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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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We need as many people there as possible to carry our message - no more of our tax dollars for endless wars. Can we count you in? Sign up here:
https://www.codepink.org/novdc26
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Thousands of Immigrant Children, Alone and in Court, Face Deportation
For years, the government has helped secure lawyers for minors who arrive at the southern border. But a contract dispute has forced many children to face immigration judges on their own.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Madeleine Ngo, Oct. 15, 2026
The reporters attended in-person and virtual hearings in Arizona and New York, reviewed court records and interviewed more than 20 former and current federal officials, nonprofit leaders and immigration lawyers.
“In Texas, a 7-year-old agreed to voluntarily leave the country without a lawyer present to explain the legal consequences of the decision. In Arizona, an immigration judge ordered a 1-year-old baby appearing without a lawyer to file an asylum application, according to court filings. The baby’s mother, a 17-year-old who is an unaccompanied minor herself, appeared with the child in court.”
Unaccompanied minors appeared virtually at an immigration court in New York. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The faces of the six migrant children beamed into a Manhattan courtroom on large screens. All had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone. All were facing potential deportation. And none had lawyers.
The minors — five boys and a girl, ages 13 to 17 — fidgeted in their seats, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts, as an immigration judge ran through her script. Where were their parents? Were they afraid to return home? Had they found a lawyer?
At times, a lawyer acting as a court adviser interjected from another screen to recommend that the judge grant the children more time to find counsel. The judge, Lisa W. Ling, pressed ahead, often with little more than a nod.
“Do you want the voluntary departure?” she asked a 15-year-old boy from Guatemala during the September hearing.
“Yes, that’s fine,” he replied. It was unclear if the boy knew that meant he was giving up on obtaining legal immigration status and agreeing to leave the country.
The scene in Manhattan has been playing out in courtrooms nationwide for months. In Texas, a 7-year-old agreed to voluntarily leave the country without a lawyer present to explain the legal consequences of the decision. In Arizona, an immigration judge ordered a 1-year-old baby appearing without a lawyer to file an asylum application, according to court filings. The baby’s mother, a 17-year-old who is an unaccompanied minor herself, appeared with the child in court.
Unaccompanied minors went without legal representation in about 55 percent of nearly 50,000 immigration cases completed as of August this year, the highest percentage since 2019, according to an analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research group.
Deportation orders for the children who Vera identified as unaccompanied minors have also surged, topping 7,300 in July, up from 3,500 in May. By comparison, that number was 2,000 in January 2025, according to the group.
The surge in deportations comes amid a monthslong contract battle between the Trump administration and the network of nonprofits that have long provided legal services to migrant children who have arrived at the southern border without their parents or guardians. (Vera held the federal legal services contract until December 2023.)
For decades, the young and vulnerable population has posed deep humanitarian and political challenges for both Republican and Democratic administrations. The minors make perilous journeys north alone, facing higher risks for trafficking and exploitation along the way and once in the United States. A New York Times investigation in 2023 found thousands working dangerous jobs at meatpacking plants and construction sites in violation of child labor laws.
Inside the nation’s immigration courts, they face another set of vexing obstacles. Many children do not have adult guardians to guide them through complex legal claims, and because many may be in pursuit of work or schooling, motives that do not qualify for asylum, they may be unshielded from deportation unless a lawyer can identify other protections.
Although migrant children do not have a right to court-appointed representation, under a 2008 law meant to protect children against human trafficking, the federal government is required to ensure unaccompanied minors have representation “to the greatest extent practicable.”
That responsibility lies with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Officials say they have sought to overhaul their contract to enforce basic oversight of legal services, as they push to clear backlogs, curb fraudulent claims and increase vetting to protect migrant children from abuse and trafficking.
ORR has been in a dispute with the Acacia Center for Justice, a group that had a $200 million contract with the agency to provide legal services for migrant children. The agency allowed that contract to expire at the end of July, arguing that Acacia had refused to share new data to allow it to verify its legal services. Acacia and its nearly 100 legal services subcontractors said the data the administration is seeking is privileged, attorney-client information and assert that the government had improperly cut off funding.
Child advocates say the contract dispute has resulted in unrepresented minors filling courtrooms across the country at a time when the administration is speeding up immigration cases with little notice. With many judges saying they are under intense pressure to deport more people, many minors have been stranded in detention for longer periods of time, and others have been returned to dangerous home countries, lawyers said.
In response to questions about the number of minors going without representation, Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department, said claims that unaccompanied children “are being sent to immigration court without access to legal support do not accurately describe ORR’s role or the legal services available to eligible children in its care.”
“Dedicated public servants are working around the clock to safely reunite these children with their families,” she said.
The contract dispute has prompted a turbulent search for a new legal services provider. In August, officials awarded a contract to Our Rescue, an anti-trafficking group with little immigration court experience. The Acacia Center, which most recently held the contract, filed a formal protest, temporarily blocking Our Rescue’s contract. Officials then considered hiring Pentagon lawyers before abruptly scrapping the plan.
In a quiet federal notice published in late September, the administration indicated it planned to use Health and Human Services’ own lawyers to represent migrant children, a move that former department officials say would be a conflict of interest.
For now, ORR has hired the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or U.S.C.R.I., to provide legal services through December. But the organization’s lawyers had formally represented only 12 children as of early September and a few dozen children by mid-month, according to court testimony and filings. Instead, in the vast majority of cases, U.S.C.R.I. lawyers have appeared as friend-of-the-court advocates, or neutral voices who can inform children of their rights but do not represent them.
Back in the Manhattan courtroom last month, the limitations were clear. A U.S.C.R.I. lawyer remained silent for much of the morning, at times reminding Judge Ling that the contract dispute had kept the agency from being able to secure lawyers for unaccompanied minors on her docket.
In the cases of the six children who appeared in a group, two of the boys agreed to voluntarily leave the country at their own expense. A 13-year-old girl from Honduras refused, saying that she did not fear returning to Honduras but that she had never known her parents and hoped to go to school in the United States.
Although Judge Ling noted the girl might be eligible for a special immigrant status for abused, abandoned and neglected children, she said that process could take years through a state family court. But the girl would need a lawyer to file the case there.
“Based on what you are saying, you are only eligible for voluntary departure,” Judge Ling told the girl. When the child still refused, the judge ordered her deportation.
For years, both Democratic and Republican federal lawmakers sought to ensure all children and teenagers in U.S. immigration custody received shelter, social services and access to a fair legal process. But that bipartisan consensus cracked as hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border during the Obama and first Trump administrations, fleeing rising poverty and violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Many came to reunite with relatives or in the hopes of finding work.
In his second term, the Trump administration has put up new barriers for young migrants to obtain deportation protections and increased its vetting of immigrant relatives and guardians, discouraging many from coming forward. It also has sped up children’s asylum claims, sometimes with only a day’s notice, lawyers said.
Robert Carey, who served as ORR director in the Obama administration, acknowledged that not all unaccompanied children were eligible for immigration relief. But he saw the contract dispute as part of a “systematic dismantling” of guardrails meant to guarantee them a fair process.
“Essentially, there was a wall between enforcement and child protection, and that wall has fallen pretty dramatically,” he said. He added that ORR operated under a simple premise during his tenure: “Not every child deserves asylum, but every child deserves to be heard.”
For 17-year-old Jairo, one of the six on the screen in the Manhattan courtroom, the search for a lawyer was an urgent scramble against a tight deadline.
He had told The Times at a prior hearing that his family had paid smugglers to drive him north in a series of van trips from Guatemala.
He was afraid to return home, he said, and he and an older cousin had been desperately searching for counsel. The boy asked that his full name be withheld for fear of retaliation by U.S. authorities.
Now before Judge Ling again, he asked for more time, saying they had just found a lawyer whose name he could only remember as “Kevin.”
Judge Ling granted him two more weeks.
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2) The Glaciers Are Collapsing. This Is What We Must Do.
By Bibek Raj Kandel and Daniel Schrag, Oct. 16, 2026
Mr. Kandel is an adviser to the government of Nepal. Dr. Schrag is a professor of geology and public policy at Harvard.
Atul Loke for The New York Times
At 9:10 a.m. on Aug. 26, a school staff member burst into a classroom in the town of Nuwakot, Nepal, shouting that a wall of water was coming down the valley from the mountain above. Rajendra Dawadi, the school’s principal, ordered the roughly 900 students then on campus to run for higher ground, put the students who had just arrived back on their buses and told the drivers to leave. By 9:23, about 13 minutes after the first warning, the school was gone, swept away along with the rest of the valley floor. Every student survived.
Most of the people in the valley were not so lucky. High above the school, a mass of rock and glacier ice, by some estimates as much as seven billion cubic feet, broke from the north face of Langtang Lirung, a mountain peak near the Nepal-China border, and thundered downhill. It is most likely the largest such collapse ever recorded in the Himalayan mountains.
More than 7,000 people are dead or missing, many probably buried under feet of debris. As the country mourns them and begins to rebuild, it’s also coming to terms with the fact that such a disaster could easily happen again.
Climate change is causing glaciers across the Himalayas to retreat and permafrost to thaw, making these mountains more dynamic and less stable. What if the communities living in them could be warned long before the next glacier collapses? That’s the opportunity we see: International scientists could use artificial intelligence to monitor vast quantities of satellite images and then send out an alert to evacuate when the warning signs are there. Building such a system is a way for wealthy countries to help remedy a problem — the increase in climate disasters — that they have created by burning an overwhelming share of the fossil fuel humanity has used to date.
You might think that the best option would be for communities at risk of glacial collapse and flooding to retreat and relocate. But the river corridors most exposed to these hazards are Nepal’s best sites for producing hydroelectricity; at least a dozen hydropower projects were damaged or destroyed in this one event.
Nepal cannot easily forgo the revenue and electricity these rivers offer. Its per capita electricity consumption is among the lowest in the world, and hydroelectricity remains the best opportunity to support economic growth with clean energy. The country is already racing to develop other sites, with a goal of increasing the 4,300 megawatts of installed capacity today to 30,000 megawatts by 2035. But it can no longer plan as though these valleys are safe. Every dam, tunnel and workers’ camp built below a glacier is now a wager against the stability of the mountain above it, and the odds are changing.
Here the international scientific community may have something concrete to offer. Satellite radar had recorded Langtang Lirung’s slow-motion instability for months: Data going back to January show the slope creeping downhill and accelerating in the weeks before it failed. But no one looked at the data until it was too late.
Spotting that kind of signal in one mountain, after disaster strikes, is one thing. Doing it continuously, across the thousands of glaciers and rock slopes scattered through the Himalayas, is a different scale of problem. It’s also exactly the kind of problem new artificial intelligence tools are suited to. Machine learning can now sift through enormous volumes of satellite imagery automatically, day after day, flagging the handful of slopes accelerating among thousands that are not.
It will take a big effort by glaciologists and geomorphologists around the world to design and test such a system, but deployed at scale, it could give communities in Nepal not 13 minutes, but hours or days. It could give agencies time to plan evacuations rather than improvise them. And such a system could be used to address similar risks in other Himalayan countries including China, India, Pakistan and Bhutan.
Climate risk is not Nepal’s to solve alone. Its contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet is negligible, yet the mountain communities living beneath these unraveling massifs are among the poorest people on earth, suffering a disproportionate share of the consequences. Climate finance funds, such as the United Nations Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, established in 2022 after the torrential floods in Pakistan, were designed with exactly these disasters in mind. Contributions from wealthier nations could be used to make Nepal more resilient, but the fund is woefully underfunded and slow to process claims. New money is needed for development of monitoring systems, disaster planning and, in the most exposed valleys, new roads and escape routes that let people get away from the river.
The heavy monsoon rains will return next summer, and the glaciers above these valleys will keep retreating as global temperatures rise. The protections Nepal needs will take years to build, and the countries most responsible for the warming can afford to pay for them. The question is how many disasters Nepal will endure before they do.
Bibek Raj Kandel is an adviser to Nepal’s minister of energy, water resources and irrigation. Daniel Schrag is a professor of geology at Harvard University and a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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3) Caracas Is Eerily Safe. State Death Squads Made Sure of It.
Crime plunged after police raids killed thousands. Venezuela is now withdrawing from the International Criminal Court as it investigates this blood-soaked campaign.
By Simon Romero, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, Oct. 16, 2026
Simon Romero was based in Caracas when it was one of the world’s deadliest capitals. He returned this year to report on the changes taking place across Venezuela.
Visitors to a former safe house used by an armed gang in Cota 905, a neighborhood in Caracas.
Crime used to be so out of control in Caracas that Miguel Dao, a professional kidnapping negotiator, was hired to secure the freedom of three different captives in a single day. But it’s been three years since Mr. Dao has had a single kidnapping to negotiate.
The homicide rate in Caracas has plummeted in recent years, a remarkable shift for a city once known as the world’s murder capital. Street robberies are rare. Kidnappings, both extended high-ransom cases and “express” abductions lasting about a day, have all but disappeared.
Mr. Dao, a former director of Venezuela’s equivalent of the F.B.I., said he was a critic of the country’s authoritarian government. But he called the sharp decline in crime under its watch an “accomplishment by any measure.”
“I applaud them for this triumph,” said Mr. Dao, 77, who owns a law firm in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. “I just don’t know if it will last.”
The devastating earthquakes in June underscored how fragile the newfound sense of peace might be when fears emerged that the city’s social fabric might fray. But crime has remained largely under control, and visitors in the aftermath were astounded by how safe Caracas felt.
The sense of safety in the capital, and in some other parts of Venezuela, ranks among Latin America’s biggest security turnarounds.
This shift is often overshadowed by changes in another authoritarian country, El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele reduced crime largely through mass incarceration, inspiring imitators around the region.
Different factors — some the stuff of nightmares — drove Caracas’s security gains.
Bypassing the legal system, police squads executed thousands of poor young men, according to United Nations investigators, in a campaign targeting the demographic most likely to join criminal gangs. Mass migration also played a role, with gang members constituting a small percentage of the millions who fled Venezuela’s economic collapse.
I lived in Caracas when it was still one of the world’s deadliest cities. Talk of kidnappings dominated dinner parties. People stopped going at out night. Fatal assaults by smartphone thieves grew so common they were called “Death by Blackberry.”
Reporting from the city’s morgue, I wrote about how Venezuela had more than 16,000 murders in a single year, three times the number of civilian deaths from violence during the same period in Iraq, when the war there was raging.
Hugo Chávez, then Venezuela’s leader, responded by denouncing me on national television. My family and I went into hiding until he focused his ire on something else. When we left Venezuela in 2011, the ever-present fears over violent crime were woven into the fabric of daily life.
When I returned to Caracas this year, I was stunned. A city legendary for instilling fear in hardened travelers felt safer than other large Latin American cities, like Bogotá or São Paulo.
Multiple walking tours were reintroducing Caraqueños to their own city. In well-lit plazas, couples lounged on benches well after dusk. Nightlife was back with a vengeance in former no-go zones.
One of the strangest aspects of this new normal was how little regular people, and Venezuela’s leaders, talked about it. Instead, many in Caracas seemed focused on simply making ends meet. Unlike in El Salvador, the authorities weren’t constantly boasting about the reduction in crime.
Luiz Izquiel, a criminologist, attributed this ambivalence to the brutal methods the government used to bring crime rates down. (Venezuela’s government did not respond to several requests for comment.)
“It’s one thing for Bukele to boast of creating one of the world’s largest prisons,” Mr. Izquiel said, alluding to CECOT, the prison complex that is a symbol of El Salvador’s security policies.
“It would be quite another if Delcy were to celebrate killing thousands of Venezuelans in the name of peace,” he added, referring to Delcy Rodríguez, who replaced Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s leader this year.
Around a decade ago, Mr. Maduro started what he called Operations for the Liberation of the People, ushering in highly militarized police raids into low-income areas. The stated objective was to dismantle armed gangs.
But instead of reducing crime through the judicial system, the strategy consisted largely of extrajudicial executions. It primarily targeted young men, describing the justification for their killings under the bureaucratic label of “resistance to authority.”
Venezuelan security forces killed at least 6,856 people in just one 18-month period in 2018 and 2019, United Nations investigators found, then often manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest.
The International Criminal Court responded with its own investigation. But in July, Venezuela said it would withdraw from the I.C.C., following the example of countries like the Philippines and Burundi, which also left while under the court’s scrutiny.
The Trump administration, which wields exceptional control over Venezuela’s government, has supported the move as it tries to dismantle the I.C.C., driven primarily by the court’s warrants against Israeli leaders and the potential for the I.C.C. to examine the U.S. military’s conduct.
Trump officials announced sweeping new sanctions on the I.C.C. this month after Norway awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a lawyer who served as a judge on the court.
Legal experts say the I.C.C. retains jurisdiction over the atrocities in question even as Venezuela seeks to leave the court. Meanwhile, those who lost relatives in the police raids are still picking up the pieces.
Millanyela Fernández said Richard Jesús Briceño, her son, was 23 and had no criminal record when a police unit swept into their neighborhood of La Vega in 2021 and fatally shot him before her eyes.
“They forced my son to his knees and shot him right in the chest, through the heart,” said Ms. Fernández, 46, a maid. “I opened the window and screamed at him not to kneel down. But he followed their orders, and they killed him.”
Venezuela’s new leader Ms. Rodríguez made an unusual mention of the security gains in January, saying the country’s homicide rate had reached a low point of 3 per 100,000 people in 2025.
It’s undeniable that security has improved in Caracas and much of the rest of the country, but criminologists expressed skepticism over that figure, which would give Venezuela one of the lowest murder rates in the Americas.
Venezuela’s government did not provide data to support her assertion, and it’s been years since authorities published comprehensive crime statistics or even census data.
Along with the dearth of reliable information about criminal activity, the authorities have made it clear that anyone publicly criticizing security policies, or even asking about the current situation, could face consequences.
In one case last year, a journalist, Nakary Mena Ramos, was detained for months after interviewing people over whether street robberies were on the rise because of the return of deportees from the United States.
That case exposed another hypersensitive issue for authorities: mass migration’s role in easing unlawful activity, and the potential for crime to return as deportations rise.
Some in Caracas view the calm as a temporary reprieve relying on hard-line policies that are starting to ease. Ms. Rodríguez recently announced a plan to remove police checkpoints in cities around Venezuela, potentially eliminating a deterrent.
Even so, other factors have contributed to the decline in crime.
When Venezuela’s economy cratered, many people simply had less money and fewer valuables to steal. Street crime also lost some of its allure when Venezuela informally adopted the U.S. dollar and began introducing electronic payment systems. The lack of local currency in circulation reduced opportunities for muggings and express kidnappings.
After incursions into low-income areas, the authorities also raided prisons, which had become the operational headquarters for some gangs.
The result, some Caraqueños say, is a veneer of safety in which the street gang era has been replaced by an institutionalized system in which police and military forces wield control over both territory and extortion rackets.
On the ground in Cota 905, a labyrinthine squatter settlement, people are trying to adapt. Until 2021, the area functioned as a self-governed criminal stronghold where gang members stashed kidnap victims.
Then the authorities embarked on a multiday operation that killed or scattered the leadership of the gang controlling Cota 905. Security forces hunted down and killed the gang’s leader, Carlos Luis Revette, better known as El Koki.
Dozens of other innocent young men were killed in the police raids, residents said. The trauma over so much bloodshed lingers even as Cota 905 became much safer.
Now walking tours take visitors deep into the area. The day-trippers, mostly from moneyed parts of Caracas, dance salsa with residents before the outing ends in a half-destroyed watchtower that was El Koki’s base of operations.
Neyda Cuauro, who sells soft drinks to visitors, said she and her neighbors had no idea how long the new calm would last.
“It’s safer now, but look how we got here,” said Ms. Cuauro, 44, pointing at her front door, still stippled with the impacts of gunfire from the police raids. “No wonder our children run when they see the police.”
Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.
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4) Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinians and Washington Post Journalist in West Bank
In the latest surge of violence, settlers targeted Palestinians during the olive harvest, a cultural touchstone and economic lifeline in the Israeli-occupied area.
By Azam Ahmed, Oct. 16, 2026
Azam Ahmed reported from the village of Khirbet Abu Falah where he and a team from The New York Times witnessed the violence.
Heidi Levine, an American photographer working for The Washington Post, in the emergency room of a hospital in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Friday. Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Dozens of masked Israeli settlers on Friday attacked a group of Palestinians while they were picking olives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, seriously injuring several people, including a veteran Washington Post photographer covering the harvest.
Shortly after 8 a.m. during the start of the harvest, the settlers, dressed in black, descended on the village of Khirbet Abu Falah, a small hamlet of fewer than 6,000 people northeast of Jerusalem, according to residents and the mayor.
A team of New York Times journalists arrived on the scene around 9:30 a.m. and witnessed the attack. Armed with slingshots and batons, the settlers launched heavy stones at the Palestinians and set trees ablaze, sending dense columns of smoke into the sky and prompting residents to flee. At least one settler carried a firearm.
Panic ensued as the settlers pressed closer and some young residents squared off with them, trying to defend their neighbors.
Videos of the attack, which were verified by The Times, show that the photographer, Heidi Levine, 63, who was wearing body armor with large press tags, was trapped behind the settlers. They began to beat her with bats and sticks, kicking her as she was prostrate on the ground, according to the videos.
We saw Israeli military forces arrive amid the ongoing attacks and begin pressing residents back from the olive fields, which stretch across several acres along the outskirts of the village. They fired dozens of rounds of tear gas. The sound of live fire rang out.
Medics from neighboring communities raced into the swarm to rescue the injured as tear gas filled the area, where dozens of other journalists and activists had gathered.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said three Palestinians were also wounded. Ms. Levine was transported to a hospital in the area of Ramallah, a city in the West Bank. “While we are relieved that Heidi has received medical care and is safe, we are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job,” The Post said in a statement.
Doctors have said Ms. Levine has a broken rib and lacerations on her legs, rear end and hip, as well as a serious cut on her left hand, according to Michael Milner, her son.
The Israeli military said soldiers and border police officers were dispatched to the area of Khirbet Abu Falah after receiving a report of a confrontation. It said that a female foreign journalist was injured, adding that all circumstances surrounding the incident would be examined.
“Attacks and violence against innocent civilians are grave and unacceptable acts that require a coordinated, multi-agency response,” the military said.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement in English: “The facts surrounding the confrontation near Abu Falah, during which Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was allegedly assaulted, remain unclear and are under investigation.”
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, settlers have intensified their attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, a campaign of violence that has emptied out entire villages and instilled fear in communities. In recent weeks, their assaults have focused on the olive harvest, a cultural touchstone in the West Bank, with hundreds of villages relying on it as both a communal rite and economic lifeline.
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that monitors settler violence, said it has documented 82 violent incidents against harvesters, 135 instances of crop theft, and 39 of damage to or destruction of trees.
The village of Abu Falah has been subjected to several settler attacks in recent weeks, according to the mayor, Nazem Saleh Shuman. In one incident last week, he said, settlers burned three cars.
“This is our land, we were born here, our ancestors come from here, and we’ve lived here all our lives,” he said. “We believe in this place and we take care of it. We have nowhere else to go.”
In the chaos after Friday’s attack began, we saw several men race past a group of Israeli soldiers right near us. The soldiers then chased the men, including a member of a local council, Abed Aljaber Obied, who had a hand-sized red garden tool in his back pocket. Our photographer took a picture of him running away from the soldiers.
We raced after them and heard rounds being fired. Moments later, we saw the man lying wounded on his back, bleeding, the plastic garden tool beneath him.
The mayor identified the man as Mr. Obied, adding that he had been injured by the military.
The military in its statement said it acted to break up the confrontation upon arriving at the scene and “fired warning shots into the air and subsequently toward a suspect who ran toward them carrying a sharp object and posed a threat to them.” The military did not identify the subject.
People crowded around to check Mr. Obied’s condition. The soldiers pushed them away, while another placed a tourniquet around his leg. A third soldier screamed at the injured man to present his identification, and warned that he would not let the medics take him if he did not.
The military eventually let him go, and he was in stable condition.
After the ambulance left with Mr. Obied, the soldiers remained on the scene. An armored truck with a multi-barrel tear gas launcher attached to its roof fired dozens of rounds, leaving the crowd heaving.
“This place became unlivable,” the mayor, Mr. Shuman, said after the attacks. “This is a residential place, where the people live next to their fields, next to their land.”
“But it’s become a hell for us,” he added.
Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman, James McManagan and Aric Toler contributed reporting.
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5) The 53-Year-Old in a Suit Who’s the Face of France’s Youth Protests
Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of a working-class suburb near Paris, has been a regular presence at student demonstrations, prompting both applause and condemnation.
By Catherine Porter, Oct. 17, 2026
Catherine Porter has interviewed Bally Bagayoko several times since April and observed him at a student rally in Paris.
Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of St.-Denis Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France, standing between protesters and police officers this month during a student demonstration in Paris. Le Pictorium, via Alamy
During a student demonstration this month in eastern Paris, a row of riot police officers pushed their shields against a group of young male protesters.
Wedged between the boys and the police was a tall man, dressed in a gray suit and lavender tie. He spread his arms wide, shielding the boys, and screamed, “Stop!”
That was Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of St.-Denis Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, one of Paris’s most populous and diverse suburbs, known for a basilica and the national stadium, as well as for high rates of poverty and crime.
Mr. Bagayoko has become a household name in France since students started to blockade their schools roughly a month ago, calling for better conditions — protests that were amplified by rallies and unrest on Saturday across France.
Footage of Mr. Bagayoko at the protests has featured regularly in social media and television news programs, to both applause and condemnation. His supporters have called him Spiderman, a comic-book superhero who has become a symbol of youth protests across the world. Others, including right-wing politicians, have accused him of inciting violence and have called for him to be removed, particularly after he said that “violence at some point can be legitimate,” though “every time it can be avoided, that’s better.”
For Mr. Bagayoko, 53, the backlash is a sign that his political opponents see his far-left party as a threat in next year’s presidential election. His party leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — buoyed by votes from cities, like Mr. Bagayoko’s, with higher numbers of immigrants — could make the runoff.
“They believe a victory could come from the working-class neighborhoods embodied by this atypical mayor,” Mr. Bagayoko said in an interview, speaking about himself in the third person. “So they have to smear him. They have to disqualify him.”
Critics say Mr. Bagayoko inflames division and should take the blame for acts of vandalism by protesters at school blockades that he has attended. Valérie Pécresse, the center-right head of the regional authority that contains St.-Denis, suggested that he should pay about $110,000 to repair a damaged gate at a school in his city.
“Let the mayor take responsibility for his actions,” Ms. Pécresse said on social media.
The criticism of Mr. Bagayoko started the night of his unexpected election in March.
He was part of a wave of new mayors of color elected in the sprawling suburbs north of Paris. Mr. Bagayoko’s victory attracted particular attention because St.-Denis Pierrefitte-sur-Seine is home to roughly 150,000 citizens, more than any other area on the edge of Paris.
Hours after his win, Mr. Bagayoko was interviewed live on national television. A clip of the interview was truncated and misleadingly described by far-right politicians and journalists. He said he was now the mayor of “la ville des rois,” or “the city of kings” — France’s former kings and queens are buried in the city’s basilica. But the incorrect descriptions said he had called it “la ville des noirs,” or “the city of Black people.”
Then, on national television, the founder of a far-right media outlet, Frontières, falsely claimed that drug dealers had pushed for Mr. Bagayoko’s election. “Whose pockets are you in, Mr. Mayor?” the founder asked.
The following week, CNews, a television channel known for broadcasting far-right views, discussed Mr. Bagayoko’s election and his proposal to ban the police from using rubber bullets. A guest on the channel, noting that humans were “part of the great ape family,” compared the mayor with a “hunter-gatherer” leader “whose role is to establish authority.”
The next day, a host on the channel described Mr. Bagayoko’s intention of asserting control over the police as “very tribal.” The Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into the channel for “public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion,” an accusation that CNews rejected.
Throughout it all, Mr. Bagayoko remained calm and kept smiling. As a Black man, he said in an interview, “No one would have forgiven me for losing my temper on a TV set.”
The onslaught made clear to him, he added, that France has yet to truly accept that citizens of an African background, like Mr. Bagayoko, are full members of French society. Black French, often descended from immigrants from France’s former colonies, are underrepresented in positions of power.
“France still has a problem with its own children,” he said. “Because I am French.”
Unlike many Black leaders in France, Mr. Bagayoko has made the issue a focus. Since his election, he has organized two large rallies to denounce racism in France, and in August, he helped start an initiative to make the issue part of the debate in the coming presidential election.
Rokhaya Diallo, a journalist, filmmaker and prominent antiracism activist in France, said, “Tackling systemic racism in France is very taboo.”
“We don’t see many Black, proud politicians who are not afraid of naming racism,” she added.
Mr. Bagayoko is also facing two judicial investigations. The first concerns whether he, earlier in his career, was given a patronage job at the city’s transportation agency, an accusation he has denied.
The second concerns claims that he incited violence after his comments last month about the legitimacy of violence during protests.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bagayoko’s popularity — and social media following — has surged, with supporters comparing him with Zohran Mamdani, the left-wing mayor of New York.
“He’s our Mamdani. He represents the same hope for people,” said Maxime Beauchamps, 21, a communications student who joined those surrounding Mr. Bagayoko at a recent rally, thanking him and asking for selfies and hugs. The crowd at several points chanted: “Bally, président! Bally, président!”
Many said they saw him as a role model. “He shows us that just because we come from working-class neighborhoods or from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds,’ as they say in sociology, it doesn’t mean we can’t succeed,” said Aya Guetib, 17.
‘We Are Fully French’
Born in 1973, Mr. Bagayoko grew up in a housing project in St.-Denis. He was the second of eight children to parents from Mali, which was ruled by France for much of the 20th century.
Since their father worked long hours as a mechanic, Mr. Bagayoko and his older brother helped their mother raise their siblings in their crowded apartment, according to a younger brother, Yaya Bagayoko. He would go over his siblings’ homework and attend their school meetings, and he registered them for basketball camp in the summer so they were not hanging out in their neighborhood and getting into trouble, said Yaya, 50.
“Bally has always been the rock in the family,” Yaya added. “He can be super nice, but with us, he was pretty strict.”
Mr. Bagayoko earned a bachelor’s degree in geopolitics and a master’s in science and technology. His thesis, he said, was on the mind-set of people living in working-class suburbs like St.-Denis.
He played semiprofessional basketball, and coached children in the sport in St.-Denis.
In 2001, the Communist mayor of St.-Denis, Patrick Braouezec, recruited Mr. Bagayoko to his electoral slate. Mr. Bagayoko was elected to the City Council, swiftly becoming deputy mayor and remaining a fixture in city politics ever since.
Ms. Diallo, the filmmaker, said: “There is no way you can do anything in St.-Denis without knowing him. He’s part of the local fabric.”
In 2017, Mr. Bagayoko joined the far-left France Unbowed, attracted, he said, by the party’s criticism of police violence, racism and Islamophobia.
After his election to the mayoralty in March, he made youth-focused policy a key part of his mandate.
The city expanded a free school lunch program, offered free school supplies to elementary-school students and began a free bike program for 15-year-olds to make commuting to distant high schools easier.
After the protests started last month, he was among the first politicians to join student blockades, including at his own alma mater in St.-Denis.
While others criticize the students for vandalizing their schools, Mr. Bagayoko’s position is that the real violence is performed by the state.
It is a form of systemic violence, he contends, to offer a subpar education — missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, decaying infrastructure — to children from already underprivileged backgrounds. That, he says, breaks a fundamental promise of the French Republic of equality for all citizens.
“We grew up with an ideal, which is to say that the Republic must be fair to everyone, and it isn’t,” he said.
He also accuses the police of using disproportionate force against student protesters, saying officers were more aggressive against those from working-class neighborhoods.
“There is a contempt directed at these kids from working-class neighborhoods,” he said.
Mr. Bagayoko expresses ambivalence about his role within the French state.
In his office, he has kept a portrait of President Emmanuel Macron on the floor, instead of on the wall, as it is in most public offices in France. He said this summer that booing the national anthem was understandable, when “France dishonors itself through its international actions,” including by not going far enough in its criticism of Israel. And when he wades into protests with students, he makes a point to not wear his three-colored sash — the symbol of elected officials in France. It makes him feel separated from people, he said.
But he has been clear to hold a French national flag when marching in protests, surrounded by young people who, like him, are the children of immigrants.
The message he is sending, he says, is, “We are fully French, regardless of what some people might think.”
Giulia Imbert contributed reporting
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6) He Was a Top Voice on Palestinian Liberation. Filmgoers Are Listening.
A new documentary on Edward Said, the Palestinian American literary critic and activist who taught for decades at Columbia, brought New Yorkers together in a fraught political moment.
By Sara Aridi, Oct. 17, 2026
Maiken Baird, left, directed the documentary on Edward Said, and Sarah Mowaswes, center, was one of its producers. Mr. Said’s daughter, Najla Said, right, was also part of the filmmaking process. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Outside the crowded entrance of the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Gisella Castagna sat at the front of a line.
Ms. Castagna, a Barnard student, had arrived about four hours early to snag a ticket last month for a sold-out 8:45 p.m. screening of “Edward Said: Between Worlds,” a documentary about the Palestinian American scholar and activist.
Mr. Said died in 2003, before Ms. Castagna, 21, was born. But his ideas on Palestinian self-determination have resonated with her recently, particularly as she helped organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University.
“A lot of us do point to his words,” she said.
After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in Israel that killed about 1,200 people and the war in Gaza that killed roughly 68,000 Palestinians thrust the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back into the spotlight, Mr. Said’s words — which he shared through countless lectures, columns and books — have found new life.
The film, which made its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, comes after a cease-fire last year between Israel and Hamas, but tensions have not subsided. Israeli strikes have continued; public figures have been criticized for taking sides, or not; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is under pressure ahead of an election this month.
The screening was a homecoming of sorts: Mr. Said was a fixture of the Upper West Side as a professor at Columbia University for nearly 40 years.
In the documentary, Mr. Said narrates his life story through video and audio clips pieced together by the Danish American filmmaker Maiken Baird and Sarah Mowaswes, one of its producers.
“Between Worlds” opens with grainy 8-millimeter home videos from 1930s Jerusalem. Viewers see archival news clips about the creation of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, and Mr. Said moving from Cairo to Massachusetts and eventually New York. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the film shows Mr. Said becoming politically active, writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and working alongside organizers and leaders.
Ms. Baird, 60, was inspired to make the film after Oct. 7, 2023. “I just couldn’t help but think back on Edward Said, how much I had learned from him,” she said. Growing up, she was told about the Nazi occupation of Denmark and the creation of a Jewish state, but became curious about what had happened to the “native inhabitants of the land,” she said. Years later, she read Mr. Said’s 1979 book “The Question of Palestine.”
“Then it all came together,” she said.
Ms. Baird approached Mr. Said’s widow, Mariam C. Said, and daughter, Najla Said, who became a consulting producer on the movie. “It seemed like the perfect way to bring him back at the right time,” his daughter said.
Ms. Baird, whose father was friends with Mr. Said, grew up overhearing their conversations, which partly influenced her to study at Columbia in the 1980s, where she said Mr. Said was “the most popular professor.”
Off campus, things were more complicated. In 1989, an essay he wrote was criticized as promoting terrorism. In 2001, he faced backlash after he was photographed throwing stones toward an Israeli guardhouse in Lebanon. His office had been vandalized; death threats were common. One clip in “Between Worlds” shows that he faced opposition from Arabs who thought he was too moderate.
Ms. Mowaswes, 32, said in an email that “the sheer fact that he is a Palestinian born in Palestine is considered ‘controversial’ to some.”
Making an independent film is never easy, but “the issue with getting this kind of narrative funded in America is that you’re not going to get any institutional support,” Ms. Baird said. Most of the funding, she added, came from people who hoped to start nuanced dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On the night of the premiere, the theater was packed with some of Mr. Said’s old friends and colleagues. The Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who founded the now destroyed Edward Said Public Library in Gaza, walked out holding back tears. He said it was “enraging” to see that the issues Mr. Said addressed “continue to unfold today.”
Victor Kovner, who met Mr. Said in the 1980s, said, “It was thrilling to see him.”
Mr. Kovner, 89, is a founder of J Street, an organization that supports Israel and “the security and freedom of both Israelis and Palestinians,” according to its website. Though he and his wife, Sarah Kovner, are in favor of a two-state solution, that did not get in the way of their friendship with Mr. Said.
“You could talk about it with him,” Ms. Kovner said. “You could disagree but not in a way that was disagreeable.”
Reflecting on the war in Gaza, Mr. Said’s widow said her husband “would have been appalled, because all of his writings are about humanism.” Yet others at the screening said he would have been heartened to see growing support for Palestinians.
Ms. Baird is hopeful that more audiences will be drawn to Mr. Said’s story.
“Even if they don’t like what they’re hearing,” she said, “they have to acknowledge his humanity and his truth.”
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7) Corporate Tax Revenue Falls Even as Profits Soar Under Trump
The annual decline was about $70 billion. Companies are writing off billions in A.I. investments, taking advantage of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law.
By Andrew Duehren, Reporting from Washington, Oct. 17, 2026
A law signed by President Trump last year lets companies claim larger deductions in the year they make new investments. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Corporate tax revenue has fallen precipitously under President Trump even as companies’ profits have surged to record highs, a divergence that began after Republicans approved tax breaks allowing firms to write off the cost of their investments more quickly.
Revenue from the corporate income tax, which applies to the profits made by the largest and most sophisticated companies in the United States, fell roughly 15 percent, to $381 billion, in the fiscal year that ended on Oct. 1, according to data released on Friday by the Treasury Department. The roughly $70 billion drop followed a similar decline the previous year. Corporate tax revenue is down more than quarter from 2024, the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration.
Corporate income tax revenue
Behind the decrease are the tax cuts that Republicans passed and Mr. Trump signed last year. That law lets companies claim larger deductions in the year they make new investments, a change made as many of the country’s largest technology firms began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence projects, including data centers.
The cuts have reduced corporate tax revenue even more sharply than analysts projected. Company leaders, locked in a frenzied race to build more powerful A.I. models, have said they plan to keep increasing their investment spending, potentially depressing corporate tax revenue for years to come. The additional investment may also supercharge firms’ profits, enlarging the gap with the taxes collected from those earnings.
“It’s very unusual to see a divergence of that magnitude, but it’s not surprising in the sense that we know what’s causing it,” said Peter Berezin, the chief economist at BCA Research, an investment research firm. “A.I. spending is projected to increase for the next few years, so these companies will be able to write off even more of their spending. If they didn’t have huge profits, that would be one thing. But they do.”
The fall in corporate tax revenue is just part of the deterioration in the nation’s fiscal situation. The difference between government spending and revenue neared $2 trillion last fiscal year, as military spending increased and higher interest rates raised the cost of payments on the federal debt. The debt held by the public, more than $32 trillion, is now nearly equivalent to the annual output of the economy, a level not seen since the years after World War II.
The deficit is growing even though the economy remains relatively strong and unemployment low. Corporate profits have only swelled in recent years, powering stock indexes to record highs, a development that might be expected to increase corporate tax receipts. Revenue from the individual income tax grew last fiscal year.
But in their tax cut, Republicans made a series of changes allowing companies to reduce the amount of earnings subject to tax. They changed the timeline over which companies can write off the cost of new investments, as well as research and development costs. Rather than deducting the cost of new computing equipment over several years, for example, companies can now write it off immediately.
Businesses aggressively lobbied Congress for this seemingly minor accounting tweak because it improves the economics of new investment. Academic researchers found that the tax break, when previously in place, did help generate additional investment, which can help power the economy overall.
That was before the competition to dominate A.I. technology unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on chips, data centers and the electrical systems that power them. Major companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta appear so committed to sharply increasing their investment that the tax break may not be having much of an effect on their plans.
“These companies’ leaders aren’t really acting as if they’re feeling constrained in their investment behavior right now,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank. “It seems pretty uncontroversial to say that we are rewarding these companies for what they were going to do anyway.”
The tax break applies to investment spending broadly, not just to data centers and other A.I.-related expenses. While the tax change could encourage additional business investment in other sectors, the A.I. rush is so significant that it may be crowding out other capital expenditures. Financing the build-out of A.I. infrastructure has helped push up interest rates, making borrowing for new investments more expensive across the economy, while the prices of other business inputs have also increased.
“It looks like we are at a point for the macroeconomy of having about as much investment as we can,” said Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, a Harvard economics professor who co-wrote a paper finding that the tax break helped increase investment. “In that circumstance, increasing the marginal incentive to do investment may end up ultimately increasing the price of investment, rather than producing more total investment.”
On the campaign trail, some Democrats have started to attack Republicans for voting to approve the tax break, painting it as subsidy exclusively for data centers. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has proposed excluding components for data centers from the investment incentive.
That has worried proponents of the tax incentive, which has historically enjoyed a measure of bipartisan support. They argue that the accelerated write-offs will, over a longer time frame, still spur additional business investment. The drop in tax revenue should be temporary, they said, as companies exhaust the deductions they can claim on their investments.
“To the extent that we think this investment is occurring because there are very large profits to be had, when those profits are had, they will be taxed, and that’s how we should want the tax system to work,” said Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, a think tank that generally supports lower taxes.
But the government’s payday may be years away if the A.I. investment cycle continues unabated. One economist, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh at Columbia University, has estimated that total spending on A.I. infrastructure between 2025 and 2032 will exceed $10 trillion.
Then there is the question of whether the A.I. investments will actually become profitable.
“If we realize data processing is a commodity, and we can have open-source models that charge way, way less, then there’s a big bubble and the whole thing bursts,” said Jeff Hoopes, a professor of accounting at the University of North Carolina.
“You end up not generating as much revenue,” he said, adding that the revenue would not have materialized in that case under the previous tax approach, either.
The decline in corporate tax revenue is an early indicator of how A.I. could reshape the tax system. As companies and investors profit off A.I., those earnings would, under current law, face lower tax rates than the wages paid to workers, who may also be displaced by the technology. That could, in the long run, curb tax revenue overall.
On Wall Street, excitement about A.I. is tempered by concerns about the deficit. Beyond the tax cuts passed through Congress, the Trump administration has taken several regulatory steps that could reduce tax payments for companies, including by weakening a measure aimed at limiting corporate tax avoidance.
David Kelly, the chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said the economy didn’t need the business tax breaks that Republicans passed last year.
“If you’ve just drunk five cups of coffee, a sixth cup of coffee isn’t going to do you much good,” he said. “You’re stimulating something that doesn’t need stimulating.”
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8) Huge Riots in France Prompt Shock and Blame Game
After anti-government protests devolved into chaos, leaders from across the political spectrum blamed one another for the unrest, even as it subsided on Sunday.
By Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Reporting from Paris, Oct. 18, 2026
A street in Paris, littered on Sunday with debris a day after nationwide protests and riots. Benoit Tessier/Reuters
France was in a state of shock on Sunday, as citizens walked through streets lined with shattered storefronts, charred cars and burned-out government buildings after the country’s largest demonstrations in years devolved into riots and looting.
The unrest on Saturday — which led to some 2,000 arrests — caused widespread damage to several symbols of the state, including a 19th-century city hall in Limoges, a town in central France renowned for its porcelain, that was largely destroyed in a nighttime arson attack. More than 600 police officers were injured, Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, said on social media on Sunday.
Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. A fire also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I’ve never seen this before, I am disgusted,” said Sophie Vanpoperinghe, 47, as she gazed at ransacked shops on Boulevard Magenta, the road in Paris where she has lived for 22 years and which is frequently used for demonstrations.
More than half a million demonstrators marched on Sunday to protest the rising cost of living and poor conditions in schools, among other grievances. Many were stunned on Sunday at how rioters had used those demonstrations as a smoke screen for vandalism.
Estelle Grandidier, a nonprofit worker who had marched in Paris, said she was “shocked” to see scenes reminiscent of those she has observed in crisis zones overseas.
But Ms. Grandidier said that a clear distinction should be made between the rioters and the protesters, who came “onto the streets to present their demands in a completely peaceful manner.”
On Sunday, the violence and protests had subsided and given way to a political blame game. Government officials and far right leaders accused the far left of stirring up the unrest, and left-wing leaders blamed the government.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu placed the blame for the chaos squarely on a far-left party, France Unbowed. The leader of that party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, stands a chance of beating centrists to the runoff in next year’s presidential election to succeed President Emmanuel Macron.
Mr. Lecornu accused France Unbowed of sowing distrust about the police among student protesters all week. He also said that the earliest rioters had started attacking riot police and government buildings before official protests were set to begin and were members of the “ultra-left.”
“Behind all this, there is obviously a political battle to wage,” Mr. Lecornu said, adding that the country was at “the point of no return.”
“It’s also time to choose sides,” he said. “Either you are in the camp of the Republic, and therefore of law enforcement — and of those who protect people and property and enforce the laws — or you are on the side of the rioters.”
In response, Mr. Mélenchon blamed the government. He said on social media that Mr. Lecornu was “responsible for the chaos” — due to “incompetence or a worst-case strategy to create a party of order that would make people forget his failure in public finances.”
Mr. Lecornu did not respond to that accusation, but had earlier urged Mr. Mélenchon to call out the perpetrators of looting and violence.
Mr. Mélenchon had offered a qualified condemnation of the violence, stating that “those who share our fight have no place in looting, in pillaging.”
Regardless of the “responsibilities of those in power,” he said on Saturday night, the left “must refuse to take part in actions without political meaning and contrary to our methods.”
Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader who leads the polls for next year’s presidential election, said that “legitimate social demands” had been “hijacked by the far left and the rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon” and his colleagues, whom she accused of fostering chaos by “legitimizing violence.”
Protest organizers had hoped that the demonstrations on Saturday would lead to a convergence between the student demonstrations demanding better school conditions that have roiled France since September, and a broader social movement addressing a wider array of concerns, including the rising cost of living.
What emerged on Saturday, as more than half a million people protested nationwide, seemed like a split-screen event. Students, farmers, teachers and trade unionists often marched peacefully through one part of a city, while groups of black-clad agitators sparred with police and caused damage in other areas.
Then, as things unraveled, opportunist rioters joined in, exploiting the chaos, government officials said.
“It’s sad, people got angry,” said Laure Monloubou, 50, as she gazed at the aftermath in Paris near Place de la République, where dozens of shops were looted and cars were burned on Saturday.
But she, too, emphasized that the anger of those who looted was “not to be mixed up” with that of people peacefully walking in the streets.
In Paris, the police said they were confronted first by “wildcat marches” and violent groups of 500 to 1,000 people. The situation changed in the late afternoon, the Paris police prefecture said in a statement on Sunday morning, with “the massive arrival of individuals whose sole objective was to commit theft and looting, taking advantage of the disorder to act.”
Sorin Moraru, 48, the owner of a cleaning company, was working on Sunday to restore a bank agency that had been attacked in Paris. He said the vandalism was “unacceptable.”
The damage, he estimated, would take days for his team of six to clean up. The vandals “should be caught and punished, they should pay,” Mr. Moraru said.
“One can demonstrate, one can express oneself, but not destroy,” he added.
Though the scale of the protests on Saturday led some union leaders to consider it a success, the movement faced an uncertain future on Sunday as French society processed the violence and looting that accompanied the demonstrations.
With French schools starting a two-week half-term holiday, the high school movement is expected to lose steam — though some labor unions, including the C.G.T., one of France’s largest, have called for another day of mass demonstrations on Nov. 5.
“It feels like society is spinning out of control,” said Henri Parent, 56, a tourist from Belgium who was surveying broken storefronts in central Paris on Sunday morning.
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9) Huge Riots and Anti-Government Protests Roil France: What to Know
Rioters attacked city halls and shops over the weekend amid protests over living costs and poor school conditions.
By Amelia Nierenberg, Lynsey Chutel and Catherine Porter, Oct. 18, 2026
Catherine Porter, who reported from Paris, has covered the protests for weeks.
“More than half a million people joined some 110 marches throughout France on Saturday, the interior ministry said, in the biggest day of protest since the demonstrations began about a month ago. A major union, the C.G.T., gave a higher estimate, saying 800,000 protesters had turned out.”
Amid many peaceful demonstrations on Saturday, rioters vandalized roughly 1,500 shops and many symbols of the French state. Credit...Kiran Ridley/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
France is reeling from its largest unrest in years, after anti-government demonstrations devolved into riots and looting that caused nationwide damage and deepened a sense of national reckoning.
As the chaos subsided on Sunday, political leaders blamed each other for the unrest and citizens looked on with shock at their cities, littered with broken glass and the charred skeletons of burned cars.
The violence marked a convergence between a weeks-old student movement for better school conditions, an emerging national movement to protest high living costs, and opportunistic rioters who used the demonstrations as a cover for looting.
The protests have heightened a sense of fiscal and social crisis in France, the European Union’s second-largest economy. The government is trying to pass an unpopular belt-tightening budget while facing public anger that has helped position Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader, as the favorite to win the presidency in an election next spring.
What happened this weekend?
More than half a million people joined some 110 marches throughout France on Saturday, the interior ministry said, in the biggest day of protest since the demonstrations began about a month ago. A major union, the C.G.T., gave a higher estimate, saying 800,000 protesters had turned out.
Amid many peaceful demonstrations, rioters vandalized roughly 1,500 shops and many symbols of the French state, leading to roughly 2,000 arrests. An arson attack largely destroyed the town hall in Limoges, in central France. In Marseille, the second-largest city, masked people broke into a government building and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the Republic.
Why are students protesting?
High school students started protesting last month to express frustration with the condition of their schools.
They have pointed to crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, overloaded schedules, a shortage of teachers and staff, and underfunding in schools. Many are also calling for an overhaul of state-run admissions platforms for higher education and universities that they call unfairly selective.
Students have blockaded hundreds of schools. They have set fire to, or damaged, at least 24 of them, according to the government. Thousands have been arrested since September and over 1,000 police officers, students and school staff have been hurt.
The students’ anger has been exacerbated by the police’s forceful response. Prosecutors and a police watchdog are investigating at least 34 cases involving accusations of police misconduct during the protests.
The cases include a 15-year-old boy whose left hand was ripped off, officials said, likely by the explosion of a police stun grenade; and a 14-year-old boy maimed by a tear-gas grenade that an officer had fired at close range.
Why did other groups join the students?
Throughout October, labor unions and other campaign groups have increasingly joined the students’ demonstrations. They have held bigger rallies to express solidarity with the students as well as to protest a broader range of issues.
Some are angry over the cost of living and rising fuel prices that have surged, in part, because of the Iran war. Farmers have joined in, angry at agricultural costs.
Social media accounts associated with the “yellow vest” protest movement, which roiled France nearly a decade ago with roadside demonstrations against high gas prices and other issues, have joined calls for demonstrations.
And left-wing parties have also seized on the protests as part of a wider expression of discontent at President Emmanuel Macron, who is limited to two terms and is nearing the end of his time in office.
Such discontent has a long history in France, where student-led protests in 1968 nearly toppled the government and helped transform French society.
What is the political fallout?
On Sunday, far-right leaders and the centrist government blamed the far left for the chaos. They pointed in particular to a major far-left party, France Unbowed, that they said provoked the unrest.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has accused party leaders of sowing distrust about the police among student protesters, and said some rioters were members of the “ultra-left.”
France Unbowed has rejected that accusation and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has instead blamed the government for actions that he said made the unrest more likely.
Mr. Mélenchon said on social media that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu was “responsible for the chaos, because of “incompetence or a worst-case strategy to create a party of order that would make people forget his failure in public finances.” Mr. Lecornu did not respond to that accusation.
Giulia Imbert, Ségolène Le Stradic and Zane Irwin contributed reporting.
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10) I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.
By Chris Marquis, Oct. 18, 2026
Mr. Marquis is a professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of “The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.”
This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?
This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States.
I have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.
These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.
This change can take place in a single semester. Again and again, I have watched students abandon their altruistic intentions, instead becoming consumed by whether to choose careers in consulting or finance and who will land a summer internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.
The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s. President Trump, a Wharton graduate, has treated foreign policy and government itself as extensions of dealmaking and personal gain.
Surely, not every business graduate governs this way. But recent research by the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues shows what tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge. In both the United States and Denmark, firms that appointed managers with business degrees cut wages and reduced labor’s share of income. Yet these companies didn’t become more productive, nor did they grow sales, investment or employment any faster. What registers as managerial acumen turns out to be wealth transfer — value moved away from workers and toward profits, shareholders and executives.
I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them.
Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”
When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.
The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.
One well-known case study that I have taught many times is “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley.” The facts are simple enough to produce a lively classroom debate. Mr. Parson has delivered impressive results and is viewed as a star performer, but his abrasive and go-it-alone style has alienated people across the firm. In the classroom, students take the position of his manager, Paul Nasr, and decide whether to promote him, delay the promotion or push him out.
Nearly three decades after publication, it remains among H.B.S.’s most widely used cases, and the dilemma is enduring: Should results be rewarded even when the person producing them damages the culture around him? In class, students vote on Mr. Nasr’s options and often role-play the difficult conversation between him and Mr. Parson. The discussion can be dramatic, engaging and effective.
But my experience has shown that by asking students to inhabit Mr. Nasr’s role, the case study narrows their imaginations to the decision facing one senior manager. Deeper questions — like whether Mr. Parson is himself a product of investment-banking culture — are rarely raised. Mr. Parson becomes an individual problem, when the larger issue may be an industry that rewards rainmaking, hierarchy and masculine performance norms, then acts surprised when they cause conflict.
When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals. Medical students work through detailed patient scenarios — symptoms, test results, histories and social and economic context. Law students read real court opinions, dissecting facts, arguments and judgments. In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.
Business school cases operate on another logic, focused not on inquiry but on decision making. H.B.S.’s own overview of the method describes students imagining “themselves in the decision-maker’s role” and “taking decisive action.” The point is to practice acting like the person in charge — or, as George W. Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School, put it, “the decider.”
By overestimating the importance of individual decision makers, the business school classroom avoids harder questions: Who made this person the legitimate protagonist? Whose knowledge is absent? Why are workers, regulators, communities, ecosystems or citizens rarely given equal standing?
I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.
For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.
Corporate influence feeds a larger problem: The cases almost always feature winners, making it easy to mistake luck or timing for a proven strategy. Failures, dead ends and nonmarket solutions are rarely considered. Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.
Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.
The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”
Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.
A classic win-win is the contention that environmental programs like reducing waste or using LED lights can save money or that decent pay and benefits lower costs by reducing employee turnover. Business schools now claim to educate “leaders who make a difference in the world,” as H.B.S. proclaims in its mission, while Wharton pursues a “quest for positive global impact.”
These aspirations are built on the delusional but widely accepted idea of “stakeholder capitalism”: that companies can produce climate stability, fair wages, healthy communities and functioning democracies while also delivering profits. Executives promise that technology will solve our environmental problems; voluntary measurement systems are offered as appropriate alternatives to public accountability; ethics is rebranded as competitive advantage rather than moral obligation.
During the 2010s, stakeholder capitalism was quickly woven into M.B.A. syllabuses. But when researchers examined whether the corporations that signed on to a statement pledging commitment to this ethos actually changed their behavior on wages, investment, governance or climate, they found little evidence of a shift. The statement was less a new doctrine than an effort at reputation management — and a ploy to avoid oversight.
Recent evidence shows that many foundational studies supporting the win-win idea were based on flawed data or couldn’t be replicated. Yet faculty members keep researching, writing about and teaching the topic — suggesting an ideological project more than an academic exercise.
Much of what has happened in business schools turned out to be the leading edge of a broader transformation: the corporatization of the university itself. Institutions now chase rankings, donors and corporate partnerships, tout their contributions to innovation and growth and treat everything else as overhead. Students are “customers,” and the degrees are “products” with greater and lesser “market shares.” University strategic documents talk about “brand positioning” for departments and “R.O.I.s” on tenure lines.
Once you accept this frame, it becomes hard to defend the existence of a philosophy seminar or a history department for any reason other than the revenue it generates. The hiring of non-tenure-track adjunct professors follows: If education is “content” delivered to fee-paying “customers,” why keep full-time scholars on the payroll when you can hire contingent, low-wage instructors?
Business schools’ success in placing their graduates in high-paying jobs boosts their rankings; high rankings attract more applicants and allow higher tuitions; and wealthy alumni fund new programs and buildings that elevate the school’s status. It is a self-reinforcing cycle — a flywheel, in M.B.A. parlance — that pulls money, attention and legitimacy away from the disciplines best equipped to question this logic: history, philosophy, sociology, political theory.
The university’s capacity to cultivate historical memory, moral judgment and democratic imagination is weakened, even as its capacity to churn out data analysts, financial engineers and “innovation” managers grows. The irony — and danger — is that in the age of A.I., the thinking fostered in the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent. The domination of business schools is not only physical and financial; it is intellectual, and it is crowding out liberal education.
I’ve come to a grim conclusion: The problem with business schools is not repairable misalignment but the design itself. Business schools are not malfunctioning institutions; they are highly efficient machines doing exactly what they were designed to do. An ethics elective here, a sustainability center there, a “responsible leadership” badge — they all serve to legitimize the machine, not change its output.
The most honest solution I’ve come across is to replace the category entirely. Stuart Hart, an emeritus professor at Cornell and an early sustainability champion, told me he reached that conclusion after trying every internal route to make M.B.A. curriculums more responsible. The institution itself was the problem. At the University of Vermont, Dr. Hart has since developed a new form of business degree focused on societal impact — a small but concrete test of the case for starting over. In this program, sustainability is not a lone elective but run through the whole curriculum, and students spend the summer embedded in a mission-driven company.
What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends. Students would study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation. The central question would shift from “How do we maximize shareholder value?” to “How do different forms of organization distribute power, risk and reward — and which should we strengthen?”
Dismantling the business school as a single high-status silo that professionalizes private gain may seem a heavy lift. But universities can create cross-disciplinary pathways for students who want to work in business without submitting them to the business school worldview. Some already offer “business and society” majors or master’s programs in organizations and public purpose, drawing on sociology, law and public policy. The point would not be to abolish the study of markets, but to return it to settings where questions of power, history, democracy and ecological limits cannot be so easily avoided.
For most of my career, I’ve taught electives focused on responsible business and sustainability — gratifying work, but largely preaching to the converted. Recently, at Cambridge, I introduced a required sustainability course filled with future bankers, consultants and tech executives who once would have steered clear.
Many arrive deeply skeptical, convinced that any time a corporation acts in a responsible way it must be a marketing ploy; some push back hard on ideas they see as threats to growth. But forcing them out of their bubbles into a shared conversation about the natural environment, inequality and discrimination has produced the kind of debate that is so often missing in education today.
This is not enough. One required course cannot redeem the business school model. If anything, teaching it has intensified my disappointment. The course is relegated to the very end of the program — a telling signal of its importance — and amid a growing backlash against sustainability, there is some pressure to reduce or eliminate the class, to appease the customers who now drive decisions in higher education.
Still, the experience has reminded me why abolishing business schools cannot mean abandoning the people in them. The goal is not to write off the students as aspiring selfish capitalists; it is to stop funneling them through a machine that narrows their sense of possibility. Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.
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11) How a Dominican Migrant in New York Became an ICE Target
Oscar Belgal arrived in the city from the Dominican Republic in 2022. Chaos appeared to follow, ending in a fateful encounter with immigration agents.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Ana LeyMaria Cramer and Hamed Aleaziz, Oct. 18, 2026
The reporters interviewed more than a dozen people, in New York and the Dominican Republic, and reviewed internal federal records and hundreds of pages of court documents.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in plain clothes shot Oscar Belgal, center, in the neck. ICE officials said he had weaponized his car. New York Police Department, via Associated Press
The young man from the Dominican Republic slipped into the United States through the southern border about four years ago, acquaintances said, evading U.S. immigration authorities.
He was in his mid-20s and headed to New York, but his attempts to fly under the radar — and to find his footing in a new country — quickly spiraled.
He got a job at a carwash, and then selling carpets, but couldn’t hold down either job. He rented a bedroom in Upper Manhattan, but was taken to court after failing to pay thousands of dollars in rent.
About a year after arriving, the man, Oscar Belgal, was arrested after being accused of stealing cash and jewelry from two acquaintances, with help from an associate who had a gun. Two years later, he was arrested again, this time charged with drug dealing, after he sold bags of cocaine to an undercover police officer outside his apartment building, according to prosecutors.
By 2026, his past had caught up to him: The Trump administration was going after undocumented immigrants, and he was on its radar.
Mr. Belgal’s collision course with Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to a violent climax on Oct. 8, bringing a sudden hail of gunfire to a residential pocket of the city that straddles Manhattan and the Bronx.
It was a sunny autumn afternoon, and Mr. Belgal had just picked up his 5-year-old son from school and taken him to McDonald’s. While they were parked, with the boy in the back seat, a team of ICE officers in plain clothes surprised them.
Two officers in hats and sweatshirts, one with his gun drawn, rushed at the car and Mr. Belgal accelerated his vehicle. At least one officer fired multiple rounds, striking Mr. Belgal on the left side of the neck as he crashed into a concrete traffic barrier. His son was not injured.
Mr. Belgal, 28, was taken to a hospital and later transported to a federal prison in Brooklyn, where he was being held in solitary confinement, a bullet still lodged in his neck, his lawyers say.
Key elements of the encounter — most critically, whether the officer’s use of deadly force was legally justified — remain fiercely contested. In court filings, Mr. Belgal’s lawyers said that the officers never identified themselves — which ICE denied — and said that “Oscar was terrified for his and his son’s lives.”
While the New York Police Department released footage that shows the lead up to and aftermath of the shooting, ICE has not released body camera footage from its officers that could show the shooting itself. Local and federal officials said they are investigating the incident.
Since the start of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, shootings by ICE officers — of immigrants and of demonstrators — in Minneapolis and Maine, Chicago and Los Angeles have ignited furious protests.
Now, that tumult has arrived in New York.
For ICE, the encounter cast a spotlight anew on its tactics and provoked criticism from city and state leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who renewed calls to abolish the agency.
For Mr. Belgal, a father of two whom ICE said had entered the country illegally, the shooting marked the culmination of a brief but turbulent time in New York. Some who knew him — particularly those who felt harmed by his actions — were outraged by the shooting but said that a string of bad decisions had paved a direct path to his arrest and potential deportation.
The New York Times interviewed more than a dozen people who knew Mr. Belgal, obtained internal federal records of his apprehension by ICE and reviewed hundreds of pages of court records.
From the moment Mr. Belgal arrived in New York, his life was fraught with turmoil.
Destination New York
Mr. Belgal hailed from a poor urban neighborhood in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.
In an interview there last week, his grandmother, Juana de León, said she had raised Mr. Belgal, as well as other grandchildren, because his mother was absent.
Mr. Belgal, a slim man with long dark hair he often braided, bounced between low-wage day jobs in construction and moved out of the house after meeting a woman and having a son with her, Ms. de León said.
“He got by through odd jobs,” Ms. de León said outside her home on Thursday, as she sold shoes and clothes that had been shipped from the United States. “One day he would go work with one bricklayer, the next with another.”
Like other migrants, Mr. Belgal left the Dominican Republic alone in search of better economic prospects and made it to Colombia by October 2022, according to Carlos Martínez, a Dominican man he befriended there.
Together, they made the same journey that thousands of migrants undertook on foot during the Biden administration, cutting through the treacherous Darién Gap in Panama until reaching Mexico.
“We slept together, we ate together, we did everything together,” Mr. Martínez, 25, said in an interview.
They split up before crossing the border, though they would reunite in New York.
Mr. Belgal told acquaintances that he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in late 2022 without being apprehended. He soon found refuge in Washington Heights, the Upper Manhattan neighborhood bustling with immigrants from the Dominican Republic.
A pair of Dominican sisters whose relatives knew Mr. Belgal said they extended him a hand when he arrived in November 2022, apparently penniless.
Cruz María Reyes, 49, one of the sisters, said that they let him stay in a spare bedroom for free over nine months. They helped him find a gig washing cars, which he abandoned once it got colder, she said, and later selling carpets at a store in downtown Manhattan.
By late 2023, Ms. Reyes, who lived in the three-bedroom apartment with Mr. Belgal, said she began charging him $250 a week for the room.
A few months later, in December 2023, Ms. Reyes heard loud knocks at the door.
It was two police officers looking for Mr. Belgal. They handcuffed him and took him away.
Police officers arrested him because two months before, according to prosecutors, Mr. Belgal and another man had robbed two people Mr. Belgal knew: Mr. Martínez and his wife, Yesica Torres.
The couple told the officers that they had gone clubbing in the Bronx on Oct. 2, 2023, with Mr. Belgal and the other man, whom they did not know, according to court filings.
While they were all sitting inside a car, Mr. Belgal’s accomplice pointed a gun from the driver’s seat at the couple, who were seated in the back, and demanded they hand over their jewelry, prosecutors said. Mr. Belgal, seated in the passenger’s seat, took their chains and rings, and about $1,100 in cash, before kicking them out of the car, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Belgal faced 18 criminal charges, but his lawyer, who argued at the time that Mr. Belgal was in the car but not involved in the robbery, negotiated a deal with prosecutors. Mr. Belgal pleaded guilty to just one charge: grand larceny in the fourth degree, a nonviolent felony.
He received five years of probation.
Mr. Martínez and Ms. Torres, who said they were scarred by Mr. Belgal’s betrayal, said they fled to the Dominican Republic after his arrest because they felt intimidated by him.
“We put him in jail, and he stayed in touch with us,” Ms. Torres, 35, said in a phone interview last week from the Dominican Republic, describing how Mr. Belgal had accused them of “snitching” on him. “He threatened us.”
The Times was unable to interview Mr. Belgal.
In a statement, the Legal Aid Society, which is representing Mr. Belgal, denied that he had “threatened or intimidated witnesses.”
A second arrest
Mr. Belgal continued to share the apartment with Ms. Reyes after his first arrest.
Soon, his partner and their son, a toddler at the time, arrived from the Dominican Republic and moved in, Ms. Reyes said.
Mr. Belgal later left his job selling carpets and the couple stopped paying rent at the end of 2024, said Ms. Reyes, who took them to housing court.
Around that time, Mr. Belgal also appeared to have turned to drug dealing, according to Manhattan prosecutors.
From January to June 2025, Mr. Belgal sold plastic bags of cocaine to an undercover officer during multiple exchanges near his building on Wadsworth Avenue, and on at least one occasion, a bag that also had fentanyl and heroin, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint.
Mr. Belgal was arrested in August 2025 and charged with 10 counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance. He pleaded not guilty to all counts; the case has not been resolved.
Some of Mr. Belgal’s neighbors said the arrests didn’t define him, adding that he was generally a kind person who helped older residents with their groceries and even took them to their doctor’s appointments.
“You knew he was often out of a job,” said Aldenia Casanova, 53, who said that Mr. Belgal replaced the locks on her door in his free time. “But he was very well-behaved and mild-mannered.”
When Mr. Belgal was released from custody after his second arrest, he never returned to the apartment. His partner and their son also moved out after a judge ordered them to vacate the premises because of the lapsed rent payments, records show.
Ms. Reyes said that she is owed seven months of rent, or about $7,000.
She criticized ICE’s conduct in the shooting, but said that Mr. Belgal’s run-ins with the law had ultimately exposed him.
“I’m not out for revenge,” Ms. Reyes said. “But he’s paying for the consequences of his actions.”
In a statement, the Legal Aid Society said that Mr. Belgal’s “past does not diminish his humanity, lessen the gravity of what happened to him or erase the profound trauma his child has experienced.”
Gunfire on a city street
ICE first tried to arrest Mr. Belgal last month.
When officers found him in the Bronx on Sept. 18, he ran into a nearby building and got away before he could be arrested, according to internal federal records.
Federal agents tried again 20 days later.
They fanned out in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles on Oct. 8 in the Marble Hill neighborhood, where Mr. Belgal had moved.
They spotted him at about 4 p.m. inside a gray Honda, parked in front of a fire hydrant on West 225th Street, his blinkers still on.
Moments later, surveillance footage shows, two officers run up to the driver’s side of his car, one with his gun pointed at Mr. Belgal, who puts his car in reverse and backs up a few feet.
Then, he accelerates, steering away from the officers, as one smashes the side window of the car and the other points his gun at the windshield, the video shows.
At least one officer fired multiple shots at Mr. Belgal’s vehicle, according to local and federal officials.
After the crash, Mr. Belgal emerged from his car, its back window shattered and its windshield pierced. His son, unharmed in the back seat, was crying. Mr. Belgal held his neck, and shouted in Spanish.
“He yelled, ‘Help me!’” Viely Herrera, 21, a bystander, said. “‘Help me! I’m dying!’”
ICE officers forced Mr. Belgal onto the pavement and handcuffed him, according to witnesses.
Minutes later, New York police officers carried Mr. Belgal into an S.U.V., and drove him to a hospital.
The aftermath
ICE officials argued that Mr. Belgal had refused orders to exit his vehicle and accused him of “weaponizing” his car.
The agency said that Mr. Belgal smashed his car into two ICE vehicles and tried to run over an officer, an account that has not been corroborated by the publicly available footage.
Federal officials said that they would release ICE body camera footage upon concluding their investigation. The Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark, said her office was investigating the shooting, which she described as “a matter of grave concern.”
Arianna Montero, the mother of Mr. Belgal’s son, said in a brief interview that her son had been “traumatized,” speaking little and having nightmares.
“Why fire so much at a single person, and a child?” she said.
Federal officials said that the officers did not know the boy was in the car.
Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said that officials believed Mr. Belgal had “indirect or direct knowledge” about a shooting that injured an off-duty customs officer in Manhattan in July 2025, but Mr. Mullin did not elaborate.
ICE officials said that Mr. Belgal had ties to a gang known as the Trinitarios, but offered no evidence. His lawyers said in filings that Mr. Belgal — whom they said most recently worked in construction — “vehemently” denied any gang affiliations.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security blamed New York’s so-called sanctuary laws, which they said prevented the city from transferring Mr. Belgal to ICE when he had been previously arrested.
“Make no mistake: ICE is not going anywhere, and we will continue to target the worst of the worst in sanctuary cities who refuse to jail criminal illegal aliens,” the agency said.
Mr. Belgal’s lawyers argued that his arrest was illegal because the officers arrested him without a valid warrant and without having started deportation proceedings against him.
His lawyers said he was semiconscious when he arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital the night of the shooting. Inside, doctors stopped his bleeding and, when he awoke, ICE officers handcuffed him to his bed, his lawyers said.
Mr. Belgal spent about five hours in the hospital and was discharged after doctors found that he was medically stable, the federal records say.
ICE officers moved him the next day to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison in Brooklyn.
His lawyers, who are suing for his release, said that he was being held without proper medical care while awaiting surgery that doctors had told him he needed to remove the bullet, adding that “the left side of his face is numb, and he can barely hear out of his left ear.”
Anusha Bayya, Hurubie Meko, Oishika Neogi, Wesley Parnell, Nate Schweber and Ed Shanahan contributed reporting from New York. Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting from the Dominican Republic. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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12) This Is What America’s Utility Bill Crisis Looks Like
Record heat and a rising demand for electricity are closing in on Oklahoma families trying to keep the lights on and the AC running.
By Eli Saslow, Photographs by Erin Schaff, Oct. 18, 2026
Genia Weitz and her husband, Daryl Mason, confined themselves to their living room to try to keep their electricity bill down.
Record heat and a rising demand for electricity are closing in on Oklahoma families trying to keep the lights on and the AC running.
Genia Weitz and her husband, Daryl Mason, confined themselves to their living room to try to keep their electricity bill down.
The worst of the heat was just beginning to lift when Genia Weitz, 58, walked into the stubborn Oklahoma sun last month and found the next emergency waiting in her mailbox. “Disconnection notice,” the letter began. She scanned her electric bill and saw a total balance of $1,340.96, far more than her monthly income. State rules prevented the power company from shutting off someone’s electricity when the heat index was above 101 degrees, but now it had dropped to 99 in September, and Weitz had nine days to pay.
She went back inside, where the window shades were drawn and heavy blankets hung across the halls and doorways to trap cool air. The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but for the past several months Weitz and her husband, Daryl Mason, had mostly confined themselves to their 300-square-foot living room, letting the rest of the house bake to save money on electricity. They had an air-conditioner mounted to the window that rattled all day. They had her oxygen machine plugged into the wall and his CPAP machine for sleep apnea hooked up in the corner.
Weitz had been sleeping on the couch while Mason slept in the recliner. Sometimes, their grandchildren would pile onto mattresses in the living room. On the most humid nights, the heat index outside barely dropped below 85, and their machines ran until morning.
“I can’t breathe if I don’t have my oxygen,” Weitz said, as she handed the bill to Mason. “I don’t think I’d last a single night.”
“We’d probably stroke out anyway in all this heat,” Mason said. “If we lose this room, we’re not going to make it.”
As fall sets in across the country, the bill is coming due for the hottest summer on record in the United States. The last three months were about three degrees above average, hotter than the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 and the heat dome of 2021, and tens of millions of people can’t afford to pay for the air-conditioning that helped keep them safe in the deadly heat. About one in six U.S. households is already behind on its utility bills, according to federal data. More than a dozen hot-weather states like Arizona, Georgia, Virginia and Oklahoma restrict shut-offs during the most dangerous heat, so disconnections tend to peak in October, when a climate crisis turns into a collection notice.
The Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO) had disconnected Weitz’s power before, so she knew the shut-off notice wasn’t an idle warning. PSO had told customers it was also facing rising costs: for fuel and equipment, for investments to update an aging power grid, for the rising demands of extreme weather and new large-load customers, including data centers being built for artificial intelligence. The company’s rates were still below the national average, and it attributed much of the summer’s higher bills to temperatures that kept air-conditioners running around the clock.
Weitz studied her bill and saw she was paying nearly $500 each month to live in a single room. “Turn the lamp off, Daryl,” she said. “Stop running the ceiling fan.”
She’d read on Facebook that power companies sometimes offered 30 days of relief to people with serious medical conditions, so she printed a form to bring to her doctor. “Please be advised that a life-threatening situation does not cause the debt to be forgiven, but merely postponed to a later date,” it read.
Their car was broken down in the driveway, so she boarded a shuttle bus and looked out the window at the faded brick buildings of McAlester. It was a town of 18,000 people built on a coal rush and sustained by an ammunition plant and the state penitentiary. Weitz had always known it as a hard place to live, but after five decades she also knew almost everyone, including the shuttle driver, Sondra Beck.
“Never thought I’d need to see the doctor just to keep my lights on,” Weitz said.
“I owe $700 by Friday,” Beck said. “Everybody’s getting shut off lately.”
They had worked together for several years at a nearby chicken plant, where Beck was a supervisor and Weitz worked on the deboning line. Weitz had stood in the refrigerated plant and deboned as many as a dozen birds a minute, hundreds an hour, thousands in an average 12-hour shift. She dug her fingers under the meat, peeling each fillet off the rib cage until her wrists went numb and her fingers swelled inside her gloves. Now she had arthritis in both hands, two artificial knees, a damaged back and $860 a month in government disability payments. She missed her job. She missed the chill of the factory floor.
The shuttle stopped at the clinic. Weitz tried the front door, but it was locked. A sign on the window said the office was closed for lunch. She went back to the shuttle, took out her phone and eventually texted her eldest daughter.
“You know I hate to ask,” she wrote.
Weitz’s daughter Shenia Mick put on a business suit and a necklace and left home in the dark to drive to her office in Tulsa. Mick, 36, had always believed in showing up early for her job at GasTech Engineering, but lately she was stretching her hours from 6 a.m. until early evening. What her bosses attributed to ambition and work ethic was also basic math. Her office was air-conditioned, and somebody else paid the bill.
Her house had been dangerously hot for much of the summer, as her two aging wall units failed to keep up with 17 consecutive days of 100-degree heat and high humidity. She pushed the AC to its limit around the clock and ran up electric bills of more than $500 each month, but her indoor thermometer rarely dipped below 80 degrees. She set up fans in her bedroom and still awoke sweating in the night. Once, she tried to cook dinner on the stove and became dizzy and then nauseated, suffering from what she believed to be heat stroke. Her boyfriend got her into the shower, and the ice-cold water felt hot against her skin.
She worked in her office until lunch, when she saw a text message from her mother in McAlester. Mick was already helping to pay for her mother’s water bill and car insurance, and here was a photograph of her mother’s electric bill.
“These numbers are getting crazy,” Weitz wrote.
“It’s bad here, too,” Mick wrote. “I’m constantly paying for something. I’m at work right now.”
“You’re doing so good. I’m proud of you.”
Her mother said it often and to everyone: Her eldest daughter had escaped McAlester and become the town’s most unlikely success story. Mick had dropped out of high school, run away from home several times, and returned with two children and a DUI before she turned 18. She lost years to alcohol and heroin before going into liver failure, and then she’d walked out of a Tulsa hospital in her mid-20s and somehow started clawing her way back: to a methadone clinic every day, to a G.E.D., to a manager’s job at IHOP. She signed up for college classes and went to night school for seven years, earning three associate degrees and eventually a job at GasTech.
She started in the shop, wearing T-shirts and jeans as she helped build equipment for natural gas plants, until a manager noticed Mick was organizing and running a team like a seasoned boss. The manager offered Mick a job on the business side, lent her a wardrobe of professional clothes and helped her pay back years’ worth of court fines. Now she was a senior buyer in the purchasing department, earning more than $80,000 a year to negotiate deals with suppliers around the world, with a LinkedIn profile her mother showed off around McAlester. She had her hair highlighted, her facial piercings removed, her suit jacket tailored. “A results-driven professional,” the profile read.
But lately it seemed to Mick as if the reward for so much transformation was more of the same bills, the same stress, the same debts that kept accumulating as she paid almost $1,500 for her own rent and just as much each month to help support her family in McAlester.
In August, she made three separate payments to PSO for her own electric bill, sending $150, $194 and then $101.42. After she became dizzy from heat in the kitchen, she borrowed money from an online lender to buy an extra portable AC unit for $379. The unit cooled parts of the house but drove up her electricity costs. Now she had another bill from PSO, and she would have to borrow to pay that balance, too.
Mick texted her mother with a photo of her own bill: $589.51. “Avoid disconnection,” the bill read. “Pay at least $169.59 to keep your power on.”
“I’m paying this every month, and it’s still so hot in our house,” Mick wrote.
“That’s way too much,” Weitz wrote.
“Is there anyone else who can help?” Mick asked her.
The heat held in the 90s. The window unit kept rattling in the living room. Weitz went back to the clinic and had her doctor sign and mail the medical form, certifying that losing power would be life-threatening. That bought her another 30 days, but her oxygen machine kept running and her debt continued to grow. One afternoon, she showed her electric bill to her daughter-in-law, Autumn Cooper, 24.
“I still don’t know what I’m going to do,” Weitz said.
“Even looking at that number gives me a heart attack,” Cooper said. “I’d panic if I was dealing with those big amounts.”
Instead of being billed hundreds of dollars each month, Cooper had switched to a prepaid plan with PSO so she could make small payments to her account every few days. As long as her account had a positive balance, she had power to cool her house, wash laundry and cook for her five children.
For the last month, she had been washing dishes by hand in the dark and still burning through an average of $12.29 in electricity each day as she monitored her balance constantly. Whenever it dipped below zero, PSO cut her off within a few days. She had received more than a dozen low-balance warnings over the course of the summer. Now she checked the latest balance on her phone and showed it to Weitz: $2.46, enough for a few more hours of power.
“See, that would stress me out even more,” Weitz said. “It’s hanging over your head every minute.”
“I can always come up with a few bucks,” Cooper said. “But every day is a hustle.”
Cooper was going to school to pursue a nursing certification during the week while her husband stayed home to care for their children — a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, 2-year-old twins and an infant. On weekends, she worked back-to-back double shifts at the New Hope Retirement and Care Center, where she earned $16 an hour to bathe, feed and change residents in the memory care wing. She scraped together a little extra money by selling used baby gear online, borrowing from friends and doing odd jobs for a construction company. If everything went exactly right, she made just enough to keep her power on. One day in July, she sent PSO three separate payments: $7.15 in the morning, $3.65 a few hours later and another $3.14 before she went to bed.
She had come to believe that any real solution would take more than a few dollars at a time, so she went online to start researching electricity charges. Oklahoma was emerging as a major hub for data centers, luring companies like Google and Meta with the promise of tax breaks and cheap land in an effort to become “the high-tech data center capital of the world,” Gov. Kevin Stitt had said in 2025. One proposed data center outside McAlester would use more electricity each week at full capacity than all the homes in McAlester used in an entire year.
PSO was planning to invest $1.2 billion in new power generation and storage to keep up with the rising demands of a growing population, new homes and new businesses. A new state law aimed to make the largest new consumers pay their share, but some of the costs of adding more power had already fallen on ordinary customers.
PSO had cut off power 58 times for every 100 residential customers in 2024, the most recent year with federal data. It was the highest rate of any investor-owned utility in the country, and the company said most of those disconnections were on a small number of prepaid accounts like Cooper’s that shut off when they dipped below zero and then came back on within minutes of payment. On and then off again. On and then off.
PSO had promised to waive some late fees on high summer bills and offer extensions and payment plans. The company had written a public letter to customers saying “affordability is important” and “we do not take any change to customer bills lightly,” but Cooper went on social media and found hundreds of Oklahomans complaining about a similar crisis.
“My bill is unreal. I guess I’ll just burn up.”
“I use a flashlight on my phone before I turn a light on, and I pay $100 a week.”
“Single mom here. Cried on the phone with them last week because mine is so high.”
“My monthly bill is almost 900. I know it’s hot, but this is like an AC bill on Venus.”
Cooper read through the complaints in mid-September and started a petition online to demand more affordable and transparent electric bills. “We, the customers of PSO, are speaking up,” she wrote. “We want our voices heard and our concerns addressed.”
Now she sat in Weitz’s living room and checked the petition on her phone. It had 24 signatures.
She switched to her PSO account. “Urgent: low balance warning,” the app read.
“Here we go again,” Cooper said. “I could be waking up in the dark tomorrow.”
“They might cut you off before me,” Weitz said.
“Guess I have to figure this out,” Cooper said.
They got into Cooper’s car and drove into downtown, passing the cluster of churches that were losing members even as more people came to their doors for help. Cooper watched her gas gauge dip below the empty line as she pulled up to the post office. She had cut a deal online to sell 30 baby outfits to a buyer in Texas for a total of $10, but she wouldn’t get paid until the clothes arrived.
“How long until it gets there?” she asked the clerk.
“Two days, maybe three.”
“Nothing faster?”
“You could overnight it, but that’s not going to be cheap.”
Cooper shook her head and went outside. “It’s time to get creative,” Weitz said. She knew people in town who hired drivers for odd jobs and businesses that bought scrap metal or paid cash for gift cards. She knew all of the aid organizations in town and how much they gave to whom. Just a few weeks earlier, she had gotten almost $500 in energy assistance from a federal program for low-income families.
“Let’s try the churches,” Weitz said.
“I already feel guilty about not going to church,” Cooper said. “I don’t want to ask for help.”
“You have a better plan?”
Cooper stood in the parking lot for a moment and then got back into the car. They drove to the charity Shared Blessings, where the administrator said it had resources to help 10 people with electric bills each month, and Cooper’s request was the 43rd. They continued to All Saints Episcopal Church, where a woman came outside with her cellphone pressed to one ear and waved them away. “Sorry, all out,” she said. They walked a few blocks to Mike’s Club, a thrift store where the owner, Mike Brown, sometimes took money out of his register for families in need.
“I’ve got employees who’ve had their power cut,” Brown said. “The whole town’s going dark. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
Cooper thanked him and went back to her car. She started to drive home, but Weitz pointed to a building up the street. “Last stop,” she said.
Cooper groaned but then turned into the parking lot for First Baptist Church. A woman at the front desk greeted them with two bottles of water and a package of snack foods. “Let me guess — electric bill?” she said.
“I really just need maybe $10, $20 to keep my lights on,” Cooper said.
“I get it,” the woman said. “Let me talk to the pastor.”
Cooper and Weitz waited as she disappeared into the back of the church. A few minutes later, the pastor came out to the lobby, shaking his head. “My bill last month was $1,800, and I live in a double-wide,” he said. “We’re all out for the day. Will you try us again?”
“Sure,” Cooper said. “I’ll be in the same situation tomorrow.”
She drove back to Weitz’s house, parked out front and checked her account. “To prevent disconnection, please make a payment immediately,” the app read.
“The kids might stay over here with you for a few nights,” Cooper said.
“Of course,” Weitz said, and they walked through the dark house, past the hanging blankets and back into the living room.
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13) Food Pantry Patrons Face ‘Too Much Month at the End of Their Money’
Food inflation, gas prices and cuts to federal benefits have created a “perfect storm” for food pantries, which have become vital parts of the family budget for millions of Americans.
By Audra D. S. Burch, Reporting from Immokalee, Fla., Oct. 18, 2026
“People are hungry, and they are scared,” said Chris Manno, who volunteers and shops at a food pantry in Virginia. Eze Amos for The New York Times
Every Thursday, Chris Manno volunteers at a food pantry near the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Waynesboro, Va., where she helps guide the families waiting to shop for free groceries.
Then she gets in line herself, sitting in a white lawn chair until the doors open.
For two years, Ms. Manno has shopped at the Lifeworks Project’s River City Bread Basket. Then this summer, her federal food benefits were cut by about $300 a month in an unforgiving economy, and her trips to the pantry went from supplement to necessity.
“People are hungry, and they are scared,” said Ms. Manno, 57, who is on medical leave from her job at a nonprofit and shares an apartment with her 22-year-old disabled son. “I am here because my food budget kept getting tighter and tighter.”
Rising grocery bills and dwindling federal food benefits — the first driven by tariffs and war, the second by government budget cuts enacted, in part, by President Trump’s signature tax-cut-and-spending law — are pushing struggling families to food pantries to help bridge the gap.
An NBC News survey this month of 48 of the largest food banks — representing 35 states and Washington, D.C. — found that nearly three-quarters reported increases in the number of people coming to their sites over the past year. The rise is coinciding with midterm elections that could prove to be a referendum on Mr. Trump’s economic stewardship.
“We are sitting at food insecurity levels that are the highest they have been since the Great Recession,” said Linda Nageotte, president and chief operating officer of Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 250 food banks. “Prices for everyday basic necessities are increasing faster than incomes, and the result for too many families, is that there is just too much month at the end of their money.”
The recent jump in food pantry traffic sits atop elevated demand from pandemic-era disruptions and inflation that had already widened the type of families dependent on help. Assistance that was once reserved for emergencies has become indispensable for many.
“The role of a food bank has gone from being a real lifeline in the most extreme cases to being an important part of the social services infrastructure of many American communities,” said Richard LeBer, president and chief executive of the Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, which serves about 300,000 people monthly in five counties.
He said the food bank served about 20 percent more families this August than last August.
One Friday this spring in Albuquerque, N.M., Jacqueline Marquez, 29, was running low on food and needed help, so she drove for the first time to a food distribution site.
Ms. Marquez sat in the drive-through line for about 90 minutes, waiting for a box of fresh fruit and vegetables to be loaded into her minivan. She remembered feeling overwhelmed by the thought that so much of her financial circumstances was tied to distant geopolitics out of her control.
It has been, she said, “a season of struggle.”
Ms. Marquez works part-time as a cooking instructor and is looking for a full-time job now that her youngest attends day care. She needs higher-quality foods for a daughter with severe food allergies. Child support and about $700 in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits go only so far, as the price of gas — about $4.39 per gallon in New Mexico — and other essentials rise.
She has canceled doctor appointments too far from her home, she said, “because I have to ration my gas.”
Even then, she said, “sometimes I run out before the month is over.”
Overall, consumer prices are up 3.7 percent from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food costs jumped 2.5 percent over the past 12 months and about 30 percent from 2019 to 2025.
The result: Almost half of Americans struggle to pay for at least one of their basic needs, a study by the Pew Research Center found. Nearly three-quarters of lower-income adults reported difficulty covering the cost of groceries, housing, medical care or daily transportation.
Compounding all that, the Trump administration cut about $1 billion in federal aid for anti-hunger programs last year, then trimmed SNAP funding — to cut waste and fraud, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said.
SNAP participation fell by about 5 million people from July 2025 to June 2026, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzed federal and state data. That has added pressure to charitable food groups.
“It’s the perfect storm of long-term financial strain, disruptions related to SNAP, higher cost of living and wages not keeping pace,” said Kari Diener, chief executive of the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank in Virginia, who has seen demand increase by about 40 percent over the last four years.
Kyle Waide, president and chief executive of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, said the demand for food assistance within the metro Atlanta and North Georgia network had increased by about 70 percent over five years, most notably after the expiration of pandemic-era benefits.
He added that much of the demand was among households that earn too much money to qualify for federal programs. The food bank is serving about 275,000 households per month.
The most recent increases are not being caught in national statistics. The Trump administration decided a year ago to no longer track hunger. The last federal report showed about 48 million Americans experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024.
Data from the 211 network, a national information and referral service for social services and other assistance, offers a more recent if narrow snapshot. The United Way, which supports the 211 network and handles about 60 percent of the referrals, reported at least a 20 percent spike in requests for food assistance last year in multiple states, including Louisiana, Texas, Maine, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Heather Black, who leads United Way Worldwide 211 System Strategy, said some who reached out to 211 acknowledged they were racking up credit card debt to buy groceries.
On Tuesdays, Celia Rosas wakes up an hour or two before sunrise to take a couple of worn lawn chairs to a nearby church parking lot in Immokalee, Fla., to secure spots for her and a neighbor in the front of the weekly food pantry line.
Twice a month, she heads to a drive-through food pantry pitched on the grounds of a rodeo where she picks up two prepackaged bags of chicken, fruits and vegetables. And, on Saturday mornings, if her food is low, Ms. Rosas visits another local church for ingredients to make a big pot of spaghetti — pasta, tomato sauce and ground beef.
“Coming to the lines was hard at first because I had never had to do that,” said Ms. Rosas, 57, a third-generation tomato picker and packer who was forced to quit after open-heart surgery three years ago.
Now, Ms. Rosas and her husband, a cancer survivor, are getting by on his $1,200 disability check. It’s not enough, so Ms. Rosas is looking for part-time work and relying on food pantries.
“I see so many people in the lines,” she said, “that I know I am not alone.”
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