners. Now his far-right party is the favorite to win a state election in eastern Germany on Sunday.

By Christopher F. Schuetze, Sept. 6, 2026

Reporting from Tangermünde and Magdeburg, Germany

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/afd-germany-election-ulrich-siegmund.html

Ulrich Siegmund, center, is the lead candidate for the far-right party Alternative for Germany in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday. The party is projected to finish first. Annegret Hilse/Reuters

During the coronavirus pandemic, a little-known German state lawmaker with an upbeat patter and a telegenic smile started railing on TikTok against pandemic regulations. Complaining about masks, vaccinations and other government requirements that he deemed “crazy,” the lawmaker attracted millions of viewers with his videos by using an affable tone to deliver an anti-establishment message.

 

Now, that lawmaker, Ulrich Siegmund, has harnessed his online popularity to come closer to power than any other far-right politician in Germany since the Nazi era ended in 1945.

 

Mr. Siegmund, 35, a former air freshener salesman, is the lead candidate for the Alternative for Germany party in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in eastern Germany where the party is projected to finish first in a statewide election on Sunday.

 

If the party, known by its German initials, AfD, wins an outright majority, Mr. Siegmund will become the first far-right politician to govern a German state since the re-establishment of the country’s democracy nearly eight decades ago. That would be a convulsive moment for Germany’s postwar political system, which was designed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent politicians deemed extremist from ever taking office.

 

To the political establishment in Berlin, Mr. Siegmund’s party is an outcast. The domestic intelligence agency has labeled it as “suspected extremist,” an accusation it rejects as politically motivated. The party has said that Islam is incompatible with the German Constitution and has vowed mass deportations of immigrants. Several of its leaders are close to Russia, and some have made dog whistle comments about the Nazi era, including by minimizing the Holocaust and repeating Nazi slogans.

 

Mr. Siegmund himself has said, in a podcast interview with Politico, that he could not “presume to judge” if the Holocaust was humanity’s worst-ever crime, “because I can’t possibly come to terms with the entirety of human history.” He also declined to condemn supporters who chanted his surname, Siegmund, in the style of the Nazi salute, “Sieg Heil.”

 

Still, Mr. Siegmund has won over voters in Saxony-Anhalt, experts say, through his ability to present the party’s hard-line policies in a more approachable and optimistic tone than many of his AfD colleagues, without distancing himself from extremists. In addition to deporting immigrants, the party has proposed cutting funding for public broadcasters, banning gay pride flags in schools and teaching more Russian, as well as tax breaks for large families and free child care.

 

“I can provide motivation, create a sense of optimism and get things moving forward again,” Mr. Siegmund said in an interview with The New York Times this year. (He declined more recent interview requests.)

 

That affability has made him more acceptable to voters beyond his hard-right base, said Prof. Steffen Mau, a prominent sociologist at Humboldt University of Berlin.

 

“He’s a canvas onto which people can project some kind of promise for the future,” Professor Mau said.

 

Many mainstream politicians, who have said Mr. Siegmund and the AfD are dangerous, also call his proposals unrealistic. “Whenever the topic turns to substance, when people actually ask how you intend to move our country forward economically, you’re nowhere to be found,” Sven Schulze, the incumbent governor of Saxony-Anhalt, said to Mr. Siegmund during a televised debate last month.

 

An August cover story in Germany’s premier newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, called him “the most dangerous man in Germany,” partly because his sunny disposition makes his party’s hard-line goals more palatable to some voters. Mr. Siegmund’s followers took it as a badge of honor and, during campaign stops, asked him to sign copies of the edition.

 

Mr. Siegmund is “so approachable and charming,” said Wolfram Adler, 67, a retired train driver who attended one of those rallies.

 

From Air Fresheners to Politics

 

Born in 1990, weeks after the reunification of East and West Germany, Mr. Siegmund was raised in the picturesque medieval town of Tangermünde, in eastern Germany.

 

Growing up in the east, he came of age amid increasing resentment about how reunification played out for his home region. The east’s economy, employment rates and population ebbed after 1990, leading many East Germans to feel excluded in the new Germany. It was a sense of grievance on which the AfD would later capitalize, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt where the unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent is well above the national average.

 

In his 20s, Mr. Siegmund worked as an account manager at a health care provider before starting his own business in Berlin selling room deodorizers.

 

He joined the Christian Democratic Union, a mainstream conservative party that currently leads the national coalition government.

 

But he soon grew tired of the party’s rigid leadership structures, he has said in past interviews with the news media, and joined the AfD in 2014. He was drawn to the AfD, he said, because the party stood against what he perceived as the highhanded policies of the national government in Berlin.

 

The AfD was founded in opposition to Germany’s adoption of the euro. After it shifted to an anti-immigrant message, Mr. Siegmund ran on the party’s slate for the statehouse in 2016. He won a seat as the party netted 24 percent of the state vote, profiting from growing concerns about Germany’s decision to welcome roughly a million refugees during the European migrant crisis. He also served on his local council alongside his father and brother.

 

He rose to national fame in 2021 with his personable videos about pandemic restrictions, helping to project both the party and himself as the voice of voters who felt disenfranchised by mainstream parties.

 

Now, Mr. Siegmund has more than 850,000 followers on TikTok, an astronomical number for any German politician, giving him a platform that helped to amplify his stump speeches on the campaign trail this summer.

 

When speaking to sizable crowds, he has often filmed the scene on his phone, turning the camera toward the crowds to show viewers how big they were.

 

“When you see all of Siegmund’s campaign appearances, it becomes perfectly clear: They’re not primarily intended for the live audience, they’re primarily for the internet,” said Paula Diehl, a professor who studies populist leaders at Kiel University.

 

His preppy shirts and his trademark tuft of graying hair have made him instantly recognizable in Tangermünde, his hometown of 10,000 residents. During the Times interview this year, passers-by repeatedly greeted him, wished him luck or smiled.

 

Throughout the conversation, he combined a measured, even tolerant tone with a hard-line, exclusionary message.

 

He said that he did not blame immigrants for coming to Germany — before, seconds later, vowing to make their lives in his state “very uncomfortable.”

 

Combining Nostalgia With Optimism

 

The backgrounds of his campaign team also highlight his contradictions. The production company behind Mr. Siegmund’s genial campaign videos is led by a far-right activist with the Identitarians, a movement that German intelligence has accused of extremism. Mr. Siegmund’s spokesman was once part of a banned extremist group inspired by the Hitler Youth.

 

Mr. Siegmund did not reply to requests for comment about these links. In interviews with other outlets, he dismissed their relevance.

 

Mr. Siegmund, said Professor Diehl, “pretends to engage in an inclusive discourse and then immediately shatters it.”

 

Part of his strategy has been to tap into nostalgia for East Germany among some residents, even though he was born after it collapsed. Though many remember Communism as a dictatorship, some recall it as a time of full employment and stability.

 

One campaign event featured a comedian who sang the East German national anthem — an act so contentious, because it appeared to validate an authoritarian regime, that even some AfD politicians distanced themselves from it.

 

At some events, Mr. Siegmund rode through the countryside on a Simson, an anemic two-stroke East German motorcycle that has long been associated with life during Communism. His machine was painted baby blue to match the AfD’s colors.

 

At other times, he has sought to look forward instead of back. Tapping into widespread disenchantment with high unemployment and living costs, he has painted a picture of a better, if ill-defined, future under AfD leadership.

 

“Things are going downhill everywhere, and that’s a bad and demotivating place to start,” he said in the Times interview. “I want things to start moving uphill,” he said.

 

Critics say he is simply selling false hope, pointing to his past life as a salesman.

 

“I discovered my strength in sales early on,” Mr. Siegmund told a business magazine in 2014. “I love to sell.”

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