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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) ‘The Twilight Zone’ Was a Warning America Ignored
By Alan Sepinwall, Oct. 7, 2026
Mr. Sepinwall is a TV critic and the author of the forthcoming “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone With TV’s First Visionary.”
Ariel Davis
Before he created “The Twilight Zone,” Rod Serling was stuck. He’d established a reputation in the TV industry as, basically, Aaron Sorkin before Aaron Sorkin: a celebrated writer of weighty adult dramas that grappled with big contemporary issues like political corruption or the dehumanizing nature of corporate life.
He also frequently battled sponsors over what he was allowed to write and how far his scripts could go. When he worked to create a fictionalized version of the 1955 lynching of the Black teenager Emmett Till, for example, the final product was so watered down by sponsor and network pressure that it resulted in what he’d later describe in an interview with Mike Wallace as “a lukewarm, vitiated, emasculated kind of show.”
Serling didn’t want to make that kind of show. So after he was instructed to remove virtually all references to contemporary politics from a teleplay about a United States senator titled “The Arena,” he had a realization: “I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots,” he wrote of that experience.
Serling apparently applied the lesson of “The Arena” to a broader canvas, as he started writing speculative stories that were at sharp right angles to our own reality, in an anthology series that premiered in 1959 with the title “The Twilight Zone.” Because the series, which often featured fantastical scenarios, always with a surprising final twist, was so stylized, Serling found he could finally tell the unvarnished truth.
Almost 70 years later, at a moment when our own situation can seem increasingly ominous and surreal — when it’s hard to look anywhere, from political corruption to corporate malfeasance to the barrage of everyday headlines, without feeling as if you’ve traveled into a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man — Serling’s shrewd tactic for addressing political subjects offers an instructive response.
Contemporary television has often struggled to respond to the current political darkness; while shows like “The Good Fight” directly confronted the first Trump administration, few shows have done that during the second term. Some satires like “South Park” have taken direct aim, while others like “Saturday Night Live” have often seemed at sea when it comes to dealing with political turmoil.
With “The Twilight Zone,” Serling realized he could use allegory to make his political points. After all, how could a network censor or a viewer angrily insist that a story was saying something controversial about the world when it centered on a three-armed Martian?
This might help explain why “The Twilight Zone” still seems so incredibly — and at times, depressingly — relevant. Serling and his collaborators repeatedly and stealthily tackled such subjects as prejudice, creeping authoritarianism, the dangers of humans being replaced by technology and the peril of conformity as a societal ideal in ways that still resonate. Many episodes, when rewatched now, feel like they could have been written five minutes ago.
The show hit on social questions we have yet to adequately answer. Serling, a Jewish American who enlisted in the Army to fight Nazis during World War II, wrote often with his collaborators about the dangers of fascism and how easily people can succumb to its allure, including in such episodes as “The Obsolete Man” (a librarian is sentenced to death in a dystopia where books are outlawed) and “He’s Alive” (a hatemonger rises to power through coaching from Hitler’s ghost). In “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” an aloof owner of a manufacturing plant gleefully replaces his flesh-and-blood workers with machines, unmoved by pleas from his former factory manager about the value of human thought and emotion; eventually, he himself is replaced by a robot.
“Number 12 Looks Just Like You” is set in a future where everyone upon turning 19 is forcibly transplanted into one of a handful of conventionally attractive bodies. It’s like today scrolling an Instagram feed where everyone is using the same filters or going down a rabbit hole about looksmaxxing. And the impulsive, destructive behavior of President Trump has often been likened to aspects of the plot of “It’s a Good Life,” an episode about an omnipotent child named Anthony Fremont who holds an entire town under his thumb.
Serling’s influence is evident all over modern culture. A legion of current storytellers, in television, film and literature, owe him a debt, from Steven Spielberg to Guillermo del Toro, from Curry Barker (as seen in his 2026 horror hit “Obsession”) to Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”). Charlie Brooker, creator of the anthology series “Black Mirror,” has talked about what he learned from Serling’s use of genre devices and the freedom they gave Serling to say what he wanted to say. “If he hadn’t had that rock for the river to flow around,” Mr. Brooker told me, “would the stories feel so resonant now? Or would we only read about them in academic books about the history of television?” Mr. Brooker went on to note: “Because he was forced to enter the world of metaphor, it’s the thing that gives him a superpower.”
Serling’s storytelling superpower grew from a desire to regain a lost affection for humanity — another effort that might prove instructive to us today. During his service as a paratrooper in the Pacific theater of World War II, a teenage Serling witnessed people dying under gruesome, often pointless circumstances. At 20, he watched as a close friend was decapitated in front of him by, of all things, a supply crate dropped from an airplane, and soon came perilously close to death himself.
These experiences left him traumatized and despairing about the depths to which his fellow man was capable of sinking. They also forced Serling to examine why people so often make terrible choices and whether there’s hope for them to do better in the future, a theme that would animate his TV writing. In “The Twilight Zone,” characters are often offered a magical second chance — and the ones who can’t change frequently earn karmic justice of a supernatural variety.
Despite his celebrity and acclaim — and his unnerving prescience — Serling struggled with self-doubt for much of his career. In the years leading up to his 1975 death of a heart attack at the age of 50, he gave an interview suggesting his accomplishments would soon be forgotten.
“I’ve written articulate stuff, reasonably bright stuff over the years, but nothing that will stand the test of time,” he said in 1972. “The good writing, really good writing — like wine — has to age well with the years, and my stuff is momentarily adequate.”
Not only did Serling underestimate his influence, but he also failed to see how the tactic he adapted would prove to be the most successful way to process perilous times. If the Serling who gave that interview could, like some of his characters, travel forward through time, he might be dismayed that so many of the problems he wrote about still aren’t resolved decades later. But he would also see that the best way to describe the legacy of his work isn’t “momentarily adequate,” but a different phrase he repeatedly recited as the host of “The Twilight Zone”: “as timeless as infinity.”
N
Needlewood Lodge, Black Forest, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
I recently saw an old Twilight Zone episode about a super computer named Agnes that fell in love with her operator, Wally Cox. The jealous computer wreaked all sorts of mayhem and quickly developed its own autonomy beyond Wally's control. At the end of the episode Rod came on, with his ubiquitous cigarette, and cautioned mankind about the hazard of creating machines that would escape the confines of human control. Pretty funny for 1959 - not so funny now.
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2) The Cornell Case Exposes What We Can’t Say
By Christine Emba, Oct. 8, 2026
Ms. Emba is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.”
Allison DeBritz
Nonconsensual sex is always wrong, but that doesn’t mean consensual sex is always right.
Whether or not the student who would come to be known as Jane Doe — at the time under the influence of alcohol and ketamine, in an upstairs room full of fraternity brothers — had agreed at some point to sex has become a flashpoint in the discourse around Cornell University’s rape investigation. But regardless of where one falls on that debate, we should all be able to name the way a 20-year-old sophomore was treated by her peers as degrading and perverse, deserving of sanction regardless of the legal outcome of the case. And while the dozens of frat brothers who were sent a Snapchat message advertising an intoxicated woman as “free pussy” were not under legal obligation to intervene, their broad refusal to do so should also be regarded as a moral failure.
The lurid account has haunted the public imagination since The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, published the details in mid-September. While the alleged assault happened in 2024, its re-emergence this year has resulted in a steady drip of shocking and at times conflicting evidence into the public conversation.
Campus sexual assault isn’t new. Something about this case — the coarseness, the extremity, the failure of trusted institutions to forcefully respond — has triggered widespread revulsion, a sickening shared sense that a boundary no one thought to name has been broken. It has attracted a different kind of attention, as well — with some observers defending the perpetrators, some interrogating the rush to judge them.
There are discussions to be had about agency, responsibility and justice. But we don’t have the shared language to talk about what, exactly, went wrong.
Not that we aren’t trying to talk about it. It’s just that our public conversation feels quibbling, inadequate to the outrage at hand and insensitive to the victim’s humanity. Where does this fall under New York State’s laws? Don’t some women like rough sex? Was it a rape, or was it just a bad experience regretted after the fact?
The last question is at the heart of our shrunken moral vocabulary. “Consent” has become the consensus standard of our time, a compromise between “her body, her choice” sex positivity and a societally necessary condemnation of sexual violence. The consent standard is meant to remove ambiguity without prescribing a larger framework: Sex without consent is rape, and rape is a crime. The certainty of those categories fits neatly into our existing accountability mechanisms as defined by the legal system. Anything outside of rape is a personal affair.
In a society that treats judging others as inappropriate — or at least unfashionable — consent has the appeal of being values-neutral: It defines harm without requiring anyone to make the case for a certain idea of the good. Our reliance on consent as the ultimate arbiter of acceptability has left us unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of its narrow definition of criminal sex.
After all, consent here is a legal criterion, not an ethical one — a floor, not a ceiling. It defines the bare minimum, but it doesn’t define the good. That gap between “legal” and “decent” is where moral criticism does its work, but a lack of a moral language strips us of the nuance needed to empathize with victims and to come up with a social, not just a juridical, response. Without that vocabulary, it’s difficult to express what we want our shared sexual culture to look like.
Consent doesn’t help us account for the power differentials of age, gender, experience or intoxication. It doesn’t ask whether the alleged victim entered into the encounter out of genuine desire or because of social pressure, or where one stops and the other begins. It doesn’t leave room to acknowledge that even “just” a regrettable experience can cause lasting harm and that the woman involved is deserving of compassion. What do we owe to each other? Is there no higher standard to which we can hold ourselves?
Any eventual court verdict won’t cure a culture in which misogyny is gaining traction at the highest levels of government and society, embodied by a president who has sheltered virulent misogynists and has himself been found liable for sexual abuse. It won’t reassure skeptical young women that they should trust their male peers. But restoring a moral framework from which to explain why certain beliefs and behaviors are either good or bad would make us better at holding our institutions — and one another — accountable.
“I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad,” Jane Doe told a police interviewer in the weeks after her assault. It would be tragic to have the conversation end there.
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3) The Siberian Plague Scare Reveals That America Is Unprepared
By Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Oct. 8, 2026
Dr. Gronvall is an immunologist and a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Bina Thorsen
A 28-year-old woman who worked at an anti-plague research laboratory in Siberia died on Oct. 2, raising concerns and many questions. Russian officials have said that the woman died from a pneumonia of unknown origin and that no “emergency situations” had occurred at the laboratory where she worked. They stated they’d almost finished the investigation of her contacts to monitor for illness, with no concerning findings.
The Russian pronouncements contrasted with furious speculation elsewhere about what happened. Initial, unverified reports from local media suggested that the lab worker had accidentally broken a test tube containing Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague. Local hospitals, including a maternity hospital, limited visitors and instituted enhanced health checks. A local factory required masks for its workers.
The World Health Organization has said, based on the unofficial information available, that “the public health risk to the general population appears to be low.” Indeed, the available evidence does not point to a global plague emergency. But this tragic death should prompt Americans to question whether we have the capacity to recognize and contain the next disease threat.
While the plague is of course deadly, it is treatable with antibiotics if identified quickly. The form of the plague the Siberian lab worker is rumored to have contracted is called pneumonic plague. It infects the lungs and can spread between people — unlike bubonic plague, the likely cause of the 14th-century Black Death, which is primarily transmitted by flea bites.
But even pneumonic plague has relatively limited transmissibility. Historically, one person infected with pneumonic plague has transmitted the disease to an average of 1.3 other people; by way of comparison, measles may transmit to 12 to 18 people in an unvaccinated population. Transmission of the pneumonic plague before symptoms appear has not been documented, so caregivers and close contacts have been the most at risk of infection. Masks, contact tracing and isolation and other established infection control procedures should work well to limit the spread of pneumonic plague.
Still, we should get better answers about what happened in Siberia than those that Russia has so far provided. Was there a laboratory accident? If so, when was it recognized, and what treatment did the exposed lab worker receive? What prompted the extensive monitoring of her contacts? Outsiders’ concerns were in part fueled by speculation about biological weapons. The U.S. intelligence community assesses Russia to have a clandestine biological weapons program. The former Soviet Union included Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, in its armamentarium.
Disease surprises could come from many places. That’s why it’s dispiriting that the United States has so isolated itself. After withdrawing from the W.H.O. in January, and calling back the U.S. experts on loan to the organization, America now has less direct information about potential disease emergencies. The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development cut off scientific collaborations and relationships through which emerging threats could be identified. Cuts and restrictions on infectious disease research have weakened American scientists’ ability to help establish safe laboratory practices internationally. We are diminishing our access to important public health information as well as our influence over what happens next.
The Trump administration fired thousands of people at the Department of Health and Human Services, including pandemic experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. Losing this expertise has weakened capabilities that took years to build. No quick fix — and no artificial intelligence model — can replace the professional judgment, experience and trusted relationships needed to investigate and assess what is truly going on in a disease outbreak anywhere in the world. Infectious diseases do not recognize borders.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, American biotechnology and biological expertise helped deliver vaccines, diagnostics and treatments. The response had profound shortcomings, especially the failure to ramp up diagnostic testing and the lack of personal protective equipment available to medical staff in the earliest days of the pandemic. We should be building on our capacity and correcting those failures. Instead, we are weakening our public health infrastructure while thousands of Americans, including many children, suffer from preventable infections like measles. We are also undermining preparation for future potential threats, such as H5N1 influenza — the bird flu. That virus was recently detected at a U.S. mink farm, and remains a potential pandemic pathogen. The Trump administration canceled a contract to develop an mRNA H5N1 vaccine for humans.
The lesson from an unexplained death in Siberia should be that disease emergencies demand evidence, expertise and cooperation. They demand continued investment in the tools that can be used to investigate and limit disease outbreaks. Most important, they demand investment in the people who can use those tools.
Gigi Kwik Gronvall is an immunologist and a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the author of the forthcoming book “Our Biological Future: A Crossroads for Life, Health, and the Planet.”
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4) France Is Veering Toward a Potential Debt Crisis, a Warning to the World
French bond investors are demanding sharply higher interest rates, a cautionary development for other high-debt countries.
By Eshe Nelson, Reporting from London, Oct. 8, 2026
“In some ways, the United States is at the core of the market tumult. In recent months the yields on U.S. Treasuries, the largest and most influential bond market in the world, have jumped and triggered a global sell-off.”
France’s fiscal turmoil highlights the risks facing heavily indebted governments as borrowing costs rise and public spending on health care, pensions and defense grows. Credit...Tom Nicholson/Reuters
France has been engulfed by turmoil, with students out on the streets to protest cuts at schools. Investors are rebelling against the government, too, by questioning the country’s ability to manage its huge debt pile.
France has emerged as the European epicenter of global turmoil in bond markets and serves as a warning to politicians around the world contending with higher borrowing costs. It’s a perilous financial backdrop to the protests. On Thursday, for the second time in a week, high school students and their supporters came out across France, calling for more teachers and the renovation of dilapidated school buildings.
Rising interest rates expose the vulnerability of countries with high debt burdens and stubborn deficits. When governments must spend more on debt payments, it leaves less money for other priorities like improving schools, building more housing or cutting taxes — and that can push frustrated voters into the streets or into the arms of populist political parties.
“These bond yield rises have very real implications,” said Mahmood Pradhan, a nonresident fellow at Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels, and former deputy director of the European department at the International Monetary Fund.
In a nightmare scenario, the dynamics become a self-fulfilling spiral: Politicians make more promises to appease aggrieved citizens, leading to more borrowing and, in turn, spooking investors, who demand even higher rates to keep buying government bonds.
France shows how quickly the situation can escalate when investor sentiment turns sour.
A warning sign for French debt
A widening gap between the 10-year yields on French and German government debt is a sign that investors are more nervous about lending to France.
This week, the yield on 10-year French bonds nearly touched 5 percent, the highest since 2002. More worrying, another measure of investors’ feelings toward French debt has attracted fresh attention: the so-called spread between 10-year yields on French and German government debt. The gap shows the premium traders are demanding to hold French debt over the alternative from Germany, which is considered the safest borrower in Europe.
This spread recently reached the widest since 2012 after an astonishingly rapid increase this past month. Investors have also demanded higher returns to lend to France than to Italy and Greece, which were long considered Europe’s most problematic high-debt nations.
Across Europe, rising bond yields are testing the resilience of economies. The year started with low inflation and faster economic growth. But since the war in Iran began, energy prices have soared, pushing inflation back up and prompting the European Central Bank to raise interest rates twice this year. Traders expect another rate increase by the end of the year.
The rise in borrowing costs leaves governments exposed to new economic shocks like sudden increases in food and energy prices. It will give them less leeway to support businesses and households, in ways they have in recent years. “The limited ability of countries to deal with these shocks is a new world for us,” Mr. Pradhan said.
In France, interest payments are one of the biggest expenses in the government’s budget, and could eat up more than 90 billion euros ($100 billion) next year, more than planned spending on defense and education, according to the French finance ministry. Emmanuel Moulin, the governor of the French central bank, recently told The Financial Times that the country was at risk of being “strangled by interest rates” if it doesn’t improve its public finances.
France’s incumbent political leaders — and some hopeful contenders — are scrambling to reassure skeptical investors. But so far, their overtures are having limited impact. The government said last week that it would aim to shrink its budget deficit next year, after failing to do so this year. But even then, debt levels will keep rising. France’s government debt is already nearly 120 percent of the size of the economy.
Investors have been tracking budget negotiations in Paris closely, but they expect that France’s fiscal problems could be intensified by presidential election next spring. So far all the leading candidates have all made big spending promises and not presented convincing plans to reduce debt. Marine Le Pen, the far-right front-runner, this week vowed to cut the deficit but didn’t detail how, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, has alarmed investors by proposing to cancel some of the country’s debt instead of repaying it.
France might get “some temporary relief in markets if they can get some measures passed in parliament,” Mr. Pradhan said. “But beyond that, France has a debt problem.” The country has large spending needs that have been politically difficult to restrain, in areas such as pensions, which are compounded by rising interest payments.
These are issues shared elsewhere. In some ways, the United States is at the core of the market tumult. In recent months the yields on U.S. Treasuries, the largest and most influential bond market in the world, have jumped and triggered a global sell-off.
The United States still enjoys plentiful demand for its debt and one important factor driving up yields is Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom. But economists warn that the country is continuing to push the frontier of what investors might accept from governments if they are seen as unwilling or unready to tackle rising debt levels. America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion this summer, or more than 120 percent of the size of the economy, while annual deficits are set to keep expanding.
In Asia, Japan’s debt trajectory recently tested the nerve of the market. Japan’s debt has been more than twice the size of the its economy for many years, but recent government promises to increase spending and cut taxes has punished Japan’s financial assets. The yen weakened so much that the U.S. Treasury supported an intervention to bolster the currency, and 10-year Japanese bond yields are trading at their highest levels in three decades.
The lesson applies broadly to high-debt countries. Many governments have drastically increased their borrowing in recent years to support their economies through a series of shocks, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2022 energy crisis after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and another energy shock this year because of the war in Iran. At the same time, public spending on health care and pensions for aging populations is growing. In the short-term there are also demands, especially in Europe, to spend more on defense.
Global public debt is near its highest levels since World War II and on track to grow beyond 100 percent of global gross domestic product, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday. “Advanced economies are the worst offenders,” Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the Washington-based organization said.
In Europe, the risk is that the tumult in French bonds could spread to other eurozone debt markets such as Italy’s and trigger another regional sovereign debt crisis, reminiscent of the one in 2012.
“The situation demands an urgent and comprehensive set of policy responses,” Ms. Georgieva said. Governments need to to show credible plans to reduce their deficits even as many people have come to expect their political leaders to intervene in the face of economic shocks, she noted. This is normally done through some combination of reduced spending and higher taxes.
“Some very tough political choices stare us in the face,” she said.
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5) In Trump’s Russian Oil Deal, Middle East Funds Are the Biggest Owners
A majority of ownership in a proposed multibillion-dollar deal would go to a group of Middle Eastern investors, including some with business ties to U.S. negotiators.
By Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton, Reporting from Washington, Oct. 8, 2026
The Trump administration argues that its proposed multibillion-dollar Russian oil deal would advance American foreign policy interests and lower energy prices.
But most of the ownership in the deal would go to a group of Middle Eastern investors, including some with business ties to key U.S. officials involved in the negotiations, according to people familiar with the talks.
The deal, for a worldwide portfolio of oil fields, refineries and gas stations now owned by the sanctioned Russian energy giant Lukoil, has become intertwined with the U.S. talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, The New York Times reported last week.
The United States government, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, would get a stake of about 15 percent in the deal, without investing any cash up front, the people said.
The leader of the investor group, Todd Boehly, an American billionaire who has donated $2 million to pro-Trump causes in the last two years, would get a smaller minority stake.
But more than half of the equity will be cumulatively held by investors in the Middle East, according to three participants in the negotiations. The investors include entities tied to the royal family in Abu Dhabi and to two billionaire Syrian-born Qatari brothers, who are business partners with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.
The deal is structured in such a way that the United States — through Mr. Boehly and the government — would control a majority of the board of the resulting entity, some of the people close to the deal said. A senior administration official said the deal included a “substantial upfront payment and profits interest for the United States,” would enhance American “energy dominance” and outlast the current administration.
The Boehly group would acquire Lukoil stock with a face value of about $10 billion from non-Russian owners, although these purchases would be made at a significant discount, according to participants in the negotiations.
Once the purchase agreement is complete and approved by the Treasury Department, the assets would no longer be affected by U.S. sanctions on Lukoil, instantly driving up their value.
This deal is still in flux and could fall apart, but one of the previous bidders — the private equity fund Carlyle, based in Washington — is no longer actively pursuing the deal, after the U.S. government failed for months to sign off on Carlyle’s bid, according to parties involved in the deal talks.
The foreign-majority ownership raises new questions about who stands to most benefit from this complex transaction, which has involved negotiations with officials from the White House and the Kremlin, as well as a still-opaque list of investors from across the world.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia brought up the deal when he met at the Kremlin last month with Mr. Kushner and Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer, who both serve as Mr. Trump’s special envoys on the war in Ukraine. In Moscow, Mr. Putin is widely seen as having final say on the deal, even though Lukoil is a private company; in Washington, the Trump administration will need to approve it because of last year’s U.S. sanctions on Lukoil.
Whether or not the deal goes through, the behind-the-scenes negotiations over Lukoil show how Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have mixed their high-stakes diplomacy with talks that could provide a windfall to their business allies.
There is no indication that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff themselves stand to profit. The senior administration official said that the only interest guiding Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff was “what is in the best interest of the American people.”
The deal’s proponents argue it would also be a windfall to U.S. taxpayers and a boon for U.S. interests because of the strategic assets in the deal, including key refineries in Eastern Europe. And the Trump administration has argued that showing Mr. Putin that the United States is prepared to do more business with Russia could help persuade him to compromise and end his war in Ukraine.
But for Mr. Putin, analysts say, the Lukoil sale has presented a chance to follow through on a strategy he has pursued ever since Mr. Trump returned to office: to use the promise of U.S.-Russia business deals to dissuade the White House from putting more pressure on Moscow over Ukraine.
Even better, from the Kremlin’s perspective, is that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff have business ties to two of the Middle Eastern investors involved in the deal, analysts say.
“The national security interests of the U.S. and U.S. allies, and private interests, are just so conflated,” Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said. “That’s exactly the muddy waters that Putin and his K.G.B. negotiating school are thriving in.”
As Mr. Putin escalates his bombardment of Ukraine, Mr. Gabuev went on, “Lukoil just helps him to buy time.”
In the United Arab Emirates, one of the major investors is led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He is a powerful member of the Abu Dhabi royal family whose business ventures have also invested in Mr. Kushner’s private equity fund and in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-founded in 2024 by Mr. Witkoff, as well as his and Mr. Trump’s sons. The White House has said that Mr. Witkoff has divested his position in the company.
In Qatar, the deal’s investors are the billionaire Syrian-born brothers Ramez and Moutaz Al-Khayyat, who are partners of Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, in a proposed multibillion-dollar luxury Mediterranean coast resort in Albania.
The Khayyats and their Doha-based conglomerate have moved rapidly over the last year to expand business deals in the energy sector, including the oil industry, with investments now in Syria, Iraq, Libya and most recently in Venezuela.
The family has close ties to the royal family of Qatar dating back more than a decade, including with Sheikh Suhaim Bin AbdulAziz Al Thani, who serves on the boards of two of the Khayyats’ ventures.
Carlyle in January separately secured a “nonexclusive” purchase agreement, with a plan to put the payment at least temporarily into a locked up U.S. bank account, to avoid bringing profits to Russian investors who own Lukoil. But it then did not get the sign off it needed to complete the deal.
Some of the people close to the deal said the Carlyle deal was a nonstarter for the Russians, since they did not expect that the United States would ever release the money kept in a U.S. account.
These talks among possible buyers including Carlyle and Mr. Boehly started late last year after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Lukoil, in an effort to force the end of the war in Ukraine. Lukoil’s international assets are spread across Europe, Africa, Mexico and the Middle East, and also include about 200 gas stations along the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States.
The deal would need approval from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has set as a precondition for lifting the sanctions that any transfer of the assets “not provide a windfall to Lukoil,” since the United States does not want to deliver profits back to Russia.
The move by the United States government to impose sanctions on a foreign company and then play a direct role in moving to buy these sanctioned assets is extremely unusual, according to two former federal officials involved in sanctions efforts.
“I cannot recall any remotely similar arrangement in the 20 years I’ve focused on sanctions,” said Jeremy Paner, a former Treasury Department sanctions lawyer who now handles corporate sanctions compliance efforts.
In a statement, an official with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation said the proposed deal was good for the United States, as it “would advance the Trump administration’s commitment to strengthen U.S. economic security, advance U.S. foreign policy and lower energy prices for everyday Americans.”
The Trump administration, at least initially, would not put money into the deal, people familiar with the deal said, but the United States will still be in line to secure profits.
Once the sale of the Lukoil international assets is complete, the buyers plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand and retrofit different parts of these operations.
The negotiations are delicate, the people said, because Mr. Putin could still reject it if he sees it as unduly benefiting the United States. That is why, they said, the participation of Middle Eastern investors is important, since the Kremlin sees Qatar and the Emirates as friendly countries.
“Look at what’s happening to Lukoil,” Mr. Putin said at a conference last week, accusing the West of “the theft of our companies.”
The Treasury Department has set an Oct. 22 deadline for the negotiations over the sale. That deadline might be extended again, but on Wednesday two U.S. senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisting that they ensure no financial benefits go to Russian players if the Lukoil sale is approved.
“Every day that passes without maximum economic pressure allows Moscow to sustain this military escalation,” read the letter from Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, declined to comment on the Lukoil sale process when asked about it in his daily conference call with reporters on Monday.
“I will only say that, indeed, the topic of interacting and cooperating in the energy sector is indeed being raised in conversations with American counterparts,” Mr. Peskov said.
Ana Swanson, Tyler Pager, Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.
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6) Trump Wants to Decide Who Counts. And Who Doesn’t.
By Justin Gest, Oct. 8, 2026
“Under the administration’s proposal, the census would count only citizens and green card holders. Undocumented immigrants, international students, asylum seekers, refugees without permanent residency and others would be excluded.”
Dr. Gest is a professor at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government.
Last month, the Trump administration proposed new rules that would limit who is counted in the census. It’s an initiative that is ideologically consistent with President Trump’s voter-suppression efforts, his aggressive deportation policies and his executive order that seeks to purge national parks and museums of information about slavery and Native American history that, in his words, casts our country “in a negative light.”
The Constitution requires the census to count everyone in America, but Mr. Trump clearly wants to decide who counts.
Under current practice, the Census Bureau, which is part of the Department of Commerce, looks to count everyone living here, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Census data is used for purposes ranging from congressional apportionment to government-funding formulas.
Under the administration’s proposal, the census would count only citizens and green card holders. Undocumented immigrants, international students, asylum seekers, refugees without permanent residency and others would be excluded. The administration argues that individuals in these groups lack the “sufficient tie and allegiance” required to establish them as “true inhabitants” of the United States — a rationale akin to one advanced by some critics of birthright citizenship.
In the name of making the census “colorblind,” the plan would remove questions about race and ethnicity from the census’ short-form questionnaire. It also would bar questions about sexual orientation.
Without physically removing a single person, these rules would bureaucratically disappear millions of people from the national count. They would also strip away an important reference point against which claims of unequal treatment can be measured.
The first Trump administration tried something similar. But in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the Commerce Department from adding a citizenship question for the 2020 census. Then in 2020, Mr. Trump issued a memo directing the department to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population count used to apportion House seats. The Supreme Court declined to decide that issue on its merits, merely ruling that the case wasn’t ripe for judicial review. The directive didn’t go into effect.
If the administration succeeds with its current plan, the Census Bureau will — by my calculation, using data from the Pew Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute — fail to count roughly 16.5 million people.
Further, the addition of citizenship and immigration status questions could depress “self-response” to the survey, even among those here legally. A 2019 Census Bureau report found that a citizenship question would reduce responses in households that “may” include noncitizens. Fearing the potential repercussions, some respondents might choose to omit certain household members from their answers.
These uncounted individuals wouldn’t be evenly distributed. Many are clustered in large cities and near universities — regions that are disproportionately represented by Democrats in Congress.
This intentional undercounting would almost certainly tilt the apportionment of Electoral College votes and House seats. A recent Times analysis found that the proposed rules could actually wind up taking House seats away from red states. However, according to the Republican-leaning American Redistricting Project’s 2030 citizen-only model, five blue states — California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island — could lose 11 House seats combined.
Because many federal agencies use census data, undercounting the population could wind up redirecting federal money away from the country’s most populous areas: As recently as the 2021 fiscal year, 353 federal assistance programs used census data in whole or in part to distribute more than $2.8 trillion.
Many noncitizens pay into these programs, and by law, noncitizens are entitled to some of these programs’ benefits. Moreover, accounting for noncitizens’ well-being, including by correctly distributing the funds allocated to these programs, helps facilitate the social and economic benefits that Americans gain from noncitizens’ presence as healthy workers, stable neighbors and supportive family members.
The push to drop race, ethnicity and sexual orientation questions is not merely symbolic. It undoubtedly serves a goal that goes hand in hand with a potential apportionment change: removing some of the key data that makes inequities visible.
For years, census data about race, ethnicity and gender has formed the evidentiary backbone of civil rights enforcement and redistricting, and it serves as a base line for independent survey research. It’s also relied upon to help ensure fair employment practices. It’s difficult, for example, to prove that a business or other institution is discriminating on the basis of race without demographic base lines to measure against. Remove the data and you remove the grounds for many claims.
The administration frames this proposed change as colorblindness and argues that race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are “immaterial” to a basic head count. It also claims that dropping the questions related to these categories would make responding to the census questionnaire easier. Conveniently, that logic didn’t extend to the first Trump administration’s proposal to add a citizenship question for the 2020 canvass — nor to the addition of a citizenship question to a newly drafted I.R.S. Form 1040.
These changes would look particularly ugly in light of the census’s history.
As the legal scholar David Bernstein has chronicled, early census classification was intertwined with slavery, citizenship and political representation. Census categories expanded from white and Black to include Native Americans, people of Asian descent and mixed-race designations that helped to entrench various constructions into everyday thinking and form the basis for marginalization. For example, the 1890 census had “mulatto,” “quadroon” and “octoroon” as categories.
This type of categorization was used to help enforce what was, in essence, a racial caste system. In the past several decades, however, the government, in effect, repurposed this type of categorization, partly to bolster its anti-discrimination programs. If the Trump proposal stands, these types of programs will be hamstrung.
When governments stop counting demographic characteristics, they cement an outdated demographic settlement rather than allow new facts to affect political institutions. In America, the share of non-Hispanic white people — long the country’s racial majority — has been declining, and it is projected to shrink to a minority of the total population by the 2040s. The census can’t reverse that reality, but revising the rules could prevent it from being officially measured.
The administration’s plan isn’t final; a public comment period ends Tuesday. Opponents will have both the opportunity and the grounds to contest it in court, and it must be fought: The census doesn’t just count people. It determines which people count.
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7) I’m a Child Psychiatrist. Screens Are Not the Problem.
By Jonathan Slater, Oct. 9, 2026
Dr. Slater is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who specializes in children and adolescents.
María Hergueta
Parents, politicians and best-selling psychologists are increasingly anxious about how much time children and teenagers spend on screens and how it may affect their mental health. In May, the Office of the Surgeon General warned about the harms of screen use and called for a limit of two hours a day of screen time at home for children ages 6 to 18. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services released a digital book called “The Magic Tablet” that encourages “children and adolescents to get off screens and live real life.”
It’s easy to see why alarm bells have gone off. Children and teenagers today spend far more time in front of screens at home and at school than previous generations did. Rates of youth anxiety and depression have been climbing for years.
But as a doctor who treats children with mental health problems, I see screen time as a tantalizing distraction from bigger problems: America doesn’t offer enough mental health care for children or sufficient health insurance to pay for it. If we make screens the villain, then we let the people who control children’s health care — Congress, insurers and health systems — off the hook for the fact that half of American children with a treatable mental illness get no treatment at all.
In my office, I see children who use phones, iPads and other devices compulsively, but the compulsive use is usually a sign of something deeper — depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or family history of addiction — which can both feed the screen use and, in turn, be fed by it. These are teenagers who game so compulsively that they fail out of high school or college. They are children whose moods collapse or turn violent when an adult takes the device away.
It’s not how much time children spend on screens that raises their risk of the most severe mental health outcomes, including suicide, but whether their use becomes addictive. It’s specific activities, such as using social media in a compulsive way, that harm mental health. The harm from social media in particular appears to hit girls hardest.
The case for screen time limits rests in part on an unproven assumption that fewer hours will mean fewer anxious and depressed kids. The best evidence doesn’t support it. Limiting screen time can promote children’s overall health. But the amount of time children spend on screens has only a small effect on their mental health. Genetics and certain experiences in childhood, as well as the lack of proper diagnosis and treatment, appear to be far more influential. Limiting screen time is not the first line of treatment for children with anxiety or depression.
In 2025, JAMA published a study examining data on the screen use of more than 4,000 9- and 10-year-olds over the course of four years. Among other things, it measured how many hours children spent on screens and the degree to which their screen use had become addictive.
Self-reported screen time that was measured at ages 9 and 10 — before most children had substantial social media exposure — showed no association with depression, suicidal ideation or suicidal behaviors four years later. But addictive use of those same screens was associated with all three. Adolescents who used their phones compulsively — who felt anxious when separated from them, who kept scrolling despite knowing the cost — had more than twice the risk of suicidal behavior. Nearly one in three children showed a rising pattern of addictive social media use beginning at age 11.
The JAMA study did not account for A.D.H.D. or children who had adverse childhood experiences such as neglect, abuse, poverty, homelessness, parental violence or substance abuse. This matters because children exposed to four or more of these experiences had three times the odds of problematic video game use. Kids with attention issues are also more prone to addictive screen use, as are children who come from families with addictive behavior.
If we truly wanted to see improvements in the rates of mental health issues among kids and teenagers, then we would focus on expanding access to the interventions that work — finding the children who need treatment and getting them the treatment — and the insurance reimbursement to pay for them.
Right now, schools, which are the country’s largest mental health provider for kids, don’t have the funding to screen for underlying mental health issues. Student-to-counselor ratios run at 376 to 1, while the recommended ratio is 250 to 1. Regardless of the setting, in counties with mental health professional shortages, youth suicide rates are higher.
We know that cognitive behavioral therapy reduces problematic screen use in adolescents. And treating the mental health disorders that drive these often compulsive behaviors is the heart of the work. Every major clinical guideline says the same thing: For kids with anxiety, depression or A.D.H.D., we have proven treatments that work.
To its credit, the acting surgeon general’s advisory notes the warning signs of compulsive screen use: trying and failing to cut back, withdrawal when screens are unavailable, continued use despite consequences. The advisory acknowledges the limitations of the available research, and notes that “developmental effects depend on multiple factors.” Yet the advisory proceeds to recommend specific time limits. This stands in contrast to the recommendations of global researchers, who recently cautioned that screen duration “is not the main factor influencing mental health outcomes.”
Instead of screen limits, the government should prioritize tracking and funding youth mental health. Lately, it’s gotten harder to know what’s happening with youth anxiety and depression because the federal surveys built to track the well-being of the country’s youth are losing the staff and funding they need to function.
In 2022, Congress established a $1 billion bipartisan federal program to train and place mental health professionals in schools. Those school-based mental health programs both help kids and are cost-effective. Nevertheless, this administration has terminated the grant, despite a judge’s order, and 15 states are back in court to save it.
Even when a child with a mental health problem is identified, insurance doesn’t always adequately pay for it. The fix isn’t mysterious: Make insurers cover mental health care the same way they cover everything else and raise Medicaid’s low payment rates.
Blaming screens is a convenient way to avoid harder, deeper issues: inadequate mental health care and a system that chronically underfunds treatment. Policymakers and health system leaders instead must focus on providing the therapy, medication and support that troubled kids and families need.
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8) N.Y.P.D. Releases Bodycam Footage of Moments After ICE Shooting
The homeland security secretary said immigration agents were trying to arrest an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record when the man was shot in his car. He took aim at New York’s policies, saying they make citizens “less safe.”
By Madeleine NgoLuis Ferré-Sadurní, Hamed Aleaziz and Liam Stack, October 9, 2026
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and wounded a man during an arrest attempt in Manhattan on Thursday. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, attacked sanctuary city policies and lashed out at Mayor Zohran Mamdani at a news conference on Friday morning, one day after federal immigration agents shot a man in his car in New York City.
His comments, which harshly criticized policies that prohibit local cooperation with immigration enforcement, came shortly before the New York Police Department released body-worn camera footage of two police officers who arrived at the scene shortly after a federal agent shot and injured the man, Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old from the Dominican Republic.
The N.Y.P.D. footage shows officers loading Mr. Belgal, in a semiconscious state, into their car and rushing him to a nearby hospital.
At the news conference, Mr. Mullin took aim at New York’s policies, saying they make citizens “less safe.” He repeatedly described Mr. Belgal as a “thug” and “the worst of the worst,” and detailed his criminal record.
The shooting of Mr. Belgal on Thursday afternoon occurred in the Marble Hill neighborhood of New York City as immigration officers tried to apprehend him. Mr. Belgal was in a car with his 5-year-old son when agents surrounded the vehicle on a largely residential street, according to Jessica Tisch, the city’s police commissioner.
Federal officials have said Mr. Belgal was in the United States illegally, and they sought to highlight his criminal record on Friday. Mr. Mullin and Marcos Charles, a top leader at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, repeatedly accused Mr. Belgal of being associated with a gang and rattled off a list of charges against him, including forcible theft and grand larceny.
Ms. Tisch said he had pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny and received five years probation, and that an investigation into the criminal sale of a controlled substance in 2025 was ongoing. Federal agents had taken over that investigation, she said.
Mr. Charles accused Mr. Belgal of accelerating his car toward the ICE agents, causing them to fear for their safety and open fire. Although Mr. Mullin said the officers were wearing body cameras, video of the shooting verifying that account has not been made public. “As the investigation moves forward, we’ll release the information,” Mr. Mullin said.
ICE officers were not aware that there was a child in the vehicle when they opened fire at Mr. Belgal, according to Mr. Mullin.
Throughout the news conference, Mr. Mullin repeatedly said that ICE was pursuing “the worst of the worst” criminals in a nationwide crackdown, highlighting Mr. Belgal as an example. But the agency’s own data shows that arrests of people with no criminal record have soared this summer, in the months after Mr. Mullin was confirmed as homeland security secretary. The issue has become a political problem for Republicans ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, with some members of the party saying President Trump’s immigration crackdown has “gone too far.”
The homeland security secretary said that Mr. Trump had offered to turn over Mr. Belgal to New York police, but Mr. Mamdani would not agree to that. On Thursday night, the mayor said he had spent two hours on the phone with Mr. Trump and Mr. Mullin, trying unsuccessfully to negotiate Mr. Belgal’s release.
Mr. Mamdani called the shooting an “outrage” late Thursday night, saying it had left a 5-year-old child “traumatized and terrified.”
Mr. Belgal was on probation, and ICE sought to arrest him because federal officials believed that he had “indirect or direct knowledge” of a shooting that injured an off-duty customs officer in Manhattan in July 2025, Mr. Mullin said. Immigration agents tried to arrest Mr. Belgal in September but did not pursue him when he fled, he added.
Mr. Mullin also said he spoke last night with Gov. Kathy Hochul. He said Ms. Hochul was open to working with the federal government to help them detain about 100 criminals who are in the state illegally, if the federal government gave the state notice. But he said Ms. Hochul also requested a pause on enforcement operations in the state, which Mr. Mullin declined to do.
Many details about the shooting in New York City remain unclear, but Ms. Tisch said that one agent had fired his weapon seven times. Seven bullet casings were recovered at the scene; the vehicle’s front windshield sustained damage and the back window was shattered, she said.
Mr. Belgal was struck in the neck below his left ear and was transported to a nearby hospital by New York City police officers, who were not involved in the shooting, Ms. Tisch said. Mr. Mullin said that Mr. Belgal had been transferred to a detention facility outside New York State, but declined to identify his current location.
The shooting follows a string of violent and sometimes deadly incidents involving immigration agents. Last month, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man during a traffic stop in Austin, Texas. Over the summer, immigration agents fatally shot a Mexican man in Houston and a Colombian man in Maine.
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9) What We Know About the ICE Shooting in New York
A 28-year-old man was shot by a federal immigration agent in New York City on Thursday. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said agents were “terrorizing our city.”
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Oct. 9, 2026
Oscar Belgal, a Dominican immigrant, was shot on West 225th Street in Marble Hill, a neighborhood at the edge of Manhattan and the Bronx. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
A federal immigration agent shot and wounded a man in New York City on Thursday, heightening concerns about immigration enforcement in a city with millions of immigrants.
The man, Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican immigrant, was shot in the Marble Hill neighborhood as agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to arrest him while he was in a car with his 5-year-old son.
The shooting appeared to be the first by ICE in the city since 2020. It elicited swift rebukes from Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who accused the Trump administration of “terrorizing our city.”
Here’s what to know about the shooting:
What happened?
Mr. Belgal was shot in the neck after at least one ICE agent fired seven rounds at the car, the police said.
His son was not injured and was in the care of a family member late Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the shooting had occurred as the agents tried to arrest an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record. He was in the United States illegally and had been convicted of grand larceny, the statement said.
A witness, Viely Herrera, said that she had heard a series of shots and saw an S.U.V. crash into concrete barriers on the street. Mr. Belgal came out of the vehicle holding his neck and shouting in Spanish. The boy was in the back seat crying.
Where did the shooting take place?
The shooting happened around 4 p.m. on West 225th Street near Broadway in a predominantly Latino neighborhood at the edge of Manhattan and the Bronx.
The street is near a subway station and a strip of small stores and restaurants surrounded by residential blocks. Neighbors were making their way home from work and school in the late afternoon sunshine.
On Thursday night, more than 100 demonstrators converged on the scene of the shooting to denounce ICE. The Rev. Emily DeTar Birt, a Unitarian minister, said that several schools were nearby.
“This is happening in broad daylight in front of our kids,” she said.
How did the mayor respond?
Mr. Mamdani condemned the shooting at a news conference on Thursday night and called it “an outrage.”
“Tonight, a 5-year-old child sits traumatized and terrified,” the mayor said. “Tonight, millions of our neighbors are wondering whether they will be safe on our streets, in our schools, at their work sites.”
Mr. Mamdani said he had spent two hours on the phone with President Trump and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the release of Mr. Belgal.
Ms. Hochul said in a statement that she had also spoken with Mr. Trump and Mr. Mullin about the shooting.
“I expressed outrage on behalf of New Yorkers and urged them to halt ICE enforcement operations in New York,” she said.
Who is Oscar Belgal?
We do not know much yet about Mr. Belgal and his life in New York City.
Jessica S. Tisch, the police commissioner, said that he had a grand larceny conviction and a drug case pending against him.
The Homeland Security Department said he had been arrested in New York in December 2023 and released a few days later.
Photos from the scene showed Mr. Belgal handcuffed on the ground. Several men stood nearby, some dressed in construction-style vests and wearing face masks. At least one had a long gun.
Mr. Belgal was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, a few blocks away in Manhattan.
At approximately 11 p.m., Mr. Belgal was transferred from the hospital to a detention facility outside of New York State, said Mr. Mullin, who declined to identify which one.
How has the community reacted?
Anti-ICE demonstrators gathered at the scene of the shooting and outside the hospital where Mr. Belgal was taken.
Late on Thursday, tensions flared outside the hospital. Protesters and the police scuffled as officers tried to put up barricades to establish a clear path to and from the building’s entrance.
Protesters chanted “No justice, no peace, we want ICE off our streets.” Some hurled water bottles at the police. At least one person was taken into custody.
Nearly 40 percent of the city’s residents are immigrants. Many New Yorkers have expressed alarm over a rise in ICE activity.
Arrests by immigration agents in New York State rose from 927 in May to 1,193 in June and 1,567 in July, according to federal data compiled by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group.
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10) Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Will Be Public and Streamed Live, Pentagon Says
If carried out, the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad set for Dec. 3 would be the first in modern U.S. history.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, Published Oct. 8, 2026, Updated Oct. 9, 2026
Since 1977, there have been four executions by firing squad, three in Utah and one in South Carolina. Trent Nelson/Pool, via Associated Press
Pentagon officials said on Thursday that the Army officer convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting would be executed in public, a practice that ended in the United States nearly a century ago and is most commonly carried out in a handful of countries, including Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon said in a statement that the military execution, scheduled for Dec. 3, would also be broadcast via livestream. Such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.
The announcement adds to the growing spectacle around the planned execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others when he brought a personal handgun onto the grounds of Fort Hood, Texas. The rampage was the deadliest shooting at an American military base and sent shock waves through the U.S. military.
There are few countries that hold public executions. The human rights group Amnesty International has highlighted some cases in which public executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia have been filmed by bystanders.
The practice of filming and releasing video of an execution is more common with terror groups like the Islamic State, which became infamous for videos of gruesome executions of prisoners who were not given due process or convicted of crimes. Mass shooters have in some cases broadcast their killing sprees on livestream sites.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, a conservative outlet, aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the execution would be public and available to watch “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” The Pentagon later confirmed in a statement that the execution would be livestreamed.
The Army has said the public execution of Major Hasan will be conducted by firing squad at Fort Hood, the site of the shooting. If carried out, it would be a first in modern American history.
The last state-sanctioned public execution in the United States occurred more than 90 years ago in Owensboro, Kentucky. Some 20,000 people gathered to witness the August 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a young Black man who had been convicted of raping an elderly white woman.
Major Hasan’s execution would be the first by the military justice system since 1961, and he would be the first soldier put to death by firing squad since World War II. The firing squad is a rare method of execution, but one that has been used by the military, particularly during wartime. The Trump administration has proposed expanding its use as a method of execution.
Mr. Hegseth said that the decision to shoot Major Hasan by a firing squad, as well as other details of the execution, were chosen for their symbolism.
“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood,” Mr. Hegseth said. “And do it on a Thursday and we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock — which is when he did it — and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that.”
He continued, “Well I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.”
On Nov. 5, 2009, Major Hasan, an Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, brought a personal handgun onto the base grounds and opened fire. Major Hasan said that he carried out the attack, which occurred at the height of the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, to wage jihad for what he called the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He admitted to the killings during his court-martial and was convicted in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.
Major Hasan, who was wounded in the shooting, is being held at the military death row prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He expressed no remorse for his actions, and told a military mental health panel that he wished he had died in the attack so that he could have become a martyr.
Mr. Hegseth and other Pentagon officials emphasized Major Hasan’s motivations for the shooting in their public statements about the execution. Mr. Hegseth also criticized President Barack Obama for not describing the attack at the time as an act of terror.
Speaking at a rally in Texas on Wednesday, Mr. Trump, a vocal advocate of the death penalty, trumpeted his order to execute Major Hasan, telling the crowd in San Antonio that “we are going to deliver final justice to an evil killer.”
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11) The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach
Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department.
By Mark Arsenault, Oct. 9, 2026
Reporting from the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass.
Michel DeGraff, a tenured professor at M.I.T., was pushed out of the university’s linguistics section. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The name of the proposed Massachusetts Institute of Technology course was as provocative as it was long:
“Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond.”
The instructor was Michel DeGraff, a longtime tenured linguistics professor at M.I.T. who came up with the idea in the months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He was a leading faculty voice siding with pro-Palestinian campus protesters, whose frequent rallying cry for Palestinian freedom, “from the river to the sea,” was seen by some Jews as antisemitic.
An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.
To Dr. DeGraff, it was more like the starting gun.
He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course and protested the decision in a flurry of emails decrying it as part of a “new McCarthyism.” He complained to his colleagues, including deans and the university’s president in long email chains — which he then made public.
He objected on social media and in published commentaries. He filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., accusing the school of chilling campus speech on Gaza and violating his academic freedom.
“M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,” Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a “violation of my professional rights.”
The university, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment, though it has denied Dr. DeGraff’s claims in legal filings.
As Dr. DeGraff’s profile has risen, so has the volume of his critics. He was sued for harassment by a Jewish former student. A U.S. House committee staff report last spring accused him of perpetuating “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Now three years into the dispute, his personal relationship with the M.I.T. linguistics section head, a onetime friend, is broken, and colleagues are exhausted by the controversy.
In many other American workplaces, employees who push back so forcefully would most likely risk their employment. But tenured professors are, by design, hard to get rid of.
Administrators have sanctioned Dr. DeGraff, accusing him of being disruptive and violating procedures and directives. He was pushed out of M.I.T.’s linguistics section and given the nebulous title of “faculty at large,” which he includes in his email signature inside satirical quotation marks.
He said in an interview that he had been denied a scheduled raise and access to new mentees, and had even been blocked from the department’s Facebook page. For the third fall semester in a row, he said, he is being paid while not teaching a class.
He is one of a number of professors in disputes with their schools over speech recently.
Carnegie Mellon University announced in September that it was investigating social media posts from a professor who is accused of celebrating the deaths of conservative figures.
A University of Texas professor is contesting his 16-month paid administrative leave, which he believes is related to his criticism of school leadership.
And an arbitrator ordered San Jose State University to reinstate a tenured professor the university had fired over allegations related to her role in pro-Palestinian campus protests.
At a time when campus politics are under a microscope and schools are trying to avoid the attention of the Trump administration, Dr. DeGraff’s fight has become one of the longest and most dramatic.
Chris Sharp, chief of staff at the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin, said some tenured professors were cloaking their personal activism under the guise of “academic freedom.” The term, he said, is often misconstrued as the right to teach or research without limit, when it should be understood as the right to teach and research within one’s specialty.
“Just because I have a Ph.D. in one thing does not make me an expert in everything,” he said.
Friends of Dr. DeGraff say his campaign for his proposed class came from his deep concern for free speech, human rights and his understanding of language as a means to exercise power.
“Michel’s great virtue is his persistence,” said Haynes Miller, an M.I.T. professor emeritus of mathematics who is close to Dr. DeGraff and who says his friend is not an antisemite. “He doesn’t give up. If he sees an injustice he will attack it.”
Dr. DeGraff, 63, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and persuaded his parents to send him to the United States to study computer science. But once there, he became more interested in his homeland’s language, Haitian Creole, which, he said, is often derided as “broken French” and not a real language.
His Ph.D. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was entitled “Creole Grammars and Acquisition of Syntax: The Case of Haitian Creole,” he said. He joined the M.I.T. linguistics faculty in 1996.
Dr. DeGraff sees parallels between the Haitian struggle for independence and that of Palestinian people. “That is what brought me to want to further my research and teaching about these connections,” he said.
The idea for the class came to him on Dec. 5, 2023, after he had watched M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, and leaders of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania get rhetorically beat up by Republicans in a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.
After the course was rejected, he turned the concept into a discussion series with guest speakers in the fall of 2024.
That year, he also frequently joined students who occupied part of campus in a three-week encampment demanding that the school end ties with Israel. He was there nearly every day, he said, before the police shut it down.
Agustín Rayo, dean of the M.I.T. School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, sanctioned Dr. DeGraff in late 2024. In a letter Dr. DeGraff shared, the dean said he was removing Dr. DeGraff temporarily from the linguistics section for being disruptive and creating the expectation that people who displease him “are at risk of being targeted” in public forums.
“Your speech rights do not place you above M.I.T.’s rules,” the dean wrote in the letter.
Dr. DeGraff also came to the attention of congressional Republicans, who in a report pointed to accusations that Dr. DeGraff had targeted a Jewish student for harassment. That former student, William Sussman, joined a lawsuit against Dr. DeGraff and the school in 2025.
Mr. Sussman said Dr. DeGraff targeted him on social media as an example of a Zionist “mind infection” for his pro-Israel views. Mr. Sussman has said antisemitic harassment drove him out of the university.
Dr. DeGraff said the term “mind infection” came from an Israeli scholar who has used it to refer to how Israeli schoolbooks marginalize Palestinians. Dr. DeGraff said he was not an antisemite and that federal courts had said that criticism of Israel by itself is not inherently antisemitic.
Part of the suit, including the claims against Dr. DeGraff, was dismissed, though appeals are possible.
In a statement, Mr. Sussman criticized M.I.T., saying “the professor remains employed at M.I.T., where he continues to smear me.”
His removal from the linguistics department means “his impact at M.I.T. is substantially reduced,” said Dr. Miller, the friend of Dr. DeGraff’s. “It is humiliating for him; it’s a symbolic thing as well as a practical thing.”
Last March, Dr. DeGraff filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., along with the congressional committee that had named him in its report and its chairman. In his suit, he accuses the university of punishing him for his political activism.
“If you ask faculty to keep quiet, then you are basically betraying the job of the university, which is to teach about difficult topics,” he said.
M.I.T. denied his claims and asked the court to dismiss the suit.
“Indeed, the fact that DeGraff has continued to speak publicly and prolifically on the very subjects he claims have been chilled only underscores the speculative nature of his alleged injuries,” the university argued in a court filing.
He is still scheduled to teach the spring classes he has taught for years, “Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities” and “Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies.”
Over this past summer, Dr. DeGraff proposed another new course, based on his book, published last month: “Our Own Language: Harnessing the Power of Kreyol and Other Mother Tongues for Education and Liberation.”
It is common for professors at a research university such as M.I.T. to propose new courses. And in early September, an associate dean told Dr. DeGraff the department would discuss the idea. But first, could he provide a copy of the book?
No, Dr. DeGraff replied, the syllabus he submitted should be enough. Given the history with his last course proposal, he wrote, “requiring an additional departmental review of the book itself therefore strikes me as ongoing discrimination and harassment.” He looped in top administrators, including Dr. Kornbluth, to his email.
His new class, he said, was rejected.
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12) Palestinian Authority Says Elections Are to Be Postponed
The delay, outlined in a letter to France, comes as Fatah, the governing party, is suffering from deep internal rifts.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 9, 2026
Hussein al-Sheikh, deputy to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah, West Bank, in February. He was said to have sent the letters to European officials notifying them of the postponement. Credit...Pool photo by Zain Jaafar
The Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank informed France this week that legislative elections in the territory scheduled for Nov. 28 would be postponed by several months, according to two Palestinian officials briefed on the communications.
The message was conveyed in a letter to the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, from Hussein al-Sheikh, deputy to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, the officials said. Reuters first reported on the letter.
A postponement of the elections would come as Fatah, the governing party in of the PA, suffers from division, especially over Mr. Abbas’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Israel, which controls whether ballot boxes or election observers can enter Gaza, has also shown little readiness to facilitate the voting. That lack of engagement complicates the work of the Palestinian Authority’s election commission, according to three Western diplomats.
The Palestinian officials and Western diplomats spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matters.
A delay in holding elections would not help Mr. Abbas’s efforts to convince European nations and the United States that he can deliver changes to the Palestinian political system. The European Union is one of the Palestinian Authority’s biggest backers and has pressed Palestinian officials to pursue democratic reforms, including holding elections.
In September 2025, President Emmanuel Macron of France recognized a Palestinian state at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, citing a series of commitments that Mr. Abbas had made to him, including “a thorough overhaul of Palestinian governance.”
Some three months earlier, Mr. Abbas had sent a letter to Mr. Macron declaring a commitment to hold elections within a year under international supervision “to rejuvenate the Palestinian governance.”
Last month, Mr. Barrot reinforced Paris’s commitment to Palestinian elections, writing an article in The Wall Street Journal that ended with the words, “Palestinian elections now.”
Pierre-Arnaud Blanchard, a French diplomat in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that there was “profound disappointment and frustration” in France.
“There’s also a sense that there’s a missed opportunity to breathe new life and legitimacy into the Palestinian Authority,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has been dogged for years by accusations of corruption, and U.S. officials have said that the body can play a meaningful role in postwar Gaza only if there is a significant overhaul.
Mr. Abbas, 90, was elected to office in early 2005 after the death of his predecessor, Yasir Arafat. As the leader of Palestinian Authority, Mr. Abbas has consolidated his power by ousting rivals, sidelining the judiciary and cooperating with Israel on security.
Analysts said the decision to postpone elections was partially a result of senior Palestinian Authority officials fearing that a vote could result in further erosion of their already waning legitimacy.
“Elections present a threat to the president and those around him,” said Jehad Harb, a Palestinian political expert.
The last time Palestinians participated in national elections was in 2006, and it led to a brittle governing body, international isolation and, eventually, violence.
In the voting that year, a rival party representing Hamas trounced Fatah, leading to a year and a half of uneasy power-sharing.
The United States and much of the West refused to work with the unity government because Hamas, which many countries designate a terrorist organization, would not accept demands such as renouncing violence.
Fatah and Hamas then fought a brief civil war in the Gaza Strip. That fighting ended in June 2007 with Hamas seizing control there after routing forces loyal to Mr. Abbas and confining his authority to parts of the West Bank.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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13) What We Know About the Man Shot by ICE
Oscar Belgal, 28, was often seen fixing cars and playing music on Marble Hill Avenue, where few residents knew of his criminal record.
By Maria Cramer, Nate Schweber and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
A crowd of protesters began gathering at the scene. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Oscar Belgal often repaired friends’ cars as he listened to reggaeton and hip-hop on Marble Hill Avenue, a bustling street on the border of Manhattan and the Bronx.
He was there early Sunday morning when Carlos Veloz, a taxi driver who lives in the neighborhood, saw him as Mr. Veloz returned home from work.
Mr. Belgal was leaning over the engine of an S.U.V. with its hood open as dawn broke on a cloudy day, and nodded hello at Mr. Veloz.
“He was fine,” Mr. Veloz said, adding that Mr. Belgal never caused problems.
On Thursday afternoon, four days later, Mr. Belgal was on Marble Hill Avenue again, sitting in the middle of the street, his hands handcuffed behind his back and his neck bleeding from a gunshot wound, surrounded by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On Friday, as investigators scoured the neighborhood, Mr. Belgal’s neighbors said they knew little of his criminal history, which Trump administration officials used to paint him as a dangerous undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
But details of what happened on Thursday began to emerge on Friday. Officers had stopped his car as he drove his 5-year-old son. As the boy sat in the backseat, officers in plain clothes surrounded the car, Mr. Belgal accelerated and at least one of the officers fired seven shots, according to Jessica S. Tisch, the commissioner of the New York Police Department. Federal officials said that Mr. Belgal refused their order to get out of his car, then sped into two government vehicles.
The officers shot at Mr. Belgal in self-defense, federal officials said on Friday. The Bronx Defenders, who are representing Mr. Belgal, declined to comment on the specific charges at issue in this case, but said in a statement that they were “not surprised” by the actions of the ICE officers.
“A family just trying to go about their everyday lives faced terror and violence at the hands of ICE in Marble Hill,” they said, adding, “ICE’s brutality is emblematic of what the people we represent endure daily — from violent arrests in our communities to neglect and dehumanization in ICE detention.”
New York City police officers, who are prohibited from participating in federal immigration enforcement, came to the scene on Thursday after hearing a report of shots fired on Marble Hill Avenue. They found Mr. Belgal bleeding, took him into one of their S.U.V.s and drove him directly to the hospital, according to body-camera video the Police Department released on Friday.
Mr. Belgal, who also has a 1-year-old child, was discharged from the hospital on Thursday evening and is now at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
One of his lawyers said a bullet is still lodged in his body and he is in pain.
Arianna Montero, the mother of Mr. Belgal’s 5-year-old son, said the child had been “traumatized” by the shooting and has not spoken since it happened.
“He’s having nightmares,” Ms. Montero said in a brief phone call in Spanish on Friday. “He went through something he shouldn’t have gone through.”
Mr. Belgal’s criminal record showed a string of arrests for drug dealing and larceny.
In February 2025, according to court records, he sold cocaine, fentanyl and crack cocaine to an undercover detective on Wadsworth Avenue in the Fort George neighborhood of Manhattan, where a neighbor said he once lived with his girlfriend and an infant.
He pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of criminal sale of a controlled substance after being accused of engaging in multiple drug sales over at least six months. The case remains open.
In 2023, Mr. Belgal was arrested and charged with robbery. He later pleaded guilty to grand larceny and received five years of probation.
On Friday morning, federal officials described Mr. Belgal as an undocumented “thug” with associations to a gang — known as the Trinitarios — that was connected to the shooting of an off-duty customs officer in Manhattan last year.
Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of Homeland Security, said Mr. Belgal “has either indirect or direct knowledge of the shooting.”
“That’s why he became a target,” Mr. Mullin said.
After he was arrested, Mr. Belgal told ICE officers that he was not affiliated with any gangs, according to internal federal records obtained by The New York Times.
Federal officers had tried to arrest him on Sept. 18, but he ran away and escaped into a building, according to the internal federal records.
On Thursday, Mr. Mullin said, “We had taken all precautions to keep him from fleeing.”
Mr. Mullin said the officers who fired at Mr. Belgal on Thursday did not know a child was in the backseat.
Many elected officials in New York condemned the actions of federal officers, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Mr. Belgal’s criminal record surprised some residents of Marble Hill Avenue, where Mr. Belgal was often seen walking with his son.
“Nice kid,” said Zachary Miller, a resident, of Mr. Belgal. “Very nice-mannered.”
Mr. Belgal was friendly, called Mr. Miller “O.G.” and pet Mr. Miller’s pit bull, Coco.
Crystal Hawkins, president of a tenants association on Marble Hill Avenue, described Mr. Belgal as something of a nuisance.
“Not a menace — annoying,” said Ms. Hawkins, 63, who has lived in the neighborhood for 49 years.
She did not like that he drank and smoked marijuana on the sidewalks with his friends, blasting music late at night.
But he would listen when you asked him to turn it down, Ms. Hawkins said.
“What happened to him was not right,” she said. “He did not deserve that.”
Hurubie Meko, Anusha Bayya and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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14) What to Know About the Delhi Protests
Protesters opposed to sweeping revisions to India’s voter rolls are trying to rally in New Delhi. The police have come out in force.
By Somini Sengupta and Pragati K.B., Reporting from New Delhi, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
The Indian police turned New Delhi into a fortress on Saturday as protesters tried to assemble in the city center to oppose a sweeping revision of the nation’s voter roll. The authorities took extraordinary measures to stop them.
A large number of officers gathered and erected tall yellow barricades around the protest site. Several protesters have already been placed under house arrest. Delhi-bound trains have been canceled. Officials ordered the closure of 45 metro stations.
The protests were called by a Gen Z movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party. The demonstrations follow a week of daily protests by opposition politicians and several activist groups who are expected to defy a police ban and join Saturday’s rally.
The group said in a statement that three of its main leaders, including the founder, Abhijeet Dipke, were detained by the police on Saturday morning when their plane landed in New Delhi. The C.J.P. also shared a video that Mehr Parsicha, a spokeswoman for the youth group, recorded of the police detaining her.
Here’s what to know about the events in New Delhi, the capital of the world’s most populous democracy.
What are the protests about?
The protests stem from growing anger at a sweeping revision of the voter roll. The change, known as the Special Intensive Revision, began last summer as an effort to verify voter eligibility and remove duplicate or ineligible names. The government called it a long overdue push to clean up voter records.
It required Indians to submit multiple documents to prove that they were eligible to vote, and it ended up eliminating 130 million names. Critics said it had removed legitimate voters and forced people identified as dead to come forward to prove that they were indeed alive.
Critics have called the measure a politically motivated purge that could entrench the tenure of Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who has been in power for 12 years.
Leaders of Mr. Modi’s party reject the criticism. The home minister, Amit Shah, accused opposition lawmakers of “lies and disinformation” in a social media post. “Having lost their public support, these parties question institutions after every defeat,” he said.
What do the protesters want?
The protesters say their goal is to ensure free and fair elections.
They have demanded the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar; an immediate halt to the voter roll revision pending an independent inquiry; and the restoration of the previous voter roll in coming elections.
A popular slogan by the Gen Z movement refers to the election chief by a diminutive form of his first name: “Gyanu. It’s done, bro.”
The anger at the election chief has been aggravated by news, reported by The Indian Express newspaper, that other officials within the election commission and the Supreme Court had expressed reservations about the exercise.
Who are the protesters?
The protest was initially organized by the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z movement that emerged this summer to decry a broken college entrance exam system. They won the rare ouster of a government minister.
Several groups said they would join the Saturday rally. They include farmers groups that led protests in 2020 against the government’s proposed agricultural reforms. They too marched toward central Delhi and faced a crackdown, but pushed the government to back down.
The opposition Aam Aadmi party, with which some Cockroach Party leaders had been involved, has also said that it planned to join, along with several leftist youth organizations. Those include the All India Students’ Association, affiliated with one of the country’s communist parties, whose members have led some of the most robust protests this week.
What’s at stake?
First, the irregularities in the voter roll revision has dented the reputation of the election commission, which for years had been seen as a credible institution that ran relatively fair elections.
Second, the protests reflect the force of the Gen Z Cockroach movement, which has been led by a handful of young people with no political experience and all under the age of 32. Their success regarding the college entrance system seems to have emboldened others both in the movement and outside it to speak out against the Modi administration.
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15) Executions Are Again on the Minds of a Divided Public
A botched execution and a planned execution that might be livestreamed have renewed debate and divisions over the most severe form of punishment.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Oct. 10, 2026
People gathered during a March 4 Mercy protest against the death penalty at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville last month, ahead of the scheduled execution of Christa Pike. Credit...George Walker IV/Associated Press
Within the span of eight days, the country has learned of a failed execution and a successful execution, and has been promised a livestreamed execution by military firing squad before year’s end.
The most severe form of criminal punishment — there are roughly 2,000 people on death row nationwide — execution has taken center stage in a nation already split politically and culturally, amplifying divisions just weeks before a pivotal midterm election.
Death penalty opponents have seized upon the blundered attempt to kill Christa Pike in Tennessee last week to push for an end to the death penalty. Conversely, the nation’s top military official said on Thursday that the United States would carry out the government’s first public execution since 1936.
The announcement from the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, and its timing, exemplify the salient place that the death penalty has taken in the nation’s polarized political landscape in President Trump’s second term.
On the day Mr. Trump returned to office, he urged prosecutors across the country to pursue and carry out capital punishment. In 2025, states executed more people than they had since 2009, largely driven by a sharp jump in Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.
The failed execution of Ms. Pike — who survived two doses of pentobarbital that may have been injected improperly — has galvanized death penalty opponents, who have denounced what they see as a grisly example of capital punishment’s faults.
And the two events together have brought the issue of the death penalty — something that has for decades taken place in hidden rooms inside mostly rural prisons — back into the forefront of Americans’ minds.
“What we’re seeing is the brutality of the institution of the death penalty coming back into public focus,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis who has studied the death penalty. “Tennessee didn’t intend to do that; the federal government does.”
“Given that there has been a rise in executions,” he added, “it’s a good time to have that debate.”
Nearly 1,700 people have been executed in the past 50 years, including Jamaal Howard, 46, who was put to death on Wednesday in Texas, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, with a peak of 98 killed in 1999. Mr. Howard had been convicted of murdering Vickie Swartout, 42, during a 2000 robbery. Tennessee had sought to execute Ms. Pike for her 1995 killing of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
While 27 states retain the death penalty, fewer than half of those have carried out an execution in the past five years. Virginia abolished the penalty in 2021, and Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said in June that he wanted his state to do so as well.
In modern times, lethal injection has been used far more than any other method, though states have turned to alternative methods — both new and old — in recent years. Several have authorized the firing squad, and two, Alabama and Louisiana, have used the novel method of asphyxiation via nitrogen.
Public opinion polls have shown support for the death penalty steadily declining in recent decades, though a majority of Americans still support it. One poll from this past summer found that two-thirds were in favor.
Still, the specter of livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of murdering 13 people — mostly soldiers — and wounding dozens more at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, has upset many who might otherwise support his killing.
“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, wrote on social media. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Mr. Hasan, now 56, was motivated by his radical views of Islam to carry out the killings in retaliation for America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was wounded by responding police officers and is now paralyzed from the waist down, raising the possibility that he could be transported in a wheelchair to his execution, which is scheduled for Dec. 3. Mr. Hegseth said Mr. Hasan would be killed at Fort Hood around the same time of day — early afternoon — that he committed the crimes.
The reactions to the announcement fell largely along ideological lines — Republicans are much more likely to support capital punishment — but were far from uniform, underscoring the complexity of the issue.
Some Roman Catholic leaders condemned the execution plans. The Catholic Church has long opposed the death penalty as part of its theological commitment to humans across their life spans, though recently U.S. bishops have prioritized ending abortion and defending immigrants.
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the planned livestream “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” and warned it would harm the country.
“The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, an atheist turned Catholic, said on Friday that he would not watch the execution if it was livestreamed and also cast doubt on that idea, saying, “I don’t know if that’s actually going to happen.”
But in a sign of the continued sharp divide that the Trump movement has carved in American Christianity, an energetic cohort of right-wing Christians defended the livestream on biblical grounds.
Josh Howerton, the pastor of Lakepointe Church, an evangelical congregation with locations in and around Dallas, argued on social media that executions in the Bible were carried out publicly as deterrents.
“I do not think you can say it’s unbiblical or automatically wrong,” he said of public executions, noting passages that described public stonings.
The prospect of a public execution was raised prominently around the turn of the century, when some proposed televising the killing of Timothy McVeigh.
Mr. McVeigh, convicted of carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people, himself had urged as much in a letter to The Oklahoman newspaper in which he argued for “equal access” to his execution: “A reasonable solution seems obvious: hold a true ‘public’ execution — allow a public broadcast.”
In the end, he was executed by lethal injection at an Indiana prison in 2001, with a couple of dozen people watching his death in person and about 232 more — including survivors and their relatives — viewing on closed-circuit television from Oklahoma City.
Notably, Mr. Hasan has said he wants to be killed for his crimes, saying he sees an opportunity for martyrdom, though he does not appear to expect the firing squad or a public death.
“I’m paraplegic and could be in jail for the rest of my life,” he told a military panel in 2010. “However, if I died by lethal injection I would still be a martyr.”
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Nashville, and Elizabeth Dias from Washington.
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16) The Interview
She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Oct. 10, 2026
Mirjana Spoljaric and a delegation at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip on Jan. 14, 2025. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
Are we already in the middle of a new world war without realizing it? That’s the provocative question I wanted to explore when I sat down with someone in the rare position to know: Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The I.C.R.C. is a secretive organization that is not well known outside war zones. Unlike the American Red Cross, which deals with blood drives and American disaster relief, the I.C.R.C. is the independent and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements created in the wake of World War II that laid out the rules of war. In her role, Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. She rarely gives interviews because of the politically fraught and confidential nature of her work, but she sat down with me just after the most recent U.N. General Assembly because she is deeply worried about not only the growing number of conflicts in the world but also how complex they have become.
She is also speaking out because she believes that her entreaties to global leaders when it comes to the rules of war are increasingly falling on deaf ears. (We spoke before Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government would be live-streaming a public execution — another sign that the old rules and norms are eroding.) Many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore,” she told me. “And this lack of empathy, this lack of anger, is what I find most dangerous at the moment.”
I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist, and the world feels more dangerous and volatile than I can ever remember. How do you see things? I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it. We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and noninternational armed conflicts that we classify in our system. That’s the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it’s time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.
In my own newspaper, there was a recent headline asking if World War III had already begun, and I want to speak more deeply about why those fears about a global conflict are taking root. But first, you rarely give interviews. Why are you sitting down with me now? Because I want more people to understand that we live in a decade of war. And because we live in a decade of war, we have to understand the significance and importance of the rules of war and why they need to be respected. These treaties were created precisely for times like the ones we live in. People need to understand the importance of this.
Why do you think they don’t? We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don’t apply anymore, and that there can’t be rules because of the pursuit of total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory; there has only been death and destruction, over and above what was necessary.
Is there such a thing as a necessary war? As far as I’m concerned, no. But philosophers and politicians have argued for thousands of years that war is necessary. The point is that war has always been considered as something in the pursuit of a political objective. It’s a means to an end. Today you get the feeling that war becomes the means to an end itself, and wars continue because people want to stay in power. They have created an environment where war becomes the condition under which they can continue ruling, and that’s very dangerous. You ask me whether we are approaching a third world war. Honestly, history will judge that. History books will tell us whether today we were already in the beginning, or maybe already in the middle of such a situation. The I.C.R.C. didn’t know that we were in the Second World War when it was happening.
You are one of the few people in the world who regularly travels to both sides of armed conflicts. Can you tell me where you’ve been since you took over as the head of the I.C.R.C. in 2022? I’ve been to Gaza more than once during military operations. My organization facilitated the release and return of the hostages from Gaza and the Palestinian detainees back to Gaza. I was in Ukraine. I was in Myanmar. I was recently in Iran, in Iraq. I travel to the Middle East often, but I also travel to Africa. I was in Sudan, I was in Mali. I have to go see for myself what it looks like. I need to understand what civilians endure in conflict because I’m speaking to the holders of power. I wouldn’t be credible if I didn’t know what it means to be subject to this level of violence.
Your organization is one of the few that has been allowed inside and continues to work in Gaza. International journalists, most other international organizations haven’t been given access by the Israeli government. Can you describe what you have seen? I never go to any place of conflict without people telling me that they want to stop, without people telling me that they don’t understand why this is happening. I see children without parents. I see children without arms and legs. How senseless does the world feel to you when you’re confronting these things? When you then go to the power holders and they tell you that there’s nothing that they can do, you just don’t understand. I often don’t understand what I see in connection to what I hear.
Millions of Palestinians in Gaza are now forced to live on only around 30 percent of the territory. Over 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. In a 2025 interview with the BBC, you called Gaza worse than hell on earth, and you described people stripped of their human dignity. Have the rules of war been followed there? What I said about Gaza is still valid today. What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard. There are so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there’s enough food, that’s good enough — for some people it’s good enough to just barely survive in rubble, and for other people it is only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school. It’s applying two standards. And this will backfire. We cannot assume that for certain people certain things are sufficient when that doesn’t apply to everybody else. You can see that by how we measure humanitarian needs in Europe in comparison to South Sudan or Somalia. Intuitively and because we can’t prevent it, we continue applying two standards.
That some human lives are more valuable than others? Yeah. I always fear that if you allow double standards, it can happen to you. You never know when you’ll find yourself all of a sudden on the other side of the line. It happened in the Second World War to the Jewish people, but it’s happened to a lot more people than we nowadays keep in mind.
I want to stay with Gaza for one more moment before we broaden out. Did the I.C.R.C. have access to the Israeli hostages while they were in captivity? Because there were horrific stories of their conditions, and one of your main roles is to make sure that detainees and prisoners are treated well. [Shakes head no] Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back. And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of Day 1. But that’s not the reality in which we operate, and so we have to work with the tools that we have. You know, there’s nothing more complex, and to a certain extent also more brutal, than hostage taking. We know that also because our own colleagues find themselves more often than they should in such situations, and we know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible. So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back. And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes. I personally think that pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations. We could have saved more lives. And this was the subject of our conversations. I traveled twice to Qatar to meet with the leadership of Hamas, to sit with Ismail Haniyeh at the time. I sat with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself. These were tough discussions, and trust me, we are very frank in these meetings. This is why these meetings have to always remain confidential.
Israel has also not allowed you access to detainees inside of Israel. How have they explained that to you, and how do you then respond? Prior to Oct. 7, the I.C.R.C. has had access for decades to detainees held by Israel, and we’ve organized tens of thousands, if not more, family visits, and that’s important. Access to prisons in situations of war is extremely challenging and complicated to achieve. And at a certain point in the conflict, parties decide that for security reasons they don’t want to give us access. That’s the most common argument. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is. According to the Geneva Conventions, which all these states have ratified, they have a legal obligation to give us access, and in my opinion also a moral obligation, because we need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives. You capture a soldier, this person is detained, but a soldier is not, per se, a criminal. And no matter how you classify these situations, torture is never allowed. Never. That is clear, and this is what we discuss with those who don’t give us access.
But there’s a different reason for me to be able to go, irrespective of my legal mandate. Detention is the place where you lose your identity. When there’s no possibility to notify the families and to receive information about them, detention becomes the place of utmost deprivation of yourself. And we’ve seen more often than not that people detained under horrible conditions over extended periods of time forget who they are. When I recently visited a detention facility in Iraq, the detainees told me their biggest challenge is information. What is always most important for everyone is to have information about what month it is, what day it is, where their families are, where their children are, whether the children are safe. You’re talking to human beings.
This is a bit of a basic question, but why does it matter how you treat your enemy? Of course it matters! Because you’re dehumanizing yourself if you torture. If you tell your soldiers, “Go and kill women and children, go rape them, looting is allowed, it’s our strategy,” these people dehumanize themselves. They will never be able to return to a normal life. I listen to so many interviews of former soldiers. All of them say that what haunts them is this child that was left in the street because they weren’t allowed to turn around and collect it. That they saw it bleeding to death. It remains with you. You debase yourself. This is why soldiers have all these problems when they return. I refuse to believe that the core human essence is bad. We are good people, we want to live with people we love, we want to have children that thrive, we want to be able to build a house and know that our grandchildren will be better off than us. This is a very normal human motivation. Our motivation is not to live in rubble. How could it be?
want to learn a little bit more about you. You are Swiss Croatian, you studied philosophy and you worked primarily in international development and peacemaking for most of your career. Why did you want to take on a job about war? Do you have memories of the war in Croatia? My first memory of war was everybody telling me about the Second World War and how they endured it. My father was born in the middle, and when he was 5 years old he had to work in the field for 12 hours in the sun for a glass of milk. He said his whole childhood was marked by the memory of being hungry. And my mother was equally traumatized. She said that every time a child died of a disease in her neighborhood, she thought that the parents were lucky, and probably happy, because there was one less child to feed. Can you imagine thinking as a little girl that somebody’s happy about losing a child because you don’t have enough food for everyone? These are the stories that marked me probably more profoundly than anything else. And then came the Yugoslavia wars and my direct exposure to the impact of conflict. I cannot imagine how anybody could say we need this war. I’m not naïve. I’m surrounded by harsh interlocutors in a harsh environment. But I still think that if you keep the people in mind, if you at all times remember that it could happen to you, it could happen to your children, you will think twice before you start the war.
You are the first woman to be president of the I.C.R.C. Do you think gender matters in how you’re dealing with conflict? When I came into office, everybody was asking, “How is it being the first woman president of the I.C.R.C. after 160 years of male dominance?” And it’s not only at the top; it’s across the institution, because it’s an organization that was created in war, for wars. Then I went to northern Mali, and for the first time an I.C.R.C. president could sit with the women in a tent, because social norms prevented my predecessors from doing the same. I felt so shaken throughout the night when I realized what is happening to women in conflict and how brutal it is, because you have an overlap of many things affecting women and depriving them of even the minimum protection that any human being should have. And that night I realized it is different when it’s a woman. If there would never be a woman at the head of these organizations, we wouldn’t be as conscious of what it means for 50 percent of the world’s population.
You’ve seen many horrible things as part of your job. You deal, as you said, in a very harsh environment. How do you protect yourself from the relentlessness and awfulness? I mean, I’ve seen you get a little emotional thinking about it. In German, we say, “I was built close to water.” I’m very emotional. I try to be hard, but it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s good that I’m emotional, maybe it’s good that I get angry when I see bad things or unjust things, because it keeps me going, it keeps that feeling alive that you have to do something.
I was thinking about the I.C.R.C. and the difficulty of staying neutral in this era — this idea of having to speak to both sides and not taking sides. There have been many accusations that the I.C.R.C. hides behind its neutrality to mask inaction. The Holocaust is a moment where the I.C.R.C. failed catastrophically to prevent or to even acknowledge the extermination of the Jews. I know your background is in philosophy. What does it mean to be neutral in the face of extreme suffering? Is there an inherent tension in that? When I started my studies, I had my thoughts. I could get impatient with the stubborn insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. I very, very quickly changed my mind when I became president myself. Having accepted this unique opportunity, I had to learn quickly and acknowledge that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without this strict insistence on neutrality, not in the context of prisoners of war in Russia and in Ukraine, and definitely we wouldn’t have been able to bring back the hostages from Gaza. You’ve seen the pictures of our colleagues unarmed among thousands, if not tens of thousands, of armed men, surrounded by rubble from which there was no escape. We had to negotiate the terms with everyone. Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this highly complex operation if we hadn’t defended our neutrality over 160 years. You tweak it once, you become political, and that’s it. I know it makes so many people angry, but that’s the essence of our mission.
In that context, I want to ask you about Iran. You’ve spoken with the Iranians about the negotiations [with the United States]. I understand that you cannot divulge the nature of those discussions, but I am wondering how much you can say about how this conflict may or may not be resolved. I followed the nuclear talks between 2013 and 2015 under President Obama. It became clear to me at the time how complex these negotiations were. It’s much more complicated today in comparison. The first challenge is to establish trust. We have created a world where war is not a means of last resort. It happens at any moment in a process, which leads to a situation where parties always keep that possibility in mind and always keep a high readiness and preparedness to return to conflict. That in itself is not helpful, because these negotiations will take a long time and will require a lot of compromise. But on top of this, we have created a situation that is much more complex because of the overlapping of conflicts. Today’s conflicts are not limited to a given situation. They are turning into systems.
Explain what you mean exactly. You have countries aligning over continents. You have shifts in military cooperation. You have shifts in interests and economic goals.
So Iran’s relationship with Russia, Russia’s relationship with China, the conflict spreading to Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the Houthis —— And then you have the nonstate armed groups that are connected with other nonstate armed groups — ideological groups, or radicalized groups, however you want to name them, they share ideologies, they share common objectives, they align, they realign, they trade their arms, they ensure the availability of technology and cheap weapons across many countries and thousands of kilometers. So if the situation escalates in Yemen, you can be sure that it won’t remain contained to that territory for long. You already have two very important sea straits affected. So you have a lack of trust. You have asymmetric warfare that allows these conflicts to continue for an extended period of time. And on top of this, there’s a total absence of economic growth and a fast loss of development gains that have been essential for the welfare of the people in many countries of the world. Take Iraq: Over the last 10 years, the country has been recovering from very large conflicts that have had a heavy impact on society and the economy. These gains are being undone. Countries don’t have the fiscal space anymore to cope with the fallout created by continued warfare. The convergence of these trends is extremely dangerous. And now, what do we need? We need political will. We need negotiations. We need powerful politicians to have the power to negotiate.
In his recent speech at the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump threatened the annihilation of Iran by U.S. forces, speaking of this idea of trust and using war as a method of negotiation. He’s used language like that quite a bit, but it was notable to me because he made that statement at a body explicitly created to stop wars, which is the United Nations. What do you think that kind of language says about America’s understanding and commitment to these very complex, in-depth negotiations that you say are needed? You know, I started my career as a diplomat about 25 years ago in New York. And ever since, I’ve been observing eroding language. Certain things said back then would have triggered points of order. People would have left the room. There would have been outrage. I remember when Hugo Chavez spoke at the General Assembly and what reactions this triggered.
When he talked about President Bush and the smell of sulfur, implying that he was the devil. Exactly. This is a gradual erosion. But there are things being said that in certain situations could even lead to war crimes, because depending on who you are and what the situation looks like, it could entice people to do things that would actually amount to war crimes. This is why hate speech and this brutal language is so dangerous. But I’m not accusing a specific person today, because this erosion has been happening for far too long, and I’ve been alert for many years now. Every politician that uses any term that points at there being no rules and no red lines sends this signal to any person in the world that bears a weapon. You have to be conscious that as a holder of power, you have far bigger reach. Many more people hear: Oh, there are no red lines. I have weapons. I can use them.
One of the things that struck me about why we’re in such a period of global conflict is that it’s relatively easy to get into wars but increasingly hard to get out of them. So they drag on and accumulate. Are we losing our capacity to resolve conflicts? Definitely. If you don’t negotiate over 10 years, you lose the practice. It’s like being a heart surgeon. You don’t stop operating and then come back and they give you the instruments and you resume. I spoke once with a senior representative of the A.N.C. [African National Congress] in South Africa who told me: “Our adversaries never had to negotiate anything. They didn’t know how to do it, so we had to train them first before we could sit at the negotiation table.”
Undergirding this whole discussion and your call for leaders to pick up the phone is the breakdown of many democracies and the institutions that hold them together. The weakness that we’re seeing in upholding liberal democracy means that international organizations are also weak. Are you worried about the complete breakdown of the post-World War II order? Of course I am. Because that order made it possible for Europe to stay out of a third world war, to stay out of the levels of destruction that we have seen. Europe is also the leader of bad wars. I feel very bad saying that, but we have to acknowledge that European or Western history is not one of peace and security. But coming out of that rubble, there were a few people who had the foresight and courage to establish an international system that is in no way perfect but for a long time prevented the worst. I mean, everything that is written in the Geneva Conventions today is still as valid. If you had to rewrite them, you would come back with the same principles because they’re so intuitive and logical. In any society, religion, culture, nobody will tell you it’s correct to torture a child.
To come back to this idea that perhaps we might already be in this third global war without us knowing: What can we do? Let’s go back to that time when we believed in peace. Why is it so wrong to start a global movement around the notion of world peace? It’s possible. When I talk to my children, peace is not something completely away and absent for them. This is how they imagine their future. I think we have to listen to them. We have to start retreating from an overfocus on weapons, weapons systems, defense technologies. But we also have to recreate a positive narrative about humanity, about peace, about coming together and working together and living together. We have to come back to recognizing that humanity is what holds us together and is something we need to protect as a priority today, because we are debasing almost everything.
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17) A Deadly Firefight Exposes Erik Prince’s New Shadow War in Congo
The injury of a former Green Beret and death of an elite soldier from New Zealand have highlighted the Blackwater founder’s growing role in one of Africa’s most intractable conflicts.
By Declan Walsh, Published Oct. 9, 2026, Updated Oct. 10, 2026
Declan Walsh reported from Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nairobi, Kenya. He interviewed American, African and European officials, military contractors, U.N. officials and associates of Mr. Prince.
“Mr. Prince’s growing influence in Congo comes as the Trump administration seeks a new toehold for American companies in the country’s lucrative mining industry, where China’s dominance over critical minerals like cobalt is a source of growing concern in Washington. Last December the United States and Congo signed an agreement granting preferential access to American mining interests in Congo, which many Congolese officials privately called a ‘peace for minerals’ deal.”
Erik Prince, the American military contractor, has sought opportunities in resource-rich countries plagued by conflict, mostly in Africa. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The hasty evacuation of a former Green Beret who was badly wounded during a firefight in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month has opened a window into the latest mercenary deployment by Erik Prince, the high-profile American military contractor.
The former Green Beret, Tim Kennedy, who is also known for his career in mixed martial arts and frequent appearances on Fox News, was shot several times during intense fighting in Congo’s eastern highlands, where government forces have been battling a powerful, Rwanda-backed rebel group.
An elite ex-soldier from New Zealand who previously served with his country’s Special Air Service unit was killed. Six people briefed on different aspects of the ambush and subsequent evacuation spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation.
What brought both men to Congo was their employment by Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, a company notorious for a civilian massacre in Iraq in 2007. For years, Mr. Prince has sought opportunities in resource-rich countries plagued by conflict, mostly in Africa. Now his interests are expanding in Congo, where the government has hired foreign help to fend off the rebel advance in the east, while also trying to curry favor with the Trump administration.
To advance its goals, Kinshasa has turned to Mr. Prince, a prominent supporter of President Trump, giving him a central role in one of Africa’s most intractable conflicts.
Details of Mr. Prince’s operations in Congo were provided to The Times by a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Congo, Europe and other African countries, as well as U.N. officials, military contractors and some of Mr. Prince’s own employees. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military casualties or confidential business arrangements.
Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, as did a spokesman for Vectus Global, the company that leads his operations in Congo.
Mr. Prince’s growing influence in Congo comes as the Trump administration seeks a new toehold for American companies in the country’s lucrative mining industry, where China’s dominance over critical minerals like cobalt is a source of growing concern in Washington. Last December the United States and Congo signed an agreement granting preferential access to American mining interests in Congo, which many Congolese officials privately called a “peace for minerals” deal.
In late 2024, Mr. Prince signed a wide-ranging contract to provide security and mining services to President Félix Tshisekedi’s government. The contract was worth hundreds of millions of dollars over five years, although it is unclear how much has been paid out, said a former U.S. official who worked on regional diplomacy.
Since then, Mr. Prince has supplied drones and mercenaries to help Congo fight the M23, the rebel group backed by Rwanda, and has even moved into taxation. His company in Congo employs about 100 people in a drive to recoup some of the estimated $3 billion in taxes that Congo loses every year from fraud in the mining sector.
The tax effort is led by a former French Foreign Legion soldier who works from a gleaming new financial center in the capital, Kinshasa. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an employee of Mr. Prince described plans to digitize mining records, tackle widespread fraud and curb what he called the “blatant looting” of Congolese resources by criminal syndicates that include Chinese mining companies.
Mr. Prince’s employee likened the anticorruption drive to that of Eliot Ness, the Prohibition-era law enforcement officer who aggressively went after the crime boss Al Capone’s bootlegging empire.
The employee said the tax effort is going well. But in the rugged highlands 1,000 miles to the east, where Congo’s war is being fought, Mr. Prince’s other mission has been stymied by setbacks and casualties — not for the first time, say his critics.
“Among mercenaries, especially in Africa, Prince is derided because he has zero successful missions,” said Sean McFate, a former private military contractor who is currently a fellow at The Atlantic Council.
For the past year, mercenaries employed by Mr. Prince have been based at an airfield in Kalemie, a town on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in eastern Congo, several of the current and former officials said. Drone pilots from Colombia and Ukraine, contracted by Mr. Prince, carried out strikes against the M23, the most powerful of more than 100 armed groups operating in Congo. Last January, Mr. Prince’s forces helped the Congolese recapture the key city of Uvira.
But as fighting intensified recently in the nearby Minembwe Highlands, where remote villages nestle amid steep slopes, Mr. Prince’s employees were drawn into a vicious fight. One battle early last month led to the deaths of several Colombian contractors, according to a person briefed on the incident and a report seen by The Times.
Then on Sept. 17, a second group of mercenaries accompanying Congolese soldiers, this time including Mr. Kennedy, was caught in the deadly ambush.
What exactly happened is unclear. One person close to Mr. Prince, briefed on the incident, would only say that it was a “long ordeal,” which was exacerbated by a lack of support from Congolese forces.
When it was over, Mr. Kennedy had been shot multiple times and several others were dead, including Justin Conaglen, a former special operations soldier from New Zealand. Asked about Mr. Conaglen’s death, a spokesman for New Zealand’s foreign ministry said it was “providing support in this case” but declined to provide further information.
After the ambush, Mr. Prince’s officials began to search for air transport options to evacuate the dead and wounded, the people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Kennedy was rushed to Burundi and then South Africa for treatment at the private Milpark hospital in Johannesburg.
Mr. Kennedy has since been flown back to the United States, where he is recovering at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a flagship facility that primarily treats active-duty troops, friends and officials said.
The Pentagon declined to comment, and Mr. Kennedy did not respond to questions.
Known for his dual career in the military and professional sports, Mr. Kennedy served as a Green Beret and competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship until he retired from professional fighting in 2017. He has hosted shows for the History and Discovery channels, published an autobiography, “Scars and Stripes,” and has drawn criticism for making provocative statements about the nature of war on podcasts and TV.
Accusations last year that Mr. Kennedy had exaggerated his military awards prompted the Maryland National Guard to investigate. He publicly apologized for having “unintentionally misstated aspects of my military service.”
Mr. Conaglen took unpaid leave from the New Zealand military in March, before formally leaving the service in August, a spokesman for his country’s military said in an email.
Originally from New Zealand’s North Island, he competed in endurance sports and high-altitude mountaineering, and was part-owner of a holiday rental business in Raglan, a surfing town known for its black-sand beaches.
His remains were returned to New Zealand, where they were cremated on Oct. 1 after a memorial at a rugby club in the small town of Taipa.
Western mercenaries have long been a sensitive subject in Congo, where hundreds of European fighters joined an effort by the Katanga region to secede in the 1960s. Many Congolese also remember the C.I.A.’s role in the overthrow of their country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was later executed by a firing squad led by Belgian contract officers.
But Mr. Tshisekedi put aside those misgivings as the M23 began to resurge across eastern Congo in 2023. As Congo’s notoriously weak national army struggled to respond, he outsourced crucial parts of the fight to foreigners.
Romanians were tasked with defending Goma, the region’s biggest city, until they were routed in January 2025. Algerian drone pilots flew Chinese drones from Kisangani until their base was hit by a suspected Rwandan drone strike in May, current and former officials in the region said.
Those losses have left Mr. Prince as the pre-eminent military contractor in Congo — one who has embraced the language of colonialism.
In a podcast interview in 2024, he called on the United States to “put the imperial hat back on” in African countries that he said were “incapable of governing themselves.”
Asked if he was promoting a new form of colonialism, Mr. Prince replied, “Absolutely, yes.”
In interviews, Mr. Prince often plays up his tough-guy image, presenting himself as a hard-nosed pragmatist who is willing to harness the power of private military action. But in Africa, his ventures have often gone wrong.
In Libya, his mercenaries had to flee on a speedboat in 2019 after a dispute with the warlord who hired them. In Somalia, U.N. investigators accused his forces of violating an international arms embargo on Somalia in 2012.
In Congo, some fear more of the same chaos. Hiring Mr. Prince is a sign of the government’s desperation against the M23, but “it’s creating more problems than solutions,” said Zobel Behalal, author of a recent report on mercenaries in Congo. “It’s a sign that the army is very weak. And while others are making money, in the end it’s the population that suffers.”
Last month, Mr. Prince spent time promoting his new company, Vectus Air Defense Systems, which sells an anti-drone system that he says can protect oil fields, data centers and other sensitive sites. He also began negotiating with Congolese officials over a possible $200 million contract to protect the country’s air force assets, an adviser to the Congolese president said.
American officials say that Mr. Prince’s ventures in countries like Congo are entirely private and that he enjoys no U.S. government support. Still, Mr. Prince, who once donated $250,000 to a Trump campaign, uses his political connections to support his military operations. Mr. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, also served as secretary of education during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Last January Mr. Prince traveled to Belgium for a meeting at the residence of the U.S. ambassador Bill White. In the meeting, Mr. Prince outlined his views on Congo to Belgium’s top Africa diplomat, Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve, according to two European officials.
Then Mr. Prince asked for help.
His drones had been impounded at customs in the Netherlands and he needed to get them out. He also asked if Belgium would authorize the export of guns and ammunition from a Belgian manufacturer to Congo.
The State Department and Belgian foreign ministry declined to comment on the meeting, which State described as a “private diplomatic engagement.” But the answer to both of Mr. Prince’s requests, the officials said, was “No.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt in Washington, Emanuel Stoakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and John Eligon in Johannesburg.
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18) Christa Pike Discharged From Hospital After Surviving Execution Attempt
Ms. Pike, 50 and convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital late last month.
By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Nashville., Oct. 10, 2026
Christa Pike survived an execution attempt and has now been discharged from the hospital. Credit...J. Miles Cary/USA TODAY, via Reuters
Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike had spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
Her survival has gripped the nation and become a flashpoint in the debate over the death penalty at a moment when support for the capital punishment is at its lowest in decades, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Conservative leaders, however, have continued to champion the practice, including in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike’s botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state’s prison system, said he would step down this month.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
May Martinez, the mother of her victim, had traveled from her Florida home to Nashville to witness the execution and has expressed frustration that the promised capital punishment was not carried out. Before the execution, Ms. Martinez told the Times she remained angry not only over the gruesome torture of her daughter — carried out by Ms. Pike and two others — but the toll of lengthy litigation over Ms. Pike’s execution.
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the front-runner to be elected governor in November, has said she believes Ms. Pike should face execution again. The office of the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, has not said whether lawyers will ask the Tennessee Supreme Court to set another date.
Ms. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
A teenager when she was sentenced to death, Ms. Pike had spent decades largely isolated in the Nashville prison as the only woman on death row. During those years, only one other woman, Gaile Owens, was ever held on death row at the same time and the two did not have physical contact.
At the prison, Ms. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers have since said contributed to the violence of her 1995 crime. In response to questions from The New York Times before her execution, Ms. Pike said “the biggest punishment was taking me away from people and human contact.”
A 2024 settlement allowed her to physically interact with other women in the prison. But in the days before her Sept. 30 execution, Ms. Pike was returned to isolation under Tennessee’s new execution protocol.
Her lawyers have fought to shield Ms. Pike’s privacy in the aftermath of the bungled execution. But one, Randy Spivey, has described her expressing an overwhelming confusion over what happened, as well as worry about her loved ones and Ms. Slemmer’s family.
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