LIVE COVERAGE
Monsters 'R Us
Most of Planet Earth now knows cruelty is the point of Trump 2. But if anyone implausibly needs more evidence, meet Rev. Edward Nalwamba, a 79-year-old, pro-democracy Ugandan priest who spent over a year in ICE detention. When he went in, he was fit; at his long-delayed release last week, fellow detainees had to carry him to a car because officials wouldn't let him take his wheelchair that far. To ICE, he charged, "You are an animal...They forget they are dealing with human beings."
In the last 18 months, the Trump regime has deported nearly a million people, and killed at least 60, including two U.S citizens in cold blood and broad daylight. The family of one, Renee Good, has filed two federal civil lawsuits over her Jan. 7 murder, alleging wrongful death, "negligent infliction of emotional distress," conspiracy to conceal evidence, and coordinated campaigns of "aggression and abduction" against ethnic communities and "intimidation and violence" against their allies. And of course it has detained, terrorized, traumatized or shattered the lives of untold thousands, the vast majority with no criminal history.
One was the good Rev. Nalwamba, who arrived in the U.S. in 2002 for a religious conference. Having publicly condemned human rights abuses by the Ugandan government, and subsequently heard from colleagues that government agents were pursuing him, he decided to stay in Colorado and apply for asylum. In 2010, after his application was denied, he began living peaceably in Lakewood under a 15-year ICE supervision order, reporting to immigration officials as required, working as a health aide for people with developmental disabilities, and serving as a pastor at nearby Resurrection Anglican Fellowship until he retired two years ago.
In September 2025 he was arrested by ICE; they charged he was under a removal order dating back to 2010, and that he'd failed to "cooperate with efforts to obtain travel documents" before a deadline, aka to help with his own deportation in a timely manner. He was taken to the GEO Group's private ICE detention facility in Aurora, where for over a year DHS repeatedly vowed to deport him and then didn't. On Oct. 20, after his lawyers filed a second habeas corpus petition, Judge Cyrus Chung ruled feds had exceeded a “presumptively reasonable” six months of holding time with "no concrete plan” to return him to Uganda, and ordered his release.
When he was detained, Nalwamba was a fit 77-year-old who regularly walked, exercised and played ping pong. Inside, his health quickly deteriorated. He caught pneumonia which persisted for weeks, lost over 30 pounds and the ability to walk, developed a stubborn cough, chest pain, scratchy throat, headache and fatigue that were never treated - and besides, "You don’t want to go to the hospital - they shackle you like a bull.” "He walked in. He can't walk now," noted Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper. "They want the misery of one person to be known by others. It's a low-rent form of terrorism to make people so scared they'll self-deport."
Along with the barbaric cruelty, observers also blasted the "staggering hypocrisy" of a regime that simultaneously charged Biden et al "targeted" Christians yet in their voter intimidation efforts sent ICE into churches, interrogated church staff, and detained and abused a church elder. Last week, because they hadn't alienated Christians enough by picking a fight with the Pope, they also turned a supposed prayer gathering of Catholic bishops into a sleazy photo op, prompting two angry Archbishops to apologize, charge they'd been "manipulated," and clarify this was "in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party."
In the final, petty degradation meted out to Rev. Nalwamba, detention officials told his attorneys they would ensure his safe passage on release with a wheelchair and escort, and then reneged on it all. The wheelchair couldn't go out to the gate, they insisted, nor could vehicles approach it. Hickenlooper: "There is no excuse for this cruelty. None.” In the end - no surprise here - it was two young mensches also being released who hooked their arms together - one lawyer: "It was heartbreaking and it was infuriating" - carried the reverend to his waiting car, and went on their way: "They didn't even give me a chance to say thank you.".
After his release, a buoyant Nalwamba said he’s “in another world." He talked to his children, he's well fed, he’s staying with a family who lent him an electric scooter to get around. The next day, he visited a health clinic to get a chest X-ray, blood work, TB testing. He looks forward to physical therapy and reconnecting with his church community: "I am a happy man." Except for the monsters, still here. DHS said they were "forced" by "an activist judge" to release "an illegal alien" who "chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation's laws." Most vitally, "He remains in the country illegally," under a removal order, without legal status.
So much, or not yet for Obama's Michigan citing of "a decency we should expect from our public officials." Attorneys plan to reopen Nalwamba's asylum case; conditions in Uganda have seriously deteriorated with widespread crime, unrest and targeting of political opponents and a U.S. "Do not travel" advisory in effect. At the same time, says attorney Joy Athanasiou, she has never seen "this inhumanity and cruelty" over 20 years of working with detained clients. Before, there were under 1,000 habeas corpus petitions a year; now there are about 90,000, a demand "100 times greater than what we can provide.”
Nalwamba says his thoughts remain with those innocents still inside a callous, corrosive environment worse than any maximum security prison. He loves the America he has lived in for almost 26 years, he says, and has always thought African and other countries should aspire to be like the U.S. But no more, he adds, not without drastic change. Those other countries, he argues, treat their livestock better than he was treated. "It's as if they've gotten used to treating people that way, like they're taking care of goats or cows,” he said. “I have never imagined human beings treated like I saw in this place."
The Rev. Edward Nalwamba Photo by Resurrection Anglican Fellowship
'Absolutely Maddening': UK Approves Jackdaw Gas Drilling in North Sea
With drilling in the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea set to go forward following the United Kingdom's approval, announced on Wednesday, climate groups and progressive lawmakers demanded to know how Prime Minister Andy Burnham could declare the decision a "pragmatic" one, considering the meager job growth and energy savings and massive climate damage expected from the project.
“Is the prime minister living in a parallel universe?" asked Danny Gross, climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth (FOE). "One where we haven’t just endured our hottest summer on record, with droughts, wildfires and, in all likelihood, the most heat-related deaths on record?"
The approval of the oil and gas extraction from Jackdaw by Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Equinor, was announced as the United Nations warned that continued fossil fuel drilling has put the possibility of avoiding a global temperature rise that breaches the 1.5°C threshold out of reach, and emphasized that countries must take action to mitigate the damage and ensure the breach is temporary.
The UN said greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed by nearly one-fifth in the next four years to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
"Against this backdrop, there’s nothing that justifies giving the go-ahead to a colossal new fossil fuel project in North Sea. The disconnect is absolutely maddening," said Gross.
The Jackdaw approval was announced as the government said inflation had jumped to its highest level in almost a year, with US President Donald Trump's war on Iran and Russia's invasion of Ukraine driving up energy prices worldwide.
But an analysis by the UK climate action group Uplift, which compiled data from the public record, found that the Jackdaw project would provide enough gas to displace just 2% of the UK's current imports.
"This will not lower international gas prices paid by UK consumers," said Greenpeace, which also emphasized that Adura has admitted in an environmental statement that the project is projected to create just 27 full-time jobs—making little difference to the area surrounding Aberdeen, Scotland, the center of the UK oil industry where local officials have reported losses of 1,000 oil and gas jobs per month.
Zack Polanski, the leader of Britain's Green Party, said the projected impact of the Jackdaw project couldn't compare "to all the benefits of investing in renewables and insulating our homes."
CBI Economics found earlier this year that the UK's green economy employs more than 1 million people and is worth £100 billion ($133 billion) per year, with workers in the sector paid more than the national average.
“Jackdaw won’t make a jot of difference to our energy bills, but it will fuel the climate chaos already unfurling in front of us. The route to lower bills and true energy security lies in the UK’s vast capacity for cheap, homegrown renewable power and street-by-street home insulation programs," said Gross. “This decision makes Shell and its shareholders richer at the expense of ordinary people’s lives—a move that sees the prime minister turning his back on the very people he claims to be on the side of."
Richard Burgon, a member of Parliament who represents Burnham's Labour Party, called the approval "absolutely terrible" and urged the government not to "repeat the same mistake" with Rosebank oil field in the North Sea, which the prime minister said he would make a decision about at a later date.
Fossil fuel development in both the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields was blocked by a moratorium in 2024, imposed by the Labour government of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Drilling has previously been approved in 2022 and 2023 by the Conservative government. Supporters of oil and gas extraction in the North Sea have argued that since the fields were approved for exploration under the Conservatives, allowing drilling now does not violate the moratorium.
The climate impacts of the two projects are projected to cost each UK household £3,000 ($4,017) annually, according to Greenpeace, and gas production from Jackdaw is estimated to be equivalent to about 40 million barrels of oil, Adura has said.
"Using government calculations for climate harm, burning Jackdaw’s gas will cause an estimated £16.1 billion [$21.5 billion] in global damage and over 8,000 heat-related deaths," said Greenpeace.
This past summer, extreme heat across Europe helped ignite wildfires and was blamed for tens of thousands of excess deaths on the continent. The breakdown of a glacier in Nepal and Tibet also caused a flooding disaster that killed more than 1,000 people.
“It is a shame that one of the first big decisions for the new energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, has been to approve more fossil fuel drilling," said Rosemary Harris, North Sea senior campaigner for Oil Change International. "At a time where the impacts of climate breakdown are so clearly felt, from the loss of livelihoods, homes, and lives in the UK over the summer, to the devastating floods in Nepal, our government should look to the future, not cling to the past."
The approval also came weeks before Burnham is set to represent the UK at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye.
While drilling in the Jackdaw field will "make no real difference to our energy bills or security," said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "it will signal to other fossil fuel producers that they too should carry on with business as usual, less than a month before the COP31 United Nations climate change summit.”
Harris said that following the approval, "all eyes are now on Rosebank, and the hope that Andy Burnham and his energy secretary have the courage and vision to push back against the industry and plot a path to an energy transition that provides more security, lower bills, and a safe climate."
'Working People Will Pay a High Price': Report Warns AI Bubble Is 'Primed to Pop'
A report released on Wednesday warns that the investment boom in artificial intelligence is a financial bubble that is "primed to pop" and harm working-class Americans if lawmakers don't take concrete steps to shield them from the damage.
The report, produced by Open Markets Institute and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, warns that Big Tech companies are using increasingly risky debt-fueled financing methods to keep plowing money into AI infrastructure, which has resulted in global stock markets growing overvalued to "a historic degree."
The report highlights the role played by so-called circular financing agreements, in which one company agrees to fund another company’s AI project in exchange for the firm receiving the money buying the investing firm’s products.
"The AI industry’s extensive ecosystem of circular financing and purchase agreements makes it very hard for outsiders to determine how much bona fide revenue the technology is generating," the report notes, "and very easy for companies to artificially inflate the revenues and deflate the expenses they release to the public."
While such financing deals aren't inherently unlawful, the report continues, they can "be used to create a false impression of strong demand and disguise the true state of the involved companies’ finances, particularly when circular arrangements drive a substantial portion of the companies’ revenues."
The report also urges lawmakers to avoid the same mistakes the federal government made during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, when it bailed out financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 housing crash.
"If they face collapse, neither AI-related firms nor their leadership should be shielded from the financial or legal consequences of their mismanagement," the report states. "Under no circumstances should failing AI-related firms receive government support to remain going concerns. Instead, failed AI firms should be moved through legal proceedings for liquidating and/or dissolving firms in an orderly manner."
Instead of saving the AI firms and their financiers, the report emphasizes lawmakers "must prioritize the recovery and protection of workers and families by directing federal assistance to workers, households, and communities harmed by the crisis."
Maya Jenkins, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and co-author of the report, accused President Donald Trump and his administration of making the AI bubble more dangerous by "rolling back guardrails that protect investors and financial stability."
"If nothing changes, working people will pay a high price for an AI crash," Jenkins emphasized. "Policymakers should be taking urgent action to reduce the risks. And they should be committing now to not bail out the AI companies or banks and financial firms that caused the problems."
Matthew Scherer, fellow at Open Markets Institute and report co-author, similarly emphasized the AI bubble's potential cost to working-class Americans and urged lawmakers to take a proactive approach to mitigating harms.
"Workers could lose their jobs, families could see their retirement savings evaporate, and communities could face the fallout from another financial crisis. Policymakers need to act now to shore up the financial system and make clear that taxpayers will not be forced to bail out the companies and financiers responsible."
The AI bubble report came one day after Reuters reported that frontier AI lab Anthropic recorded a net loss of $80 billion in the first half of 2026, more than six times the $13 billion loss the company posted a year earlier.
Despite bleeding money, the company is seeking an initial public offering next month worth $1.5 trillion, according to Reuters.
Trump DOJ Brings 'Tired, Desperate' Attempt to Find Noncitizen Voting to Washington State
As a federal appeals court on Monday refused to order California officials to set aside 20,000 mail-in ballots that the Trump administration claimed were cast by noncitizens, the US Department of Justice was already pushing a similar effort in Washington state—the latest of what one advocate called "tired, desperate attempts by a cornered and losing side" to cast doubt on the validity of the November 3 midterm elections.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs received a letter Monday from acting US Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, who demanded that the state set aside any ballots cast by 405 people whom the DOJ claims are illegally registered to vote despite not being US citizens.
Floyd said the voters have cast 1,500 ballots in past elections, and complained that the Democratic-led state's refusal to turn over unredacted voter rolls to the DOJ earlier this year made his search for noncitizen voters more time-consuming.
The Trump administration has filed lawsuits against more than 20 states for refusing to hand over voter data on millions of people, and the DOJ has resorted to using commercially available information and comparing it with federal records in an effort to track down people it says have voted illegally despite being noncitizens.
The right-wing Heritage Foundation was able to uncover just 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003-22, and election officials in found that in 42 jurisdictions, .0001% of 23.5 million votes were cast by suspected noncitizens in 2016.
Those statistics are in line with the results of the DOJ's efforts thus far. In California, federal officials announced they had identified 28 immigrants who were suspected of voting before they became naturalized citizens. The group represented about .0001% of registered voters in California.
In Nevada in September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed authorities had found 16,000 noncitizens on the state's voter rolls. DHS ultimately sent the state a list of just 185 people who it said were illegally registered to vote, but state officials found that all 185 voters were citizens.
Despite the administration's track record, Floyd insisted that this time would be different, asserting in a news conference that the 405 people identified by the DOJ in Washington were "only the tip of the iceberg."
“Because of limitations the state has placed on our investigation, we’ve only been able to uncover a fraction of the total number,” he said. "We will continue to investigate and identify those who are committing crimes by voting illegally.”
A spokesperson for Hobbs' office told NBC News that the secretary of state is reviewing the list, but Hobbs stressed that he "will only respond to requests that follow due process."
"We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously," said Hobbs. "We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed. The timing of this request—one week before the general election—is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”
The search for illegally registered voters in Washington comes days after the DOJ filed a lawsuit in Alaska seeking to block the certification of the state's US Senate election results if Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) narrowly loses to his Democratic challenger, former Rep. Mary Peltola.
The DOJ argued that voters may be confused by their ballots, on which Sullivan and Peltola are listed along with other candidates—one of whom is a retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. Critics have noted that the sitting senator is clearly marked as the incumbent.
The latest polling average in the key race, which could determine control of the Senate, shows Peltola leading Sullivan by about two points.
On Sunday in an interview with CNN, Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the DOJ's push to stop the automatic certification of the Alaska election results, saying that President Donald Trump "is not trying to take over a state election in any way, shape, or form" and becoming angry when anchor Dana Bash asked whether the refusal to accept the election results could lay the groundwork for violence, as in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
Last week Blanche told reporters that the DOJ could become involved in the election certification process in a "doomsday" scenario.
"Trump’s DOJ has been trying to figure out how to rob Americans of their votes in the midterms since February," said journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez Tuesday. "I hope states are ready to fight and resist the administration. These freaks aren’t just going to let Americans vote their way out of this if they think they can do something about it."
'Hunger Disaster Unrolling Before Our Eyes': Alarm Grows Over Trump Food Aid Evisceration
An analysis published Thursday showed that millions of Americans have lost critical food assistance since President Donald Trump signed last year's massive Republican tax giveaway for the superrich, with soaring grocery prices and cuts to school meals exacerbating the crisis.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), approximately 5.5 million people, including roughly 2 million children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistance since Trump signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July 2025.
The legislation approved the deepest cuts to SNAP—also known as food stamps—and Medicaid in those programs' histories while slashing billions of dollars from other essential social programs to fund massive tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.
This, at a time when more than 47 million Americans—including 1 in 5 US children—are living in food-insecure households.
The 5.5 million people who have lost SNAP represent 13% of the program's recipients, according to CBPP. The decline is far below projections made by the Congressional Budget Office.
"The declines are especially pronounced in some states," the report noted. "SNAP participation fell in Arizona by nearly 51%... The caseload declines are 20% or more in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oklahoma, and—using more recent state data—in Indiana, Kansas, and Texas."
In absolute numbers, Texas saw the biggest loss of SNAP recipients, with 709,435 fewer enrollees. Florida lost 665,935 SNAP enrollees, while Arizona had 408,204 fewer and California lost 333,062.
The CBPP report follows an analysis released Tuesday by Unrig Our Economy and Americans for Tax Fairness that showed how Latino SNAP recipients have been disproportionately affected by food stamp cuts. The groups estimated that 1.5 million Latinos have been kicked off SNAP since Trump signed the OBBBA, with Texas (396,164) and Arizona (200,124) hardest-hit.
More cuts are highly likely, as "starting in October 2027, most states will have to pay between 5-15% of SNAP benefit costs, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars a year in many states," according to CBPP.
"The magnitude of the cost shift and the urgency surrounding error rates incentivized states to take drastic measures to reduce their payment error rates quickly and cut program costs, even if it meant delaying or improperly denying benefits to eligible people," the analysis warns.
The OBBBA's SNAP cuts, combined with stricter eligibility requirements, have forced schools across the country to scale back universal free meal programs amid declining federal reimbursements.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that school districts are experiencing ballooning unpaid lunch bills and struggling to ensure children are fed. In rural Indiana, one district’s share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price meals plunged from 66% to 44% in a year, while its lunch debt has already reached $10,000. In San Antonio, Texas, the number of schools offering free meals to every student under a federal program fell from 48 to 16. Nationwide, the average number of children receiving free school lunches dropped by 600,000 between fiscal years 2025 and 2026.
Making matters worse, many eligible immigrants are not applying for SNAP benefits out of fear it could affect their citizenship prospects.
Food banks and other charities are having to meet needs the government once addressed.
“It’s been getting out of control since last year,” Paco Vélez, president and chief executive of the Feeding South Florida food bank, told the Post. “It’s all created a situation where families are needing more and more assistance.”
The CBPP and Post reports came on the same day as a "Food Misery Index," published by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), offered a detailed view of how the combined impact of SNAP cuts and skyrocketing grocery prices—exacerbated by Trump policies including tariffs, the deadly immigration crackdown, and the illegal war of choice on Iran—"has stripped more than $22 billion from American families since July 2025."
“SNAP participation is falling because the Trump administration has intentionally kicked people off of the program—leaving Americans hungry and still struggling to afford food,” Warren wrote Wednesday in a letter to US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“Instead of reaching for tools to mitigate these threats to families and working to bring down costs, the administration continues to sit idly by, peddling false narratives about the drop in SNAP participation, while delivering a one-two punch to American families who are struggling to put food on their tables," the senator continued.
"With grocery prices and food insecurity on the rise," Warren added, "I urge the administration to work with Congress to immediately reverse its harmful cuts to SNAP."
Israeli Occupation Forces Ramp Up Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank After Palestinian Resistance Attack
Israeli forces on Friday began demolishing homes and businesses and forcibly evacuating residents near Hebron in the illegally occupied West Bank following a Palestinian resistance attack that killed two Israeli soldiers.
"First, we will destroy this place and completely transform it, but we will do something that has never been done before," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the scene of the shooting attack that took place earlier Friday near Hebron Junction. "We will evacuate the residents, go from house to house, remove weapons from there as well, and deal with and destroy all terrorist infrastructure."
"We will consider expanding this model to other cities as well," Netanyahu added.
The prime minister also ordered the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to “immediately impose a lockdown on Hebron and prepare for a full lockdown" of the entire West Bank, while vowing to launch the largest military operation in the occupied territory since it was conquered during the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently ethnically cleansed of more than 100,000 Palestinians.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also vowed that neighborhoods associated with the attackers would be "evacuated"—a word that critics call a euphemism for ethnic cleansing—"just like in Gaza; just like in Lebanon."
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed those calls.
"There is no other option but a comprehensive military campaign in Judea and Samaria to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, collect weapons, and eliminate terrorists," he said, referring to Israel's name for the West Bank.
"Exactly like in Gaza and Lebanon," Smotrich added.
Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 people in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023, while forcibly displacing around 1.9 million residents and destroying or damaging more than 80% of the strip's structures. In Lebanon, nearly 40,000 people have been killed or injured by Israeli attacks over the same period, during which there were two waves of mass displacement in which more than a million people were forced from their homes each time. Dozens of Lebanese villages have been flattened.
Demolition and displacement were the order of the day in the West Bank Friday as Israeli bulldozers began demolishing homes after Netanyahu's announcement, even as local residents said their properties had no connection to the attack on the slain IDF troops.
The Times of Israel reported that soldiers ordered Palestinians in the Farsh al-Hawa area to evacuate ahead of demolitions, with footage showing residents being pushed out as their belongings were loaded onto trucks.
“We are already here with the equipment on the ground, sending an unequivocal message to our enemies: If you mess with us, we will exact a very, very painful price from you,” Smotrich said in Farsh al-Hawa.
Israel’s High Court intervened and issued a temporary order to halt demolitions after Arab-Israeli human rights lawyer Mohammed Dahleh filed an urgent petition on behalf of two factory owners who claimed the destruction violated Israeli law as well as international prohibitions on collective punishment.
“What we saw today was an attempt to copy the illegal practices used in Gaza, in the heart of the West Bank,” Dahleh told The Guardian. “They want to wipe out entire areas exactly as they did in Gaza and the refugee camps in the West Bank.”
Another Israeli human rights attorney, Michael Sfard, called Smotrich's video announcement a "direct admission" of collective punishment.
The demolitions and forced evacuations are unfolding amid a wider Israeli campaign of home destruction, settler pogroms and other deadly violence, and displacement that Palestinian rights advocates and United Nations officials have called ethnic cleansing.
Palestinian olive harvesters, as well as international solidarity activists accompanying them, journalists covering settler attacks, and even international diplomats have come under attack by IDF-backed settler terrorists. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said earlier this week that between September 1 and October 12, Israeli settlers carried out 199 attacks connected to the harvest, killing one Palestinian, injuring 124, and damaging more than 2,500 trees and saplings.
According to OCHA, over 1,130 Palestinians—at least 250 of them children—have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since October 2023.
Friday's developments came four days ahead of Israel's elections, in which the ruling far-right coalition is trying to boost support among voters, including settler colonists pushing the government to annex the West Bank.
Netanyahu has vowed to annex all settler colonies. Smotrich has presented a plan to annex approximately 82% of the West Bank, excluding six major Palestinian cities. Ben-Gvir wants to annex the entire West Bank.
Israel's actions on Friday drew widespread condemnation.
“Israeli leaders are publicly announcing plans for collective punishment and acts that could constitute war crimes,” the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said, while imploring “governments and international institutions to act now, using all means available under international law, to prevent the forcible displacement of Palestinian civilians, collective punishment, and extensive unlawful destruction in Hebron.”
'We Want Our Son's Killers Brought to Justice,' Says Mother of Alex Pretti Months After CBP Slaying
The father of the late nurse, killed during a Trump administration crackdown on immigrants in Minnesota, urged leaders at the US Department of Justice to "do your job and stop shielding Alex's killers."
"I'm Michael Pretti, Alex's father. Our son Alex was shot and killed by the government—federal immigration agents—on January 24, 2026."
After thanking those gathered, that's how Michael Pretti began his remarks at a Tuesday press conference in Minneapolis, just over nine months after US Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez fatally shot the 37-year-old intensive care nurse in the Minnesota city during President Donald Trump's "Operation Metro Surge."
Michael Pretti recalled his son's upbringing in the Midwest, and conversations about "cars, hiking, biking, or anything that came to our mind." His wife, Susan Pretti, who also spoke at the press conference, called their first-born child "exceptionally kind and caring," adding that he "did not tolerate bullies," "loved working with the veterans" he served as a nurse, and "had a deep sense of justice."
"We are not political activists," Susan Pretti stressed. Her husband pointed out that their son was observing the immigration crackdown: "He was peaceful... He was not protesting."
Federal immigration agents "executed" Alex Pretti, his father said. The family learned about his death from the media, and "that video haunts our family... I think it haunts many Americans."
After the agents "murdered our son," Susan Pretti said, "the federal government went on TV and lied about Alex. They tried to slander his memory to cover up their crime."
Members of the Trump administration have repeatedly tried to smear Pretti and others killed during the president's mass detention and deportation initiatives as "domestic terrorists" endangering agents on the ground, even as video footage has contradicted their claims.
Michael Pretti highlighted that "no one from the federal government has called us since" his son's killing. He also said that "even in our grief, we understand that investigations need to be done carefully and thoroughly. We know that the wheels of justice move slowly—but even then, there is cooperation and communication."
Instead of justice, the Pretti family has been subjected to "cruelty," he argued. "Do your job and stop shielding Alex's killers," he urged Dan Rosen, who serves as the US attorney for the District of Minnesota, and US Attorney General Todd Blanche, who leads the Department of Justice.
The parents, who live in Colorado, are "begging for the Department of Justice to do what is right," according to Susan Pretti. "We want to clear our son's name. We want the world to understand who Alex really was. We want our son's killers brought to justice once and for all."
In March, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with state investigators probing federal immigration agents' killings of Pretti and Renee Good, both US citizens, as well as their shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan who was wounded but survived.
"The Trump administration has suggested that state prosecutors don't have jurisdiction to investigate federal officers, while Minnesota officials have said they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself," The Associated Press noted Tuesday. "The state is still seeking the cellphones of the officers involved... and recordings of key interviews."
As The New York Times reported:
Steven L. Schleicher, a lawyer representing Mr. Pretti's parents, said the Justice Department's refusal to share basic information with the family amounted to a violation of the federal Crime Victims' Rights Act. He expressed similar sentiments in a letter he sent to Attorney General Todd Blanche in July.
Hoang Bui, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Minnesota, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While the Prettis haven't yet sued over their son's homicide, their press conference comes after families of other victims launched cases in recent weeks. On October 1, Good's relatives filed a pair of lawsuits against the federal government and immigration officials over her killing and an alleged conspiracy to interfere with civil rights in Minnesota's Twin Cities.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Good—the 37-year-old writer, poet, and mother—in her vehicle while she and her partner were observing ICE operations on January 7 in Minneapolis.
"What happened to her on January 7th and what has happened to far too many people in the last year is not what America is about," said her brother, Brent Ganger. "We can and must do better, and the Constitution must be the roadmap back to decency and the rule of law."
A week after those suits were filed, groups representing the family of Silverio Villegas González filed a legal claim against the Trump administration over an immigration agent's "execution-style killing" of the 38-year-old Mexican man in Illinois on September 12, 2025.
"We are united by the same pain that every family who has been impacted by this inhumane immigration system faces," his relatives said. "A year has not erased or diminished the ache we feel in his absence. Our family demands justice for Silverio, and we hope that those responsible for his death are held accountable."
Netanyahu Accused of 'Incitement' as Arab Israelis Face Intimidation and Surveillance at Polls
The prime minister's coalition has sent around 2,000 activists, some of them armed, to surveil voters in what they called “Arab population centers.”
The leader of one of Israel's main Arab parties accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of "incitement" against Arab voters, whom civil rights groups warn are facing deliberate obstruction and intimidation at the polls on Tuesday.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is lying and inciting against Ra’am, using it as a scare tactic to mobilize right-wing voters and drive them to the polls,” the party’s leader, Mansour Abbas, said in a video message Tuesday.
Abbas was responding to a video posted by Netanyahu warning supporters of his Likud party that Arab voters in the south were “racing to the ballots.” He also accused Ra’am of “trying to steal the election from us,” citing the arrest the previous night of three people on suspicion of attempting to bribe voters to cast ballots for the party. Though Netanyahu has claimed that the three were “senior Ra’am” figures, he has not provided evidence of this.
Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Jewish-led Change coalition seeking to oust Netanyahu, has sworn off an alliance with Arab parties. However, Ra’am is hoping for an opposition victory narrow enough that the inclusion of Arab parties will be essential to form a governing coalition in the Knesset.
Tuesday’s election is the first since Netanyahu launched Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and comes amid unprecedented state-backed terrorism by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Accusing the other side of being too soft on Palestinians has been a central campaign tactic for both Netanyahu and his opponents.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that cars flying Likud banners were seen driving through Jerusalem playing the Islamic call to prayer and warning that "Arabs are voting" and that the prime minister had shared videos of long lines at Arab polling places to frighten his supporters.
"If you want this country to be Jewish and Zionist, you must go out and vote," National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, told voters for the Likud coalition. "Don’t let them win.”
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) warned Tuesday of potential deliberate efforts by Israeli authorities to slow down Arab voters. In a letter demanding urgent action from the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Judge Noam Sohlberg, the group said that in Arab communities, “the voting process is proceeding slowly, without explanation, and voters are being forced to wait for extended periods.”
ACRI reported that police and National Guard troops kept about 200 voters waiting outside a high school in the Bedouin town of Segev Shalom in southern Israel, citing overcrowding, even though relatively few voters were actually inside. Voters there had waited up to five hours before casting ballots.
The group said it received reports of long queues in other Arab communities, including Rahat, Tel Sheva, Laqiya, Umm Batin, Tira, and Tamra.
"There are numerous reports of severe slowdowns at many polling stations," Yeela Raanan, a member of a team monitoring election integrity in Bedouin communities, told Haaretz.
In many Bedouin communities, Raanan said, "people report waiting for hours, and polling station staff are taking a very long time to verify each voter's identity."
Police have been dispatched to many Arab polling places, where they've reportedly been checking voters' identification, a duty that, under the law, belongs to election officials, Haaretz reported.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said that at some locations, Palestinian voters were slowed down by election officials who asked them irrelevant questions, blocked doors, and suspended voting.
The group reported that at one polling station in Kafr Qara in central Israel, only one person had voted during the first three hours after polls opened.
At several other polling places in ethnically diverse and Arab cities—including in Haifa, Nazareth, I’billin, Eilabun, Shefa-Amr, and Nof HaGalil—Arab voters arrived to find that ballots printed in Arabic were not available. Adalah sent a letter to the head of Israel’s Central Elections Committee demanding that these polling centers immediately be supplied with Arabic-language ballots.
There are also reports of direct intimidation. Likud and its coalition partner, the far-right Religious Zionism party, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, announced plans to send about 2,000 activists to what they called “Arab population centers” to observe elections, claiming without evidence that Arabs were committing fraud on a massive scale.
Israel's Supreme Court on Sunday night rejected a petition to ban firearms at polling places on Election Day. Adalah warned that the decision "allows those taking part in Netanyahu and Smotrich's provocation to show up at polling stations in Arab communities like armed militias."
The Mossawa Center, which advocates for Arab citizens’ rights in Israel, urged election officials to intervene Tuesday, saying Israeli settlers had arrived at polling stations to obstruct voting and that it had documented confrontations in Tayibe, Majd al-Krum, Shefa-Amr, Haifa, and I’billin, according to The New Arab.
The outlet separately reported that residents in Majd al-Krum stopped a right-wing activist from forcing his way into a polling station after provoking voters.
"Settlers at polling stations in Arab communities are deliberately obstructing and slowing down the voting process," said Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset. "A sick woman fainted while waiting. I'll put it this way: It won't help you. People will stay there until they cast their votes."
Haaretz reported Tuesday that Likud also paid unofficial teams “millions of shekels” to record Arab voters to help push the conspiracy theory that the election was rigged if Netanyahu’s coalition falls short.
Despite the obstacles, Arab turnout is reportedly significantly higher than during Israel's last elections in 2022, according to estimates by the coalition of left-wing Arab parties, known as the Joint List.
Joint List Chairman Yousef Jabareen predicted ahead of Tuesday’s vote that intimidation would be widespread. He said it would be answered with turnout from voters eager to oust Netanyahu.
"They will get our answer at the ballot box," he said, "when we, with our own hands, send them home.”
Senators Investigate Insurance Giants for 'Quietly Colluding' With Trump to Kick People Off Healthcare
"Insurance companies chose to participate in a collaborative effort with the Trump administration to inject yet more chaos and damage into the ACA marketplace."
US Sen. Bernie Sanders and a dozen of his Democratic colleagues are investigating the roles that Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, and other leading private insurance companies are playing in the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to strip health coverage from millions of Americans.
On Monday, the lawmakers sent letters to the chief executives of 10 top insurance companies demanding answers on the firms' cooperation with the Trump administration in its recent removal of around 760,000 Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollees, citing alleged fraud.
"Aligning with Republicans and their so-called ‘war on fraud,’ insurance companies chose to participate in a collaborative effort with the Trump administration to inject yet more chaos and damage into the ACA marketplace,” the senators wrote. “This year, nearly 3 million people have lost coverage while millions more are paying sky-high premiums and higher deductibles for insurance that covers less."
The lawmakers noted that the 760,000 coverage terminations "would not have been possible without the cooperation of insurance companies that have been quietly colluding with the Trump administration" for months. The senators disclosed in their letters that the ten largest insurance companies in the ACA marketplaces "received, and voluntarily complied with, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data request designed to terminate coverage for hundreds of thousands of enrollees."
The letters characterize the CMS requests as "potentially unlawful" and take insurers to task for readily obeying the administration. The insurance companies that received letters from the senators are Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, AmeriHealth Caritas, Centene, Elevance, Florida Blue, Health Care Service Corporation, Imperial Insurance Companies, Oscar Health, and Molina Healthcare.
"Issuers, including Cigna, took specific steps to assist CMS in their efforts, including sending unsolicited communications to enrollees asking them to verify their Social Security numbers," the senators observed. "Issuers provided CMS with lists of enrollees who did not receive or respond to this unsolicited outreach asking for personally identifiable information. Those enrollees were deemed presumptively fraudulent, so-called 'phantom enrollees' and their coverage was terminated retrospectively, effective August 31, 2026."
The lawmakers added that "enrollees were identified as being subject to coverage termination based on metrics such as whether their projected income made them eligible for tax credits that cover the full premium of their plan, and whether they sought care during the 2026 plan year."
"As you know, there is no credible research or evidence in support of the longstanding Republican conspiracy theory that zero-dollar premium plans and zero-claims enrollment are reliable proxies for fraud," the senators wrote.
Analysts said in response to the administration's September announcement of mass coverage terminations that while fraud certainly exists in the ACA marketplaces, many of the people who lost coverage as part of the purge were likely enrolled legitimately. KFF Health News reported earlier this month that CMS has already "reinstated a small number of people whose coverage should not have been canceled."
"More could follow in the coming weeks if enrollees discover they are uninsured when they go to use their coverage," the outlet noted. "Overall, however, the administration is providing few details about the cancellations, such as how robust the outreach was to those it targeted, how long it takes for people to get reinstated after discovering their coverage was wrongly canceled, and how many such cancellations have been reversed."
The senators demanded answers from the 10 insurance company executives to a series of questions, including when the Trump administration first contacted them about its purported anti-fraud effort in the ACA marketplaces and what steps the firms took to ensure that eligible enrollees were not impacted.
The lawmakers contrasted the companies' voluntary cooperation with the Trump administration with their refusal to act on requests from Democrats last year to increase outreach to ACA enrollees amid relentless Republican attacks on the program.
"Insurance companies almost universally declined to perform any additional direct enrollee outreach, citing the cost and complexity associated with doing so outside the issuer renewal notice process," the senators wrote. "Issuers also expressed concern about being put at a competitive disadvantage should their enrollees choose to shop for more affordable coverage in light of rising premiums."
After Silencing by NFL Owner, Macklemore Opens 'Free Palestine' Tour With Sold-Out Dublin Show
The concert garnered rave reviews, with The Guardian calling it a five-star "triumph," and The Irish Times praising the “courage of Macklemore's convictions.”
In a metaphorical middle finger to billionaire NFL owner Robert Kraft's effort to get Macklemore booted from Ed Sheeran’s US stadium tour over his outspoken support for Palestinian liberation, the rapper opened his "Free Palestine" benefit tour Monday with a critically acclaimed sold-out show in Dublin.
More than 13,000 fans packed Dublin's 3Arena, waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs as the crowd repeatedly chanted “Free Palestine" throughout the show.
“I am proud to stand here on stage in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Macklemore told the audience. “We will continue to fight for collective liberation until our last breath."
"Six weeks ago, it was two words. Two words is all that it took. Two words that are rooted in love and liberation. Not against anybody, not divisive, not a call for hatred, but a call to recognize our shared humanity. 'Free Palestine.' I said 'Free Palestine,'" the Seattle native said.
He was referring to his removal from Sheeran's Loop Tour amid pressure from Kraft—who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts—after the rapper condemned Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and illegal occupation and apartheid in the West Bank during a September performance at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
"While the world debates those words, we see the videos, we see the footage, we see parents pulling their children out of the rubble, families erased, devastation beyond our imagination," Macklemore, whose real name is Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, continued.
"And somehow," he added, "those words have become more controversial than the suffering that made them necessary."
Kraft's pressure backfired spectacularly as every other opening artist on Sheeran's tour withdrew in solidarity with Macklemore, while the rapper launched his own benefit shows in larger European venues than he had played on his previous tour.
In addition to Macklemore—who rose to prominence in 2012 with his multiplatinum hit "Thrift Shop"—the concert featured performances by Irish artist Hozier, trio Kneecap, and folk band Beoga; Palestinian singer Lina Makoul; Palestinian American DJ Habibeats; and US political hip-hop duo Dead Prez.d
Actors Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon and Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas also appeared via video messages.
Macklemore has paid more than just lip service to the Palestinian cause, pledging $1 million to aid groups. Children's educator and YouTube star Ms. Rachel subsequently vowed to match the donation, declaring, “We have a moral obligation to use our privilege and platforms to protect children and human rights.”
The proceeds of the "Free Palestine" tour—which also has scheduled shows in London and Paris—will support organizations providing Palestinians with medical care, humanitarian assistance, education, and community services.
The tour's opening show garnered rave reviews, with The Guardian calling it a five-star "triumph," and The Irish Times giving the concert four stars and praising the “courage of Macklemore's convictions.”
'Another Year, Another New Record': UN Highlights Rising Greenhouse Gas Levels Ahead of COP31
"We are supercharging the ocean and the atmosphere," said one WMO leader. "That means that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for."
With the next United Nations Climate Change Conference less than two weeks away, a UN agency confirmed Tuesday that levels of three key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "reached unprecedented highs in 2025, locking in more long-term temperature increase for the planet."
“Another year, another new record," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said in a statement. "The past 11 years have been the warmest on record, and this trend is set to continue."
"The big three are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Since the 1960s, growth rates of CO2 have tripled," Barrett told journalists during a press briefing about the "Greenhouse Gas Bulletin of 2025," which is published annually.
Global greenhouse gas concentrations reach record highs in 2025. The unprecedented atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and methane lock in severe climate impacts and temperature increases for centuries ahead of the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Turkey.www.france24.com/en/live-news...
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— Flingjore (@flingjore.com) October 27, 2026 at 11:12 AM
"When the bulletin was first published in 2004, the annual level of carbon dioxide was 377.5 parts per million. In 2025, it was 426.8 parts per million," Barrett noted. Methane, or CH4, hit 1,948 parts per billion, while nitrous oxide, or N2O, was 339.1 ppb.
"Every additional part per million matters because it traps additional heat," she stressed. "In effect, we are supercharging the ocean and the atmosphere. That means that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for."
While carbon dioxide is "the most abundant long-lived gas," Barrett also addressed "gases which are present in much lower concentrations but are of potential concern," such as sulfur hexafluoride, or SF6—which "is closely related to electricity production and distribution, and has been rising over the past three decades because of the switch to global electrification."
"Sulfur hexafluoride concentration in 2025 have increased by 249% relative to 1995 levels. They are measured in parts per trillion—not million. So why should we be concerned?" she said. "Because SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime of up to 3,200 years. Its global warming potential is more than 24,000 times that of CO2."
"The energy transition is essential and welcome," Barrett added. "But as with every transition, it has to be done in a smart way and informed by environmental observations."
The WMO bulletin follows a series of recent UN reports showing the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels is no longer possible without an overshoot, but getting back to that level is, with ambitious action to phase out fossil fuels.
Additionally, before the ongoing biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, the UN warned that the world is not on track to meet any of the targets from the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, or the "Paris Agreement for Nature."
While that event on the global biodiversity crisis—which is linked to the worsening climate emergency—is set to conclude in a few days, world leaders are scheduled to convene again on November 9 in Antalya, Türkiye for the next climate conference, or COP31.
Although the United States is the world's biggest historical climate polluter, and one of the recently released UN reports repeatedly calls out US emissions, Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump has ditched the Paris Agreement, again, and is not expected to send a delegation to Antalya.
"The rest of the world is exhausted when it comes to counting the damage that the US is willingly doing to allies, multilateral structures, economic cooperation, disaster relief," Australian climate scientist Malte Meinshausen told The Associated Press earlier this month. "The rest of the world should probably continue to focus even less on the US."
There is hope in the elections taking place around the world and how they may usher in new leadership in many countries. Even with those changes, we all are in for a warm ride filled with climate shocks until we stabilize the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
— Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) (@fisherdanar.bsky.social) October 27, 2026 at 6:37 AM
In the United States, University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann said Tuesday that "there is a lot of support among the public for a clean energy transition. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry currently owns our government. But there are reasons for optimism that we might begin to turn the corner, with the midterm elections" on November 3.
"If they return one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats, there will be the possibility of Congress acting as a check on the destructive policies of the Trump administration and in a couple of years, with new leadership at the presidential level, the US could once again reassert leadership on climate," the climatologist told writer Brian McHugh.
"We have to transition rapidly away from fossil fuel burning," Mann emphasized. "There's simply no other way. Without regulating them and imposing an incentive structure that leads them to move toward clean energy, nothing else is really going to matter."
RFK Jr. Condemned Over Baseless and 'Nakedly Racist' Anti-Arab Rant at Rogers Event in Michigan
"Every day, a prominent Republican... says something insanely racist about Muslims or Arabs," said one journalist, while many Democrats are silent about "out-of-control Islamophobia from the GOP."
Visiting the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans to campaign for the Republican US Senate candidate, a week before the midterm elections during a campaign in which people from across the political spectrum have recoiled at the GOP's racist, misogynist rhetoric, the Trump administration's top health official opted to share a fact-free non sequitur about hundreds of millions of Arabs across the globe.
Apparently trying to sell voters in Michigan on Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers, who was behind Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed by two points in a recent Marist poll—and by six points among independents—Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opined on "500 million Arabs in the world," a vast population that he suggested contributes little to the global community.
"They don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature," declared Kennedy at a campaign event in Grand Rapids.
RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Novel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature." https://t.co/ikZHqklQjE
— Bulwark Clips (@BulwarkClips) October 26, 2026
The comments provoked horror among numerous Democratic lawmakers, advocacy groups, scientists, and journalists, many of whom were quick to point out that Kennedy's racist rant had no basis in reality.
"Besides being nakedly racist and bigoted, this is just hilariously wrong on all levels," said Justin Baragona of Zeteo News.
Baragona was among the observers who did not have reach far back in history to prove Kennedy, who has been widely condemned for his rejection of scientific evidence as he has questioned the safety of vaccines, entirely wrong about Arab people's contributions to the field.
Just last year, Omar Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks. Yaghi was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents. He also won the Wolf Prize, an international award for achievements in sciences and the arts, in 2018, for his contributions to the field of reticular chemistry.
Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez expressed relief that his late colleague and "brilliant co-US Science Envoy," the Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail, "didn’t have to endure" listening to Kennedy's comments. Zewail won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999.
Entrepreneur Saad Mohseni listed a number of other "Arab science giants" who came to mind.
Baragona also pointed to two winners of the National Book Award just last year—the Lebanese writer and painter Rabih Alameddine and Egyptian-American journalist Omar El Akkad.
But US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suggested that beyond debunking Kennedy's wholly inaccurate claim, "everyone needs to pay attention" to what his comments were part of: a "coordinated campaign to delegitimize Muslim Americans—not just as citizens but as humans."
"These increasingly hysterical attacks are a prelude to Republicans bringing us to a very, very dark place after the election," said Murphy.
The Council on American Islamic Relations demanded that Kennedy be removed from his Cabinet position in light of the remarks, which they called "a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry."
"To stand on a public stage as a sitting US Cabinet official and dehumanize half a billion people—and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans—with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office," said the group. "His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide. Anyone who holds such blatant contempt for an entire ethnicity has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans."
Journalist Mehdi Hasan, the founder of Zeteo News, suggested that the Democratic Party and liberal commentators deserve a large share of the blame for a political environment in which a top US official felt comfortable openly degrading hundreds of millions of people of Arab descent, including an estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans, as non-contributing members of society.
"Every day, a prominent Republican—the president, a Cabinet official, a primetime Fox host, the Michigan Senate candidate—says something insanely racist about Muslims or Arabs. Meanwhile, my timeline is full of prominent Democrats and liberals getting mad about a random ad attacking Israel and screaming about antisemitism," he said, referring to an ad recently released by Rebellion political action committee, which criticized US aid to Israel and tied it to Americans' struggles with the rising cost of living.
From many liberal commentators, said Hasan, he has heard "crickets... on the out-of-control Islamophobia from the GOP."
Kennedy's anti-Arab comments were hardly an outlier in the Michigan Senate campaign. Rogers and President Donald Trump have both accused El-Sayed of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that in 2012, as a congressman, Rogers himself said he was willing to work with the movement. The president has openly called the Michigan-born El-Sayed a "jihadist," and a speaker at one Rogers rally over the weekend said the candidate's birth certificate did not make him an American.
But prominent Democrats have also had a hand in pushing the narrative that El-Sayed is a risky choice for Michiganders. Former state Democratic Party chair Lon Johnson accused El-Sayed of “extremism” last week and said his criticism of Israel threatens Jewish communities, calling on Democrats in the state to “leave the Senate race blank." During the primary, the centrist think tank Third Way spent months attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that the US "deserved" the September 11 attacks—a comment he later clarified and apologized for.
At Protect Our Care, an advocacy group that typically focuses on Kennedy's attacks on public health, president Brad Woodhouse said Tuesday that with his remarks in Grand Rapids, the health secretary had "laid bare how small and ignorant he really is."
“Fear and racism are the crutch of pathetic political hacks with absolutely nothing to offer or progress to point to," said Woodhouse. "This is his closing argument for why Republicans need more power, smearing an entire people with gross and instantly disprovable lies? Really?"
"Secretary Kennedy thinks spewing hate will distract people from his multiple corruption scandals and starring role in the historic measles and food-borne illness crises Americans have suffered through this year," he added. "This wasn’t the first time RFK Jr has trafficked in racism, but it may be his ugliest episode yet. It’s an indictment of both Mike Rogers and [Republican US Rep.] John James that they haven’t condemned the remarks. They’d rather clap like seals and hope RFK’s racist ‘hail mary’ pays off for them politically. That makes them just as weak, pathetic, and un-American.”
‘Doomsday’ Was No Joke: DOJ Considering Scenarios In Which It Would Intervene in Midterms
"Nobody knows what the president might do if the midterms don’t go his way."
When US Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week that the Department of Justice may seek to block states from certifying elections if a "doomsday" scenario occurred, he wasn't simply speaking hypothetically.
Three administration officials have told investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein that the DOJ has several "contingency plans" that may result in unprecedented efforts at federal interference, many of which President Donald Trump and other administration officials have hinted at in the press.
The plans include extreme scenarios like a foreign cyberattack, according to a report from Klippenstein on Monday. They also include scenarios that the administration has claimed are already underway, such as “questions about qualified voters” and “voter confusion.”
The DOJ has already acted on such claims in three states.
At Trump's direction, the DOJ has demanded that Alaska suspend the certification of its Senate election if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, arguing that the presence of another person with the same name on the ballot was part of a ploy to “confuse” voters.
Earlier this month, the department sued California to keep officials from tallying ballots cast by people it flagged as potentially ineligible using an error-prone federal database. Its list contained around 20,000 names.
Two judges expressed concerns that the list could disenfranchise lawful voters. When Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 records, they found that the list included US-born people, people with inactive or canceled registrations, and people with no voting history.
On Monday, the DOJ demanded that Washington state set aside ballots from over 400 people on similar grounds.
Officials told Klippenstein that other potential "doomsday" scenarios are being discussed as possible catalysts for federal intervention, including "disruptions at the polls" and "irregularities with the count."
After suggesting the midterms should be outright "canceled," Trump has suggested that Republicans should "nationalize" elections despite the plain language of the US Constitution, which makes them the domain of states, subject to congressional regulation.
During a TV interview in February, he suggested that plans were in the works to "put in federal controls as opposed to state controls" if states could not conduct elections "honestly."
Following that interview, officials said that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi met with Trump and several governors in the White House State Dining Room to discuss potential election doomsday scenarios. Bondi then reportedly spoke with senior department officials about what situations might justify action.
While the president and DOJ cannot unilaterally block states from certifying elections, the department can bring lawsuits and seek emergency court orders under the Voting Rights Act if the attorney general has “reasonable grounds” to conclude that there has been intimidation, threats, or coercion against voters or that someone has knowingly provided false registration information or conspired to encourage false registration.
Trump has still not accepted his 2020 presidential election defeat and continues to sow doubts about it six years later. In 2020, he attempted to overturn the outcome by spreading claims that the election was marred by systemic “irregularities” and fraud, which his own advisers informed him were baseless.
Unlike previous attorneys general who declined to lend legitimacy to Trump’s claims, Blanche has repeatedly said he agrees with Trump’s sentiment that the 2020 election was “rigged.” When asked to provide specific evidence last month that mail-in voting produces large amounts of fraud, he said it was simply “common sense.”
Trump has voted by mail numerous times, and mail-in ballots have been used for elections in several states for years, including the conservative state of Utah.
Asked by CNN anchor Dana Bash on Sunday whether Trump was "laying the groundwork" to try to overturn the election again, as he did in 2020, Blanche was defiant.
"Oh stop it!" he scoffed. "You've got to stop it with that! You're not being a real person... We're not laying any groundwork for the president to do that. So the premise of your question is not true."
Breaking with previous norms of DOJ independence from the White House, Blanche declared last week, “I work for President Trump,” suggesting that he will dutifully assist any attempts by the president to undermine the results.
The question is how far he may be willing to go: “Nobody knows what the president might do if the midterms don’t go his way, what Trump might say or what he might provoke,” one senior intelligence official who served in the first Trump White House told Klippenstein.
One government lawyer told Klippenstein that while there is no law allowing the federal government to suspend elections simply by alleging fraud, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t seek to find a legal justification:
“Could Trump sign a classified emergency order raising the specter of national security to justify intervention?” the intelligence official asks. “Could Doomsday involve some continuity of government argument? You just never know with Donald Trump.”
"If all else fails,” he says, the president could put “pressure on officials, undertake unsupported litigation, or even issue unlawful executive orders." This, he says, could cause enough disruption to provoke a January 6-style riot.
Meanwhile, the government lawyer says the lack of clear legal authority hasn’t stopped the planning.
“Justice Department and White House lawyers are grappling with these very scenarios… [including] what it can do if the law is no guide,” he says.
With the midterms just a week away and Republicans projected to do poorly, Trump has a veritable army of influencers online prepared to sow doubt about the election result.
A Washington Post analysis on Tuesday found nearly 600 high-profile right-wing social media accounts, podcasts, and other media sources that have published content questioning the integrity of the election and telling Trump supporters to expect cheating. Many of their claims echo those made by the administration about the prevalence of noncitizen voting, which is exceedingly rare.
Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees have said they are prepared for Trump to claim that classified intelligence shows that foreign powers tampered with vote totals or otherwise intervened to help his rivals.
"This administration has a record of using weaponized intelligence to make the case for election interference, and now its officials are grasping at straws to satisfy the president's desire to interfere with the elections," Alexandra Chandler, the director of impact programs at Free and Fair Elections, told Common Dreams. "None of this is new."
If Trump makes such a claim, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton have agreed to review any of the underlying intelligence with him and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Himes told reporters, "We’re making the presumption that the president will not accept the results,” adding that they expect him to "pull out all the stops."
Voting rights groups have also said they are ready for whatever Trump throws their way.
"States and local election officials run our elections, not the federal government," Tianna Mays, legal director at the Democracy Defenders Fund, told Common Dreams. "Trump administration officials cannot claim powers they do not have under the Constitution, and we will fight them in court if they try."
“The pro-democracy coalition is prepared for whatever scenario comes,” Chandler said. “We will defend the integrity of this election.”
Election-Denying Trump Judges Preside Over Nearly Every Battleground Midterm Race: Analysis
"We must vote in numbers so overwhelming that no Trump judge could deny the truth."
If the Trump administration decides to challenge the outcome of any of the dozens of battleground contests in next week's midterms, there's a significant chance that one of the president's handpicked, election-denying judges will oversee the case.
That's according to a report published Tuesday by the advocacy group Demand Justice, which found that 53 of 60 battleground races for US House and Senate that will be held on November 3 "are in districts or states presided over by at least one Trump-appointed federal judge who, under oath, refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election."
“If these judges couldn’t tell the truth about 2020, we can’t count on them to do so in 2026," said Josh Orton, president of Demand Justice. "We must vote in numbers so overwhelming that no Trump judge could deny the truth."
The report defines battleground races as Senate and House contests that analysts currently rate as either a toss up, lean Republican, or lean Democratic.
Demand Justice emphasizes that federal courts "look very different" today than they did in 2020, when the judiciary "halted Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 election results."
"Since then, Trump appointed Emil Bove and Jennifer Mascott to the Third Circuit, Rebecca Taibleson to the Seventh, Michael Martin to the Eastern District of Michigan, and Eric Tung to the Ninth Circuit, which hears appeals from Arizona," the report notes, pointing to courts that previously weighed 2020-related cases.
During their confirmation hearings, each of those Trump-picked judges—along with dozens of others—refused to explicitly say that Trump lost the 2020 election. As Demand Justice observed in an earlier report, Trump's judicial picks used virtually identical phrasing to evade senators' questions about the 2020 election results, saying that former President Joe Biden "was certified as the winner."
The report comes amid mounting concerns that the Trump administration could try to intervene in the midterms if the outcome is unfavorable to Trump and his Republican Party, which is seeking to maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
Demand Justice cited as an alarming example the Justice Department's lawsuit aiming at blocking certification of Alaska's US Senate election if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. Trump told reporters late last week that he ordered the DOJ to file the lawsuit, which Democratic nominee Mary Peltola is seeking to dismiss before Election Day.
“Trump's attempt to interfere in Alaska’s Senate race is a wake-up call," said Orton. "His administration will not accept election results unless the Republicans win."
Trump DOJ Brings 'Tired, Desperate' Attempt to Find Noncitizen Voting to Washington State
"The timing of this request—one week before the general election—is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results," said Secretary of State Steve Hobbs.
As a federal appeals court on Monday refused to order California officials to set aside 20,000 mail-in ballots that the Trump administration claimed were cast by noncitizens, the US Department of Justice was already pushing a similar effort in Washington state—the latest of what one advocate called "tired, desperate attempts by a cornered and losing side" to cast doubt on the validity of the November 3 midterm elections.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs received a letter Monday from acting US Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, who demanded that the state set aside any ballots cast by 405 people whom the DOJ claims are illegally registered to vote despite not being US citizens.
Floyd said the voters have cast 1,500 ballots in past elections, and complained that the Democratic-led state's refusal to turn over unredacted voter rolls to the DOJ earlier this year made his search for noncitizen voters more time-consuming.
The Trump administration has filed lawsuits against more than 20 states for refusing to hand over voter data on millions of people, and the DOJ has resorted to using commercially available information and comparing it with federal records in an effort to track down people it says have voted illegally despite being noncitizens.
The right-wing Heritage Foundation was able to uncover just 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003-22, and election officials in found that in 42 jurisdictions, .0001% of 23.5 million votes were cast by suspected noncitizens in 2016.
Those statistics are in line with the results of the DOJ's efforts thus far. In California, federal officials announced they had identified 28 immigrants who were suspected of voting before they became naturalized citizens. The group represented about .0001% of registered voters in California.
In Nevada in September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed authorities had found 16,000 noncitizens on the state's voter rolls. DHS ultimately sent the state a list of just 185 people who it said were illegally registered to vote, but state officials found that all 185 voters were citizens.
Despite the administration's track record, Floyd insisted that this time would be different, asserting in a news conference that the 405 people identified by the DOJ in Washington were "only the tip of the iceberg."
“Because of limitations the state has placed on our investigation, we’ve only been able to uncover a fraction of the total number,” he said. "We will continue to investigate and identify those who are committing crimes by voting illegally.”
A spokesperson for Hobbs' office told NBC News that the secretary of state is reviewing the list, but Hobbs stressed that he "will only respond to requests that follow due process."
"We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously," said Hobbs. "We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed. The timing of this request—one week before the general election—is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”
The search for illegally registered voters in Washington comes days after the DOJ filed a lawsuit in Alaska seeking to block the certification of the state's US Senate election results if Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) narrowly loses to his Democratic challenger, former Rep. Mary Peltola.
The DOJ argued that voters may be confused by their ballots, on which Sullivan and Peltola are listed along with other candidates—one of whom is a retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. Critics have noted that the sitting senator is clearly marked as the incumbent.
The latest polling average in the key race, which could determine control of the Senate, shows Peltola leading Sullivan by about two points.
On Sunday in an interview with CNN, Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the DOJ's push to stop the automatic certification of the Alaska election results, saying that President Donald Trump "is not trying to take over a state election in any way, shape, or form" and becoming angry when anchor Dana Bash asked whether the refusal to accept the election results could lay the groundwork for violence, as in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
Last week Blanche told reporters that the DOJ could become involved in the election certification process in a "doomsday" scenario.
"Trump’s DOJ has been trying to figure out how to rob Americans of their votes in the midterms since February," said journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez Tuesday. "I hope states are ready to fight and resist the administration. These freaks aren’t just going to let Americans vote their way out of this if they think they can do something about it."
'A Crime of Extreme Inequality': Richest 0.1% Generate More Carbon Pollution Than Half of Humanity
“The ultra-rich are setting the planet on fire and then charging the rest of us for the extinguishers."
The richest 0.1% of humanity generates more planet-heating carbon pollution than nearly half of the global population combined, according to an Oxfam analysis released late Monday as world leaders prepared to gather in Türkiye next month for the United Nations climate summit.
The new analysis provides an updated look at global elites' outsized contribution to a climate crisis that disproportionately impacts the poorest segments of the global population through increasingly devastating heatwaves, droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather, causing death, destruction, and mass displacement worldwide.
Oxfam estimates that a person in the richest 0.1% "has contributed nearly 400 times more to today’s extreme heatwaves than someone in the poorest 50%." The 8 million richest people in the world combined produce "over three times more carbon pollution than the entire population of Sub-Saharan Africa"—around 1.3 billion people.
"The climate crisis is often described as a shared human challenge. It is not," said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International's executive director. "Those who have done the least to cause it are losing their homes, their harvests and, increasingly, their lives. Meanwhile, the super-rich can buy their way out of danger—by retreating to high-tech underground survival bunkers, hiring private firefighting crews, and securing private insurance—and are actively profiting from the consequences of their pollution. This is not a tragedy of shared fate; it is a crime of extreme inequality."
Oxfam's report notes that the same investors and firms profiting massively from the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis are also benefiting from disaster preparedness and recovery. The analysis places those investors in what it calls a "Destroy and Rebuild" index.
"Six major asset managers (including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street) make up more than one-quarter of all the Destroy and Rebuild corporations," the report states. "BlackRock and Vanguard are invested in 92% of the corporations in the index: The pair’s total investments in these corporations are more than $1 trillion."
“The ultra-rich are setting the planet on fire and then charging the rest of us for the extinguishers," said Behar. "They profit from the pollution. They profit from the disaster. And they profit again from the clean-up.”
"While ordinary people are forced to grapple with the consequences of emergencies they bear little responsibility in fueling, billionaires are busy outrunning the reality they and their private jets created."
In the United States—where the country's billionaire president has taken a sledgehammer to domestic and international efforts to combat the climate crisis—a person in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times as much carbon dioxide as the average American.
"The country’s richest 0.1% (333,271 people) emit 108 times more CO2 per person than the poorest half of the population (166.6 million people)," Oxfam's analysis shows. "In just under four months (118.3 days), someone in the richest 0.1% emits more CO2 than someone in the poorest half of the U.S. has emitted over the last 30 years."
Rachel Carle, senior advisor on climate justice at Oxfam America, said in a statement that the global climate emergency is "an inequality crisis at its core."
"While ordinary people are forced to grapple with the consequences of emergencies they bear little responsibility in fueling, billionaires are busy outrunning the reality they and their private jets created," said Carle. "Mark Zuckerberg can hunker down in his Hawaiian bunker at the first sign of chaos, but the rest of us don’t have that luxury. Addressing this glaring inequality is the first step to mitigating climate disaster, and that starts with making ultra-rich polluters pay their fair share."
In view of its findings, Oxfam urged governments to use the upcoming COP31 summit in Türkiye to:
- Make rich polluters pay to significantly and rapidly curb their carbon emissions, including through permanent wealth and income taxes, a permanent tax on fossil fuel corporations, and punitive taxes on high-emitting luxury items like private jets;
- Substantially increase climate finance for the Global South, prioritizing public, grant-based finance rather than loans that deepen debt. The amount for adaptation should be tripled by 2035;
- Radically reduce inequality within and between countries, including through climate-resilient public infrastructure and public services; and
- End profiteering from climate disasters. Governments need to curb corporate power in emergency response, reconstruction, and food systems during disasters.
"Another future remains possible," Oxfam's report concludes. "Creating a more equal world would enable emissions to fall rapidly, food systems to become fairer and more resilient, and the creation of public systems to protect people from crisis and adapt to the effects of climate change. Achieving that future will require bold political choices to curb excessive wealth and corporate power while investing in the resilience, rights, and livelihoods of the majority. Climate justice and equality must now become the foundation of climate action."